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  • Carbon bill burns as Rudd fiddles.

    Carbon bill burns as Rudd fiddles 

    Phillip Coorey Chief Political Correspondent

    May 5, 2009
    Page 1 of 2 | Single page

    THE Federal Government’s emissions trading scheme was clinging to life last night after a series of changes designed to win the support of the Senate failed to shift sentiment.

    In the biggest policy reversal of his prime ministership, aimed at wooing big business and the Liberal Party, Kevin Rudd announced the scheme would be delayed by one year to July 1, 2011, beyond the next election.

    Compensation for the nation’s heaviest polluters would be more generous and the price of a tonne of carbon for the first year would be fixed at a low $10, reducing by half the original projected impact on energy bills.

    As a sop to environmentalists, there was a heavily conditional commitment to increase from 15 per cent to 25 per cent the maximum amount by which greenhouse gases would be reduced by 2020.

    “I am in the practical business of responding to realistic challenges,” Mr Rudd said of his reversal, which, he said, would mean “a slower start” but a “stronger, greener conclusion”.

    After warning repeatedly that any delay would be reckless and costly, Mr Rudd said the changes were driven by the pressures on business caused by the recession.

    Also, with the original plan headed for certain defeat in the Senate, the Government needed bargaining power in the form of a regulated scheme to persuade other nations to take action at a climate summit in Copenhagen at the end of the year.

    Despite the delay, business still wanted a legislated scheme in place so it could start making long-term investment decisions.

    Mr Rudd said the changes were similar to those being called for by Malcolm Turnbull and he demanded the Liberals support the legislation to be introduced to Parliament this month.

    “It’s time to get off the fence, Mr Turnbull, and it’s time to act in the national interest and to secure this legislation and certainty for the future,” he said.

    Rejecting the legislation twice would give the Government the trigger for a double dissolution election this year. But the Opposition Leader said the changes were “tinkering” and “no, we wouldn’t support it”.

    But he left open the possibility of compromise. He said there was no need to pass the legislation this year because of the delay and there needed to be more analysis.

    “Why not give ourselves more time to get it right?” he said.

    Mr Turnbull faces internal pressures. The Coalition is split on the veracity of climate change and how to tackle it. The Nationals leader, Warren Truss, said the changes were “not enough to rescue this dog of a scheme”.

  • Rudd feels the heat over China syndrome

    Rudd feels the heat over China syndrome

    • May 3, 2009

    The Prime Minister knows the language but something is being lost in the translation, writes Michelle Grattan.

    Kevin Rudd might wonder at the irony. He prides himself on being such a China expert, the Mandarin speaker who’s studied the country since his youth and served there as a diplomat. You wouldn’t find too many leaders to match his knowledge. And yet things Chinese have been giving him grief.

    Moreover, he comes under fire every which way. He’s attacked for being too pro-China but sometimes the criticism comes from the other direction. His latest problem has been some arrows from Beijing before the release of the long-awaited Defence White Paper, which was launched yesterday and reflects a complex and wary view of China and the need for Australia’s defence planning to be prepared for all eventualities.

    The Chinese elephant has hung over Australia’s first Defence White Paper since 2000. Analyst Hugh White recently observed that the main concern isn’t about China as it becomes more powerful but how China’s growth is fracturing the old regional order, producing deep uncertainties about the implications for our security. White noted that Rudd in recent speeches had made it clear he saw China’s rise “as the single most important factor shaping Asia’s century and Australia’s long-term strategic risks”.

    Against a background of arguments within the defence and intelligence communities over whether China would evolve into a threat, Mike Pezzullo, a senior defence official and lead author of the white paper, went to Beijing to brief on the document.

    Beijing didn’t seem impressed. A Chinese diplomatic source was reported saying Rudd had been supposed to be a bridge between China and the US but “now it looks like he wants to act on behalf of America against China”.

    Malcolm Turnbull argues the Government is overplaying the China threat, while Rudd’s attempt to present himself “as some kind of intermediary between the United States and China is neither helpful nor convincing”.

    The risk, according to Turnbull, is Rudd “will be perceived by the Americans as being overly sympathetic to China and by the Chinese as a bearer of other people’s messages”.

    On his first round-the-world prime ministerial trip last year, Rudd made sure he visited China (which got him into trouble with Tokyo, because it wasn’t on the itinerary). But as soon as he touched down in Beijing, Rudd went to the university and delivered a firm message on Tibet and human rights.

    It’s certainly hard to accuse Rudd of being soft on China, whether the issue is human rights or defence. He’s a China admirer but a hard-headed realist, too, who has always been aware of its darker side. After all, his university honours thesis was about a leading dissident. In Nicholas Stuart’s biography of Rudd, his supervisor Pierre Ryckmans said Rudd wanted to understand “the duality of China”.

    An Opposition claim earlier this year that Rudd was acting like a “travelling advocate for China” when he argued for it to have greater representation on the International Monetary Fund was absurd. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister has raised eyebrows by some actions, notably his failure to announce at the time meetings he’d had with senior Chinese propaganda and security figures. He is clearly sensitive to how his China stances are seen. When in London for the G20 this year his staff asked for changes in the seating in a BBC studio when he found himself next to the Chinese ambassador, though he claimed he just wanted to be close to his mate, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

    After the Defence White Paper, the next testing point of the Australia-China relationship is the bid by the Chinese state-owned entity Chinalco for a bigger slice of the resource giant Rio Tinto.

    This raises important issues of resource security and Turnbull is increasing the pressure on the Government, arguing the bid, as it stands, should be rejected. His grounds are that Chinalco is effectively owned by the Chinese Communist Party, that there is a conflict of interest between a purchaser of a commodity having a large shareholding in the seller company and that no Australian company would be allowed to buy into a Chinese one.

    The judgment on the bid is an on-balance one. Whatever the decision, it will be controversial.

  • Rudd signs off on emissions trading scheme compromise

    Rudd signs off on emissions trading scheme compromise

    Lenore Taylor, National correspondent | May 04, 2009

    Article from:  The Australian

    THE Rudd Government is about to announce a package of amendments to its own proposed emissions trading scheme designed to soften its effects during the recession and win Senate support from the Coalition.

     The package includes a one year delay and then a very low fixed price on carbon for the first year of the scheme’s operation from July 2011 to July 2012. It also extra assistance for each of the two categories of so-called trade exposed industries for the duration of the recession.

    Industry sources said that the most polluting industries currently eligible to get 90 per cent of their permits for free will now get up to 95 per cent for the first five years of the scheme, and industries eligible for 60 per cent of their permits for free will now get up to 70 per cent for up to five years.

    It is also understood to include the concession that the government will consider a tougher emissions reduction target of 25 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020, in the unlikely event of a global agreement designed to limit the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million. Otherwise the government’s previously announced target range of 5 to 15 per cent would apply.

    The amendments, signed off by the Cabinet subcommittee on climate change this morning, and due to be announced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at a press conference after midday, are designed to win support from Malcolm Turnbull’s opposition in the Senate and appease mounting industry concern about the costs of the scheme during the global recession.

    The Australian Greens yesterday wrote to Mr Rudd with their “bottom line” for Senate support for the scheme, which is that the government’s “unconditional” emissions reduction cut should be 25 per cent, rather than 5 per cent, and that the government should consider cuts as high as 40 per cent in the event of a tough international deal at the Copenhagen talks in December.

  • Generating energy from the deep

    Generating Energy From the Deep

     

    Jim Wilson/The New York Times

    By KATE GALBRAITH

    Published: April 29, 2009

    LOCKHEED MARTIN is best known for building stealth fighters, satellites and other military equipment. But since late 2006 the company has taken on a different kind of enterprise — generating renewable power from the ocean.

    The technology is still being developed in the laboratory, but if it succeeds on a large scale, it could eventually become an important tool in the nation’s battle against global warming and dependency on foreign oil.

    Lockheed and a few other companies are pursuing ocean thermal energy conversion, which uses the difference in temperature between the ocean’s warm surface and its chilly depths to generate electricity.

    Experts say that the balmy waters off Hawaii and Puerto Rico, as well as near United States military bases on islands like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or Guam in the Pacific, would be good sites for developing this type of energy.

    Hawaii and many other islands rely on imported oil to generate most of their electricity, which is expensive, and last year’s spikes in oil prices have reinvigorated their search for homegrown alternatives.

    “The vagaries of petroleum impact Hawaii far more than any other state,” said Theodore Peck, an energy administrator in the state’s department of business, economic development and tourism. Generating energy from the ocean’s temperature variations, he added, is “a natural for Hawaii.”

    The Navy is also interested in the technology and in the next few months plans to award a contract to explore it, according to Whit DeLoach, a spokesman for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command. As of last year, he said, the Navy had spent slightly more than $1 million to research the technology for Diego Garcia.

    In the approach that Lockheed is pursuing (with another company, Makai Ocean Engineering), the water on the ocean’s surface is used to heat a pressurized liquid, usually ammonia, which boils at a temperature slightly below that of warm seawater. That liquid becomes gas, which powers a turbine generator. Cold water is then pumped from the ocean’s depths through a giant pipe to condense the gas back into a liquid, and the cycle is repeated.

    An important advantage of this method of producing energy is that it could run all the time, unlike solar plants, which cannot work at night, or wind turbines, which stop in calm conditions.

    But the technology is expensive and can work in only a limited number of places, like the tropics, where there is a large difference in temperature between the ocean’s layers. This excludes many major population centers, although proponents hope that Florida and the Gulf Coast could also be markets. (Other types of ocean energy being explored would harness the tides and waves.)

    Meanwhile, Lockheed is developing a test cold-water pipe — to be 13 feet in diameter and 40 feet long — in a laboratory in Sunnyvale, Calif.

    Last year, Gov. Linda Lingle of Hawaii announced a partnership between Lockheed and the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan to build a test plant in Hawaii.

    Lockheed says it hopes to obtain financing for the project from the Defense and Energy Departments, as well as from the private sector; if enough is available, the company says it would like to have the platform working by 2013. A Japanese engineering company, Xenesys, is also exploring ocean thermal energy for Cuba and Tahiti, among other countries.

    Lockheed and the federal government have worked on this type of energy before, after the 1970s oil crises. In 1979, a 50-kilowatt test project was briefly run off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. Financing for ocean-energy projects was slashed significantly by the Reagan administration, and Lockheed abandoned its pursuit of the technology in the mid-1980s.

    Proponents say that since the last attempt to develop it, the technology has improved enormously. Offshore oil platforms similar to the platforms needed for the ocean energy system have become more sophisticated, for example in their ability to withstand hurricanes and to moor in deeper water.

    In theory the technology could, among other uses, provide substantial amounts of power to Hawaii and other warm-water sites and also be used in floating power plants making industrial products like ammonia. However, such goals are distant.

    Skeptics say that the technology is highly inefficient because it requires large amounts of energy to pump the cold water through the system.

    Patricia Tummons, who edits the newsletter Environment Hawaii, said a major question about the technology was “just how economical it can be.”

    Robert Varley, who is helping to lead Lockheed’s efforts, estimated that just 3.5 percent of the potential energy from the warm water pumped might actually be used. “In reality that doesn’t matter — the fuel is free,” he said.

    But building and operating the platform will be costly. Harry Jackson, the president of Ocees International, an engineering firm based in Honolulu also working on the technology, estimated that a test plant of the size Hawaii is planning — which is still far smaller than commercial scale — would cost $150 million to $250 million.

    Some environmental groups are cautiously embracing the technology as one of many approaches that could help reduce fossil fuel consumption and thus combat climate change.

    “The environmental impacts associated with it would be probably a lot less than other sorts of power,” said Henry Curtis, executive director of Life of the Land, an environmental group in Hawaii.

    Still, the technology would not leave its surroundings unscathed. A huge amount of cold water would have to be pumped up from the depths. If that water, which is rich in nutrients, is discharged into a different part of the ocean, it could confuse fish and alter the balance of the ecosystem.

    Mr. Varley of Lockheed also said that the warm water must be siphoned in slowly enough so that fish could swim away.

    “We’ll have to put up screens, of course, on the intakes of the warm water so we don’t suck in marine mammals,” he said.

  • Cross your fingers and carry on

    Cross Your Fingers and Carry On

    Posted April 14, 2009

    Why does the government refuse to make contingency plans for peak oil?

     

    By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 14th April 2009

    Here’s how the British government describes the risk of a smallpox outbreak. “We are currently at alert level 0. Smallpox remains eradicated. No credible threat of a smallpox release.”(1)

    So, in response to this non-existent threat, it has published 122 pages of central plans(2,3). Each of the nine English regions maintains a Smallpox Diagnosis and Response Group, which in turn supports five Smallpox Management and Response Teams, one of which is on duty at all times. There are smallpox centres all over the country, and lists of doctors, nurses and support staff prepared to run them, laboratories ready to multiply vaccines and planning committees involving scores of different agencies.

    The plans, in other words, must have cost millions. They use thousands of hours of specialist time every year. But step forward the man or woman who believes the government should abandon them.

    The chances that this extinct disease might break out here are extremely remote – one in a million perhaps – but they cannot be dismissed while the US and Russia disgracefully refuse to destroy their stockpiles. Stealing, weaponising and distributing the virus would require capabilities beyond those of any known terrorist group. The government’s plans are almost certainly a waste of time and money. But they are a waste of time and money that makes sense.

    This is what government is for: to prepare for the worst, however unlikely it may be. The UK, like all rich nations, maintains an elaborate network of agencies to defend us from unlikely events: the Ministerial Committee on Protective Security and Resilience, the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, the Domestic Horizon Scanning Committee, the National Risk Register, the Capabilities Programme Board, the National Recovery Working Group, the Regional Resilience and Emergency Response Division, the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response and endless departmental and regional bodies.

    But this great state safety net is full of holes. The government has a strangely unbalanced approach to risk, over-emphasising some contingencies – terrorism, anarchy, attacks by rogue states – while underplaying, even promoting, others. It was Gordon Brown, for example, who told the bankers of the City of London in his Mansion House speech of 2004 that “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”(4).

    There is one respect in which the government’s approach seems utterly bonkers: a threat with a high likelihood of occurrence, for which it refuses to make any plans at all. I’ve been banging on about this for a while, with my usual absence of results. But now I’ve received a letter which makes its dismissive response look like outright lunacy.

    There is nothing certain about the hypothesis that global supplies of conventional petroleum might soon stop growing and then go into decline. There is a large body of expert opinion, marshalling impressive statistics, which is convinced that peak oil is imminent. There is also a large body of expert opinion, marshalling impressive statistics, which insists that it’s a long way off. I don’t know whom to believe. The key data – the true extent of reserves in the OPEC nations – are state secrets. Anyone who tells you that oil supplies will definitely peak by a certain date or definitely won’t peak ever is a fraud: the information required to make these assessments does not exist.

    In February 2008 I sent a freedom of information request to the Department for Business, asking what contingency plans the government has made for the eventuality that global supplies of crude oil might peak between now and 2020. The answer I received astonished me. “The Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020.”(5)

    As it revealed in a parliamentary answer, the government relies primarily on the International Energy Agency for its assessment(6). When I made my first request, its cavalier attitude chimed with the IEA’s. But at the end of last year the agency suddenly changed tack. Its World Energy Outlook report upgraded the annual rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields from 3.7% to 6.7%(7). Previously it had relied on guesswork. This time it had conducted the world’s first comprehensive study of decline rates, covering the 800 largest fields.

    The report also contained a word the agency had hitherto avoided: peak. It proposed that “although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.”(8) When I interviewed the IEA’s chief economist for the Guardian, he tightened this up: “in terms of non-OPEC, we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well … I think time is not on our side here.”(9) He told me that we would need a “global energy revolution” to avert this prospect. Nothing of the kind is happening.

    So I sent the British government a new request: in the light of what the IEA has revealed, what contingency plans has the government made? The response has now arrived. “With sufficient investment, the Government does not believe that global oil production will peak between now and 2020 and consequently we do not have any contingency plans specific to a peak in oil production.”(10)

    I just don’t get it. Let’s assume that there is only a 10% chance that the International Energy Agency and everybody else predicting that global oil supplies will soon peak or plateau are right. That still makes peak oil about 100,000 times more likely than a smallpox outbreak in the United Kingdom.

    As the report by Robert L Hirsch, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, shows, the consequences of peak oil taking governments by surprise are at least as devastating as a smallpox epidemic. “Without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.”(11) Hirsch estimated that to avoid global economic collapse, we would need to begin “a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking.” If he’s right and the IEA’s right, we’re already 10 years too late. But my conversations with government officials suggest to me that they wear the absence of plans almost as a badge of honour, like the Viking beserkers who went into battle without armour to show how mad they were.

    The only explanation I can suggest is that the concept of insufficient oil cannot be accommodated within the government’s worldview. Its response to a smallpox epidemic accords with its messianic tendencies: government as superman, defending us from nutters carrying vampire pathogens. The idea that we might be undone by an issue as mundane and unresponsive as resource depletion just doesn’t fit.

    But at least we know where we stand: we’ll have to make our own contingency plans. Does anyone have a spare AK47?

    www.monbiot.com

    References:

    1. http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

    2. Department of Health, 15th December 2003. Guidelines for smallpox response and management in the post-eradication era, Version 2. Downloadable at http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

    3. Department of Health, 15th December 2003. Appendices. Downloadable at http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

    4. Gordon Brown, 16th June 2004. Speech to Mansion House. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/speech_chex_160604.htm

    5. BERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request, Ref 08/0091.

    6. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080402/text/80402w0045.htm

    7. International Energy Agency, 2008. World Energy Outlook 2008, page 43. IEA, Paris.

    8. ibid, p103.

    9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/dec/15/fatih-birol-george-monbiot

    10. DECC, 23rd March 2009. Response to Freedom of Information request, Ref 09/0277.

    11. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005. Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. US Department of Energy, page 4. http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

  • The media laps up fake controversy over climate change

    The media laps up fake controversy over climate change

    Proof of paid-for climate denial at the Global Climate Coalition comes as no surprise, but it is no less depressing for that.

    There are three kinds of climate change denier. There are those who simply don’t want to accept the evidence, because it is too much to bear, or because it threatens aspects of their lives that they don’t want to change. These are by far the most numerous, and account for most of those whose comments will follow this post.

    I have some sympathy for their position. Denial is most people’s first response to something they don’t want to hear, whether it is a diagnosis of terminal illness or the threat presented by the rise of the Axis Powers. The moral, intellectual and practical challenge of climate change is unprecedented. The urge to duck it almost irresistible.

    Then there is a smaller group of people – almost all men, generally in their sixties or above – who are not paid for their stance, but who have achieved a little post-retirement celebrity through well-timed controversialism. It has kept David Bellamy in the news, long after his wonderful career on television sadly (and wrongly, in my view) ended. It has lent more recognition to people like Philip Stott and Tim Ball than anything they published during their academic careers. It attracts adoring fanmail (from people in category one) for journalists like Christopher Booker and Melanie Philips. It permits men like Lord Monckton to indulge their fantasies of single-handedly rescuing humanity from its own idiocy. Their intellectual acrobatics are as blatant as that of the people in the third category, but they appear to be driven by vanity, not cash.

    The third category consists of those who are paid to deny that climate change is happening. Patrick Michaels and Steve Milloy, whose work for fossil fuel companies has been repeatedly exposed, are good examples. There are probably a few paid stooges contributing to the Guardian’s discussion threads as well.

    Even when the risk of exposure is high, journalists working for newspapers, television or radio have secretly taken money from undisclosed interests to champion their views. Fossil fuel companies have inserted their message into every medium by means of hired hands who don’t reveal their sources of funding. Why would they not take advantage of the anonymity of these threads? Some of the contributers here are astroturfers, but we’ll probably never know which ones they are.

    Whenever you challenge anyone in categories two or three, they come over all innocent, claiming that the science is unsettled, that the other side are all liars, and all they are doing is telling the public what it needs to hear. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or who subscribes to Science or Nature knows that they cannot possibly believe this, or are able to believe it only by tying their minds into such elaborate knots that they have succeeded in deceiving themselves.

    We knew it, but we couldn’t prove it. But now we have a smoking gun. Last week the New York Times revealed that the Global Climate Coalition, the industry-funded body that led the campaign to persuade people that manmade climate wasn’t happening, knew all along that it was. In 1995 its own experts warned that:

    The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied … The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change

    It seems to me that the real suckers in this story are the media organisations – the BBC and Channel 4 are the outstanding examples – that gave 15 years of free access to companies like ExxonMobil, by inviting their paid experts to “balance” the views of genuine scientists, without demanding that they disclosed their sources. (Channel 4 appears determined to continue being suckered).

    They had only to look at Exxon’s annual accounts to see that the people they introduced as independent experts were neither expert nor independent. But they chose not to, as fake controversy provided better copy than the boring old scientific consensus. Now we know just how fake it was.

    monbiot.com