You may not have heard it amid all the shrill cries this week for corporate welfare and carbon protectionism but earlier this week a National Greenhouse Gas Inventory showed our national carbon pollution levels continue to rise.
Our record as one of the highest carbon polluters per person, our standing as one of the top 20 carbon polluting countries in absolute terms are yet to be threatened. And without stronger pollution and clean energy policies our position in the top 10 dirtiest power sectors is looking solid.
Amid all the jockeying for compensation, support and windfall gains, some legitimate, most not, pollution and clean energy policies have been made a scapegoat for the real drivers of electricity prices.
The Climate Institute today has hit out at the growing campaign of misinformation being driven by vested business and political interests and is urging the issue of pollution costs be put in perspective.
We have released research that details how current electricity price rises are primarily being driven by the cost of network wires and poles upgrades, and not pollution and clean energy policies.
The research also reveals Australia’s power sector ranks among the 10 most polluting power sectors on the planet, alongside Botswana, Cambodia and Estonia, emphasising the need for Australia to get serious about transforming its economic base.
No one denies there will be costs associated with transforming the Australian economy from one reliant on highly polluting industries to one based on cleaner energy and cleaner industries, but misleading claims are being made.
A pollution price of $25/tonne will add about $3.86 per week to the average Sydney household’s energy bill in 2012/13. This is slightly higher than the amount estimated by Treasury, but a third less than suggested by the Coalition and some business groups.
Rising network costs — which have nothing to do with a pollution price and will happen regardless — will have greater impacts at $7.88 per week.
Energy efficiency policies can further reduce the impact of pollution prices by at least $1.41 per week, reducing the difference to $2.45 per week. This is about the cost of a sausage sandwich at a local community fundraiser, or a fifth of the value of food wasted by the average household each week.
The federal government has made clear there will be assistance provided to those lower-income families who may struggle to pay the additional costs that result from making polluters finally start to pay for their pollution.
Unlike the other factors that are affecting electricity price rises, a pollution price will work to generate revenue from big polluters, which can then be used to support energy efficiency, develop clean energy and help low-income communities manage the transition to cleaner energy in Australia.
Most importantly, and this point was missed by some Coalition politicians and Mark Latham in the AFR today, making dirty power generators pay for their carbon pollution for the first time will help drive investment in, and greater generation from, cleaner energy sources. Cleaner energy becomes cheaper to produce and sell relative to dirtier energy paying for its pollution. Price increases will be passed through the system and affect consumer behaviour but the primary targets are the energy producers not the consumers. A different dynamic is at work for petrol but that’s a story for another time.
There is no doubt there are challenging electricity price increases in the system, they are there regardless, but the potential impacts and outcomes of pollution and clean energy policies needs to be put in perspective.
As The Climate Institute submission to the Multi-Party Committee details, Australia needs a mix of carbon pollution pricing, energy efficiency, emissions performance standards and clean energy policies to drive innovation and deployment of cleaner energy and cleaner industries.
Pollution and clean energy policies can make a real difference to Australia’s pollution dependent economy and can help spark investment in our abundant clean energy resources.
Looking at the Climate Institute report cited in this article (Figure 4) I compared it with figures I extracted recently (below; hoping it posts in a legible fashion). Reading the Note 8 that explains some detail shows the frustration at trying to nail down these data. My data below was obtained a month or so back but from the US-DOE site which was last updated May 2010. This gives Australia at 7.1 cents per kWh while Fig4 shows it to be about 12 c. Fig 4 shows Australia identical to France yet the figure below is 16.9 c. So PPP must account for this because I seriously doubt French retail prices have come down. The two sets of data differ quite a lot; my (DOE) unadjusted data says French electricity is 2.38 times Australia’s. I find economist’s application of a very derived factor like PPP a bit worrisome. Having lived in France for a decade and being paid less there (as a PhD research scientist) than either in Oxford or Australia, I certainly felt electricity more expensive in France. The two sets of data do generally agree with the fact that Australia has among the cheapest retail power in the developed world but Fig4 tamps down the difference.
I think it would be extremely useful if the CI posted all the raw data (unadjusted and PPP adjusted) somewhere on their website. It is kind of silly that this data is not easy to get hold of. More Australians need to be able to put their electricity prices in an international context and the media can look at this when writing about “great big new taxes” etc. Either adjusted or unadjusted it is interesting that the most nuclear country (France, >80% of electricity is nuclear) still has either equal or higher prices than Australia, one of the most coal-dependent countries.
From: US-DOE May-2010
[http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprih.html]
Country/Territory…….US c/1kWh VsAust. ………As of
Australia …………………….7.1………….1.00…………..2006/7
Canada………………………..7.8…………1.10……………2006
S.Korea (ROK)…………….8.9………….1.25……………2008
USA……………………………11.3………….1.59……………2008
Norway……………………….16.4 …………2.31…………..2008
France………………………..16.9………….2.38………….2008
Finland……………………….17.2………….2.42…………..2008
Singapore……………………19.0………….2.68………….2008
Japan…………………………20.6 …………2.90………….2008
Spain………………………….21.8………….3.07………….2008
Portugal……………………..22.0 …………3.10…………..2008
UK……………………………..23.1………….3.25…………..2008
Netherlands………………..24.3………….3.42…………..2008
Germany…………………….26.3………….3.70………….2007
Ireland……………………….26.7………….3.76…………..2008
Italy…………………………..30.5………….4.30………….2008
Denmark……………………39.6………….5.58…………..2008
why does crickey make me register????
WHYDOIHAVETOREGISTER, only once? I get hassled to register so often that I had to actually learn my damn password.
How about we make our contribution to carbon dioxide reduction voluntary. Those that want to reduce can lower their power consumption, those all hell fired to pay a tax can send a $750 cheque to Greg Combet each year so that he can buy some more votes and those that think the exercise is totally pointless can ignore the whole issue because let me tell you people, until we start to reduce population levels our emissions are not going to come down any time soon. Oh one other thing this accounting at the source is a load of cobblers. If we smelt aluminium and other metals and export coal then the carbon dioxide output resulting from its production should transfer with it to the end user.
While one readily acknowledges the high carbon emissions from electricity generation and transport, the environmental impacts of the collective mining boom (GHGs and non-GHGs) and the actions of the giant saboteurs in the mining industry go largely unchallenged. From the observations of a miner’s daughter, I challenge the figures for emissions submitted to the NPI by the self-reporting mining industry, which I believe are nowhere near accurate.
Australia’s mining operators are an international embarrassment. They have long benefitted from corruption, repression and extensive periods of military rule in developing countries. This is the industry that has committed human rights abuses, used forced evictions with impunity, significantly elevated the green-house gases and additional hazardous emissions in foreign lands and wiped out entire ecosystems before doing a runner.
Yet the Australian community’s appetite remains whetted by an industry that has propagated the sustainability lie and by an industry that has drastically compromised life-sustaining ecosystems, here and abroad. Is the Australian community incapable of looking beyond the riches promised by an industry that hides behind the great environmental swindle?
In 1984, Hugh Morgan, mining overlord and would-be saboteur of land rights said: “It was necessary for the mineral industry to defend itself against efforts by the proponents of land rights and environmentalism to destroy its legitimacy.”
Morgan also “asserted that those who attacked the miners for being materialist and non-spiritual were themselves heretical in their religious philosophy” and that “they are followers of Manichean doctrines which have been condemned by the Christian Church as heresy.”
“This was typified by the “black hand” media disinformation campaign which cost the mining industry about a million Australian dollars. It portrayed on television a giant black hand, supposedly representing aborigines and land rights advocates, taking over white lands and the Australian mining industry,” wrote Ronald T. Libby, author of ‘Hawke’s Law: The Politics of Mining and Land Rights in Australia.’
Nothing has changed except the cost of TV advertising and the new “giant black hand” is CO2 so stay tuned for yet another TV campaign coming your way – no expenses spared by mining magnates bludging off the environment for free.
Meanwhile, the high-pollutant emitting quarries grow ever larger, the industrial stacks belch black smoke; soil, air, rivers and oceans are poisoned; additional exploration leases to fell forests are granted to the bauxite industry with relish and useless and impotent parliamentary enquiries on the malfeasance of the mining industry continue while courageous but overly-optimistic citizens commence class actions with allegations of toxic air pollution, sickness and despair.
Mining barons continue to plot their next move while planting their offspring in nests across the political forum; environmental regulators feast off the mining carrot and regulate their ‘masters’ by persuasion and the status quo continues – two steps forward, three back.