As the political parties look to the race up the mountain to the election, the person wearing the yellow jersey for pollution reduction may come as a surprise to some, it’s Tony Abbott.
That’s the finding of the first run of our Pollute-o-meter across the present policies of the ALP and the Coalition. The Pollute-o-meter, conducted for The Climate Institute by independent consultants Climate Risk, reveals that present policies of the major parties will see Australia’s 2020 pollution levels at 21% above 2000 levels under the ALP and 7% above for the Coalition.
Much greater detail is needed and expected from both sides in the election race’s coming weeks. As we await the outcomes of Tuesday’s Cabinet deliberations, the Coalition is in front on the pollution reduction stakes largely because of its Emission Reduction Fund. This fund, directed to internationally compliant outcomes, achieves 76 megatonnes of reduction.
The Government’s pre-emptive cancellation of its greens loans and home insulation schemes has negated the small gains made by amending its renewable energy target legislation.
Neither major party has credible policies for achieving the remarkably still bipartisan backed targets of 5%-25% reductions off 2000 levels by 2020.
The Greens, with a limited amount of international offsets, do achieve the 25% target.
While the Coalition edges in front in the pollution reduction stakes, separate analysis by The Climate Institute of broader policies, including the extent to which policies help build global ambition and action on pollution and climate change, has the Government with its wheel ahead.
We’ve boiled down this additional analysis to a rating out of five stars after examining performance under three categories:
- Limiting and reducing pollution at home and abroad
- Making businesses take responsibility for the pollution they cause
- Making clean energy cheaper
The Climate Institute’s Action Plan on Pollution and Climate Change and summary set out the policy priorities the basis for this assessment.
Our analysis reveals the extent of the policy race to the bottom over recent months with the Government scoring just one star out of five to the Coalition’s half a star. The Greens rate four stars.
The ALP scores relatively strongly on its international policies but is let down badly by the domestic policy vacuum left by the delay of its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The Coalition scores relatively poorly across all three policy sections but trails especially with its slashing of investment in a global agreement — it removed international financing commitments in its Budget reply.
Ultimately pollution and climate change policy is not about points or stars, or how much Lycra you wear.
Good policy is about the extent to which economies make the shift to clean energy and low pollution. Australia’s highly pollution dependent economy poses risks for our health, our environment and our economy.
Globally there is a race on for clean energy and low pollution technology. It’s driven not just because of concerns about climate change, but also by concerns about clean air, clean water and energy security and independence. Research conducted by Bloomberg New Energy Finance for Westpac and The Climate Institute estimates that global clean energy investment will continue its durability through the global financial crisis in 2010 with some $US184 billion of investment. This research also shows Australia has been lagging in this race.
Recent polling research highlights that Australians will reward a party that rolls out a detailed plan on pollution and climate change — it’s time for the race to the top to begin.
The Climate Institute’s Pollute-o-meter and star rating analytical tools will be continually updated throughout the campaign here.
I have no doubt John Bennetts will read this article so I take the opportunity to ask him and any others who want Australia to lead the way in making big expenditures or foregoing big profits in order to reduce CO2 emissions how it will benefit Australia and to quantify such benefits even very approximately (but plausibly). JB, it has got nothing to do with whether I accept what the IPCC3 report says or not….
Our renewable energy targets and subsidies for renewable energy are already going to take money from Australians that they could otherwise have spent on age care, health care, indigenous housing, or even an extra meal in a restaurant with the family. At present there is no way we can do better than to export all the coal anyone will take, make the cheapest possible electricity consistent with state of the art fuel efficiency, from coal and use it to sell high energy use products like aluminium profitably, and to take advantage of the promised huge improvements in solar and other alternative energy sources when China, California or whoever, have done the research and desperately want everyone to use it. With lots of money we can choose to conserve species and the environment, or even people and we could build sea walls instead of making restrictive planning decisions 50 years ahead of need.
The only reason for not going nuclear with due care would be that coal fuelled electricity generation is going to be so much cheaper, in Australia, than any other way of producing electricity – and if I am wrong, good, let mobile capital looking for a good return build the better generators.
For some of the innumerate, let me add the reminder that saying green energy projects will employ more people is just a way of drawing attention to the negative productivity changes that going green or alternative involves.
So, with far fetched imaginative attempts to find unquantifiable reasons for going early, someone suggests that Australia will be punished in some way for not going early. (But you can’t really imagine that means Australia has to be ahead of the world agreement that would be the basis of saying we needed to be coerced – can you?). So China is going to punish us for selling coal and for burning coal to provide China with cheap aluminium? Etc. And you don’t think that Australian politicians and bureaucrats would be crafty enough to wriggle around the sanctions (think Rhodesia, Iran, Iraq, French ways of stopping Asian imports, we could import people who were smart and devious enough if our own ranks of tax accountants and lawyers, and Sir Humphreys, weren’t versatile enough).
Any policy that continues the current ban on nuclear isn’t ‘making clean energy cheaper’, it’s making it illegal. That fact on its own should at least halve the star rating of all three parties; certainly the Greens and ALP (I understand the Coalition are ambivalent).
For those who like an each way bet (preferably with only two starters) may I recommend an attempt to get in early as an investor in Better Place. I like the business model as I have heard it explained on behalf of the Australian CEO Evan Thornley. Well, up to a point, because I don’t see why it won’t be an even better business model if the don’t insist on doing all their battery charging with renewably sourced electricity.
At the next big spike in oil, diesel and petrol prices the attractions of beinga able to rely on a stable price of electricity to charge batteries will be a big sales point. The key bit of imagination required was to see that the hydrocarbon fuelled motor vehicle took off when there were reliably situated sources of fuel for those who wanted to drive more than the distance a tankful of (then expensive and inefficiently used) fuel would take them. So…. make sure that anyone travelling more than about 200k in an electrically powered vehicle will be able to change batteries regularly, taking no more than about a minute, wherever they are in Australia – or, at least, wherever they are within 500k or so of a large city. There might even be a nice little bit of business to do at the Old Rabbit Fence Station or Aboriginal settlement 250 k from anywhere provided they have a solar and a windpower generator plus a few spare batteries.
I agree with both the comments above from Julius.
But I wonder why the Australian press is not listening to and reporting what is happening in the UK and Europe where subsidies for renewable energy are being trashed as it becomes obvious they are both inefficient and hugely expensive.
Also it would be nice to see reports of the new scientific research which throws doubt on the gloom and doom theories of the alarmists.
And why is the whitewashing of the climate scientologists, authors of the climategate emails, ignored by the Australian press ?
Julius,
Many thanks for alerting readers that I have something to say on this topic.
I will try to keep it short.
You have adopted the extreme position of one who cares not a fig for his environment or, in fact, for any other “externality” as economists so daintily call them.
Your high-coal plans will definitely result in several undesirable outcomes:
+ Extinction of species – up to 60% of the world’s species before 2100.
+ Huge ocean level rises – anywhere from a couple of metres to as much as 10 by 2100, depending on which no-way-back triggers are reached. EG 7 metres of rise if Greenland’s ice plateau slides gracefully into the Northern Atlantic. The shortest route by road from, say, Newcastle to Wollongong would be via the Putty Road and other inland routes… providing of course that you didn’t try to start within a few km of the CBD of Newcastle or want to get to the CBD of Wollongong.
+ Every port and harbour facility in Australia, including those used for handling, storage and export of coal and ores, will be under water by 2100.
+ The western half of Belgium will be the new Netherlands, thus avoiding for ever having to deal with those pesky Dutch.
+ This is getting silly, but a full list would be huge.
On the good side:
+ The Harbour Bar at the entry to most estuaries will be much deeper and safer. No sea traffic, but still deeper and safer.
+ Nothing much else to count.
Kerry Lovering came in to support the irrational stance of Julius. Kerry, you made two claims, both without foundation and demonstrably false. Indeed, perhaps you are Tamas in mufti. The science is neither discredited nor wrong. The Uni of East Anglia emails have now been subjected to at least three separate investigations, on both sides of the Atlantic, and come up rosy every time. There is no climategate to discuss – it was and is simply wrong to state that there has been a whitewash. As an adult, you should be aware of the concept of defamation, which is certainly what you have done to those who have been forced to spend huge sums of time and money to defend their names and those of their universities against the claims of coverup.
So, that leaves me with only one more thing to deal with… cost.
Yes, converting our energy businesses will be expensive, but it has the goal of ensuring that the collateral damage due to anthropogenic climate change is minised and that the future of our little blue green planet will be secure for our descendents and the other miriads of organisms who share our globe.
Whether you agree or not, the external costs of proceeding with a “business as usual” approach are infinitely greater over any term longer than a couple of decades than the mitigation options which are being developed.
I currently include conversion of some of our existing power stations to nuclear as they are withdrawn from service and introducing new nuclear generation Type III+ at least, beginning asap. However, my mind is not closed to committing say 3% of GDP to fully renewable energy including solar thermal, solar PV, wind and so on.
Gas turbines are a temporary stopgap at best, but if they fit the final modelling, I’m happy for them to be in the mix.
What you, Julius and Kerry, cannot afford any more than the rest of us, is to do nothing apart from continuing the destruction of the only essential input to our lives which is still free – the air which we breathe and which cocoons our planet from some of the sun’s rays.