Thousands of ordinary Australians will form a human chain around Parliament House in Canberra on February 3rd 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.
Author: admin
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One little word undoes Labor on climate
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.
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US solar companies farm mall roofs
SunEdison, North America’s largest solar energy services provider, today announced the largest solar distributed generation program with Developers Diversified Realty, a Cleveland-based real estate investment trust (REIT) actively engaged in the development and management of shopping centers. SunEdison has the rights to deploy solar energy systems at more than 200 shopping centers, covering up to an estimated 30 million square feet, located in 24 states and in Puerto Rico. Potential capacity of the program is up to 259 MW.
Once a system is operational, Developers Diversified will be able to purchase energy for common area uses. In addition, shopping center tenants can benefit and realize energy savings by opting to purchase the power generated through the program at rates lower than retail energy rates.
“Developers Diversified is a forward-thinking real estate company—bringing clean solar energy to its properties for the benefit of its tenants and the environment through the largest distributed generation program of its kind. It’s a way for Developers Diversified and its tenants to reduce operating costs. Furthermore, a typical-sized solar energy system in the program will avoid an estimated 10 million pounds of carbon dioxide pollution,” said Brian Jacolick, General Manager, Americas for SunEdison.
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Clean coal rort exposed
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.”
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Beijing clean coal fails to impress
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.
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Posselt revises Henry Lawson
“We have made it worse for people,” Mr Posselt said. “Water is very, very divisive. The happiest groups of people that we have come across have been in areas where there’s been very little irrigation.”
Mr Posselt, 54, left Brisbane on May 27 to paddle and pull his kayak to Adelaide to focus attention on man-made climate change and its effect on the Murray-Darling Basin.
Irrigation is the backbone of Bourke shire’s economy, but six years of drought have savaged the industry.
Across the road from Mr Posselt’s Bourke campsite were citrus trees cut back to their stumps so they put all their energy into surviving rather than producing fruit. There has barely been enough water to keep the trees alive and the severe pruning means they will not be able to produce a commercial crop for two years.
Hardly any cotton has been harvested for six years. There are irrigation businesses in receivership or up for sale.
Census data show no other local government area in NSW lost a greater proportion of its people between 2001 and 2006 than Bourke.
Some say that climate change has rendered Bourke’s irrigation unsustainable and money from the Federal Government’s $10 billion water security plan should be used to shut it down.
“As Australians, we should all hang our heads in shame that we have let it get to this situation,” Mr Posselt said.
To combat climate change, coal-fired power should be replaced by renewables as soon as possible, he said, and federal control of the Murray-Darling Basin was “fundamental”.
Bourke’s Mayor, Wayne O’Mally, is a climate-change sceptic who believes the local irrigation industry has a strong future because what is being experienced is simply a drought like many other long dry spells Bourke has endured.
“There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that this drought is a cycle of nature,” he said. “Every single thing that happens with nature doesn’t have to be put down to climate change.”
But Cr O’Mally is in favour of federal action to prevent Queensland irrigators taking what he believes is too much water from Darling River tributaries.
He has also campaigned to have floodwater from coastal rivers like northern NSW’s Clarence piped into the tributaries of the Darling.
Mr Posselt says the river will be dammed “over my dead body … every society in the world that has done major inter-basin water transfer has failed eventually”.