Australia’s climate-change winners & losers
The only clear, outright winners from Australia's climate-change policy unveiled on Monday are the accountants and lawyers who will have to make sense of it.
The only clear, outright winners from Australia's climate-change policy unveiled on Monday are the accountants and lawyers who will have to make sense of it.
Losers, on the other hand, are everywhere.They include coal-fired power stations, mainly in government hands or unlisted, and some of the local stock market's biggest firms, such as smelters BlueScope Steel and OneSteel, and refiner Alumina Ltd, analysts say.
Around 1,000 of the largest polluters, ranging from transport operators and aluminum makers to gas producers and petroleum refineries, will have to pay to pollute from 2010, under a government plan to cut national greenhouse gas emissions by 5-15 percent by 2020.
Gas firms Woodside Petroleum and Santos, and refiner Caltex Australia will have to pay for permits to pollute.
Qantas Airways will also face carbon costs via higher fuel prices or the need to buy permits, or both.
But market analysts said many firms were in reality breathing a sigh of relief on Monday because the government's white paper on cutting carbon emissions could have been a lot tougher, with green groups demanding emission cuts of up to 40 percent.
"The whole tone of the white paper is that they have aimed to provide greater assistance to business," said Andrew Gray, head of environmental research for Goldman Sachs JBWere.
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