Do you have a beef with the ETS? You will!

If your house is wired up for power then every electrical appliance will be attached to a power generator which in all likelihood will pay a tax and that tax will be passed on to you, the consumer.
The price of toasting bread has just gone up, the price of ironing the school uniform has just gone up, the price of vacuuming the living room has just gone up and the price of watching the Sunday afternoon game on TV has just gone up.
If you’re associated with the consumption of food, that’s either grown with the use of carbon intensive processes, or if you like to eat beef, mutton or lamb, which involves the emission of methane and is apparently a super form of carbon, then under Mr Rudd’s proposal, you’ll potentially have to pay for the privilege.
Put simply, a single beast, which ends up on our supermarket shelves as steak, roast, mince or sausages, emits about 70 kilograms of methene and according to the Kyoto protocol this has to be multiplied by 21 which means that each beast is responsible for emitting around a tonne and a half of carbon.
Utilising NAB modelling on the price of a carbon permit, a tonne and half of carbon, multiplied by about $50, is equivalent to an additional cost to the farmer of approximately $75 dollars per beast per year.
$75 dollars per beast per year = no beef industry in Australia!
If the consumer wants to eat beef and can afford to pay for it then you will be buying it from a country that doesn’t have an ETS.
The price of beef in Australia will be above the price paid in other countries that don’t have a beef industry which will result in you paying better than $100 dollars for a prime cut roast.
Quite obviously the quality of the Australian standard of living, as reflected in our diet, will be reduced.
When it comes to lamb and mutton, sheep emit around 10 kilograms of methane, so using the same formula; this means around 210 kilograms of carbon per year, per sheep which equates to Australian sheep farmers being slugged about $10 per sheep annually and this will ultimately drive sheep meat out of the market.
So, if you decided to have a lamb roast for dinner this Sunday, which the gentleman in the car giving me a lift today said he was planning to do, then expect to pay almost $100 dollars at the butcher for it.

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