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Greener and poorer? What a strange idea.
If I give up my car - which the average Aussie 2.6 person household spends about $120 on each week - and use the train - $30 per week, times 1.1 average full-time jobs per household, plus half again for those in the household not employed, I'm spending $50 a week on transport. I am thus "greener", and save $70 a week.
So long as the power bill goes up by less than $70 a week (higher bill due to increased generation buildout required due to more electrified mass transit) I'll be better off. The average Aussie household uses 42kWh/day in electricity and natural gas, 300kWh/week, and pays $0.17/kWh for it, or $51. So the electricity rate would have to more than double before we're worse off.
And that's not going to happen unless there's a really enormous carbon tax - $100/tonne would be $0.1325/kWh for coal-fired plants, so we'd have to have a carbon tax of about $200/tonne to suck up the spare $70 - or we decided to build something stupidly expensive like nuclear.
And of course, with higher prices you can just reduce consumption. Other countries consume less electricity than us... France, Germany and Italy consume around 8,000kWh of electricity to our 12,000kWh, and they're not exactly living in barbarism.
The RBA bloke lacks imagination... which should not come as a surprise to any of us, but still.
And what will you do with the $70 a week you save? Spend it ... and thus fuel the burning of energy needed to create whatever goods and services you spend it on? Perhaps you'll leave it in the bank instead ... but then the bank will lend it out to other people who'll use it to burn energy. Either directly or indirectly the energy still gets burned, the carbon still released into the atmosphere.
Perhaps if _everyone_ stopped driving their cars and used the train or bus. Sounds good, but look at how crowded and inadequate public transport already is in most Australian cities. It just won't cope with a surge in patronage, which is happening anyway due to soaring fuel costs.
There's a very good reason why climate change will only be addressed with greenwash. Our economy is based on a model of infinite growth. When the growth stops we go into recession. If it significantly shrinks we go into _depression_. Economic growth is directly related to ever-increasing profits, jobs, money-in-circulation, consumption, population. The more growth, the more energy consumed, the more carbon is created.
Its all very well our government talking tough about CC, but in reality all they'll do is (eventually) introduce an ineffective carbon credits pass-the-buck scheme that doesn't really punish the burning of fossil fuels. "Clean" energy sources will struggle to grow enough to even keep up with the continual growth of the economy, let alone start to take market share from fossil fuels. There's no way our govt will do anything real to address CC, because to do so would be to tell voters that, sorry, we're voluntarily putting the country into recession for the sake of your grandkids.
Anyway, there's more immediate problems coming down the tube that TPTB will be hard pressed to cope with. We have a credit crunch that threatens to cause deep recession in the western world - don't imagine we'll escape it unscathed. We also have what looks increasingly like Peak Oil, here and now, which means fuel cutbacks are being forced on us & are going to get worse over the next few years. Recession, whether we like it or not ... and one we may not emerge from.
That's probably enough doom for one day :)