Ross Garnaut called climate change a “diabolical policy problem” but of course it’s turned out to be a diabolical political problem as well.
It killed off two Opposition leaders and gave Kevin Rudd a healthy shove. And it certainly didn’t help John Howard’s desperate attempts to retain power.
If you can put aside the high and rising costs of failing to commence Australia’s transition from one of the world’s biggest carbon addicts to a low-carbon economy aside, our handling of climate policy has been the stuff of priceless comedy.
Particularly when you recall both sides of politics went to the 2007 election committed to introducing an emissions trading scheme, and both have wimped it.
Labor, having devoted considerable bureaucratic resources and political capital to fulfilling its promise to introduce an emissions trading scheme only to junk it on, apparently, little more than a whim, is now desperately trying to craft a jury-rigged agenda of climate-related initiatives. Depending on which newspaper you read, it will involve spending on renewables, regulation, or some hold out faint hope, even a carbon price.
And, by the way, there is support within the Government and within Cabinet for a carbon price, however much some unidentified senior ministers rule it out as impractical.
Meantime the Opposition is trying to add some bits and bobs to its own witless “climate action” policy which will mainly involve hoping farmers are innumerate enough to undertake “soil carbon” initiatives that cost far more than the $8-10 per tonne subsidy on which the entire policy is based.
Greg Hunt, who abandoned his decades-long support for an emissions trading scheme to keep his shadow ministry job following the right-wing putsch last year, is revealing more than he perhaps thinks now that he’s spruiking nuclear power, at least to Coalition attack grub Glenn Milne in today’s Australian. The Coalition’s “direct action” guff is supposed to enable Australia to easily meet the bipartisan commitment to reduce emissions by 5% by 2020, notionally making nuclear power irrelevant.
The Coalition is dead keen on nuclear but won’t ever move without Labor giving them cover. But as Crikey showed in November last year, nuclear power is ludicrously expensive and needs massive taxpayer support, otherwise it costs a lot more to build and more to operate than renewables. And that’s before you figure out where to park the waste for a few hundreds of thousands of years or decommission reactors.
Maybe if you call it “Green Waste” it’d be easier to deal with.
More to the point, as Greg Hunt appears to have forgotten, along with everyone else in this place where the Perpetual Present reigns supreme, John Howard asked Ziggy Switkowski in 2006 to look at nuclear power, and Switkowski told him it couldn’t happen without a carbon price. So, no nuclear power without a “great big new tax”.
The debate over climate policy in Australia is equal parts hypocrisy from business (who now apparently want the “certainty” of a carbon price, having idly sat by while Malcolm Turnbull lost his leadership), rentseeking by polluters and arse-covering by our major party politicians. The last aren’t so much scared to show leadership — and what sort of leadership is needed when polls consistently demonstrate a majority of voters want action on climate change anyway? — as simply implement the policies they committed to at the previous election.
So here’s a handy rule-of-thumb for the debate. If someone doesn’t want a carbon price — an actual price that makes some things more expensive for consumers and businesses compared to others — then they’re not serious about starting the transition to a low carbon economy. Or if they are serious, they want you to think there’s no cost in using taxpayers’ largesse, or regulation, to do it.
Avoiding a carbon price does reduce one particular cost of addressing climate change — the political cost. It does it the usual way you address the political cost of reform, by shifting the economic cost from one group of voters onto the taxpayer, or by making the cost invisible by moving it into transactions and administrative efficiency.
But we still pay for those costs, whether we can see them or not. Those costs are higher than if they were directly and transparently priced onto goods and services. Worse, the longer we delay a carbon price, the greater those costs will be.
So any politician or commentator who tries to sell you measures other than a carbon price — by imposing standards on power stations, or spending more money on renewables, or handing out solar panels, or talking glibly about a “Green Army” — is in effect telling you they think you’re either too stupid to notice you’re being conned, or they don’t care if you do notice.
Australians tend to judge their politicians harshly, often without good reason. But when it comes to climate policy, our leaders are every bit as bad as voters suspect.
I’m not sure that your characterisation of the Government ‘junking the CPRS on a whim’ is entirely accurate, Bernard. They tried very hard to make it law, and were only prevented by a last minute change in the Liberal Party leadership and the predictable cooperation of the Greens with the Coalition in the Senate.
The Government only shelved the CPRS once it was clear that there was no way to physically pass any kind of emissions trading legislation through the Senate this year.
Maybe you mean that Kevin Rudd should have called a double dissolution to pass the CPRS? I doubt very much whether the decision not to call a DD was made ‘on a whim’.
Bernard, you are hopelessly out of date. Nuclear is neither as dangerous and expensive as you state, neither are the alternatives free from major problems – especially pollution problems.
As stated in the comments to your previous piece, November of last year, gas is mainly methane, Ch4. Now, this gas has about 25 times the greenhouse potential of CO2, so any leaks are pretty severe. Add to this the inconvenient fact that at the wellhead or processing plant, very large volumes of CO2 are recovered from the natural gas and simply dumped into our atmosphere, yet nowhere do I see this accounted for in the GHG analyses of gas turbines.
Regarding wind, I have seen many videos of actual fires, including grass fires, due to fires burning in the nacelle and showering the surrounding fields with incendiary plastic, metal, fibreglass and rubber stuff. The nacelles have to be permitted to burn themselves out and fire brigades (including perhaps my own self) are unable to approach and are simply forced to chase the resulting grass fires. Imaging a farmer in an Australian summer standing by as his field, fences and those of his neighbours are demoloished due to a fault in a single 2MW appliance. Not nice.
Barry Brook’s booklet “Why Vs Why”, which he shares with the anti-nuke Ian Lowe, is as good a place as any to get a feel for the true strengths of the arguments pro and agin nuclear. I side with Barry, but you are entitled to your own stance.
CARBON PRICE – A WHOLE NEW GREAT BIG TAX or a TINY LITTLE WASTE DUMPING DISINCENTIVE?
No, it is not. The real tax at foot here is the way that carbon based energy effectively taxes the air we breathe and on which the world’s ecosystems depend. To balance the scales, a carbon tax equal to the current commercial cost to remove permanently from the atmosphere each tonne of CO2 produced would be many, many times the recommended $10 (recently flagged) or the IPCC3 suggestion of circa $30 to $65US per tonne of CO2.
Remember, each tonne of (say) 20% ash coal produces 3 tonnes of CO2. In other words, the coal producers have been devaluing our planet by somewhere between $30 and $200 for each tonne of coal burned, yet to try to address this imbalance is somehow called a Great Big New Tax. It should be thought of as a Tiny Little Waste Dumping Disincentive.
And, in case the coal industry are not happy enough yet, consider that the CO2 and methane liberated from their mines, both open cut and underground, add substantially to the waste.
I have taken enough space for a single comment. I suggest that interested people check out several web sites and keep an open mind. Perhaps start at Barry Brook’s site, bravenewclimate.com .
like Barry, I have somewhat reluctantly come to the realisation that the only current technology with any hope of providing the necessary supply, security and reliability of electrical energy for tomorrow’s world is Type 3+ nuclear, transitioning to Type 4 during the next three or four decades.
Oh, and if anybody thinks that Chernobil was the end of the world as we know it, it was not nice but it has had an insignificant effect on the biosphere, certainly less fatalities than, say, swimming in the ocean or fishing from the rocks.
[otherwise it (nuclear) costs a lot more to build and more to operate than renewables]
This is just wrong, you are completely under estimating the amount of electricity one nuclear reactor can generate. You only need to build 1 nuclear reactor for every ~1000 wind turbines operating at full capacity (which they never do), or 3000 wind turbines operating at average capacity, or 20 really big solar plants operating at their average capacity, which is about 30% at absolute best.
Remember, we need something like 100 GW of electricity generation by 2050, which is a big less than double what we use now. If renewables are going to be our saviour, where will we put all these renewable plants. Do you really think people will accept building 150,000 wind turbines? Remember, you need to put them near where people live, else you will you will need to spend hundreds of millions on new transmission lines, and you will reduce the efficiency of the network.
Plus, when you consider all the steel required to build wind turbines, it turns out that they are a more carbon polluting form of electricity generation than nuclear and photovoltaic.
Also, you can’t count on wind power to produce its capacity because the wind may change. So that means you will need other forms of generation on stand by, such as gas, to pick up the slack. So massive wind farms would also mean requiring massive investment in gas power stations. If you are burning gas, you are putting carbon in the air so that isn’t a long term solution to climate change.
The capacity factor of nuclear at best practice is 90 – 95% of rated capacity. Recently a reactor in the U.S. operated at full 1 GW capacity for nearly 2 years before needing to be shut down for refueling and maintenance.
I am excluding consideration of clean coal, because that is pie in the sky, with the first full scale plant not expected to be operating until 2035 – 2040. And the cost will probably end up being the same as nuclear.We could have a tried and tested nuclear reactor working by 2020 if we wanted it. I mean, to put this in perspective. If we shut down the 2 most polluting coal power stations in Australia, and replaced them with 4 nuclear reactors, we would cut carbon emissions by about 12%:
http://enochthered.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/
The issue of nuclear waste is serious, but most waste is stored in cooling pools then in dry cask containers at the reactor sites. What we currently call “nuclear waste” can be reprocessed into mixed oxide fuel that can be put straight back into reactors to produce more electricity. Of course, Australia with its huge geography and stable geology could safely store nuclear waste, most likely up in the Pilbara when all the iron ore is gone (which is the time scale we really need to think about, we won’t produce a significant amount of nuclear waste for decades).
I agree that a good rule of thumb is that if someone doesn’t think a carbon price is necessary then they aren’t taking climate change seriously. Another good rule of thumb is that if someone doesn’t think that nuclear energy is PART of the climate change solution, then they aren’t taking climate change seriously either.
Whether or not nuclear should be part of the mix, nuclear is only a long term option.
If we are serious about taking action on climate change then we first need to take lots of short and medium term actions. Things that will start to reduce emissions quickly. Until we have got the short and medium term right, discussing long term options is just a distraction or, in some cases, a deliberate ploy to enable business as usual for now.
What is clear from the Labor supporters on the Poll Bludger blog is that Labor has failed to get across to even it’s own hard-core supporters the magnitude of the change needed to prevent climate change.
Apart from The Greens, no party is proposing anywhere near what the science says is necessary to make a difference.
In 50 or 100 years time there is only one type of action which will have made a difference – that is action which makes the huge reductions needed to prevent warming of over 2 degrees.
But to Labor and Liberal “action” is just putting in place some policy that makes such insignificant changes to our emissions that it will only slightly delay and not prevent warming far in excess of 2 degrees.
Even worse, actions such as the roof insulation scheme and the greens loan scheme are regarded as making a difference. Yet if an ETS is put in place (and the target is not adjusted to take into account all such schemes), neither scheme will result in any changes to our emissions. If the ETS is a 5% reduction, then our reduction is 5% with or without these schemes being put in place.
You can’t play politics with nature. Either we quickly start to take real action, or it is all just political spin.