Category: Climate chaos

“The announcement coincides with the release of a new report on household energy usage which forecasts an increase in energy usage of 56 per cent by 2020, emphasising the need for immediate, comprehensive and coordinated action on energy efficiency”, Mr Garrett said.

“The report, Energy Use in the Australian Residential Sector 1986-2020 identifies clear priorities and opportunities for tackling climate change in Australian households and communities and sets the framework for action.

“The household sector is forecast to grow by almost 4 million homes and over 1,000 million square metres in combined floor space by 2020, creating increased demand for heating, cooling, lighting and electrical appliances.

“This report estimates that one in four Australians buys a new television each year and that TVs are now the fourth-largest user of electricity, behind water heating, domestic refrigeration and lighting. Without Government action, television energy use is predicted to double between 2004 and 2014.

“It is critical that we help households identify and invest in the latest cost-saving energy-efficient technologies in appliances, and energy and water saving design features.

“For more than 11 years, the previous Government sat on its hands when it came to dealing with climate change and helping Australians take steps to reduce the size of their carbon footprint.

“Since coming to office, the Rudd Government has announced and funded $1 billion in measures including our Green Loans program, assistance for landlords to install insulation in rental homes and the expansion of labelling and new standards for energy-efficient appliances.

“On World Environment Day we want to help all Australians ‘kick the carbon habit’.”

Details of the new measures:

Television and other electrical appliance labelling
The Rudd Labor Government was elected with a commitment to deliver on a 10-star appliance rating scheme. These new appliance labels, which will be in phased in over the next 12 months, will help consumers identify super efficient appliances – like clothes dryers, washing machines and dishwashers.

The voluntary television energy label is similar to the energy label used on fridges, washing machines, clothes dryers and air conditioners, helping consumers save energy, save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This new voluntary scheme will come into effect within the next six months, backed by a proposal to introduce mandatory labelling and standards next year. Combined with the acceleration and expansion of minimum greenhouse and energy performance standards, and the introduction of new 10-star labels, these measures will help consumers save energy and provide manufacturers with recognition for energy-efficient innovations.

Your Home Renovator’s Guide
The Rudd Government wants to make it easier for people to access information on ways to ‘green-up’ their homes, with measures announced in the Budget like our new one-stop web portal to provide consumers with a single window to all federal, state and local government environmental programs for sustainability at home.

The Your Home Renovators Guide, was developed in partnership with the Victorian Building Commission, Sustainability Victoria, other state Governments, the Centre for Design at RMIT and the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS. Every page of this guide provides tips to help home owners save money, and make their homes healthy and comfortable and more environmentally friendly from the front door to the backyard.

There are 4.2 million homes in Australia that are over 20 years old so the Your Home Renovator’s Guide has the potential to inform a large portion of the Australian community now and in the future, helping drive down energy usage.

Lighting
Lighting is an area where we can make quick, simple cuts in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. More efficient lights like compact fluorescent lamps are already available on the market and are an easy, cleaner alternative to the traditional incandescent globe.

The Rudd Labor Government and Lighting Council Australia have joined forces to fast track the phase out of inefficient light bulbs in Australia, bringing forward an import ban to November this year. The 12-month acceleration of the four-year phase out, beginning with the introduction of a ban on imported incandescent lamps from this year, will result in earlier cuts to greenhouse emissions of more than four million tonnes per year.

Retailers will then have a further 12 months to sell existing supplies before any sort of retail ban comes into effect.

Most of the findings, like the spread of warmth-loving pests and the inevitable loss of low-lying lands to rising seas, are not new. But the report included new projections of how the poor, elderly and communities with lagging public-health and public-works systems will face outsize health risks from warming.

Among the report’s new conclusions on health: “An increased frequency and severity of heat waves is expected, leading to more illness and death, particularly among the young, elderly, frail and poor.” It added that deaths from cold would decline, but said uncertainties on both projections made it impossible to characterize the overall risk.

It gave high odds (essentially a two out of three chance) that Lyme disease and West Nile virus would have expanded ranges because of warming. The report gave the same odds that some food- and water-borne diseases would also increase among susceptible populations, but said “major human epidemics” were unlikely as long as public-health systems remained effective.

Under a 1990 law, presidents must submit a report to Congress every four years summarizing what is known about impacts of climate change and other global environmental problems on the United States.

The last such assessment, undertaken in the Clinton administration and published in 2000, was attacked by groups and industries opposing restrictions on greenhouse gases. References to it were deleted from some government reports by political appointees in the White House.

Environmental groups sued to force the completion of a new study. In court, the White House contended that a series of more than 20 studies requested by President Bush in 2003 satisfied the 1990 law, but Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong of Federal District Court for the Northern District of California rejected that assertion last August and ordered a comprehensive assessment to be published by the end of May.

“This assessment is an example of what federal scientists can and should be doing when they are freed from political interference and allowed to actually do their jobs,” said Kassie Siegel, climate program director for the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who was the lead author of the 1990 law, strongly criticized the White House.

“The three-year delay of this report is sadly fitting for an administration that has wasted seven years denying the real threat of global climate change,” Mr. Kerry said in a statement. “In these lost years, we could have slowed global warming and advanced clean energy solutions, but instead America’s climate change strategy has been at best rhetorical, not real.”

Officials expect to collect about $1.1 million per year from the fee, with most of that coming from the 10 largest polluters, who together will pay more than $800,000. The largest Bay Area emitter — a Shell oil refinery — would have to pay $195,355 based on its 2005 emissions of 4.4 million metric tons.

The majority of businesses will pay less than $1 per year for their CO2 emissions.

“It doesn’t solve global warming, but it gets us thinking in the right terms,” Daniel Kammen, a renewable energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told the AP. “It’s not enough of a cost to change behavior, but it tells us where things are headed. You have to think not just in financial terms, but in carbon terms.”

The Productivity Commission’s clear attempt this morning to influence the outcome of the Garnaut Review may be couched in detached and academic language, but its implications are profound.

The Commission’s characterisation of the Stern Review as advocacy rather analysis can be equally applied to this morning’s Staff Paper and much of what has been published by this so-called politically neutral and independent body over many years.

We mustn’t forget that the economic troglodytes at the Productivity Commission put out a 500 page report in August 2005 the main thrust of which was that any energy efficiency opportunities that exist must largely have already been fully taken advantage of. This is patently wrong. In fact, most experts recognise that increasing efficiency is the cheapest and fastest way of reducing emissions.

Much of the critique in today’s Productivity Commission staff paper lies in the application of a discount rate to the value of human life, and the Commission is quite right to say that this is an ethical and moral question. But surely the basic assumption, as Stern concluded, must be that a life today is equivalent to a life tomorrow, and there should be a close to zero discount rate applied. Stern’s rate of 0.1% for human life takes into account the risk of the human race descending to extinction. I am one with the UK Tories, whose Blueprint for a Green Economy argues that Stern is “too complacent” in his estimates of climate impacts and emissions reduction targets, and his discount rate is too high.

Anyone putting forward models that value a human death in 50 years time as only 5% of its current worth, as would be the case with a 6% discount rate, is putting forward a position so divergent from cultural norms that it is surely more advocacy than analysis. While the Productivity Commission is not advocating one value rather than another in today’s paper, their suggestion that the discount rate should be higher rather than lower is clearly part of their ongoing advocacy campaign to undermine climate action.

If the Productivity Commission staff bothered to follow climate science, they would realise that Stern’s choice of the IPCC’s upper band of warming is now being proven to be conservative. Climate impacts are shooting ahead of the projections, leaving policy way behind. Now is not the time for more rearguard action to delay emissions cuts.

Following the recent debate over a possible cut in fuel excises to relieve the cost burden on motorists, the commission has also encouraged the Government to put up fuel prices by including transport fuels in an emissions trading scheme from 2010.

The Government’s chief climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, has already signalled concerns about Labor’s ambitious election promise to set a mandatory renewable energy target of 20 per cent of power to be generated through sources such as wind and solar energy by 2020.

In February, with the release of his first interim report, Professor Garnaut highlighted the need to phase out the MRET as quickly as possible, warning it could push up electricity prices and override the impact of a trading scheme.

The Productivity Commission was specifically invited by Professor Garnaut to comment on the policy response to climate change.

While recognising the need for a range of policy options to accelerate the development of clean energy technologies, the commission has questioned the efficiency of the proposed MRET in parallel with an emissions trading scheme.

It claims such an approach would increase renewable energy generation at the expense of gas-fired electricity, but not drive any deeper cuts in emissions.

It also expressed concern that the scheme would “provide a signal that lobbying for government support for certain technologies and industries over others could be successful”.

“An MRET operating in conjunction with an emissions trading scheme would not encourage any additional abatement, but still impose additional administration and monitoring costs,” the submission says.

The Rudd Government remains committed to the implementation ofits MRET scheme, allocating $15million in last week’s budget towards administering it over the next five years.

A spokeswoman for Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the Government made an election commitment to its expanded MRET.

“The purpose is to drive investment in, and deployment of, renewable energy in the short and medium term,” she said.

“The Government will design the renewable energy target in a careful way to reduce Australia’s emissions at the lowest cost to the economy.”

The commission’s submission is consistent with many key points raised in recent Garnaut review discussion papers.

These involve the need to include transport fuels under emissions trading and calls for a review of emissions-increasing tax structures, such as fringe benefits tax treatment of cars, and of market rules for power transmission and pricing once a price is put on greenhouse emissions.

“There may be interventions elsewhere in the economy (for example, in the taxation and tariff systems) that inadvertently create incentives for increased (greenhouse gas) emissions,” it says.

“While there could be good public policy reasons for these interventions, the emergence of more ambitious climate change objectives provides an additional reason for reviewing their appropriateness.”

Opposition climate spokesman Greg Hunt said the MRET should be replaced with a clean energy target that included technologies such as clean coal and gas. “If you want to clean up the power stations, which supply 92per cent of Australia’s energy, and if you want to firmly tackle climate change, you have to have incentives for the take-up of clean coal and gas,” he said.

Australian Conservation Foundation climate spokesman Tony Mohr welcomed the commission’s focus on taxation review, but suggested the benefits from a mandatory target were greater than attributed. The gas industry welcomed the submission as “an important and credible addition to the debate around how Australia achieves emissions reductions most efficiently”.

The commission’s comments come as Brendan Nelson described price rises stemming from the Garnaut review as “the train heading down the track”.

“Mr Rudd has capitalised on the widespread community concern in relation to change, but he’s also capitalised on the fact that most Australians are actually ignorant about what it’s actually going to cost,” the Opposition Leader said in Melbourne.

“At the moment, most Australians who are struggling to feed, clothe and house their children … have not been able to read hundreds of pages of economic theory in relation to the implementation of climate change.

“Most Australians are generally supportive … But I still think there is a vast, widespread community ignorance in terms of what adjusting to climate change is actually going to cost us.”