Carbon pricing he said, she said. Part One

Letters to the Editor in The Daily Examiner on 12 and 16 August 2011:

1. One cannot avoid death

YES, Thomas Macindoe ( DEX Aug 9 ), one cannot avoid death or the carbon tax.

It seems it will apply to both cremations and burials.

Local government will face a price rise for landflll (cemeteries?) when the carbon tax kicks in.

BILL CALVI

Grafton

2. Alternative universe

BILL Calvi of Grafton (DEX letters, 12 August 2011) assures us that cremation will incur a so-called carbon tax.

One has to wonder in which alternative universe Mr. Calvi resides.

Firstly, only individual industry/business premises which directly emit  25,000 tonnes of CO2-e emissions annually, after deducting emissions from liquid fuels, LPG, CNG, LNG, and synthetic greenhouse gases (excluding PFCs produced by aluminum smelting), will potentially attract the carbon levy. (http://www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au/, 12.08.11)

Secondly, for an individual crematorium in Australia to qualify for this carbon levy it would have to cremate at least 156,250 recently deceased people each year, based on the 160kgs of CO2 equivalent per cremated person estimated in a 2008 South Australian Centennial Park Cemetery Authority carbon footprint report.

As the Australian Museum states, it takes on average one to one and a half hours to fully cremate a body, this would see the average crematorium required to operate up to twenty-seven round the clock operating years in the space of one calendar year to process enough bodies to qualify for the carbon levy.

In 2008 and 2009 there were 143,900 and 140,800 total registered deaths respectively right across the country, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. At least fifty per cent of these deaths would have involved cremation [Cemeteries and Crematoria Association of NSW, February 2009] but even this figure would not cause one crematorium to pay the carbon tax.

Similarly, as in-ground internment produces only an estimated 39kg of CO2 equivalent per burial, individual cemeteries would be hard-pressed to conduct enough of these funerals annually to attract this levy.

Just to make sure that cremation was a non-starter in the national carbon pricing debate I contacted a public servant briefed with fielding questions on climate change policy. When he finished quietly laughing, he assured me that the carbon levy was not going to be paid by cemeteries for burial or cremation.

As for local government paying the carbon levy on its landfill waste, that will only apply to waste generated after the levy becomes law.

JUDITH M. MELVILLE

Yamba