Renfrey Clarke (lead Senate candidate for the Socialist Alliance in South Australia)
Dismayed by the Labor government’s inaction on climate change, and looking for an alternative? Well, don’t look to the Liberals. If the ALP has been dodgy on the issue, Tony Abbott’s party has been dodgier.
Mind you, sincere commitment on the issue is a hard call for Abbott, who at a public meeting in rural Victoria last September declared that global warming was “absolute crap”. But there’s one thing on which the Liberal leader is remarkably consistent – the “need” to funnel large amounts of public money to big business.
Under the “direct action” emissions abatement program announced by the Liberals last February, major carbon polluters will not be forced to pay for the damage they cause the environment. Instead, they will be bribed to pollute less. Or at least, relatively less.
And when the funding of something over $10 billion by the end of the decade runs out, will Australian greenhouse emissions have been reduced? Not by a long shot. Several studies now conclude that the Liberals’ plans would see emissions keep growing, by as much as 13 per cent over the years until 2020.
Saved?Labor’s much-diluted (and now postponed) Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was intended to put a price on carbon by forcing polluters to buy permits to cover their emissions. Total emissions would, in theory, be subject to a diminishing cap.
Under Abbott’s “direct action”, there will be no cap. Polluters will be allowed to expand their operations, and increase their total pollution, without being penalised a cent – provided their emissions per unit of production do not increase. If they reduce this “carbon intensity”, they will be rewarded at a rate of $10-15 per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions “saved”.
Most estimates put the cost needed to make industrialists think seriously about reducing emissions at more than $20 per tonne. Consequently, the Liberals’ scheme can be expected to harvest only “low-hanging fruit” – that is, the cheapest emissions gains. While “direct action” might yield well in its first years, its potential would quickly be exhausted.
Summing up for the Crikey website on February 8, Andrew Macintosh of the ANU Centre for Climate Law and Policy noted of such incentive schemes:
“…they rarely work, are often rorted, generally result in higher abatement costs and aren’t equitable.”
In theory, the various “direct action” measures would bring about net emissions cuts to equal Labor’s (laughably inadequate) target of 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020. A suite of initiatives would be subsidised, including the development of coal-seam methane gas, cuts to waste emissions, and improvements to energy efficiency. Rebates would be provided for solar panels and hot water. Abbott also proposes incentives for the planting of 20 million trees. And of about 140 million tonnes of carbon abatement required under his scheme, the bulk – some 85 million tonnes – would come from storing carbon in soils through improved farming practices.
ArithmeticCoal-seam methane is a fossil fuel with many critics, but what’s wrong with trees and soil carbon? Nothing, in principle – but the Liberals need to do their arithmetic. The trees might credibly remove 20 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere over ten years, so to have a major impact, the program would need to be far larger. Meanwhile, trees burn in hot, dry conditions, of which Australia in coming years will see plenty. Heat and drought also act to reduce soil carbon, so making big gains in the latter could prove hard as climate change bites.
On February 4 the Crikey website quoted one of Australia’s leading soil carbon experts, Sydney University’s Alex McBratney, as saying that the incentives of $8-10 per tonne [of CO2 equivalent] on which the Coalition had based its figures were probably too low. “It needs to be closer to $20-40 a tonne to be viable.”
Soon after the “direct action” proposals appeared, a study released by the federal Department of Climate Change noted that the Liberals’ claims were “subject to very large margins of uncertainty over both cost and [greenhouse gas] abatement.” Using data from a similar program in NSW, the federal analysts concluded that the “direct action” measures would yield reductions of only 40 million tonnes by 2020, not the 140 million claimed. Instead of falling by 5 per cent, net emissions would rise by 13 per cent.
A study by McKinsey management consultants and ClimateWorks, the latter a partnership between the Myer Foundation and Monash University, yielded similar results. As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald on March 16, the analysts concluded that only 27 million tonnes of carbon, not the Liberals’ 85 million, could be locked away in soils, “and only 18 million tonnes at the low price the Coalition has budgeted to pay.” Even if the result were 27 million, and all the other reductions worked, “the overall impact would be a 6 per cent rise in emissions in 2020 compared with 1990.”
To help pay for its incentives, the federal opposition plans to do away with a series of existing emissions abatement programs. Intriguingly, Abbott on July 20 revealed that the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute would be dumped, for eventual savings of $300 million. An initiative of the Rudd government, the Institute was meant to unite world governments in pursuing “clean coal” technologies.
With the Liberals quitting the field, that leaves the Gillard government as one of only a handful of big-league global peddlers of the “clean coal” delusion.
By contrast, other programs threatened by Abbott are useful and need to be defended. According to AAP on July 20, the Liberals now promise to chop funding for renewable energy, for low-energy buildings, for greening small and medium business, and for aid to poorer countries to deal with climate change.
Carbon PriceOn the important question of whether to put a price on carbon emissions, the Liberals are blowing from every point of the compass. In a capitalist economy a clear, predictable carbon price – imposed, say, through a tax on fossil energy sources – can serve as a flexible deterrent to firms putting money into polluting technologies. Senior Liberal front-bencher Joe Hockey was quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald on May 20 as saying, “Inevitably we’ll have a price on carbon…we’ll have to.”
But on July 18 Abbott told a Sky News interviewer, “I do not support the government going out there and making consumers pay a price on carbon.”
Simply making it expensive for capitalists to pollute will not, of course, be enough. So large are the requirements of reining in Australia’s world-leading emissions rates that massive, nationally-coordinated state investment is essential. Private enterprise is not up to the job, any more than it could handle the Snowy Scheme.
The energy industry will need to be re-nationalised. And that, of course, is anathema to the private-profit Liberals.
For politicians loyal to big business, stopping climate change is one of those challenges that are just too hard. The Labor leaders keep putting action off, while the Liberals prefer to dodge and obfuscate. Perhaps the Coalition’s offering to voters should be renamed.
“Direct distraction”, anyone?
