We’ve reported it before, but there’s no reason to stop reporting it if they continue to offer up evidence for it: the Morrison government is a clutch of climate denialists eager to reward its major donors in the resources sector as much as it possibly can without incurring political damage.
Its “Low Emissions Technology Statement” and its commitment of $1.9 billion to support it has been crafted with that goal in mind. All the chin-stroking commentary from the Press Gallery about how the government has abandoned coal won’t change that.
The statement was literally written by fossil fuel company executives: the panellists who advised on the statement include former Origin CEO and former head of the climate denialist Business Council, Grant King; and the CEO of the Gas Infrastructure Group, Ben Wilson, along with another BCA director, Coca-Cola’s Alison Watkins, who is also a director of the Centre for Independent Studies, which has hosted climate sceptics.
The statement itself is aimless: it offers no hard targets of any kind. The real purpose is the promotion of carbon capture and storage, a repeatedly debunked myth peddled by fossil fuel companies, to the status of a foundational goal of Australian energy policy.
There it is on page five: the four “Big Technology Challenges” guiding the statement are “more affordable, clean and reliable energy to households and industry”, “expanding production and increasing productivity”, “preserving and expanding onshore manufacturing of energy-intensive products” and “scaling geological and biological sequestration”.
They may as well have included giant orbital sunshields as the fifth challenge, for all that sequestration will ever be a workable climate strategy.
Even the statement admits, quietly, that carbon capture and storage doesn’t work unless you have a pure stream of carbon dioxide to easily bottle and store. There’s a “stretch goal” of $20 per-tonne of CO2 for this, but that “does not cover capture processes, noting the cost of capture technologies varies between applications and depends on factors such as the relative concentration of CO2 produced by an industrial process”.
Even so, the government intends multiple mechanisms for handing taxpayer funding to fossil fuel companies in the name of CCS. There will be a “King Review Co-Investment Fund” — reflecting that a review of the government’s discredited Emissions Reduction Fund run by King and another fossil fuel industry executive, which recommended the fund embrace CCS, a “CCS Deployment Fund”, as well as “Emissions Reduction Fund methods to support CCS and soil carbon within 12 months”.
Soil carbon — or, more correctly, “soil magic”, The Guardian’s Lenore Taylor’s term — is another scam that has seen huge amounts of taxpayer money directed to companies undertaking projects they would have undertaken anyway, and farmers claiming that they can permanently store carbon despite no evidence they can do so. Unsurprisingly, Australia’s emissions surged the Abbott government abolished the carbon pricing scheme and established the Emissions Reduction Fund.
To do this, the government will not merely need to remove the legislative limitation on the independent Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency that limits them to renewable and other forms of clean energy. It also promises it will force them to invest in non-renewables and scams like CCS and soil carbon. Angus Taylor’s plan promises the government will be “requiring key agencies (ARENA, CEFC and the CER) to focus on accelerating the priority technologies”.
That’s more or less all you need to know: an “energy” plan written by fossil fuel executives elevates fossil fuel industry scams to the foundation of Australian energy policy, with a government commitment to force independent renewable energy investment and program administration bodies to waste money of them, to the benefit of fossil fuel companies.
There’s probably a simpler word for it: fraud. And it comes at the expense not merely of taxpayers but of the generations to come who will suffer from our climate denialism.
Great writing BK. It is past time that we all got really fierce about this government and its continuing climate denialism.
MJM. I agree. This really is marching in the streets provocation.
Coz thaat worked so well against Iraq I & II, nuclear disarmament, Vietnam, refugee torture.
The sad truth is, the majority does not care about anything beyond immediate gratification.
Anyone taking this ‘policy’ seriously is either a snout-in-the-trough rent seeker or stupid. It is corruption enveloped in an obvious fraud. It, therefore, has zero prospects of success; ie even if this bunch of muppets had the guts to define ‘success’.
Morrison and co can’t have a climate policy because that would preclude them from running scare campaigns against any party that has.
Its worked before, why change? The only change is the realisation that they should pretend to have one, even if it is merely a protection racket for the fossil fuel fossils, rather like the one they ran for the banks.
Even more depressing is the fact that so many of your media peers discuss this energy sports rorts as if it was a serious policy. I find it harder and harder to mourn the demise of legacy media.
I agree Charles – I’m about to ditch SMH because sadly it’s become a joke. But we can’t despair because then they’ve really won
And, hasn’t it (and The Age) just.
Indeed. David Crowe is just an LNP stenographer, like that idiot Simon Benson, who mumbled some grunting unfinished sentences on the Insiders as though he resented being there,
Associates made similar comments about Benson on Insiders, DF.
They knew to advise me, because they know I haven’t watched Insiders since ‘Baddy’ Cassidy handed the reins to ‘Speersie’.
Decent, professional journalism has gone the way of the Dodo at the ABC, too.
One only has to cotton to all of the ‘big’ media’s coverage of the Assange trial, to know they are acting ‘under instructions’. An utter disgrace, and damns every last one of the lickspittles.
You can find out more by reading Mary Kostakidis twitter a/c, as she sits up into the wee smallies, and bangs out ‘as it’s happening’ coverage. And, it’s anything but simplistic – and she has ‘help’.
For instance, did you know that Wikileaks were the THIRD outlet to publish the files delivered by Manning (included ‘Collateral Murder’)?
One of the first 2 was a mob called ‘Cryptome’. Run by Yanks, based in the US, and never even approached by ‘the authorities’, let alone charged under the Espionage Act.
This is s straight up political persecution, aided and abetted by the Australian government, and their attendant lickspittles.
‘Cough’….them all!
I nominate Dick the Butcher for PM – he had the right idea.
Aaaaaagh! What’s the point? In one decade . . . Australia now stuffed!
This “road map” is the best argument for a Federal ICAC I’ve ever seen – and it comes straight from the Minister himself. I agree with Bernard: it’s barefaced FRAUD, No more need be said.
Where do these guys get their unshakeable belief that they can get away with any kind of corruption with no consequences at all?
Just a conga line of shysters and grifters from Howard onwards
Looking back the lying rodent at least had some elements of shame and a determination to hide his chicanery.
Control the lickspittle stenographer class, and you’re home free.
That’s what we get when both major parties are in lock step and the greens are invisible.
The Liberals’ knowing they can get away with anything and everything over and over again is the chief difference between them and Labor. Has been for a long, long time; at least as long as Labor has tried to dodge every perceived wedge, even though it hasn’t got them anywhere. Look at the tiny coverage given in the MSM to the abject failure of the federal aged care ‘system’, which the Royal Commission has already said is actually ‘successful’, that is, working the way it is supposed to work by putting profit before lives. Or the dearth of criticism of the Abbott-Turnbull-Fyfield-white-elephant ‘NBN’, which in itself should have sunk the government responsible for it. Every Morrison misstep, back-track and follow-the-premiers in dealing with the pandemic has been painted over to create a myth of competence. If a Labor government were as incompetent as this one there would have been a years-long vast clamour rattled up by the media for it to go. And then there’s the the BCA, the AFP, the courts, the mining companies…. and worst of all the ALP itself.