Here’s how power works in an openly corrupt outfit like the Morrison government.
An “Emissions Reduction Fund” (ERF), dreamt up as political cover for the Coalition’s climate denialism, was so spectacularly unsuccessful at reducing emissions that the Coalition was embarrassed into reviewing it, tasking two former fossil fuel company executives to report back on ways it could be improved.
They’ve recommended that the scheme be further expanded for fossil fuel donors to the Coalition to receive more funding and produce more greenhouse emissions.
The release of the “King Review” into the Emissions Reduction Fund — which is what Greg Hunt’s discredited “soil magic” winner-picking program ended up as — and its main recommendation that carbon capture and storage (CCS) be funded by taxpayers is being reported as an energy policy or an environment story.
In fact it’s primarily an example of how soft corruption pervades this government and operates in plain sight to serve the interests of companies with financial and personal connections to the Coalition.
The Emissions Reduction Fund has been one the more expensive policy disasters of recent years, with $2 billion — it was once supposed to be $10 billion, but Greg Hunt’s cabinet colleagues slashed its funding — wasted on the Abbott government’s flagship climate action program. The majority of the funding went to Coalition mates and donors while Australia’s emissions reversed the fall that had occurred under the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme and began rising again.
Under pressure from Victorian Liberal MPs about the government’s climate denialism, last year the scandal-plagued energy minister Angus Taylor commissioned what was intended to be a secret review of the fund.
The review was headed by former fossil fuel company Origin Energy CEO Grant King, who also headed Australia’s premier climate denialist body, the Business Council of Australia. Under King, Origin gave over $330,000 in contributions to Coalition branches across Australia (it also gave significant contributions to Labor branches). The company has handed nearly $150,000 to the Coalition since King’s departure in 2016.
Another member of the review was Susie Smith, a former Santos executive who currently chairs the energy and mining industry-funded “Australian Industry Greenhouse Network” that, despite its name, is dedicated to “promoting development of Australia’s industrial resources”. Santos is also a major Coalition donor and has extensive links with the Coalition.
There were also more independent figures on the panel: the government-appointed head of the Clean Energy Regulator, David Parker, was on it, along with an academic, Professor Andrew Macintosh, who has been a critic of the Emissions Reduction Fund.
With the review controlled by two former fossil fuel industry executives, it unsurprisingly urged the government expand the ERF to carbon capture and storage, which, as Phil Coorey of the Financial Review revealed last year, the Coalition is increasingly interested in returning to.
CCS is a discredited technology that even coal mining executives dismiss as “neither practical nor economic”. It ranks behind nuclear power as a climate solution, given nuclear power is at least a proven technology; CCS suffers from the same delays, budget blowouts and project cancellations as nuclear power, but is yet to be proven to actually work effectively. A large-scale CCS project at the Gorgon LNG facility off the WA coast was supposed to commence in 2016, but only began limited operation last year.
CCS also requires power companies to actually produce more emissions: CCS when used in association with power generation is a highly energy intensive technology that requires significantly greater power output to capture the relatively small amounts of carbon it is able to, thus requiring the host coal or gas-fired power plant to burn more.
But the real benefit of CCS is that it provides an excuse for climate inaction and a means for funnelling taxpayer money to fossil fuel companies; since the election Scott Morrison has repeatedly flagged more government support for, particularly, Santos and Origin, and claimed that gas is fundamental to Australia’s energy production needs.
Expanding an “Emissions Reduction Fund” to enable fossil fuel companies to actually increase the production of emissions may seem contradictory or, at least, deeply ironic, but it is entirely in keeping with the purpose of the fund, which was always to serve as a figleaf for Tony Abbott’s view that climate change was “bullshit”, and to funnel taxpayer money to Coalition allies and donors.
That’s why this isn’t really a story about climate or energy, but about political influence being used to secure taxpayer funding in a twisted version of industry policy. Fossil fuel donors to the Coalition will benefit from taxpayer handouts on the recommendation of former fossil fuel executives appointed by the Coalition. It’s the way power is used in this corrupt government.
Like many scams and confidence tricks, CCS swindles rely on the victims being unwilling to believe what a damn fool they have been. Current global emissions are 40 gigatons per year, which even when compressed to a liquid still amounts to 40 km³ every year. It is blindingly obvious that there is no hole in the earth big enough to swallow this amount and conceal it permanently for thousands of years. Yet the believers want to believe the swindlers and so they believe each other, unwilling to believe the clear evidence that they have all been trusting idiots.
However the author falls into the same trap by reiterating smears on nuclear that are believed largely because the believers choose to believe each other, rather than check the facts. If nuclear is a proven technology and we need to decarbonise, then surely we need it to become cheap and rapid. If it falls short we need to make it cheap and rapid.
What “smears on nuclear” are you referring to Roger? Please, provide evidence from unbiased sources thank you.
Ask the Finnish people-who have a long established history of building Nuclear Power Stations-if it is a “smear” to state the fact that the most recent power station is more than a DECADE behind schedule, or that a similar one in France is also many, many years behind schedule too.
https://www.reuters.com/article/finland-nuclear/long-delayed-finland-nuclear-reactor-to-start-july-2020-tvo-idUSL8N24I4LH
The facts about how regularly these power stations run massively over-budget during their construction & operational phases is also a matter of FACT….not a smear.
The fact that nuclear fuel requires significant amounts of energy to mine, mill & enrich is also a matter of fact…..not a smear.
The significant water use of nuclear reactors, compared to every other fuel source, is also a matter of fact…..not a smear.
Seriously, the extent to which you’re prepared to “die in a ditch” to defend the ageing, overpriced nuclear power industry leads me to believe that you must be on their payroll.
BTW, Nuclear is *not* a truly proven technology, because decades of use has not led to any reduction in either construction cost & construction times. This was deemed acceptable by those governments who were using it as an adjunct to their nuclear weapons program, but these days the prices simply can no longer be justified.
Marcus abuses EPRs, but Australia won’t be getting one of “those” reactors at all. The EPRs are too big at 1750 MW, part of the French strategy to supply the gigantic European grid. Each EPR provides more power than say, South Australia consumes, exporting the leftovers to Victoria. The risks of building a first of a kind EPR were borne by the French not the Finns. As expected, successive EPRs regularly became cheaper and quicker to build. The third and fourth EPRs took nine years and cost 2.14 USD/W. The fifth EPR in the UK will take less time, but the risks, learning and profits will be achieved by the French.
When Australia and other tardy nations decarbonise, we will be initially installing factory-produced SMRs, “plug-and-play” units of similar capacity to our oldest coal-fired power stations.
Seriously, the absurd lengths to which you guys are prepared to obstruct complete decarbonisation suggests that you are part of a religious movement.
> we will be initially installing factory-produced SMRs, “plug-and-play” units of similar capacity to our oldest coal-fired power stations.
Getting ahead of yourself again Roger?
Lets actually have a couple of factories actually produce these things first, half a dozen each is not too much to ask for is it?
Surely you don’t want us to run into any, shall we say unexpected costs, while the factories tool up?
Of course you don’t. Plus it will need at least a decade to persuade Federal, State, and local governments to accept them, pass our version of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, not to mention get the public to accept them when they can see price drops in their power bills from increasing amounts of firmed RE added to the NEM.
CEJ questions whether Australia will be installing factory built small reactors. Face it – we’re required to fully decarbonise the economy. How else will we eliminate (yes it must be zeroised) fossil fuels except by including nuclear? We will inevitably be tardy, because we are making a buck from selling gas and coal, and the gas industry is currently in control of our politics. CCS as decarboniser is a barefaced lie, but our pollies are still chanting it off obediently.
He says, “let’s actually have a couple of factories actually produce… half a dozen each…” Yes, let’s watch it happening. The generic NuScale design has been approved by the NRC, the full review completes in September, while the factory-level nuts-and-bolts streamlining is already underway and will continue during the construction of the first dozen NuScale SMRs. The last of which is targeted for completion in 2027. That’s fast.
He goes on, dreaming of “increasing amounts of firmed RE added to the NEM”. But there is no way to provide 100% electricity on demand using renewable energy except that it be firmed (backed up) with copious amounts of fossil fuels. Unless it is firmed with nuclear, of course.
It is true that gas seems to be the latest dream FF for the Coal-a-lition, and even the Labor likes the idea to some extent, but oversupply, low prices, and international AGW concerns will keep the lid on that a bit.
You are correct that CCS as a solution to allow continued use of FF is a whopping lie. However developing (worthwhile) CCS technology is not completely useless because we will eventually need to suck it out of the atmosphere on an industrial scale over a long period to cut down the worldwide PPM of CO2.
So starry eyed, thinking a dozen NuScale SMRs will be built on budget by 2027. So you can hope Aus will be ready to install some by 2030 to 2035. By which time firmed RE (unless both RW intransigence and governance persists nearly all of that time) will easily supply 70% of the NEM.
You seem to think serious firming can only come from peaker FF plants. At a time when Snowy-II has been approved (not that I think that is the best pumped hydro scheme), and California is starting to roll out peaker-scale battery farms, I disagree.
Nuclear power is certainly proven – to be the most complex, expensive, dangerous and indefinitely polluting way ever devised to boil water.
Blodeuwedd reiterates old antinuclear propaganda. You too, might mouth off those familiar words, but consider the possibility that you are out of date, spreading falsehoods that obstruct the only possible means of decarbonising an industrial economy. Unwittingly or not, you are denying the urgency of climate action and denying its solution.
There are more right wing ratbag maggots eating into Australia than ever, leaching away to get control of a filthy wrong, stupid, defective planet ruining agenda. They are being fobbed off by the P M a stickup poster dud for the extractive forces, getting tax payer money as HUSH money while sustaining this lie, this filthy coercive crime of pretending that fossil fuel promotion is soon to be O K by sicko miraculous lies and fantasy, Fraud by the P M and his gang of subnormals is growing at a sickening pace, fuelled by superstition, propaganda, distortion and evil greed. Probably only a mass extermination would fix it, but we must shout and denounce the anuses who insist on living in a world that never ever existed.
It has still got me buggered how Taylor has survived the “keep it away from home’ Clover Moore document scandal
The problem is that the social compact of the Parliament has been broken and the policy is now just wait it out. Hence why Cash, Taylor, Joyce, Ley, Roberts and Morrison etc. are still kicking about.
A self seeking bunch of parasitic politicians studiously “unnoticed” by a paralysed and supine main media. (cf Chomsky.. “Manufacturing Consent”)
Why Anxious claims it wasn’t him or his department of course. That’s good enough for ScoalMo.
Just as the Grasslands poisoning scandal must have been some contractor carelessly mistaking truckloads of herbicide for fertilizer.
As for the overland water Eastern Australia Irrigation scandal, Taylor had left the directorship before he entered parliament and he didn’t know who was running the Caymans registered company unless it was his old Oxford rowing mate but he didn’t ask him and Barnaby must have been too distracted by his new assistant when he signed the deal and have you given up now please please?
I saw a news report about it this morning containing the important out clause that BK missed or excluded. Taylor said he’d expect dollar for dollar private and public investment. This is as close as you can get to a guarantee this nonsense is politico media puffery.
The mentioned Gorgon CCS facility is about the CO2 removed from raw natural gas prior to shipping and use. All raw natural gas contains CO2 which must be removed before use. As such it is the best place to start for mandated CCS. If CCS was ever going to happen this is where it would already be well established.
The report to me is corrupt because it’s a form of lobbying funded by the taxpayer.
At least on a gas field you could store the CO2. I cannot think where in the coal fired power belt you would even contemplate it.
In fairness, there are systems that can be used whereby high density algae can be used to capture & store CO2-& NO2-from power stations run on natural gas or bio-gas. The algae can then be used for a variety of other end uses-like bio-fuel production, fertiliser or animal feed…..to name a few.
Test bed facilities have actually shown great success in reducing emissions from such systems, & with a much, much smaller amount of input energy required to achieve it.
Gas and water have long been pumped down into old oilfields.
It is used to force the remaining dregs of oil towards the extraction point. Is this a rebadge of an old practice?
“Openly Corrupt – May Contain Traces of Salvation”?
“Scott
Morrison’s
Emissions
Reduction
Fund”?
This mob of Smerfs are anything but green.