It’s been a tough December for Energy Minister Angus Taylor.
First his “big stick” divestment powers were neutered after being shot down by businesses, backbenchers and also potentially Australian law. Then his NSW counterpart backed out the morning of Wednesday’s extremely awkward COAG meeting, and the Australian Energy Market Commission announced that not only is the renewable energy target Taylor is set on killing about to lead to a price drop, but his new price cap will actually increase prices for shop-around energy customers.
But even allowing the “Minister for Lower Power Prices” some breathing room, his announcement this week that Australia does “not need a mechanism to reduce emissions” because the energy sector will hit 2030 Paris targets “without intervention seven or eight years ahead of time” is nothing short of a straight-up lie.
Disappointingly reported in The Australian under the headline “Paris target achieved eight years early”, Taylor is attempting to spin figures from the energy department’s “Emissions Projections 2018 Report”, which was snuck out today just before Christmas, as some kind of win for his “at a canter” approach to emissions.
Basically, he’s saying that because emissions from the National Electricity Market will fall to 26% below 2005 levels by 2022, Australia’s energy sector will meet some aspect of our 2030 Paris obligations — which, by the way, do not to refer to any one sector but a 26-28% reduction on 2005’s whole of economy emissions:
“The debate is all wrong. We are going to smash the target without intervention,” Taylor said. “There is no need to have a debate about emissions unless you have a higher target.”
Taylor, who repeated this opaque argument post-COAG, is either saying our Paris agreement has an electricity-specific target of 26-28%, or is referring to the actual 2030 target and pretending Australian sectors with increasing emissions such as transport, gas, agriculture, and fugitive emissions simply don’t count.
But while it might be the most carbon polluting sector, electricity only makes up 34% of Australia’s total carbon emissions, and needs to do much, much more than those less flexible sectors for us to hit a total 26-28% reduction by 2030.
It’s why Labor’s carbon price slashed electricity emissions to the point everything dipped overall, and why the next five years of renewables growth, did nothing to stop Australia this year hitting our highest ever levels of carbon emissions (excluding land use figures, which are now seen as highly unreliable).
This was the core argument against Malcolm Turnbull’s NEG — that legislating a 26-28% renewable guarantee for 2030 couldn’t do anything when we’ll hit that by 2021 and still fail the 2030 target. The Coalition has similarly batted away reports from NDEVR Environmental, the Australia Institute, ClimateWorks Australia, the United Nations, and even the government’s last annual emissions projections saying that, by doing nothing, Australia will miss our actual Paris target by up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over the next ten years (or just a 7% reduction on 2005 levels, according to today’s report).
Acknowledging Taylor’s spin, as well as Morrison’s plan to use Kyoto figures to fudge the numbers further, is doubly important when they’re being used to both:
a) claim Australia’s 19% renewable mix is already too big a burden on the grid — a point rebuffed by the market operator and any energy expert worth their salt, and
b) justify the government’s plan to quickly underwrite 24/7 generators including actual coal-fired power plants, with speculation now swirling around an extension of the Vales Point plant in NSW co-owned by coal baron and Liberal donor Trevor St Baker.
At the end of 2018, our government is not only rejecting emissions reduction schemes that even the industry wants, but strongly indicating it will inject public funds into otherwise unviable coal projects. All this while, just yesterday, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO’s “State of the Climate” report makes it explicit that Australia is seeing more extreme bushfires and heatwaves under 1 degree of global warming.
This isn’t normal, or at least it shouldn’t be. Coalition-led states like South Australia and Tasmania have shown responsibility around the energy transition with schemes including, respectively, battery subsidies and a possible new interconnector to export pumped hydro. NSW has been dead in the water for eight years, but NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin’s comments, even with their rather pathetic retraction, make it clear they know the federal party is killing them (at least electorally).
As one of the highest polluting countries per capita, Australia’s Paris targets are already relatively tame and we’ve ignored calls from both the UN and the Climate Change Authority for the tripled target needed to help avert the two-degree increase forecast by the IPCC report.
That Australia is instead expected to miss our 26-28% economy-wide target and potentially see taxpayer-funded coal demonstrates a shocking, cynical relegation of duty.
C’mon fellow residents of Hume…lets consign Taylor to the scrap heap of political ambition. Let’s acquaint him with his local centrelink office shortly after May.
Is Angus Taylor intelligent enough to be lying? For it to be a lie, he has to know that it’s not true. I don’t think he does.
“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country…… Worried about what to give this year? ‘For the country that has everything – Taylor-made Bull-Shit!'”
Yet this mob is asking what they can do *to* our country on behalf of their mates (to wreck and bespoil that is)
Why this so deeply entrenched intransigence, though? That’s what puzzles me. Whether they accept climate change personally is not the issue. Surely, if nothing else, their rat-cunning political survival instincts must be screaming at them that they are destroying their standing with the great majority of the electorate?
They are infinitely corrupt, of course, and have been bought and paid for – with promises of future payment, I assume. But who by? The fossil fuel bosses themselves will go under in the next few years. I wouldn’t count on getting any payment out of them.
It’s perplexing.
They’re caught between a lump of coal and a hard place.
Who’s going to fill the donation hole left if coal pulls the pin?
Turnbull’s not likely to repeat his mouth-to-mouth.
The banks are hardly likely to thank the party they’ve “backed”, after that party opened the “Hayne Drain”……
BCA? …….. “Breaking up “gouging” power generators”?
Kismet. What happens when you put your hard-earned on old nags.
To admit the other side was right undermines years – wasted – of self-righteous intransigence that has held the country back. Government that has cost the country dearly.
I can help you graeski. There is no reason. This is pure ideology. Fanaticism is all about redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your goal.
There is no more considered rationality in their thinking than you would find in an ISIS volunteer.
It’s that bad.
“19% renewable mix is already too big a burden on the grid”. Rebuffed maybe, but there is no way we can get to 100% noncarbon, without either a miracle in energy storage or a compromise with nuclear energy.
We can put 50% renewables into the grid without much problem. The AEMO produced a report on it, though they are not anxious to wave it around , in fear of the Libs.
We can get to 90% without anything more than determination, optimism and current technology. We have such a daytime renewable glut that we can store it in fleets of electric vehicles, in pump hydro, in domestic and commercial-scale batteries.
The only problem with this country is dumb corrupt politicians. You know, the usual.
Does heavylambs know what the cost of storage of all this renewable glut (courtesy of a 40% taxpayer subsidy for the kit)??
Perhaps he/she could advise the current cost of pumped hydro and battery storage to make all this free energy dispatchable.
The cost is something well within our means moriarty. You can even pay for some of it by removing the subsidies for coal and other fossil fuels.
There was a time when Australia took on large infrastructure projects with gusto. I wasn’t around, but I guess there were curmudgeons then too.
Nothing compares to the costs, currently externalised, of fossil fuel generation. It’ll cost us our future. Now you put up a number for how much our children’s future is worth.
On other words Dogs – you don’t know. Emotional claptrap about Australia’s 1.4% of world CO2 emissions ‘denies’ the real fact that we could shut down all the CO2 production overnight and not make the slightest difference to the planet’s temperature.
If you want to save the Barrier Reef, go protest in Beijing, Moscow, Dehli, Brasilia, Tokyo, Jakarta, London, Washington and Berlin where the other 98.6% of the CO2 posited warming is made.
Firming ‘renewables’ has a real cost of a minimum around $60-80/MWhr to add to the ill defined heavily (40%) subsidised capital costs. And the subsidies for coal fired plant if they ever existed have been sunk long ago in a fleet 10-40 years old, and no coal plant is currently being built.
The big energy companies like AGL are on the rent seeking gravy train, professing the same green BS as the Greens and Leftist readers of Crikey…..BS in search of a Federal Plan which will boost subsidies to renewables and keep prices high for the punters who struggle at the bottom of the income range.
My plan is simple (as in part supported by Finkel) – no subsidies to anyone and let the market decide – except that your supply must be ‘firmed dispatchable’ before it is connected to the grid. That means the renewable suppliers must invest the real cost of storage or team up with a gas peaker or hydro to deliver dispatchable power when the sun dont shine and the wind dont blow..
Still denying the science I see Roger. Pumped hydro with renewables can get us there ‘ in a canter’.
Why nuclear? Why do you continue to cheer for a horse that will never run, and isn’t required?
Yes, let’s not deny the science. Climate science is shouting at us that fossil carbon emissions must be eliminated completely. 100% replaced.. Renewables cannot even achieve 50%, a target failed by the German Greens. Ninety percent, which includes baseload, is unattainable, not even if the country is covered with tanks on stilts. One hundred percent noncarbon power on demand requires nuclear.