Another day, another climate lie from Scott Morrison.
In the latest budget drop, the government says it will spend $275.5 million on developing as-yet commercially unproven hydrogen production, and another $263.7 million on carbon capture and storage (CCS).
That is — putting aside the push from fossil fuel companies to power hydrogen production — another quarter of a billion dollars to be wasted on CCS, a discredited scam run by fossil fuel companies as a delaying mechanism to prevent serious climate action.
More than $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds have already been wasted on CCS under both sides of politics so far this century.
Morrison targeted his announcement at regional jobs, meaning he’s the third behind NSW’s Matt Kean and the federal opposition to start talking about the opportunities for jobs growth in climate action, especially in regional areas. Only, Morrison’s idea of climate action is handing more money to his fossil fuel donors.
It was a continuation of the lies from Morrison’s “wine bar” speech to the champagne-swilling business elites of the Business Council of Australia annual dinner on Monday night, when he cherrypicked an array of statistics to claim Australia was actually a world leader on emissions reduction. “We are leading the way,” Morrison said, with a straight face. “Our domestic emissions have already fallen by 36% from 2005 levels. That sounds to me like Australia doing its heavy lifting.”
A lot of political journalists continue to credulously report this stuff, along with the lie that Morrison is somehow moving to a 2050 net zero target — something wholly inadequate in any event for addressing accelerating climate change.
Calls of BS getting louder
Outside a compliant press gallery, though, the calls of bullshit are becoming louder. Tony Boyd at the Financial Review devoted an entire column today to forensically demonstrating the flaws in Morrison’s cherrypicking — and inconsistency with his own government’s figures. Those figures show that the bulk of the fall in Australia’s emissions since 2005 occurred between 2008 and 2014, when Morrison and his colleagues repealed Labor’s highly successful carbon pricing scheme.
Thereafter, until the pandemic (which caused a worldwide decline in emissions that is now being reversed), emissions fell almost entirely as a result of the uptake of renewables in the energy sector driven by state and territory governments — something the Abbott government opposed, the Turnbull government briefly supported, and which the Morrison government, with its fixation on rewarding the Liberals’ fossil fuel donors, does not support.
Morrison’s energy priority has been to fund a study of a new coal-fired power plant, encourage coal mining and fund a “gas-led recovery”, including building a new gas-fired power plant itself.
And Morrison, of course, focuses only on domestic emissions, not the colossal emissions we are responsible for in other countries through our coal exports. Even his own government recognises that Australia’s coal exports are a contributor to catastrophic climate change, though it refuses to accept any responsibility to prevent that.
And none of Morrison’s lies change the fact that Australia remains, behind the oil sheikdoms, the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse emissions.
As Boyd noted, a 2050 target is now irrelevant. 2030 is the target for climate action now as world leaders prepare for this week’s Biden-led summit and the end-of-year climate conference in Glasgow. The days of pushing off climate action into the political never-never came to an end with the presidency of Morrison’s friend Donald Trump.
This means more than Australia’s continuing role as a global block to climate action, up with the Saudis, the Russians and other climate criminals. It means the forfeiting of opportunities in the boom industries of renewables and replacement technologies for fossil fuels. Morrison is trying to prop up carbon capture and storage while the world still spent — despite the pandemic — more than $300 billion in renewables investment in 2020 and major mining companies are literally paying others to take coal mines off their hands.
The press gallery may be deluded about Morrison’s coal credentials but chances are the rest of the world won’t be fooled for a second. Australia is a climate criminal, and should be treated as such.
CCS is the perpetual motion machine of climate policy. Anybody with an average grasp of scientific and commercial reality knows it’s nonsense. But the gullible and optimistic want it to work so much they keep putting it forward, supported by both the shonks who find it a useful distraction from real action and the con-artists making money selling the make-believe.
I’d love to be in the receiving line of all that money, oh I do mean my tax money, being spent by con artists trying to sell CCS.
If we use renewable energy to produce ammonia, then Germany and japan will buy all that we can produce.
Ammonia is the only safe way to transport and burn the Hydrogen inside it leaving a little water.
Currently we are exporting ammonia to Japan from the port of Newcastle. It is produced using coal fired power, unfortunately.
Angus ‘Shonk’ Taylor on RN this morning kept referring to “BLUE hydrogen” (made from coal or gas ie, dirtier even than the Fischer-Tropsch process) whilst dismissing the soi disant ‘green’ hydrogen made by electrolysis of water using (off-peak) electricity from renewables.
Be afraid.
Be very afraid – it’s another CCS sham!
A bit rough BK to claim Australia is a climate criminal, when in reality only the federal LNP is the criminal, the gullible and/or greedy voters that appointed them are just foolish accomplices, and the rest of us are only collateral damage…
Unbelievable that Smirko’s bullshit has got him this far – but then again, Trump.
I think BK’s comment is fair. I recall that Abbott won the 2013 election by calling the carbon pricing scheme a tax and promising to repeal it if the LNP won office. He was voted in and those who voted for the LNP deserve the label “criminal”.
and let’s not forget Labor’s pissweak efforts
The aussie voter who doesn’t have to vote for change, is a happy aussie, looking at our history of election results.
The generic conservative aussie, following their head-in-the-sand, rusted-on inclination to stick with the status quo until it’s completely unavoidable, swallows huge quantities of the Morrison-style bs with a big helping of tomato sauce and gratitude, because it lets them off the moral hook so they can get back to that “real world” they’re always talking about.
Having a sympathetic mainstream media to ram home the guff makes the whole process that much easier. Even stuff that clearly makes no sense at all, like “clean coal”, if repeated a millions times on the telly, starts to sound like it’s an actual thing.
This is why the Libs/Nats coalition justifiably call themselves the natural government of Oz – so long as the economy isn’t diving, and the scandals can stop long enough for the goldfish memory spans to do their job, then that’s a good enough reason to vote to change nothing. Phew!
It doesn’t always go the Libs way of course, there is a level of badness that just can’t be ignored, which in all honesty, I thought Morrison had hit, but the bar just might turn out to be lower than anyone thought.
On the other side of politics, it’s a different story. While the Libs can get by with a team of inept and/or corrupt mediocrities, get pats on the back for just not killing the economy, Labor need to be led by a charismatic superstar who if elected, has to then perform economic miracles, just to get a pass mark.
Even then it’s a simple case of the Murdoch machine just saying the opposite, for long enough, and it usually does the job.
Hopefully the outside world can crash through this recalcitrance, because we’re having a real struggle doing it off our own bat.
Well said.
Nailed it. Upvote x50 if I could.
Hi Bernard
“And Morrison, of course, focuses only on domestic emissions, not the colossal emissions we are responsible for in other countries through our coal exports. Even his own government ”
You forgot emissions due to LNG.
It is no longer seen as the saviour of the petrocarbon industries, even taking into account the so-called coal substitution theory.
Emissions from methane, including fugitive emissions, from LNG are possibly on a par with even brown coal.
We have the active example of the Gorgon project in WA to show how poor these projects can go. Its CCS solution via reinjection into subsea aquifers is proving to be one of the biggest increase in CO2 emissions in Australia IIRC.
Yes well done, good article.
What we see here is the fossil fuel industry with the Morrison government´s help putting on a hydrogen coat and trying to hoodwink the population into thinking we are getting CO2 free
cleanhydrogen …. a word that sounds so similar to thegreenhydrogen the media have been running stories on playing footage of Morrison and Forrest looking at fields of solar panels generating the actual green stuff.Case in point. Look at this crap from ABC TV News last night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnb8tb5r2wI&ab_channel=ABCNews%28Australia%29
It tells a story of Morrison moving away from coal to green hydrogen with zero emissions.
Nothing about coal gasification or the mythical CCS. Just more pictures of solar panels and electrolysis .
I can only hope old mate Malcolm can spread the truth tonight on Q&A.