Carbon Tax Ramifications

This week I received this in the mail from a normally reliable source.
Hi friends,
This is a letter I have received from a friend who is in the Commercial Refrigeration Business explaining very clearly the enormous additional cost the Carbon Tax will add to us, the end user. He has given me permission to forward this on to all.
Sent: Monday, 8 August 2011 4:46 PM
Subject: FW: Carbon Tax update
Hi Ethne,
You may not know, but I have been involved in the commercial refrigeration business since 1985 and still own 50% of one of the major players in Australia.
We just got the attached through from our supplier regarding the effect the Carbon tax will have on the price of refrigerants.
To give you some concept of this, in 1985 we were paying around $1 per KG for refrigerant. In the mid to late 80’s, there was the whole CFC thing regarding the ozone layer, which was all lies driven by DuPont, who wanted to get patents on the new refrigerants as their existing patents had expired, and the whole thing had little or even nothing to do with protecting the ozone layer. Anyhow, this drove the price to about $22 per KG after it peaked at around $60 per KG. (These are our buying prices.)
You will see in the attached that our the Carbon Tax will push the price we pay for refrigerant R404a, which is what we use most in Supermarkets and retail outlets, from $21.60, of which $2.30 is Government CFC levies, to $112.73 + GST 19 per KG from 1st of July next year. (Yes, we pay GST on the levies, and no doubt will pay it on the carbon tax.)
For a Coles/Woolworths Supermarket, this would add between $80,000 to $150,000 per new store, and approximately $17,000 per year in maintenance costs per store, per year, or $15 million per year just for Coles.
There are alternatives, but the industry has very little time to adapt skills and technologies, that will also add cost and need more labour, when our industry is short on skilled labour due to lack of apprentices and skilled migration. And to adapt an existing Coles type supermarket would cost around $1 million.
This is one hell of a destructive tax.
Kind Regards,
Gareth