Four of the five major projects blocked by the Morrison and Albanese governments since 2019 as “clearly unacceptable” under the country’s decades-old environmental laws have been renewable projects, including the Asian Renewable Energy Hub Revised Proposal and the Lotus Creek Wind Farm.
None have been fossil fuel projects.
It comes as Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek used the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EBPC) Act to block the construction of the country’s largest offshore wind plant in a decision published Friday.
Plibersek noted some 83% of the Victorian government’s proposed Renewable Energy Terminal, located 72km from Melbourne, would sit within the Western Port Ramsar Wetland, resulting in “permanent and irreversible damage” to the internationally protected area.
“It would also have involved dredging up to 92 hectares in the wetland to allow ships to access the wharf,” she found.
Plibersek’s decision was welcomed by many in the environmental activist community. Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA) nature campaigner Shannon Hurley noted that the proposed terminal at the site placed Western Port at risk — a bird sanctuary that supports 65% of Victoria’s threatened bird species.
During the five years to 2019, however, 24 coal projects and 116 gas wells have been approved under the EPBC Act. Plibersek has personally greenlit four coal projects since 2022, principal adviser Mark Ogge from The Australia Institute’s Climate & Energy program noted.
“What is more concerning is that the rare decision to refuse a project as ‘clearly unacceptable’ under EPBC law seems to be disproportionately applied to renewable energy projects and never applied to fossil projects that are clearly unacceptable,” Ogge told Crikey.
“The nearby HESC brown coal hydrogen gasification export terminal, also in Victoria’s Western Port Bay, will require intensive dredging that will also impact the wetlands, and is a horrendously emissions-heavy form of energy production.
“It should be ruled out immediately.”
EPBC laws date back a quarter of a century
Australia’s EPBC laws underwent an independent review in December 2022 preceding a damning conclusion they were “duplicative, inefficient and costly for the environment, business and the community”. New laws are set to be introduced to Parliament sometime this year.
The Greens have called for a moratorium on all new coal and gas projects while the country awaits reforms to the outdated act, which as it stands does not force Plibersek to consider the greenhouse gas emissions of a proposed project before approving it.
The act names nine “matters of national environmental significance (MNES)” that the minister must consider the impact upon. They are world heritage and national heritage places, internationally important wetlands, threatened species and ecological communities, migratory species, Commonwealth marine areas, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, nuclear actions, and water resources.
Even a quarter of a century ago, excluding high emissions from the MNES list was seen as an oversight. Then Liberal environment minister Robert Hill introduced a greenhouse trigger in 2000 that would allow the minister to veto a project that would release more than half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in a year. It was defeated following an outcry from the fossil fuel industry.
Five years later in 2005, Anthony Albanese took up the mantle as the opposition’s environment spokesperson, declaring a “glaring gap in matters of national environmental significance is climate change” in a rousing speech to Parliament following his private member bill.
Albanese’s climate trigger proposal failed as well.
But that doesn’t mean Plibersek’s hands are tied when it comes to the country’s filthiest projects, Ogge added.
“The minister could interpret the law as it is to refuse fossil fuel projects on climate grounds,” he said.
“It is open to the minister to decide large fossil fuel projects endanger MNES — for example, the Great Barrier Reef — by making climate change worse.
“She is choosing not to.”
Renewable energy goal still in sight
The decision to block the Port of Hastings terminal in Victoria hardly places Labor’s goal of 82% renewable energy by 2030 in “jeopardy”, as reporting in The Australian claimed.
Ogge noted offshore wind is forecast to make up just nine gigawatts (GW) of over 200 GW of wind and solar energy planned for the country’s grid by 2040.
It does not spell the end of the terminal either, as the Victorian government can appeal Plibersek’s decision or submit a different proposal for the project.
Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said her department would be determining its next move after reviewing Plibersek’s feedback.
In September, D’Ambrosio said the now-vetoed site was chosen for its proximity to Gippsland wind farms and port precincts, as well as its deepwater channels and large swaths of zoned land.
From what I’ve read, it is the location of the terminal and port facilities not the wind farm that has been refused and there are alternative locations for the terminal/ port
We simply don’t have time to faff about.
We need to get this done.
For this particular project, yes we do have time. AGL’s similar proposal a couple of years ago for a gas terminal was rightly opposed, and ultimately defeated. It would be hypocritical for supposed environmentalists to now agree to what will be a 600-metre-long, 100-metre-wide, concrete-covered wharf at Hastings, which will involve much dredging of the very shallow Westernport Bay and large-scale disturbance to the Ramsar-protected bay, which includes numerous low shorelines already impacted by rising sea levels and partially protected by mangroves.
Bell Bay and Port Anthony were proposed by the developer themselves as possible port alternatives; there’s also potentially the Geelong port. I’m as big a fan as anyone for Star of the Sea to proceed asap to help push coal out of the electricity network, but not at the expense of sensitive and irreplaceable Westernport wetlands, when there are alternative port locations available.
However, the article is correct in pointing out the easy ride coal and gas proposals seem to get compared to renewables (e.g. Beetaloo fracking & the disgraceful Middle Arm proposal in Darwin) – both Libs and Labs need to keep those sweet fossil-fuel donations coming at election time!
No we don’t have time.
People really do not appreciate just how big a task we are facing in shifting all our energy supply to clean energy.
Most people like to imagine we will also REDUCE our energy consumption (in a world of more people and technology including AI demanding MORE energy) OR through some made up carbon capture/carbon offset/accounting equation/greenwashing marketing campaign.
We need war levels of mobilisation to get this done and we need to use every inch of available land.
Per-capita energy consumption has actually been slowly declining for 10-15 years in advanced economies due to technology efficiency improvements.
Even the total energy consumption on the NEM has declined since ~2010, despite another ~4.5m people.
https://www.aer.gov.au/industry/registers/charts/annual-electricity-consumption-nem
It will be interesting to see how much the electrification of gas appliances and transport will reverse these trends over the next 10-30 years, and for how long.
Nonsense.
These are greenwashing figures that underestimate the size of the task.
In the last 10-15 years the global population has grown by nearly 2b, we’ve invented bitcoin and AI (both of which consume vast amounts of energy) and we’ve viewed billions of cat videos
(According to an article on the guardian from a few years ago it is estimated that when the music video Despacito reached 5bn streamed YouTube views in 2018, the energy consumption was equivalent to powering 40,000 US homes a year (at the time the article was written it had exceeded 6.5bn views).)
It’s this kind of denialism (not climate denialism) which is our biggest obstacle because it’s a denialism that is pushed by the people who supposedly accept the science.
Climate change is not a task anyone should be underestimating.
*shrug*
The data are the data. You can open up the link that shows the NEM consumption and see the downward trend (which is quite clear) for yourself.
It’s a trend repeated in most developed countries.
Anecdotes like “distributing a video is equivalent to powering X homes” presents this as if a decision was made between one or the other, when in reality both happened and that power would have been used anyway – it just happened to be used to distribute that video.
The data are quite clear, and articles – often by people alarmed that decreasing electricity use is a negative indicator – have been written about it for the better part of a decade. A lot of it is the result of declining industry, but more energy efficient technology (eg: LED lighting) plays a part as well. It just means that without Bitcoin and cat videos (or something in lieu) the decline would have been more dramatic.
Some of the decline is also being driven by increasing electricity prices, I also meant to add (a portion of which will be captured by the switch to more power efficient solutions).
The data doesn’t reflect reality.
According to the UN total fossil carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high of 36.8 billion tonnes in 2023, as outlined in the annual Global Carbon Budget released at the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP28).
The big picture here is that our carbon emissions are increasing not decreasing.
Anything we tell ourselves to pretend that that is not true is a form of denialism.
The green hydrogen required to replace diesel etc will need 8 times the electricity now produced in Australia. This will blow your figures out of the water. If we become a renewable superpower as Garnaut says we have the opportunity to do, we could use 10,000TWh of annual power generation, fifty times todays NEM.
This can be done over the next few decades, and not at the cost of wiping out more species, respect for which is in our own best interests.
I think that green hydrogen is the wrong way to go. We don’t need to replace diesel for the national fleet of freight trucks. We need to replace freight trucks with electric freight trains. Don’t bother carrying your fuel…. scrape it up as you carry on….
I don’t disagree in principle, but upgrading & recommissioning (and in many cases rebuilding from scratch as they’ve been torn up) electric trainlines into population centres is a mammoth and resource-intensive task.
Start with the Indian-Pacific?
Good thinking. Track-side renewables. Electrolysis uses too much electricity to just burn it. Putting it in a dirigible is another idea. But Ross Garnaut has us making iron from the ore and aluminium from bauxite, etc, also fertiliser from ammonia because we have the best and cheapest renewables. We’d be exporting hydrogen and ammonia the same way we now export LNG/methane also – hence the big numbers. It’s all too big a change to get my head around it, but no bigger than what has happened in the last 75 years – my lifetime. And we basically know how to do it.
Locally we have bipartisan foot dragging encouraged by fossil fueled campaigns in ‘delay phase’ to now slow transition to renewables away from fossil fuels. However, this belies what is happening offshore with faster transition now occurring, with economic growth versus the supposed empirical environmental construct of ‘degrowth’.
Interesting analysis form Burn-Murdoch in FT ‘Data Points. Economics may take us to net zero all on its own. The plummeting cost of low-carbon energy has already allowed many countries to decouple economic growth from emissions’ (from the graph comparing nations, it’s clear that Oz is lagging way behind….)
Further, there is more recent significant news in a large industrial economy, last week in The Guardian ‘Germany’s emissions hit 70-year low as it reduces reliance on coal. Country emitted 73m fewer tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2023 than year before, study reveals’
Locally? Ignore and avoid while using mass of ageing voters rusted onto the RW MSM & social media campaigns to help delay transition by deflecting from climate science and credible analysis; all imported US modus operandi.
Economics won’t take us to net zero because the main reason the fossil fuel industry (and middle men) are fighting us on this because they want to maintain control over their energy supply.
In fact economics tells us that businesses prefer to operate in oligopolistic markets where they can make supernormal profits.
Renewables decentralise energy and open it to competition.
That is one of the advantages of nuclear. It lets the baddies keep their stupid oligopolies but just not a fossil fuel based one.
We can’t fight market domination AND climate change at the same time.
Locally we have bipartisan foot dragging encouraged by fossil fueled campaigns in ‘delay phase’ to now slow transition to renewables away from fossil fuels.
However, this belies and avoids what is happening offshore with faster transition now occurring, with economic growth versus the supposed empirical environmental construct of ‘degrowth’ and doing nothing to maintain status quo.
Yeah, right-wingers everywhere are given to claiming that it’s an emergency, so process and due regard must be disregarded.
Every assault on civil liberties by the Howard government was excused by Gerard Henderson with the excuse that “there is a war on”.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck & quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck.
If a decision looks dodgy, appears to be inconsistent with stated aims you need to see where the influence comes from.
The Ministers decisions are becoming increasingly inconsistent so one needs to look closely at the reasons for that and to seek meaningful explanation & justification is not unreasonable.
It’s often said in this country that a vote for labor gets you liberal lite, no matter whether it’s the environment, housing, energy infrastructure, military acquisition or cost of living. On top of all the coal and gas approvals, we now learn that the federal court approves old growth logging in NSW. Labor seems to be paddling like mad on small decisions, but is indistinguishable from the LNP on the big stuff.
Yes a HUGE disappointment. Greens are the only answer if you want a progressive party to govern.. .
I’d have thought that even under the woeful tome that is the EPBC, impacts to ‘ecological communities’ would cover off on ALL proposed fossil fuel developments – as they impact ALL ecological communities (including us) however they’re defined.
Or even, she could change the effing law because she’s in government. Perhaps she prefers to be a Minister Against the Environment in the “grand tradition” of the Coalition.