The carbon price is being given its own day of worship, with PM Gillard announcing the full details of the policy at midday this Sunday.

After months of speculation, the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee decided last night that “considerable common ground” had been made on a carbon price deal for the announcement to go ahead.

It’s a policy the Gillard government has taken to calling a “price on pollution” rather than a price on carbon (one assumes because ‘pollution’ seems something that everyone can unite against).

Details on the carbon price package remain scant, although Gillard has already let some key points slip through. A $3 billion package has been put together to promote clean energy. As part of this, a coal plant — likely to be Victoria’s Hazelwood plant — will be bought out and closed down by the government as part of the carbon price package, revealed The Age last week. But the owners of Hazelwood said a deal has not yet been struck.

In addition, Gillard declared that household petrol would be exempt from the carbon tax forever. Speculation remains over whether public transport and heavy transport will be included under the carbon price policy.

But Gillard’s petrol trade-off is more complex than it seems, wrote Bernard Keane in Crikey yesterday:

The consensus on putting a carbon price on petrol is that it won’t do a great deal to curb private motor vehicle use. In the scheme of things, six cents a litre won’t make a great deal of difference to people’s driving habits – if you’ve got to drive to work, you’ve got to drive to work. Thus, the omission of petrol from the carbon pricing scheme agreed by Labor, the Greens and the independents won’t have much effect. Even Ross Garnaut suggested the impact be offset by a one-off cut in petrol excise.

That’s the theory. Reality is a little more complicated.

Rob Burgess at Business Spectator declared that a petrol exemption for small driver vehicles was a bad idea and the whole carbon price policy was riddled with problems:

Whatever hideous sewn-together beast Labor unveils at the weekend, it will claim that negotiating such a complex policy is one of its great successes. While there is no doubt the objective of the reform is on a par with the great reforms of the 1980s and 1990s — a major structural shift in the economy’s energy base — the political climate in which it is born pretty much ensures a policy Frankenstein.

Tony Abbott encountered a fiesty interview with Chris Uhlmann on ABC’s 7.30 last night, questioning Abbott over Opposition’s climate policy plan costs in comparison with Gillard’s carbon tax.

CHRIS UHLMANN: But in the end, do you agree that the budget’s funded by taxes, so there will be a carbon tax?
TONY ABBOTT: Look, I accept that everything has a cost, but we will spend roughly a billion dollars a year from savings in the budget to buy emissions reductions. The Government is going to hit people with what we think is gonna be about $11 billion a year in extra costs in the economy. So it’s one billion dollars with us, versus $11 billion from them.
CHRIS UHLMANN: And what happens after 2020? Of course you have the same target as the Government as five per cent, but obviously you don’t stop in 2020, so what happens beyond that?
TONY ABBOTT: Well let’s wait and see. 2020 is nine years away. We’ll make our decisions about 2020 at that time.
CHRIS UHLMANN: But this isn’t a wait-and-see proposition, is it? You either believe that carbon’s a problem or you don’t and it doesn’t stop in 2020, it continues thereafter.
TONY ABBOTT: What we’ve said, Chris, is that we are happy. We want to achieve a five per cent reduction. We believe that we can achieve that reduction by our direct action policy. We’ll be reviewing things as time goes by. We’ve said that in 2015 there’ll be a review and we’ll announce well before 2020 what we think should happen after that.

Tim Colebatch provides an interesting economic analysis in The Age about the Opposition’s ‘direct action plan’ policy, explaining that while the Coalition’s policy figures don’t add up, neither do Labor’s claim of how much Abbott’s policy would cost voters.

Dennis Shanahan at The Australian says that Gillard is struggling with the political repercussions of a carbon price:

Last week the Prime Minister tried to backtrack on the fact that the carbon tax is a tax but she is now declaring she is “happy” to call it a tax. Yesterday she switched the rhetoric again, but this time it was right away from any tax at all and back on to the images of climate cataclysms.

Now that the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee has decided the details, watch the in-fighting begin, writes Michelle Grattan in The Age.

Cut adrift to some extent, the Greens hope to get any available credit, such as for the $2 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation. After all, they have to justify caving in on a major issue like as the exclusion of petrol for motorists and small business.

But the government doesn’t want the Greens to be painted as kings of renewable energy. Hey, we believe in that too, it says.

And for something a little bit different, Alison Rourke writes an interesting profile examining working town Wollongong and the effects of a carbon tax on it in The Guardian:

The steep hills around Wollongong afford views of endless queues of ships on the watery horizon, waiting for their cargo of black gold. Coal has been the lifeblood of the city for 150 years and the backbone of its steel industry.

Regardless of the climate extremes, the droughts, wildfires, cyclones and floods that are ravaging Australia, locals do not want to give it up.

“It’s all right for greenies to say this carbon tax has to happen, but we can’t all hug trees for a living,” said Brett Withers, who has worked as an industrial cleaning contractor in the steelworks for 20 years. “It might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. If the tax comes in, this area will be devastated. It’s not just the steel industry — it’s the butcher, the hairdresser and the baker. Everyone will suffer.”

Withers’ remarks illustrate a furious backlash against imminent government plans to introduce a carbon tax.