climate change
15 Dec 2008
Labor Sells Australia Out To The Business Lobby
Rudd's emissions target doesn't make economic, or ultimately political, sense. So why has he done it?
Kevin Rudd's extremely weak greenhouse gas emission target cannot by any rational argument be justified as being in the national interest. The reason is simple: every economic study has shown that reducing our emissions will cost the nation very little.Even the driest of the dry economic models, from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, shows GDP growth would be reduced by only a fraction of a percentage point. We would still, by their modelling, be much richer in 2050 than we are now.
More realistic studies, that take account of practicalities generally overlooked by economic models, show we could actually save money by eliminating wasteful practices, and those savings could pay for further reductions. For example a study by McKinsey Australia showed we could reduce our emissions by 20 per cent in 2020 for no net cost. We could reduce them by 30 per cent for a modest cost.
The key to the McKinsey result is to stop being wasteful, so that we dramatically improve the efficiency with which we use energy. To do this we need, for example, to upgrade our space heating and the systems that pump air and water in buildings and factories. All new buildings and factories can be built to much higher standards, and we can invest in retrofitting the old ones.
A big political attraction with this approach ought to be that it can contain household energy bills. Energy will be more expensive, but we will use less of it, so it won't cost much more to keep our houses warm. Rudd's approach, on the other hand, will increase household energy bills.
If it's so cheap and attractive to reduce our emissions, why is Rudd not taking this approach? The reason for this is also simple: winners and losers. It's good old fashioned politics of the most sordid kind.
If we reduce our energy needs, then we need less fossil fuel, and the fossil fuel industry makes lower profits. To accomplish our long-term goals, we would need new kinds of energy sources, and that would put the fossil fuel industry out of business. There would be new businesses to replace them of course, which is why the economic models show little net cost. But the fossil fuel industry doesn't care about other industries, it only cares about itself.
Neither does the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry care about new industries or the national interest. Its member industries care only about themselves.
What is comes down to is that Rudd is not governing for the national interest. The Prime Minister is governing for sectional interests. He is governing for the presently rich and powerful.
To try to clothe himself in some shreds of reasonableness, Rudd has even resorted to the term "environmental extremists" to describe those, including most of the world's climate scientists, who call for much stronger action.
The Rudd strategy is virtually guaranteed to fail. Carbon capture and burial is presented by the coal industry as the big fix, but it is the most speculative of all the projected energy technologies. There is no assurance at all that it could work on the required scale, it would be hugely expensive and it would only address a fraction of our emissions.
The fossil fuel industry already benefits from multi-billion dollar indirect subsidies, and Rudd just dropped another $4 billion of our money in their laps. That money could have insulated a lot of houses, could have saved on a lot of people's heating bills, could have started reducing our emissions now instead of in a decade, or three, or never.
Fossil fuels have no future, and Rudd is tying Australia's future to the fossil fuel industry. His path is a virtual guarantee that we lose the Great Barrier Reef. It is, according to the latest science, quite likely to lead to runaway catastrophic warming.
Rudd's stance is indefensible and pathetic. His is a monumental failure of leadership.
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Thanks Geoff, great piece as usual.
Strange times when a Labor prime minister can describe as a balanced approach a target that lets the world turn to dust. And I must have missed it on the news bulletin, but the only possible action by Wong and Garrett, following this nonsense Press Club speech, would be resignation in protest. Or don’t Labor ministers work on principle any more?
David,I don’t know if you are being ironic or are just a litle starry eyed about the ALP.The current PM is no different to Howard in any important sense.It has been a long time since any cabinet,Labor or Tory,worked on principle.Wenny Pong and Geter Parret won’t resign.
This is a government about and for vested interests.This not a government about long range thinking,let alone acting.This is not a government about patriotism,even.
Failing an awakening of a significant part of the Australian population we are toast,in more ways than one.
Great headline , the result is no surprise with the back peddling on transparent lobbying and political donations. Rudd will make a great mining company CEO .
Bizarre that the same man can herald this ETS nonsense and open a solar farm.
http://www.cleanenergy.qld.gov.au/windorah_solar_farm.cfm
‘Idiot politician’ seems to be a good phrase.
Rudd is great friends with Heather Ridout. He wines and dines with all the Big Polluter heavies.But he also knows that State Premiers such as Brumby, Bligh, ‘whats-his-name’ in NSW ( he is a nonentity) are totally dependent on Big Coal, and re-election of Labor in these states is conditional on making Big Coal happy. A lot of pressure from there. Barnett in WA would also have applied a lot of pressure on behalf of his mining mates.
Rudd never has had the saving of the planet in mind, only the re-election of State Labor and most essentially, his own Government.
A bit of the speech was actually devoted to how he was going to wedge the Co-alition, and I think that was actually uppermost in his mind at that moment. See that mean little smile when he was talking about Turnbull? He is a ‘small’ man, in character, and there is no way that the saving of the world has ever come into his consideration. He is a pollie, first and foremost, and a mean, nasty one at that. But he does have a very efficient PR ‘spin’ team. I should be surprised at his popularity, but how could I be surprised by the ignorance and stupidity of the Aussie voter.
As for Wong and Garrett. I do not think that Wong is actually on the same planet as the rest of us, she seems to be in la-la land most of the time. A robot, like Rudd. Garrett! Lord love me, what a disaster that man has proved to be. The sooner he is turfed the better. But he does what Rudd demands, and has lost every shred of any credibility he may have had once, before he took the job on.
No, they will not resign, they will have been totally subservient to Rudd during all this process, and I am sure did not raise a peep of protest. I think they are both from the NSW Right? Wong is, for sure. What could you expect.
Turnbull will come to the party, after some internal wrangling, and this may well be the last straw for the Co-alition with the Nats. The world will continue on it’s merry way to mass species extinction, while Rudd and Co. (and most of the rest of the world pollies) continue to play stupid local politics, fiddling while the world burns, floods, dries up etc.
I really felt for Bob Brown, and that girl, it must have felt utterly terrible hearing the words come from Rudd lips. I know that I felt betrayed, as indeed, so many others will also. But I was not surprised. I expected nothing better from Rudd. Indeed, he is a failure as a human being!
Join Get-Up and fight!!! Join the Greens and fight this mob! Try to keep us all from going down the gurgler. Dazza.
Hi thirra, yes, I was being just a little sarcastic I’m afraid. Garrett’s role in greenwashing the ALP was obvious from the time he was pre-selected, and he has done nothing since. Wong I thought might be enough of a heavyweight to stand up to the pro-coal likes of Ferguson in cabinet, if she chose to. She has obviously chosen to do nothing about climate change and little about water. I never had any illusions about Rudd, although I thought he might be smart enough to understand that science doesn’t lend itself to "balance". You can’t bargain with CO2 like you can between ALP factions. Rudd clearly thinks you can, and therefore reveals himself as not an agent for change but an agent for the status quo. All of us need to kick up such a fuss that we can’t be ignored. I do it by blogging and in newspaper columns. Everyone can find a venue, even if it is just lecturing the neighbours or the other drinkers in the pub. I have made a suggestion on the Eltham article about political strategies. We can’t just shrug our shoulders and put it down to politics as usual. I don’t know where Rudd thinks his grand-children are going, but mine don’t have a handy alternative planet.
You may have reacted with anger and despair to the news of the Federal Government’s barely-there emissions reduction target. You are not the only one! Let’s turn our collective will into powerful action that the Government cannot ignore.
http://www.climatesummit.org.au/
Please join the Australia’s Climate Action Summit in Canberra the weekend before the first day of the 2009 Federal Parliament. You will join hundreds of people from community climate action groups across Australia, meeting together to set a strong campaign for 2009. On the first day of Parliament, Tuesday 3rd February 2009, we will have a large peaceful community action, forming a human chain that will encircle Parliament.
Below is more information about the Day of Action - please do forward.
2009 is a critical year for climate policy. The Rudd honeymoon is over as the Government demonstrates that it is not listening to science or equity, but instead to big business and the heaviest polluters. Now more than ever, it is time to come together to build a strong, diverse people’s movement that creates the pressure on the Government to achieve the necessary action on climate change. Please promote the Summit and the Day of Action to your family, friends and networks.
For a future free from catastrophic climate change.
Organising Team
http://www.climatesummit.org.au/
Geoff says:
"For example a study by McKinsey Australia showed we could reduce our emissions by 20 per cent in 2020 for no net cost. We could reduce them by 30 per cent for a modest cost. "
Was the McKinsey report talking about 20 per cent on projected 2020 emissions levels under a business-as-usual scenario, or was it compared to 2000 levels - the scenario to which the CPRS refers? It makes a big difference given our growth in emissions, especially if land use change is discounted.
Not happy Kevin.
This betrayal, unless changed, will see me vote for others at the next election, despite being a Labor Party member. I joined your party and voted Kevin 07 mainly because I really believed you’d come to save us from climate dinosaurs and, until now, I’ve been pretty happy with your words and those of Penny Wong, but now I see they were all empty!
What was the point of the Garnaut report in the end? Was is just for show before the election so you could say ‘we’re looking into it’?
I don’t recall feeling this betrayed or this lied to over election promises (you promised us action on climate change) ever before.
Mark
To Barry Brook:
Barry, the McKinsey report calculates the costs of a 30% reduction in emissions below the 1990 level by 2020. It shows that the economic savings from efficient energy use can pay for a large part of the additional costs of renewable energy and partially clean energy sources.
Thanks Geoff Davies and Anna Rose for your valuable articles.
Cheers,
Mark Diesendorf
And here http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/105493/Cooked_goose_.html is my call to arms. Aimed at an American audience specifically, but just as applicable here. I can’t remember the last time I was as incensed by something, and I got incensed a LOT during the Howard years.
Another ‘Doomsday Green’ report with no real understanding of the science and economics behind the White paper.
Rudd’s approach is to obviously take the current global model of 460 ppm CO2 and project a decade ahead with a 5 - 15% reduction on this figure, which could then mean a less than 10% rise in CO2 levels (350 ppm CO2) since the Middle Ages.
The White Paper offers a responsible and politically strategic move that allows for business and economic factors, as well as the new science of the ‘oscillation factor’ between Summer and Winter temperatures, that means we are in a state of temperature and weather pattern flux that could only be described as ‘climate change’ , but certainly not not just as ‘global warming’.
And its about time the ‘Doomsday Greens’ woke up to the fact that the last election had very little to do with ‘climate change’ and everything to do with the erroneously named policy of Work Choices!
So there is no mandate for fallacious ‘global warming’ arguments, only realistically planned ‘climate change’ strategies.
Thanks for clarifying Mark, and yes it’s clear in the report they use 1990 as their base, unlike slimey Kevin who uses 2000.
Does anyone know how much emissions increased from 1990 to 2000? I don’t have a ready source.
denise, you seem to be using figures and concepts from a school of thought previously unknown to me, and I thought I was reasonably well-informed about the range of views out there. Lots of people talk about cycles; exactly what oscillation are you talking about?
Also, I cannot make sense of what you say about ppm CO2. In the Middle Ages, ppm CO2 should have been about 280. At the moment it’s about 384 ppm, and going up by 2 ppm per year (see co2now.org). Australia being about 1% of the global problem, we should be contributing about .02 ppm increase per year. The 5-15% reduction applies to that .02 ppm, so that means reducing it to .016-.019 ppm increase per year.
If annual global emissions of CO2 persist and even increase (to match economic and population growth), then later in the century we will see levels of 500, 600, etc CO2 ppm, which all correspond to increasingly dramatic increases in average temperature. It’s to avoid these and higher levels of CO2 that the global agreements exist. 450 ppm CO2 is considered an ambitious target, but it still implies at least 2 degrees increase on current understandings. There is even a growing school of thought which says that spending too long above 350 ppm CO2 (and we are above that already) will melt the icecaps, though just how long it has to stay at that level (decades? centuries?) is unclear. So I think the trend among scientists who set targets is to call for a long-term restoration of those medieval/preindustrial levels. Plants and the ocean have some capacity to draw down CO2 naturally, but it’s considered too slow, so I would expect an increasing interest in artificially accelerated geochemical processes which cause CO2 to react with minerals and form carbonates. There may eventually be trillion-dollar industries and vast mining-like operations which exist to do nothing but draw CO2 out of the atmosphere at an accelerated rate.
It may be that some of the numbers you use refer to "CO2-equivalent" (CO2e). There are other human-made factors (other gases, soot particles and so on) which also warm or cool the earth, and sometimes their aggregate effect is described in terms of the level of CO2 only which would have the same effect. So you could have a future which is only 600 ppm CO2, but 1000 ppm CO2-equivalent because you have the equivalent of another 400 ppm CO2 coming from other warming influences. You can sometimes find people (even informed people like Tim Flannery) saying that in terms of CO2-equivalent, we are already well over 400 ppm CO2e, but that particular calculation actually leaves out some of the cooling factors such as aerosols. People tend to think that human-generated non-CO2 warming and non-CO2 cooling actually balance each other out at the moment (not for any profound reason, just because they happen to be at comparable levels) and so the current CO2e is actually around the current CO2-only levels. But as those other factors move out of balance, CO2e will deviate from the pure CO2 value.
Sorry if that’s all complicated. The basic thing is that you have CO2, then you have CO2e which includes extra factors and expresses them in terms of CO2, but at the moment the extra factors roughly balance out.
Mitchell, keep it simple. I think Denise is confusing stocks and flows, pretty basic, but I admit it’s hard to tell.
Sorry to add a new dimension to the discussion BUT I’ve just read the news under the headline of Backflip on solar power rebates.
My response is - this is no backflip [never seen one anyway but who cares] it is downright skullduggery.
I have posted off letters to a number of places saying:
"Garrett’s announcement of a backflip on the Solar rebate scheme is nothing of the sort. It is a cheap and individious way for the electricity companies to meet their renewable energy targets, without having to invest in real change to the way in which they do business.
Coupled with the Government’s plan to pay the coal-fired electricity companies to keep polluting, this is the Dodgy Brothers at their worst and Garrett is once again the fall-guy for a Government that presumes we are all idiots."
For an indication of how this might be the case, see the ATA Renew article on what happens when you sell your RECs to the company from which you buy solar equipment.
RENEW Issue 105 p34
Thats correct, none of Rudds policies make sense.
The spending spree was a sign of a leader in free fall..he must have difficulty sleeping, which is not good for a PM.
The focus needs to be on governance, good governance seperated from corporate interests which was the big achievement of Howard…Rudd has run with the baton and playing the asia prosperity game…wrong call…prosperity begins at home and can extend to neighbors but not under the guise of policy to sell Australia (or the world) short, the answers rest in simple keynesian economics and he was a genius economist who understood the importance of ‘local’ economy and the risks of ‘global’ economy.
Every system is self adjusting when the ‘time’ component is removed and everyone is accountable ultimately…so we should all not stress too much but focus on our own ‘local’ economy and not put too much trust in our politicians at this stage as the level of governance is currently low - ie lets not invest energy in our politicians but invest it instead in our homes, local communities where it matters. To invest energy into insanity is insanity and will not be productive.
Our politicians at this stage are on the take and we need to work towards changing this situation and until that time stop voting for these buffoons until parties/people of proper ethics present themselves and demonstrate credibly that they have our people and environment closer to their concerns.
Bob Debus and Faulkner show signs of this - lend support to the ethical and let the others know their time is up. Australians want a better deal and will have to accept that the policies which have led them into debt and consumerism are not sensible long term policy and will be seen by history thus.