2020 Submission: TOPIC 3: Sustainability (C)

This is the fourth of a series of blog posts detailing my submissions to Rudd’s 2020 gabfest (you can make your own submissions here). This covers "Topic 3: Population, sustainability, climate change and water", with this just the first of 3 dot-points.

I hope all of you who have been making blog posts or comments on the 2020 gabfest have been making your own submissions (add a comment on this page to get included in my hall of fame).

OK, here’s my submission with a bit of reformatting:

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C: Encouraging more efficient buildings

A pro-rata tax on properties that did not meet certain environmental standards would encourage improvements to newly constructed and existing stocks, whether residential, office, or industrial. For example, this would discourage windows without eaves that increase energy requirements, and encourage installation of water tanks and solar panels. A carrot-and-stick approach could be used, with taxes on the sale of a less-efficient building being returned (if only in part) to the purchaser if improvements are made within a certain period.

Industrial buildings and installations could have similar carrots and sticks: for example, furnaces that use excess heat for power generation that can be sold to the grid.

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See Also

• Previous posts based on my 2020 gabfest submissions:
  • TOPIC 3: Sustainability (A) (2008-03-18) on need for better metrics to describe the economy
  • Topic 2: Economic Infrastructure, the digital economy and the future of our cities (2008-03-09)
  • Topic 1: Future Directions for the Australian Economy – Education, skills, training, innovation and productivity (2008-03-05)

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