Category: News

It comes on top of Obama’s election commitments to invest $US150 billion ($A210 billion) over ten years to create five million green jobs and reduce carbon pollution by 80 per cent by 2050.

Obama’s proposed stimulus package is expected to total at least $US775 billion ($A1.1 trillion).

A joint statement by groups including the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the ACTU says Australia has an opportunity to adopt a similar package to boost the economy and tackle climate change.

It calls for a green building program to improve water and energy efficiency of commercial, residential and public buildings, and maximise short-term economic benefit by stimulating the construction industry.

Investment in sustainable infrastructure across public transport and rail networks for freight to reduce carbon footprints is also critical, the statement says.

The groups want green jobs made a “centrepiece of economic and industrial policy” and say the right mix of investment, skills and training could create market demand.

“The green stimulus component is one of four major cornerstones in Obama’s proposed economic recovery package and there is a crucial opportunity for Australia to do the same,” ACF executive director Don Henry said.

“There is no time to lose if we want to avoid falling behind the US and other developed nations in the race for green jobs growth and tackling dangerous climate change.”

Thousands of ordinary Australians will form a human chain around Parliament House in Canberra on February 3^rd to inisst that the government honour its election promise to significantly reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions. Treasury estimates revealed last week that the Rudd government’s proposed emissions trading scheme will actually increase emissions by 5.84 percent. Tim Colebatch wrote in The Age that the government is deliberately misleading the public by reducing emission allocations while giving polluters the right to offset unlimited quantities of pollution overseas. Scientists, church leaders and environmentalists have called on the government to invest in renewable energy infrastructure and green jobs. Marches in capital cities will coincide with the activities in Canberra on the weekend before parliament opens.

Read Giovanni Ebono in the Tweed Daily News

Read Tim Colebatch in The Age

It’s an ugly reality that exemplifies why the Government’s model is doomed to fail. It promises change, but tries to shield everyone from all the points that drive change.

As I have argued before, the problem is not the targets themselves. If we were to cut our emissions in 2020 to 5 per cent below 2000 levels, that would be a rapid cut of 25 per cent in emissions per capita from current levels. A cut to 15 per cent below 2000 levels, promised if we get a good international agreement, implies a cut of 33 per cent per capita between 2006 and 2020. If we achieved that, it would be real progress towards the ultimate goal of halving global emissions.

The problem is that with Rudd’s decision to shield companies and households from the changes the scheme is meant to drive, it’s unlikely that Australia will reduce its emissions. Yet that is what he promised to do.

There’s a crucial point we all overlooked. Labor has not committed Australia to cut its emissions by 5 per cent, but to cut its emissions allocation by 5 per cent. And that is very different. In 2000, Australia emitted 553 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. In 2020, the Government will allocate permits for 525 million tonnes of emissions. But even before last week’s changes weakened the scheme, Treasury estimated that Australia would emit 585 million tonnes.

The key to it is that the scheme allows companies to use unlimited numbers of permits from other countries instead of our own. And the permits we import will be subtracted from our emissions tally.

They would come from other Western countries or (more likely) from developing countries, under rules such as the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism (CDM), which allows Western companies to buy permits for emissions saved in developing countries by using cleaner technology. A noble idea, unfortunately it has proved easy to rort.

The Garnaut report proposed a tighter test, but the Government refused. Permits from CDM and “joint initiative” projects in countries with emission reduction targets are expected to be plentiful and cheap. That’s why Treasury estimates that emissions trading will prove cheap.

On Treasury modelling, even with constraints that will no longer apply, Australia in 2020 would import permits for another 46 million tonnes from other countries. And by 2050, Rudd pledges, Australia will reduce emissions by 60 per cent from 2000 levels, to 221 million tonnes. But Treasury projects that in fact Australia would cut its emissions by only 24 per cent, to 420 million tonnes, and buy 199 million tonnes of permits overseas.

Moreover, its modelling assumed Labor would limit the use of foreign permits, to supply at most half the cut in emissions. But Rudd threw out that constraint, allowing an even larger share of our “emissions cuts” to be bought overseas.

What’s wrong with that? Nothing, so long as it really cuts emissions. But we have seen China sell “certified emissions reduction” permits for phasing out hydrochlorofluorocarbons, which it has to do anyway under the Montreal Protocol. The ease of rorting is one reason why economists such as Jeffrey Sachs plead instead for a carbon tax.

The Government’s spurned climate change adviser Ross Garnaut spelt out eloquently in Saturday’s Age how its scheme would waste the revenue from emissions trading in unjustifiable and/or extravagant compensation payouts to interest groups, rather than using it to drive change. It’s a sad picture of a weak Government that crumbles under pressure from big business.

The net effect will be to reduce emission cuts in Australia, so the targets are achieved by buying dubious overseas permits. The scheme won’t be a write-off, but it will be rorted, and it will not achieve what it claims to do.

Labor has tried to deflect criticism by focusing on the cuts in per capita emissions. That would be fine if the cuts really happened, and if, like Garnaut, it proposed that contraction and convergence to a global per capita emissions target by 2050 be the framework for an international agreement.

But when Penny Wong addressed other environment ministers at Poznan, she did not mention per capita emissions. Why? Because Australia’s per capita emissions are the sixth highest in the world — and under Garnaut’s framework we would have to make (or buy) the sixth biggest cuts.

Yet there is no other viable way for the world to cut emissions to levels that would end global warming. The greenhouse gases that threaten environmental catastrophe are not those already up there, but the far greater volume to be emitted in future, mostly from developing countries.

We need real leadership — not this.

The Huanen Beijing co-generation power plant is not the shining advertisement for clean coal that advocates claim, according to Thomas R Blakeslee in Renewable Energy World last week. Australian carbon capture and storage technology has been installed at the plant and 3,300 tonnes of carbon dioxide are captured annually and sold to soft drink manufacturers. Blakeslee said this is less than one thousandth of the CO2 produced by the plant and that the equipment required to compress and process the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide the plant produces each year would be larger than the plant itself and would consume a significant portion of the power it produces. Blakeslee said, “the political stranglehold of the coal lobby is the biggest threat to our climate today.”

Read the Renewable Energy World article

The Huaneng Beijing Co-Generation plant is a very impressive and clean looking 845-megawatt (MW) coal-fired plant. It features sulfur removal, water recycling and dust control. Efficiency is improved by selling excess heat for district heating. I was particularly interested to see the separate building, where an Australian carbon capture system collects and compresses 3300 tons/year of CO2 for sale to soft drink manufacturers.

At the end of the tour there was a presentation, which gave the impression that the CO2 capture solved the global warming problems of coal. I knew that a coal plant of this size emits about 6 million tons of CO2 per year, so capturing only 3300 tons means that 99.9 oper cent of the CO2 must be released to the atmosphere! When I asked the guide about this he was very embarrassed and had to admit that this was just a test and would have to be expanded. Looking at the large CO2 capture building, I would estimate that to capture all six million tons would take a building larger than the whole complex. The CO2 is now delivered in heavy steel cylinders. Hauling away and selling six million tons this way will obviously be impractical.

In the conference hall there was also a stack of free copies of the Carbon Capture Journal available. A strange thing to distribute at a renewable energy conference! The coal business is big money in China as it is here. In the U.S. we have the same problem. A coal industry front group called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices sponsors similar propaganda in the U.S. They ran US $35 million worth of TV ads during the Presidential debates, which implanted “clean coal” into our unconscious without ever mentioning that it doesn’t really exist anywhere in the world

Unfortunately, even Obama seems determined to spend billions more on the dream of “clean coal.” The political stranglehold of the coal lobby worldwide is the biggest threat to our climate today. Supporters of sequestration conveniently ignore the staggering volume of the CO2 that must be disposed of: 10 billion tons/yr worldwide! The largest sequestration project in the world so far is an Algerian plant that stores 1.2 million tons per year in four gas wells. It will be full when 17 million tons have been stored. Many U.S. coal plants emit more than 20 million tons every year!

Somehow we must find the political will to free ourselves from these powerful forces that fight to maintain the status quo. Coal is an environmental nightmare that only appears cheap because we have ignored its hidden costs. Geothermal power is cleaner and cheaper yet we are fooled into wasting precious time and money trying to keep coal alive.