climate change
24 Mar 2009
Has The Carbon Lobby Captured Kevin Rudd?
Guy Pearse exposes the extent to which the carbon lobby has used its financial clout to infiltrate both government and "independent" organisations
Long before climate change and peak oil emerged as serious issues, fossil-energy producers and their biggest Australian customers — our carbon lobby in waiting — exerted a disproportionate political influence.
As mostly foreign-owned, capital-intensive businesses, they often lacked electoral clout, so the only real ace in their pack was to threaten to take operations elsewhere. The best way to avoid regulation or to attract government support was to confuse the national interest with their own. That required strong relationships with both sides of politics, with bureaucracies, think-tanks, industry associations, scientific and economic agencies, and media commentators.
The extent to which these industries succeeded over a period of decades is best reflected, as we've seen, in successive Australian governments' judgment that cheap coal is the centrepiece of national competitiveness. Thus, when climate change emerged as an issue, there was already a consensus among Australia's business, political and media establishment that the quarry was sacrosanct, coal non-negotiable. It had to be protected at all costs.
In the early 1990s, the Australian carbon lobby got busy, fast. Its members immediately recognised that any Australian commitment to absolute cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions was a problem. It threatened the place of cheap coal in Australian energy and trade policy, raised operating costs and could expose the fact that many commodities were produced with more emissions here than virtually anywhere else. These industries were under threat of losing their privileged position in Australia's political order, but they were well placed to defend it and they knew the issue would take decades to play out. They prepared for a long, drawn-out fight.
Their strategy was to prevent action by Australia, and if that failed, to delay action, and if delay failed, to shift the burden of emission cuts elsewhere. This meant nurturing seeds of doubt about whether climate change was caused by burning fossil fuels. It meant persuading government that emission-intensive industries made a much greater economic and employment contribution than was the case; that greenhouse constraints would wreck the entire Australian economy. It also meant arguing that Australia was a special case: an emission-intensive country with relatively less scope to decarbonise. Finally, Australian action had to be made conditional on action by other countries (there would always be sufficient recalcitrance elsewhere to justify delay).
For Australia's emerging carbon lobby, success depended on the political leadership hearing these messages repeatedly from all the sources they trusted. Much of the infrastructure of influence was in place, but the key to winning the policy battle was using big money and the right people. Directly and indirectly, the key players wrote big cheques to the main sources of economic, scientific, ideological, industry, union and political advice for Australian governments.
Knowing that the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) would be relied upon from the mid-1990s as the principal internal source of greenhouse economic advice, a "who's who" of fossil-fuel producers, burners and users bought chairs on an ABARE steering committee. (That is, they literally bought them: the price was $50,000 per year, and payers included the Australian Coal Association, the Australian Aluminium Council, BHP, CRA, the Business Council of Australia, the Electricity Supply Association of Australia, Exxon Corporation, Mobil Australia and Texaco). This committee oversaw the creation of the economic models on which crucial assessments about emission cuts were based.
Though the ensuing analysis showed how easily affordable such cuts were, the presentation was consistently spun to create the opposite impression. Given that ABARE's mission was to "enhance the competitiveness of Australia's agricultural and resource industries" (rather than the broader national interest), the quarry-friendly take on climate change was unsurprising. However, the carbon lobby took no chances, spending large sums on commissioning extra ABARE greenhouse policy work (hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in one documented case involving the Minerals Council, the Aluminium Council and the Electricity Supply Association of Australia). As a senior carbon lobbyist involved in that work told me:
"Basically ABARE has a requirement to meet certain earnings targets so you can do that through outside consulting. So we commissioned [another party] to do some work ... and they got the modelling done by [another party] and ABARE, alright? To our assumptions."
Carbon-lobby companies and industry associations have also contributed considerable sums towards ABARE's overall research program, helping the organisation to raise the tens of millions of dollars it needs annually to meet its external funding requirement. Predictably, all of this has resulted in a steady stream of reports about the cost of cutting emissions that have lent themselves to misrepresentation. A senior minister in the Keating government (still serving today) told me a few years ago that, although he didn't appreciate it back then, ABARE was:
"...effectively used by pro-industry interests at the time ... If ever you wanted to see a self-serving group, ABARE would be the absolute classic [example] of an agency that acted that way in my view when we were in government."
"They were guns for hire," the minister said. "They were a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Primary Industries and Energy at the time and they did the bidding of the DPIE. [So the idea that they propose, that they're an independent ...] Is unadulterated crap ... don't fall for any suggestion that there's any impartiality about ABARE."
Knowing that the government listened to more than one source of economic advice, the carbon lobby locked in the key consultants, such as ACIL Tasman, to prepare research backing up its arguments in favour of delay. In recent years, the lobby has also relied heavily on a few consultants in the local branch of CRA International, a firm that has been at the forefront of the successful campaign to delay emission cuts in the United States.
Favoured CRA consultants have now moved over to a group called Concept Economics, and together it and ACIL have advised almost every major carbon-emitting industry in the country. ACIL (and CRA to a lesser degree) has also been contracted, sometimes without open tender, to run government inquiries and taskforces, and to provide advice on a host of greenhouse-related matters to federal departments from the prime minister's on down. Thus, whether "independent" advice came from inside or outside government, it was subsidised one way or another by carbon-lobby cash and showed a remarkable but unsurprising uniformity.
Steering the scientific advice to government was equally crucial, and once again the cheques came thick and fast. Since the late 1990s it has been dangerous for large multinationals and their industry associations to deny openly the link between greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change. Rather than risk damaging their brands, they fund front groups to challenge the findings of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A small global network of "experts," many of them with no relevant climate-science qualifications, have been funded directly and indirectly to ensure a constant stream of submissions to government inquiries, conference speeches, bogus petitions, documentaries and media commentary. This has created the impression of division in the scientific community where almost none exists.
In Australia since the year 2000, the Lavoisier Group has co-ordinated the local fight against the science. Such organisations can freely say what their sponsors dare not: that climate change is "the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the public," a "scam" and a "web of deceit"; that concern about climate change is "green religion", that wind farms are monuments to "pagan gods", and that the "Great Barrier Reef may actually benefit from some global warming."
They publish books like Thank God for Carbon and go so far as to suggest that those running the IPCC should "be facing criminal charges and the prospect of going to jail."
Internationally, the funding links between climate sceptics and resources companies (especially Exxon and the coal industry) have been exposed. Some of the "experts" are veterans from previous industry-backed campaigns to discredit scientific findings about tobacco, asbestos and leaded petrol. Yet there has been little attention paid to the funding of Australia's sceptics, who have delivered testimony to the US Congress, the House of Lords and at countless conferences. They put their hands on their hearts and say they receive no "research" funding from corporations, but what is not disclosed is who funds the globe-trotting greenhouse advocacy that takes up most of their time.
The funding arrangements in Australia are relatively opaque, but the template is the same as overseas. Occasionally we get a glimpse: Western Mining Corporation (WMC), for example, proudly acknowledged its support for the Lavoisier Group in, of all things, a sustainability report. WMC's former CEO Hugh Morgan launched the Lavoisier Group, and senior staff ran it.
More often than not, the sceptics' activities are funded by neo-liberal think-tanks, such as the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs, which are in turn funded by emission-intensive companies. The IPA's Energy Forum is dominated by fossil-energy interests, including La Trobe Valley and NSW coal-fired electricity generators. Senior IPA staff running the forum say the IPA rarely takes a position that differs from that of its Energy Forum funders, "otherwise they'd stop funding us".
Financing the sceptics is only half the story. At the respectable centre of the debate, a different approach is required. Given that fossil-fuel burning is in fact the problem, the case has to be made that fossil fuels are also the solution — that emissions can be safely and economically stored underground through carbon capture and storage. Funds have been channelled into sections of the CSIRO to support research and development of CCS technologies. This has helped to meet external funding requirements just as it helped ABARE, but it has also created "constant pressure" to focus on commercial research for paying industry partners.
As CSIRO has publicly acknowledged, it also gave polluter clients the right to veto research findings they didn't like being made public. A succession of eminent scientists have spoken out since leaving the CSIRO about the various ways in which they were barred from making public comment unwelcome to the carbon lobby or a government determined not to offend it. Talk about emissions trading, emissions targets or climate refugees was off limits — as was membership of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.
Various cooperative research centres, along with the Centre for Low Emission Technology, have been established with carbon-lobby backing. On the surface, they resemble academic institutes objectively studying the viability of CCS. In reality, they are champions of the technology whether it is viable or not, and PR conduits for those providing the funding. While these "R&D institutions" are busy generating the impression that "clean coal" is a fait accompli, their sponsors are busy inflating hopes of what it might achieve. The Hydrogen Energy collaboration between BP and Rio Tinto, for example, promoted the idea that coal gasification is the path to a hydrogen economy. The Monash Energy collaboration between Shell and Anglo Coal promoted the idea that coal liquefaction can deliver Australia independence from foreign oil.
Though the carbon lobby is bashful about the amount of money it funnels to independent scientists, the Australian coal industry has consistently lauded its own generosity in placing a levy on itself to fund carbon capture and storage. The billion dollars this levy is intended to raise sounds impressive, but it is spread over more than a decade. It is a tiny fraction of the industry's profits, and not enough to cover the cost of just one large conventional coal-fired power station, let alone a "clean" one.
Most major greenhouse polluters are represented by at least one industry association: mining, electricity, cement, oil, car manufacturing, trucking, paper, plastics and chemicals. Some, like the Australian Aluminium Council, do little but greenhouse policy; all spend large sums communicating the economic and scientific cases for delay or taking minimal action. Their willingness to spend has enabled these industries to dominate the debate. With a steady stream of international negotiations to be monitored, and a plethora of domestic policy processes, very few stakeholders can afford to be everywhere.
Greenhouse policy is a rich man's game and the deep pockets of the Australian carbon lobby have made its members ubiquitous. From parliamentary testimonies to press-club speeches to the relentless stream of communication with ministerial offices, senior bureaucrats, party officials and the press gallery, they've never missed a day at school.
This is an edited extract from Quarterly Essay 33 — Quarry Vision: Coal, Climate Change and the End of the Resources Boom, by Guy Pearse (Black Inc).
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Guy Pearce wrote that climate science is accused of being a religion. I’ve noticed that before and have wondered how they justified it. I’ve decided, that is because they worship the one true faith and everything else is just a cult.
I now think of them as the Intelligent Deniers. Different from the Intelligent Designers because they worship a God that doesn’t live in the sky. He lives in the ground and he is a bit darker.
Hard to get by the acolytes though.
The above listings of almost total capture of the input into Carbon Reduction in Australia, merely show it is a subsidiary of the world domination by Multi-National Corporations involved in carbon release, so although absolutely horrifying in the reading, it is nothing new.
It is only slightly possible that the GEC will cause these ‘octopi’ some pause, they have so much control over all aspects of our daily lives, and so much money, that never mind that they possibly know that they are destroying the world they are, as humans, living in, they will continue to do so, because individually they are divorced from all humanity (and reality).
If the response to the GEC were to take some control over these monstrosities back into the hands of people-elected Governments, then it may be possible that some humanity be injected into the Corporate bodies. If the CEOs and other Executives were to lose most of the money they have stolen from societies in order to rise above having to consider being part of societies, (and they are so isolated now as to be totally divorced from reality), maybe, just maybe, we could see some changes, and these monstrosities may become responsible and involved corporate citizens. Perhaps wishful thinking!
Almost every Government in Australia, from Local to State to Federal, are now beholden to Carbon Polluters (coal mines, coal burning power generators) so much so that every decision made is one to enhance the profits of some Polluter.
State Governments, in particular Queensland, NSW, South Australia and WA, the NT, would now find it very hard to survive without the income from the miners and polluters such as Aluminium smelters.
Mining Unions have great sway with Labor State Governments, and the polluters ‘own’ Martin Ferguson in the Rudd Ministry.When he opens his mouth he sounds like one of those Born Again Christians in relation to Polluting Industry, he is so much a believer. He should be sacked.
Penny Wong has to be sacked from her Ministry. It is now quite obvious that she intended to give the Polluters everything they could possibly want, for decades into the future.
I note that Wong hates being questioned about any aspect of her Ministry. In any case, she treats her questioners as idiots (which they well may be in some cases) and never does give a straight answer. As she has been doing the bidding of those she is supposed to control, for whatever reason, she could hardly do otherwise, I suppose. I do not know of her personally, but I would imagine that up close and personal, she could be extremely nasty. She makes no effort to cover her arrogance, her total superiority to everyone. Even Kerry O’Brien treats her with ‘kid gloves’, after having his nose tweaked once or twice, metaphorically speaking. I have to wonder how anyone such as her can be elected by people…but then we (the people, not including me) also elected another extremely ‘superior being’, K.Rudd. And somehow, in absolute ignorance(?), keep on supporting them, despite the many total disasters and manifestations of contempt for human rights and even ‘democracy’ that they have been responsible for since coming to power.
Perhaps it is that they now, with the GEC, hold our very lives in their hands, and we all have to hope like Hell that they are capable of doing something, anything, in order to save us from the greed of the CEO’s and other Execs. Throwing money around like it grows on trees must help!?
Poor fellow, My World!
Dazza.
This comment has been edited.
Excellent article by Guy Pearse. The following letter sent to all Federal MPs set out the bizarre situation on which pro-Coal Rudd Labor policies are the CONVERSE of recommendations of top climate scientists here and abroad – it concludes by saying ”Australia urgently needs a public Senate Inquiry to identify those who are LYING to Government, Her Excellency the Governor General and the people of Australia over these massively life-threatening issues.”
Dear Mr, Ms, Mrs, Dr, Senator [named individual] , The Liberal-National Party Coalition under Malcolm Turnbull must be congratulated for its sensible new approach to renewable energy and biochar – however an entrenched Culture of Ignoring and Denial in Australia means that it has a long way to go before it joins the informed and responsible Australian Greens in appreciating the urgent need for rapid, progressive cessation of fossil fuel burning and other greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution.
Top UK climate scientist Dr James Lovelock FRS (the Gaia hypothesis) (a) says that fewer than 1 billion people will survive this century due to unaddressed, man-made global warming; (b) says of carbon dioxide sequestration “That is a waste of time. It’s a crazy idea - and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done”; and (c) regards biochar as the last chance to save humanity and the biosphere: “There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal” (see New Scientist Environment, 23 January 2009: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-chance-to-sa… ).
However the Rudd Labor Australian Government (a) is remorselessly committed to an indefinite 2% annual increase in Australian Domestic and Exported greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution (contrary to top expert UK advice that an annual 6-8% decrease in GHG pollution is urgently needed to avert an atmospheric CO2-e concentration of 450 ppm) and to Australia as the world’s biggest coal exporter and a World leader in annual per capita GHG pollution, threatening billions of impoverished non-Europeans with climate genocide; (b) is committed to carbon dioxide sequestration (as stated overseas recently by Her Excellency the Governor General); and (c) totally rejects biochar as a solution (as stated recently by Climate Minister Penny Wong).
Top US climate scientist Dr James Hansen (NASA GISS) says that “we face a climate emergency”, a view shared by Dr Lovelock, and by other eminent scientists including Victorian Governor Professor David de Kretser AC and Australian Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty who says: “We are in real danger”.
Australia urgently needs a public Senate Inquiry to identify those who are LYING to Government, Her Excellency the Governor General and the people of Australia over these massively life-threatening issues.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Gideon Polya [Melbourne]
PS For what outstanding World and Australian scientists are saying about the Climate Emergency see: http://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/climate-emerg… and http://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/climate-emerg… .
PPS Below is a concise 1-page summary of Climate Emergency Facts and Required Actions:
http://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/climate-emerg… .
Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
I wonder of if our friend dazza above and the publishers of new matilda are aware of the libel laws in this country?
While I agree with Pearse I have a question for everyone of you.
How has your own lifestyle been enchanced and enriched by fossil fuels? Do you drive petrol cars?
Have you always had electricity and not bothered with the amount of coal being burnt for the past 50 years?
Have you ever lived in a small town where the only power was a 12 volt generator in the cellar and bad eyesight was the norm?
Come on now. Sure, CO2 is bad for the health of the nation, but how about at least acknowledging that we are the ones responsbible along with the scientists who discovered that coal generated cheap power.
The same scientists gave us DDT, Dieldrin, Aldrin and other organophosphates. We managed to work with them to ban the bloody stuff.
The same scientists invented nuclear but forgot about the consequences of the waste yet we still mine and sell the filthy crap without ranting about uranium lobbies and so on.
Other scientists have invented all sorts of things that later proved to be dangerous but we did not have this incredible abuse of the people who used that knowledge to make lives better for all of us in the last half century did we?
Fair shake boys and girls. The hypocrisy is utterly astonishing to me even though I agree that massive cuts to the burning of fossil fuels is required.
The only question is why did someone put a question mark in the title? Probably to protect against defamation. Certainly not because there’s any doubt. It’s screamingly obvious. It was obvious before the election. Of course they worked both sides of politics.
The only surprise is how blatant the systemic corruption of our politics has become. That seats on an ABARE steering committee should be up for sale.
We scientists said, when Keating and co forced CSIRO to get outside income, that it would compromise CSIRO advice, and ultimately its research. It’s now far along that degraded road.
And the country carries on as if we actually have a democracy, rather than the plutocracy it so obviously is. Welcome to the Brave New World (while it lasts).
Harry Morton Years ago Dutch Shell commissioned a British scientist to investigate the likely changes in climate. The scientist concluded that it was even then probably too late to prevent a massive change in climate and any preventitive measures that people did would not prevent it. If the pollies admitted that we would have riots in the streets. So we are encouraged to turn off the lights and the air condiditoners for a while. It gives us a warm glow but it won’t change a thing. Even though the pollies and the boffins tell us it is not global warming (the snow storms buggered that) it is now climate change.
douglas jones
What else can be expected?
Business has the credo, enshrined in law, that their job is to make a profit, for the shareholders of course! Nothing else is of concern.
Should it be necessary to engage in at best propaganda at worst lies then provided a profit is made, for the shareholders of course, then this is okay.
Naturally when these folk marry their proclamation is all about empathy, truth and fidelity. Fidelity beyond who one copulates with extending to an unknown concern, a not previously experienced concern, for another. This is quite foreign to business. I have no data on the length of marriage but I guess as is the way of business a little on the side and baubles for the wife keep the system from imploding.
Not so the economy or environment but then shareholder returns are all that legality requires.
I feel sure both government and business have a fall back position. Management perks have provided the money to seek a climate proof site and equally climate proof building, water and food supply.
Sure many deny climate change has anything to do with business activity or that alternatives exist but this is like their proclamation of religious belief, a cover gaining dollars and respect. Fixing the market is only the behaviour of a dedicated business guru with mind directed to profit, for the shareholder, demanded by law.
Those that fail with the management taking the lions, the only share of profit and capital?
Well the management deserve recompense for their efforts, after all they did provide shareholders with some dividend even if garnered form incoming shareholder money.
Any way there is Africa and some of the third world plus the juicy bits exposed in the West, and competition should ensure such becomes the plaything of our business.
Yes of course the smarter of our breed saw the crash coming we lobbied for years to have regulations gutted and politicians bought. Sure it is a bit more scary than we imagined but a few words here and a ponzi there and we will be alright. Mind you shareholder entitlements might need to be on hold for a while but we the management will do the best, even take only a dollar a year for our services.
Peter Rsvenscroft
Graeme, you are right on the money. It is a religion. I have them pegged as the Church of the Holy Molecule, with their main supporters as the thin air burial societies, and Al the Carbon Bagger as their messiah. Penny, Kevin and Old Oily (and Malcolm) are all recently baptised.
douglas jones
My somewhat intemperate rejoinder should have some context.
Sure the coal lobby along with the many other lobbies trying to push their barrows via special treatment will continue at least until our media, also beholden to the establishment can be made to provide money for investigative journalists to bring to the public just what deals are being done behind the façade of democracy. This article does this but to a limited audience. So perhaps the audience even for investigative reporters in the media will also be small, but just for a time perhaps the latest troubles will sensitise the population to seek causes and demand correction. Such will fade just as the fear of another 1929 faded from the people most economists and the business lackeys the easily swayed politicians. The establishment has of course always felt that it was right that they should be the beneficiaries of reverse socialism.
It was in order that they should be slow to implement any measures reducing the environmental consequence of laissez faire. That such measures are available and have been for awhile is testified by the Rocky Mountain Institute reports, many of its suggestions appearing in Germany, Holland Japan to name some, but rarely implemented by government or business in this forward thinking country.
Here the aims were remaining in power and profit.
Until each of these is changed we will wallow in a world of could be as conditions worsen.
Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba, has estimated that capturing and burying just 10 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted over a year from coal-fire plants at current rates would require moving volumes of compressed carbon dioxide greater than the total annual flow of oil worldwide — a massive undertaking requiring decades and trillions of dollars. “Beware of the scale,” he stressed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/weekinreview/03revk.html
To put it in a nutshell, geosequestration involves each year pumping huge masses of liquid CO2 (we are talking tonnages of about three times the totals of coal, petroleum and gas consumed per year) at around 100 atmospheres pressure down shafts drilled to about a vertical kilometer into subterranean aquifers or the seabed. There is no question as to its technical feasibility on a small scale, but at the industrial scale required is another matter again. However, all the available space down in the possible aquifers is presently occupied either by the material of the rocks, or by the liquid that saturates them, which is in most cases water. As liquids are incompressible, the fact that the CO2 can be pumped down at all means that water is being displaced out of its way. In other words, whatever liquid is presently down there has to be free to go somewhere else than where it presently is.
It would be different if CO2 were insoluble in water, and could be stored underground as gas or liquid over water, as the insoluble hydrocarbons are stored in natural deposits. But unlike hydrocarbons, CO2 is reasonably soluble in water. (The solution is commonly known as soda water.) The hope of the geosequestrationists is that in the long term (over thousands and probably millions of years from the time of sequestration) the CO2 will slowly react with iron and magnesium compounds down there to form permanent mineral deposits bonded into the rocks. What we do not know is whether or not that happens, and on what time scale. But long before that might happen, the dissolved CO2 will too likely have managed to migrate through the aquifer rock to reach the ocean at an underwater outcrop of the aquifer. For as I said, if the CO2 can be pumped down, some liquid is moving to make way for it, and it all surely has to go somewhere. Just where is uncertain, but scientific perceptions are resting in too large a part on the economic needs of coal and steel interests for us to have unreserved confidence in them.
Australia’s coal burning power stations and iron and steel plants are located relatively close to the coast, as are its coal mines. This fits in by and large with the global pattern for location of major coal burning facilities. The economic imperatives of pumping all the CO2 they produce down into the sedimentary strata below as liquid mean that the geosequestration sites should ideally be as close to the coal burning sources of CO2 as possible, which thus means close to the coast: giving the CO2 minimal distance to migrate through the rock in order to emerge into the seawater, where there is already too much of it. This threatens to make the proposed carbon geosequestration one of the greatest follies of all time, and a monumental waste of money.
But wait. There’s more: Perhaps only 100 or so years from now, humanity will need the carbon dioxide for plant food material, as by then Peak Oil will be past and Peak Coal will be creating shortages of the principal reducing agent for the smelting of iron, and the principal fuel for thermal power stations.
A disclosure at this point: I own BHP shares, so in a way I am operating against my short term financial interest here. But I believe that I am operating in the far more important longer term interest of the biosphere, of which I, those dear to me, and anyone reading this cannot help being a part. The best information I have seen indicates without a shadow of a doubt to my mind that a government policy based on the hope that geosequestration will save the coal industry is a chase after a complete illusion.