Andrew Dickens Afternoons

Dear me.This Year of Delivery is just getting worse.  Here we are 10 months down and nothing is coming through the letter boxToday the Government dumped plans to bring farming into the Emissions Trading Scheme.  Reminding you that agriculture has been exempt since the scheme started in 2008. Now the government has opted for a sector-led plan to address agricultural emissions. This is what farmers had been asking for all along.I think this is sensible because a penalty scheme does nothing to encourage buy in and long term reductions.  The ETS has always been an artificial scheme to me that does nothing except irritate and squash the economy.This is all round awkward because the Government has always said climate change is our nuclear free moment and because the Emission Trading Scheme has always been part of it’s arsenal.As late as July they were trumpeting a break through in calculating emissions at a farm level and they were proposing a 5 per cent tax on emissions.But today all that is gone and the governmen