climate change
5 Aug 2009
Actually, Rudd DOES Break Promises
Despite proudly asserting that his Government mostly keeps his promises, Rudd's track record on climate change commitments is appalling, finds Mark Diesendorf
In Australia, both the previous Howard Liberal-National Coalition government (1996-2007) and the present Rudd Labor Government have been strongly influenced by the big greenhouse gas emitting industries to go slow on climate action.
One source of evidence supporting this statement is a set of leaked notes from a meeting on 6 May 2004 of the Lower Emissions Technology Advisory Group, which comprises CEOs of the major fossil fuel producing and consuming corporations. The meeting, which was addressed by the then prime minister John Howard and former industry minister Ian Macfarlane, discussed ways and means of limiting the growth of the renewable energy industry and thus protecting the fossil-fuel based industries.
This apparent collusion between the Howard government and the big greenhouse gas polluters was subsequently confirmed by author Guy Pearse. As a member of the Liberal Party and a former ministerial adviser in the Howard Coalition government, Pearse was able to obtain frank interviews with the captains of these polluting industries for his PhD thesis. He reports that they boasted to him that they — the self-styled "Greenhouse Mafia" — were responsible for writing government policy on greenhouse response.
Additional grounds for concern that the Howard government was attempting to suppress renewable energy comes from an apparently concerted government campaign against wind power, the least-costly of the new renewable sources of electricity. In this campaign, verbal attacks on wind power were uttered by at least five ministers, including the prime minister, within a period of about one year.
The Rudd Labor Government won office in November 2007, partly because of its promises to expand renewable energy in Australia. As of May 2009, no leaks or whistleblowers have revealed collusion with the big greenhouse gas emitters per se, though clearly emitters are having a strong say in the development of Government legislation. The new Government’s failure to implement its main election promises — by not making the necessary financial allocations to renewable energy in the May 2008 budget and its failure to set up the appropriate institutions in 2008 — are indications that the change of government has not necessarily brought a significant change of policy. Specifically, apart from the symbolic gesture of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the new Government has delayed implementation of all of its principal election promises to support renewable energy. A comparison of the November 2007 election promises with the 2008 budget papers, raises a number of concerns.
The first is over the "Renewable Energy Fund" that Labor promised before the election, to which it would allocate $500 million over seven years for the development and deployment of renewable energy. But in its first budget in May 2008, Labor allocated nothing to renewable energy (apart from geothermal drilling) from this fund. However, it did allocate funding to the coal industry from its so-called Clean Coal Fund — for $500 million.
Another concern is over Labor’s promised $150 million Energy Innovation Fund for renewable energy research. From this fund $50 million was to be allocated to solar thermal energy research and $50 million to solar photovoltaic electricity research. But in its first budget, the new Labor Government allocated zero research funding in 2008-09 to solar, wind and bioenergy. As of March 2009, it is still in the process of setting up the fund and the associated Solar Institute.
Then there is the "Renewable Energy Target". Before the November 2007 federal election, Labor promised to expand the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) to 20 per cent of electricity by 2020. This means increasing the existing contribution from renewable energy — about 8.5 per cent of electricity or 15 Terawatt-hours (TWh) per year, mostly hydro — to about 60 TWh per year. However, after attaining government, Labor unnecessarily delayed implementation by handing over the process to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG).
According to the Government’s White Paper, implementation will only take place on 1 January 2010, over two years since the Government was elected. Meanwhile, Rudd set up the Wilkins Inquiry to pronounce on whether such "complementary measures" as MRET were necessary once an emissions trading scheme is operational. Wilkins reported around July 2008, but the Government has stated that it will not make this report public.
Rudd has also cut subsidies for residential solar power. In the May 2008 budget, the Government introduced a means test of $100,000 gross household income to limit eligibility to receive the $8000 rebate for residential solar electricity. This was a weakening of an election promise. At the same time the Government proposed to replace the rebate with a feed-in tariff, handing the proposal over to COAG — a sure recipe for delay. After considerable public debate throughout 2008, the Government announced in early 2009 that on 1 July 2009 it would discontinue the rebate and not implement a feed-in tariff to replace it. Instead it would increase the number of "solar credits" (renewable energy certificates) allocated to residential solar PV electricity under the new Renewable Energy Target by a factor of five. In this way, the Government diminished support for residential renewable electricity, transferred the costs from itself to electricity consumers and in effect reduced the size of the Renewable Energy Target.
Perhaps one of Labor’s most significant broken promises came when it changed the way it would respond to the Garnaut Climate Change Review. Before the 2007 election, Labor announced that it would base its emissions trading scheme on Garnaut’s recommendations. However, in February 2008, when Garnaut published an interim report expressing the need for very strong action, the Minister for Climate Change backtracked, announcing that the Garnaut Review would be just one of several inputs to its policy.
The Government’s White Paper on climate change ignores or waters down several of the key recommendations of the final report of the Garnaut Review. As Garnaut points out, for an emissions trading scheme to be effective, it is essential to auction all permits and to use the revenue raised to assist low-income and other households to reduce their emissions and to fund new infrastructure. Garnaut also pointed out that paying "compensation" to the largest greenhouse gas polluters would undermine the scheme. Yet in its White Paper, the Government attempts to placate the vested interests in greenhouse pollution by offering the coal-fired electricity generators free emission permits valued at $3.9 billion in the first five years of operation of the scheme, and offers the emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries initially 25 per cent of all permits free of charge, increasing to a maximum of 45 per cent by 2020.
The first four of these broken promises were unconditional election commitments that should not have been delayed until the Garnaut Climate Change Review and the Government’s White Paper on climate change had been published. Given adequate political will, they could all have been implemented in the first six months after the Government took office.
The Government’s explanation for the delays is that they were needed for setting up administration. This is hard to believe. The MRET already existed under the Howard government, so the scheme could have been expanded immediately, with the constraint that projects could not benefit from both the federal and state schemes.
Furthermore, administration issues have clearly not delayed funding for so-called "clean coal". The most likely real explanation for the delays is pressure from the Greenhouse Mafia. While it is possible that all the 2007 promises will be implemented in some form in the near future, the long delay indicates that the Government is unwilling to treat climate change as an urgent issue and give strong support for renewable energy, despite its rhetoric. The need for a growing climate action movement is clear.
If you have any lingering doubt that the Rudd Government has been captured by the Greenhouse Mafia like the previous Howard government, inspect the membership of the High Level Consultative Committee for Australia’s 2009 Energy White Paper. The business representatives come from coal, oil, gas and uranium. There are no specific representatives for renewable energy or energy efficiency. Clearly, the result of the Energy White Paper process is predetermined.
In July last year, 34 per cent of Australians thought Labor was the "party better able to handle climate change". By October, an opinion poll found that number had fallen to 28 per cent, with the Coalition rising 5 points to 14 per cent.
But perhaps most significantly, almost 60 per cent of Australians could see no real difference between Labor and the Coalition on climate change.
This is an edited extract from Climate Action: A companion manual for greenhouse solutions (2009), by Mark Diesendorf, published by UNSW Press
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Thanks Mark
A useful summary of a very sad series of disappointments.
It’s often said we should treat the Climate Change challenge like a ‘war’. The analogy is simplistic, but it might be instructive to consider how well the Rudd Government is fairing on this issue, judged by the usual criteria of war-fighting.
Let’s say it ‘declared war’ on Climate Change on winning the election in late 2007…
Instead of using the last two years to do what governments at was usually do when fighting wars (which includes massive expenditure on investments - soldiers, weapons, ‘intelligence’ etc to achieve specific short-term targets), in this case it has decided to focus on long-term results through the use of ‘economic instruments’.
It all sounded very plausible back then. But here we are, now nearly at the end of the first decade of the new centruy, still without any ‘economic instruments’ in place, still bickering about the design of the ‘economic instruments’. Meanwhile lobbyists for the enemy have begun eroding the effectiveness of the instruments that are being designed by the government - and they’re flooding the mass media with propaganda undermining the public’s will to fight and seeding doubt about the need fight at all.
Personally, I’d have liked much more of this laid-back attitude when it came to Australia’s Iraq and Afghanistan policy. If we’d taken a similar approach to those wars, our troops still be ‘just about’ to leave Australia, we’d still be debating the size of troop carriers we’ll need to get them there (and the hapless Afghans and Iraqis wouldn’t have been blown to bits by Australian troops and weapons for years on end).
Why is it that we never fight the wars we actually need to fight with real drive? The fatuous War on Drugs is still with us while the ‘War on Poverty’ was quietly and quickly abandoned. The bogus War on Terror is still with us too - yet in the case of Climate Change, the folk who really pull the strings in Australia are making sure it’s like the War we have when we’re not really having a War at all.
Just a minor correction - the Government did release the Wilkins Report. it’s available at
http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/strategic-reviews/index.html
Syd,
the trouble with declaring ‘war’ on anything is that it creates a mindset and war is a backward, primitive and ineffective means of problem-solving anything. More to the point, you can’t have a war on an idea or a belief because ideas or beliefs do not and cannot constitute an adversary. You can’t kill an idea or a belief in the way that you can kill a person or even an entire people. Genocide was the only way that wars were ever won. Complete destruction gave power to the ‘winner.’ No idea or belief will ever be completely destroyed.
For as many who believe ‘climate warming’ is the result of human action there are as many who believe it is not. To fight wars people have to either care, that is believe, or they must be forced into it.
Teaching people to respect the world in which we live, without terrifying them into submission, is a better way to be.
As Ross Gittins said recently - Rudd over-promises and under-delivers. And this excellent analysis is further evidence of that. Perhaps we all hoped for too much, but no one expected that we would have a Prime Minister and a Minister so firmly in the clutches of the fossil fuel industry.
Krudd is a constant disappointment, shaming Australians to the rest of the world. The environment has become as important as finance, work, health, and education to Australia - but krudd is treating it as a football, to be kicked around the oval at his whim. He clearly has little talent for kicking goals.
Where are the ethics now? He has the work ethic, but not much else.
rossross,
I agree with you FWIW. War is bad and it usually makes a bad analogy too.
My main point was that the climate change issue - when the rhetoric is stripped back and we look at what’s really been done by the Rudd Government - is being treated with all the seriousness that Governments treated the entirely predictable (and predicted) demise of the Murray-Darling system 20 years ago. That is, not seriously at all.
His the Rudd Government been serious, it would have made ‘green infrastructure’ (rail, insulation retrofitting, installation of large wind, wave and solar farms etc etc) the centerpiece of a massive new national investment. In Rudd’s case, the timing was almost perfect - because suddenly the ‘credit crunch’ financial panic made it respectable again for governments to spend big. But the plans weren’t ready, the will wasn’t there… a major opportunity squandered, as far as I can see.
In the tiny part of Australia where I live in I get the impression more stimulus package money is being spent on public toilets than anything else.
I can’t believe that seemingly intelligent people from real universities are continuing to repeat these puerile conspiracy theories regarding energy. Don’t any of you have a calculator? Renewable energy in Australia essentially comes from damming rivers and burning forests. That’s why the world, including Australia is exporting wood to Europe to burn in coal plants in order to meet the EU’s stupid renewable energy quota http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124691728110402383.html
Yes wind and solar power is great when it works but it only produces a ting fraction of our energy. We all hope that someday there will be a breakthrough that will make it produce a more significant amount, but in the meantime the Rudd Government has to keep our fridges running and it has to attract the investments that will ensure that our kids and our grandkids get the energy they need as apposed to blackouts.
When is the media going to stop being taken for fools on energy and do some basic reasearch.
Come on guys lift your game http://tinyurl.com/c65rqn
All I can say is thank goodness he IS BREAKING HIS promises, hopefully this madness will end soon.
A few days ago the Sydney Moaning Herald published an opinion piece by 15 Australian scientists about global warming, it’s not a coincidence with the upcoming vote on ETS and given the political agenda of the SMH.
Ironically on the very same day the following letter addressed to Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel was penned by ~250 of Germany’s top scientists including 60 climate scientists many of whom are on the IPCC!
The salient quote of the July 26 letter urged Chancellor Merkel to “strongly reconsider” her position on global warming and requested a “convening of an impartial panel” that is “free of ideology” to counter the UN IPCC and review the latest climate science developments.
If you can read German you can see the full German text (with all 250 signatories) here:
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/news-anzeige/klimawandel-offener-brief-…
Below is an English translation:
Open Letter – Climate Change
Bundeskanzleramt
Frau Bundeskanzerlin Dr. Angela Merkel
Willy-Brandt-Strabe 1
10557 Berlin
#
Vizerprasident
Dipl. Ing. Michael Limburg
14476 Grob Glienicke
Richard-Wagner-Str. 5a
E-mail: limburg@grafik-system.de
Grob Glienicke 26.07.09
To the attention of the Honorable Madam Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany
When one studies history, one learns that the development of societies is often determined by a zeitgeist, which at times had detrimental or even horrific results for humanity. History tells us time and again that political leaders often have made poor decisions because they followed the advice of advisors who were incompetent or ideologues and failed to recognize it in time. Moreover evolution also shows that natural development took a wide variety of paths with most of them leading to dead ends. No era is immune from repeating the mistakes of the past.
Politicians often launch their careers using a topic that allows them to stand out. Earlier as Minister of the Environment you legitimately did this as well by assigning a high priority to climate change. But in doing so you committed an error that has since led to much damage, something that should have never happened, especially given the fact you are a physicist. You confirmed that climate change is caused by human activity and have made it a primary objective to implement expensive strategies to reduce the so-called greenhouse gas CO2. You have done so without first having a real discussion to check whether early temperature measurements and a host of other climate related facts even justify it.
A real comprehensive study, whose value would have been absolutely essential, would have shown, even before the IPCC was founded, that humans have had no measurable effect on global warming through CO2 emissions. Instead the temperature fluctuations have been within normal ranges and are due to natural cycles. Indeed the atmosphere has not warmed since 1998 – more than 10 years, and the global temperature has even dropped significantly since 2003.
Not one of the many extremely expensive climate models predicted this. According to the IPCC, it was supposed to have gotten steadily warmer, but just the opposite has occurred. More importantly, there’s a growing body of evidence showing anthropogenic CO2 plays no measurable role. Indeed CO2’s capability to absorb radiation is already exhausted by today’s atmospheric concentrations. If CO2 did indeed have an effect and all fossil fuels were burned, then additional warming over the long term would in fact remain limited to only a few tenths of a degree.
The IPCC had to have been aware of this fact, but completely ignored it during its studies of 160 years of temperature measurements and 150 years of determined CO2 levels. As a result the IPCC has lost its scientific credibility. The main points on this subject are included in the accompanying addendum.
In the meantime, the belief of climate change, and that it is manmade, has become a pseudo-religion. Its proponents, without thought, pillory independent and fact-based analysts and experts, many of whom are the best and brightest of the international scientific community. Fortunately in the internet it is possible to find numerous scientific works that show in detail there is no anthropogenic CO2 caused climate change. If it was not for the internet, climate realists would hardly be able to make their voices heard. Rarely do their critical views get published.
The German media has sadly taken a leading position in refusing to publicize views that are critical of anthropogenic global warming. For example, at the second International Climate Realist Conference on Climate in New York last March, approximately 800 leading scientists attended, some of whom are among the world’s best climatologists or specialists in related fields. While the US media and only the Wiener Zeitung (Vienna daily) covered the event, here in Germany the press, public television and radio shut it out. It is indeed unfortunate how our media have developed - under earlier dictatorships the media were told what was not worth reporting. But today they know it without getting instructions.
Do you not believe, Madam Chancellor, that science entails more than just confirming a hypothesis, but also involves testing to see if the opposite better explains reality? We strongly urge you to reconsider your position on this subject and to convene an impartial panel for the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one that is free of ideology, and where controversial arguments can be openly debated. We the undersigned would very much like to offer support in this regard.
Respectfully yours,
Prof. Dr.rer.nat. Friedrich-Karl Ewert EIKE
Diplom-Geologe
Universität. - GH - Paderborn, Abt. Höxter (ret.)
#
Dr. Holger Thuß
EIKE President
European Institute for Climate and Energy
I was curious about icedvolvo’s letter by German scientists so I did a bit of googling.
I found this [among a pile of denialist stuff]:
http://jules-klimaat.blogspot.com/2009/08/open-letter-to-chancellor-ange…
The author explains its connections to the Heartland Institute [the letter mentions a Heartland sponsored conference of “scientists”] and similar denialist groups and shows how the number of scientists, particularly relevant ones ie expert in climatology, may be as low as one namely Prof.Dr. Horst Malberg a prominent denialist.
The author concludes:
“I think it’s pretty safe to say the letter to German chancellor Angela Merkel is nothing but another attempt of a lobby astroturf group to try to create confusion.”
douglas jones As one of those proposing war on climate change you are saying one cannot make war on an idea. Maybe?
What I wanted to do is clarify what was meant.
In the circumstances of a downturn unemployment and tightening of money is probable and the idea was that Government funds should be directed toward green industries providing both jobs and money in the economy. The attribute war referred to the need for a command economy directed by the Government.
Banks already insolvent it is said because the economic model did not work or because it did not factor strongly enough the greed with devised elements which would conceal what was happening combined with perverse incentives, and rating agencies being not truly independent depending for payment on favourable reporting. Money created by the banks was now outside federal control. They would be let go. As would the many who made lots of money by deceitful conduct.
So for my part there are two aims reducing climate change and penalising the fraudulent operatives even if by dint of removing regulation many actions were legal.
hannahs dad is so typical of the ideologues driving the AGW isssue.
Like the infamous deltoid mentioned in the link they concentrate on vicious personal attacks, usually venomous and vile innuendo by name calling, not the least is the usual gutter term “denialists” applied to anyone who questions the lack of scientific rigor behind the predictions of the computer models used by the IPCC. It is especially galling as this is a letter authored by Germans addressed to the German Chancellor.
BUT IT IS GLARINGLY OBVIOUS to anyone with even half a brain that “hannahs dad” and others who use these tactics (including the link given) fail to address one iota of the legitimate science raised. I have shortlisted some of them for you:
- “temperature fluctuations have been within normal ranges….”
- “the atmosphere has not warmed since 1998 – more than 10 years, and the global temperature has even dropped significantly since 2003….”
- “Not one of the many extremely expensive climate models predicted this.”
- “CO2’s capability to absorb radiation is already exhausted by today’s atmospheric concentrations. ”
You can read the rest in the review on which the letter is based in by Profs Eichner, Koscielny-Bunde, Bunde, Havlin and Schellnhuber here:
http://www.uni-giessen.de/physik/theorie/theorie3/publications/PRE-2003-…
He’s one slick operator our Manchurian candidate!
What did he say recently about the about face of the ALP on uranium mine…”we discarded our 3 mines policy in 2007…how more transparent can we be than that…” early 08 Martin Funguson talks about our need for energy security and the risks involved in the Howard 06 LNG China deals…6 months later he is praising the filthy stinking LNG Industry and opening up new plants faster than he can release his own gas, and still OZ languishes in the back blocks with no national transport energy policy ( not that the ALP have ever had one it would be a novel idea ) and then he big notes his Petroleum and Chinese electricity mates at the launch of OZ’s big hot rocks project in SA, but forgets to tell the amassed media (or the media forget to ask) that the electricity is to power a dirty stinking 4 Mile Creek ISL Uranium Mine that Garrett approved saying it was…wait for it…worlds best practice ( ISL is ground poisoning and has nothing to do with WBP mining)…and barely boo in the media about the fact SA processes were never completed ( well why would they need to be with robot man as minister ) and local Adynamathana women had a few issues to air concerning corruption and duress in the process already raised in the SA parliament by Greens Mark Parnell…but no…of course this mine or the US giant General Atomics poses no…credible risk???
But yes, im very happy with the record of Rudd on energy so far…the worn out record of wasted energy at taxpayers expense and risk!!!!
Read more of the sordid tale of the ALP’s antics raping and pillaging the outback with their corporate mates at:
BEVERLEY 4 MILE CLOSURE DEMAND AS MINERS “JUMP THE GUN”
http://cooberpedyregionaltimes.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/beverley-4-mile-…
I am old enough not to have any hope in Australian politicians and therefore cannot share the posters diaappointment in “Krudd”
I now look to what or who would do least DAMAGE realising that some public expenditure has to take place so that the government can fool the electorate into believing that it is “taking action”
Thankfully, to date on this subject the action has been puerile.
This government, like the previous, only represents business and vested interests.That is why the public pick up and continue to pick up the tab for polluters.
If we want serious action and solutions we have to change this non democratic system.
Which is exactly why the only honest and smart ALP member ( Faulkner) of the house got shafted….I mean shifted to Defence…indefencible!