In Guy Pearse’s book High & Dry he suggests that Howard’s climate change policies are a complete fraud. He suggests that the purpose of the policies is to appear to be doing something when the real effect will be to allow the polluters a free ride as long as possible, to maintain the Australian coal industry and to hold a place for nuclear. To this end he has lied, dissembled and mislead parliament. Renewables are not really a part of his agenda. Pearse tells us:
Meanwhile, according to the IEA, the renewable share of electricity in Australia has fallen from 18.5 per cent in 1970 to 8.3 per cent in 2001 – roughly where it remains today.
Of course most of this is hydro.
Pearse makes a very good case to support his views in a closely argued 400 plus pages. The question now is whether Howard has finally got it or whether we have here more of the same.
Personally I’m not well-placed to judge this issue, but from the reactions I’m inclined to say the leopard has not changed its spots, it’s business as usual.
The actual announcement targets 30,000 gigawatt hours each year to come from low emissions sources by 2020. We are told elsewhere that this amounts to about 15% of power by 2020.
While the MSM has simply accepted this figure Tim Hollo at GreensBlog has done the hard yards to find that ABARE’s official projection of energy demand projections in 2019-20 is 342,000 GWh. This makes Howard’s target 9% unless you jerk the figures around a bit.
Also notice that ‘clean’ energy includes clean coal, not renewables as such. But even so 15% is not an ambitious target. Peter Garrett has got it in one when he says:
“The Howard Government has not set a target here, they’ve stolen it from the states,” he said.
“The fact is that there’ll be no new clean energy coming out of this target, no additional encouragement of renewable energy.”
In part Howard’s initiative is a piece of national housekeeping, bringing uniformity and replacing the targets set by most of the states. This will no doubt be handy for energy providers, but it seems to water down the state targets and sits by itself, that is there are no emissions reduction targets.
Anyway the states were not impressed. Furthermore people in the know are pointing out that 20% of all new energy investment in the world is currently renewable energy, making Howard’s initiative look distinctly ordinary.
Peter Garrett assures us that Labor will do better, but they will give us the detail in their own good time.
Meanwhile Downer is off to the UN’s high level meeting in New York to spread the good word from APEC and the Oz has the good word from Harlan Watson about what Bush is up to.
A paper presented by the chief US climate change negotiator, Harlan Watson, to the Brookings Institution said the Bush administration would argue that nations should set their own medium-term goals for 2020 and 2030.
These goals would be legally binding domestically, but could not be internationally enforced. “One size won’t fit all. National-regional strategies are most realistic.”
Of course Howard’s timing with Gore in town is not coincidental.
Laura Tingle in the Australian Financial Review was inclined to think that Howard’s initiiative was a “reasonable counterpunch … to Kevin Rudd’s endorsement by climate change big gun Al Gore” but popinted out that
it means ignoring the advice of Howard’s own task group, which recommended such targets be abandoned altogether.
She suggests that Howard also used the notion that the target was really all about rationalisisg existing state targets
as the basis for a spectacular rhetorical backflip – arguing that this new target would cut costs to the economy and reduce the cost of electricity prices, when he has been arguing for years that such targets increase costs.
She points out that he has set this target before his own work group has set the price of carbon for a carbon trading scheme. Does this make him the economic wrecker he accused Labor of being?
Perhaps so. The Oz this morning:
And despite the Government saying its new strategy would cost $7.5 billion, senior Howard ministers had warned three years ago that a more modest doubling of mandatory renewable energy targets would cost the economy $23 billion, when they were arguing against an increase to the original scheme.
That was with a mere doubling. Yesterday the Oz pointed out that the clean energy initiative represented a trebling of the previous MRET target.
But the main thrust of today’s Oz article is a “blistering attack” by Tourism Minister Fran Bailey:
THE Howard Government’s policy shift on clean energy has been undermined, with a federal minister launching a blistering attack on wind farms despite the renewable energy industry declaring wind power is vital if the Coalition is to meet its 2020 climate change target.
Just one day after John Howard committed the Government to new clean energy targets, Tourism Minister Fran Bailey insisted wind power was largely unsuitable for Australia, saying there was no evidence it was a feasible alternative energy source.
Bailey says we should concentrate on solar. The Energy Supply Association says it will mostly about wind:
Energy supply association chief Brad Page said the industry’s recent assessment of clean coal had it available from about 2020, while other eligible low emission technologies were unlikely to be affordable or ready within the next decade. “We think this scheme would largely favour wind farms,” Mr Page said. “We wouldn’t envisage that there is going to be a huge rush on that target made by carbon capture and storage technology. It’s very unlikely.”
Industry sources say nearly 4000 new wind turbines will be needed to meet this new mandatory target by 2020. There are about 500 installed, mainly across the southern coastal regions of Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania.
And the gas industry say they have been ignored.
The two questions arising are, will Howard’s Clean Enegy Target lead to the necessary investment to achieve appropriate emissions targets, and is it a good political move?
On the latter, there should be plenty for Labor advertising to work on.
The ALP are well advised to go carefully on this one.
In Howard’s Dogwhistleland, genuine changes in the ways energy is produced and consumed are translated as:
Latte Lefties will force you to put your Pajero up on blocks!
“Latte Lefties will force you to put your Pajero up on blocks!”
As long as I have my BMW X5, while my neighbour can only afford an X3, I don’t care.
I’m not sure the Pajero dog whistle would work. Sales of new cars are booming, give people an excuse to replace their 3 year old Pajero with something smaller and fuel efficient (or just newer) and they won’t care either way. Those with a penchant for driving massive, guzzling V8′s (like me
) will just use them less. I can’t see anybody linking wind power with the price of petrol either – they aren’t that dumb.
The problem with the whole climate change is that while it is an enormous issue of great concern in the community, the debate is run by wonks who talk in a language which is not understood by the punters, and by politicians who use it to manipulate the genuine and deeply held concern of the community.
We know that Howard has been a captive of the coal industry but even he knows the game is up, so all he can give the coal interests is a relatively soft landing.
Labor needs to make sure that it isn’t wedged by the Libs on climate change becuase it is a wedge that they probably won’t see coming.
Howard also believes that Peter Garrett is a weak link in the Oppposition and he has been trying to draw him out to say things that he can then use, as Katz says, to try and freak out the punters.
As Mumble never tires of saying, Garrett in Environment was a bad move by Rudd. He would have been great in Education or Health, or Justice.
Katz’s caution is supported by a recent study on what consumers are prepared to pay for green power. The findings are too complex to capture in a one-liner, however.
I think Labor has caught on to the necessity of emphasising that business as asual is not cost free, as generally is assumed in arguments put by ABARE and the government. The smart thing economically is to act early, but whether this will be internalised by the voting public is another question.
The recent talk all over the media about the nation’s food bowl and wine industry moving from crisis to catastrophe and higher food prices as a result must have some effect on public attitudes.
Isn’t that the better way to specify what technology qualifies as clean? Eg specify how much CO2/kwh of power qualifies rather than saying 15% will come from solar or wind and then accidentally excluding a technology like geothermal because no one thought to list it or wasn’t seen as mature enough at the time of writing the document?
If clean coal is not viable as many people claim, then there is no problem with it being included as part of the target as none of it will be produced anyway (both sides of politics are going to be pouring money into clean coal research regardless).
Similarly, rather than saying that everyone has to use CFLs instead of incandescents, state an efficiency requirement – a minimum lumens/watt so if research into efficient incandescent bulbs succeeds you don’t need to rework the laws so they’re permitted again.
Well if they manage to get their CO2 emissions low enough then they’d qualify wouldn’t they?
I’m not sure what the gas industry were expecting. They claimed to have some technology (unspecified) that was being overlooked. I’m not an engineer, but in my simple thinking I thought gas would have a role in combination with concentrated solar to provide for fluctuations of demand and to fill in those times when the sun doesn’t shine. And the CO2 emissions can be recycled through algae or sequestered as easily as coal. Whether a solar/gas combo would come in below the “200 kilograms of greenhouse gases per megawatt hour of electricity generated” criterion I don’t know.
The main point you make, Chris (…), seems to me very fair and logical. I was going to draw attention to this item where it is argued that renewables targets are unnecessary and just muddy the waters. But I was already over 1000 words in the post and I thought it might come up in comments.
On geosequestration, the consensus seems to be that it will be a negligible factor before 2020. We can be cynical and say that Howard is signalling to the coal industry that they are still very much in the game. In fact there is nothing to make one believe that they are the game according to Howard. If Pearce and Hollo are right Howard’s policy moves the market share of renewables from 8.3% to 9% over 13 years, hardly a dynamic leap forward.
On the other hand people like Gore and Hansen are assuming that geosequestration will become available. Without it Gore would be less optimistic and Hansen even more pessimistic.
Despite the commentary slating this as a backflip, or adjustment to reality by the Howard Government I actually think it is neither.
They make a nod to their rhetoric about the “market deciding” by broadening the definition of what is “clean energy” to any energy source that meets the criteria.
It is an attempt to undermine State based targets such as SA which is 20 percent and Victoria’s VRET (10% by 2016) and buy time for big business to adjust to a “carbon constrained” future.
This is clearly a sop to the coal power generators and those industries who rely on ultra cheap electricity (think Alcoa and Aluminium), as well as giving candidates in marginal seats like McMillan an issue in which to say, “look, I’m protecting your jobs from the greenies and latte sippers in labor”.
This is not just Howard coming into line with the States, it is Howard undermining State targets in furtherance of his grand vision. remember Howard’s grand energy plan last year? The one in which he sees Australia becoming a Energy Superpower? Put this into that context and it starts to make sense.
Brian, I think the gas industry’s point is that they emit roughly half the carbon of coal – less if you compare to the brown coal in SA and Vic.
So if we replaced 30% of coal with gas, our carbon emissions would be lower than if we replaced 10% of coal with renewables.
Adapting gas for geosequestration is easier than coal.
Chris A, my original concept of the post was to carry through Pearse’s line that Howard’s real policy is to carry on polluting and to undermine attempts around the world to stop pollution until the magic of geosequestration and nuclear are available, while convincing the electorate that he is acting sensibly to meet their concerns about climate change. But I thought I’d back off a bit and make it more open. The original title of the post was “Business as usual: Howard’s clean energy plan”.
Robert, thanks for that. I thought the gas people were implying more, but it wasn’t at all clear, so you’re no doubt right.
There was an interesting article in the Fin Review last year which said that roof-top solar hot water systems that replaces coal fired power are actually GHG negative if the hot water system being replaced is a system that heats overnight from off-peak power. The contention was that coal-fired power stations don’t slow down overnight, they just blow the steam into a condenser instead of through a turbine. My impression is that gas is more flexible and can be fired up or turned down more easily in relation to demand. Any comment?
Thanks for the link, Brian.
I think one of the most interesting points to come out of the debate on this target so far is that Turnbull himself, as well as Koperberg in NSW and a few others, have publicly come out and said that geosequestration will play essentially no role on this timeframe. That’s a really important admission from them, because it tacitly acknowledges that renewables are more market-ready than geoseq.
It throws the ball back into our court (if anyone will listen), making it clear that short term emissions targets will have to be achieved with renewables and efficiency, as well as shifts in transport and agriculture.
By the way, Turnbull has told others (not bothered to reply to my request for info) that the 30,000 GWh is on top of the pre-MRET 16,000. So it adds up to 13% on ABARE’s figures. Still a pitiful target on a global scale, and far behind what the Greens reckon is possible and are calling for – 25% by 2020.
I’d be very doubtful about that claim, Brian. The utilities don’t burn coal just for the fun of it.
As I understand it, gas is much easier to throttle than coal, both from a technical perspective and from a financial perspective (because the fuel is expensive but the plant is cheap).
That’s because all climate change policies are complete fraud. All political parties want to appeal to climate change fear-mongering in the electorate. But they also know that the electorate’s shallow interest will stop suddenly at their wallet. So you get lip service like Rudd claiming to cut CO2 60% by 2050, with no attempt to say how, or more importantly, how much.
If you can’t sell “green” power to more than a handful of consumers today, why would any politician dream that they could sell it to an entire country tomorrow? Their solution is superficial, feel-good gestures that won’t have to be paid for during their term.
Of course I think the entire climate change industry is a complete fraud, so I would say that.
Tim, yes, I can’t quite make Turnbull out. When Howard passes from the scene it will be interesting to see where the Libs go policy-wise irrespective of whether they are in power. Pearce as a former insider thinks the greenhouse mafia have got them stitched up. He thinks ABARE should also be put down or at least replaced as a government source of climate policy, being to close to industry. He thinks it won’t be all that easy to break away.
Turnbull himself has repeated the notion mentioned many times before that we need to aim at an emissions-free electricity sector. This time he put a timeline – this century. Which means he still doesn’t get it or he can’t depart from the boss’s script too far.
Anyone who hasn’t seen GreenBlog should go have a look. You find strange people like christinemilne and bobbrown blogging there.
Robert, I’ve just rescued the dead tree copy of the article from the bin. It was by Duncan Seddon who is identified as “an indepedent consultant in the energy sector.”
So he says that banning this off-peak power in favour of solar would not save GHG in energy production, but would in fact cost some GHG in the production and installation of the solar equipment.
Interesting, if he’s right.
Hehe. I’d agree with Pearce that ABARE should be put down, Brian.
Re the claim that solar hot water replacing off-peak electric would increase emissions – well, it exposes the fallacy at the heart of the “baseload” argument. Coal is a great source of electricity if you ignore the greenhouse emissions and the fact that it is old, inefficient technology that can’t be throttled fast to match peaks and troughs in demand.
In our current electricity market, the line is probably half correct. You’d only get minimal reductions in emissions, because the coal power stations can’t be turned down low enough to match the dip in demand, so they’ll just keep running on spinning reserve in case they are needed shortly thereafter. It’s the same argument run by nasties against Earth Hour. And the same argument run against wind power.
But the solution isn’t to do nothing. It’s to start replacing the old coal technology now with zero emissions and/or quick response energy sources like solar thermal (not quick response, but strong stead supply that can replace coal during the day), bioenergy, hydro and gas. And soon look for geothermal and wave.
To get to Malcolm’s holy grail of zero emissions electricity, we need to replace the whole lot, pretty much, in Australia. That gives us the opportunity to restructure how we do it. I’d love to see geothermal, wave and wind carrying a large chunk of supply day and night, with solar thermal supplying a lot during the day and some through the night via storage, and bioenergy offering large potential quick-throttle generation at night.
Go and have a look, Craig. IMHO you are going to find it harder and harder to ignore. And it’s going to cost, Craig, in restructuring rural industry (or putting it to reat) in food prices, in water. Our electricity bill came today. It’s scary.
In the last week or so I’ve heard:
• Keelty warning of security issues because of climate refugees coming from China and other places
• The Indians are seeking to prevent the movement of people across the border from Bagladesh, who are moving because the rising sea is salting up their land
• Concern about rice-growing world-wide, but specifically in the Mekong Delta where a large part of their production comes from land a metre or less above sea level and most of the rest is no more than 5 metres
• Concern about movement of populations from Africa to Southern Europe and thence to Northern Europe.
But I’m just a worry wart and an alarmist, so carry on, as you were.
Gee, when do you think some of that water will reach Elwood? It’s amazing how it seems to be pile up in certain places.
It is well established that sea level has risen about 8 or 10 inches in the past century. In itself that can’t be responsible for many problems, even in Bangladesh or the Mekong Delta. If people really are crossing the Indian border from Bangladesh, its presumably for economic reasons – that, (or war) is why migration usually happens.
People are also migrating from Africa to Europe for economic reasons, because they are able to do so, and because there are plenty of African people in Europe these days.
Somehow I cant see the PRC letting millions of people flee “climate change” on junks any time soon. They are a rather authoritarian lot, and conscious of national image.
People like Brian will attribute literally anything to their Bogeyman of choice. Today the Left’s Bogeyman is Global Warning, most have given up on blaming Capitalism.
Bill, I’m not personally attributing anything, simply reporting what I hear.
And Craig too, as I understand it when ocean currents change the water does pile up in different places. As I read the IPCC report, just about every major circulation system in the atmosphere and in the ocean has changed in a way that is consistent with climate change/global warming. But specific events and phenomena are notoriously difficult to attribute with absolute certainty to global warming. You’ll notice how the scientist hedges in the link I gave when he was asked whether the changes they observed were specifically attributable to global warming. But at the same time he’s saying that things have changed enough that you can’t rely on past averages to predict the future.
All that is good because the scientists are maintaining appropriate scientific scepticism.
While individual data series are to short generally to prove anything conclusively, if you look broadly there distinct and disturbing patterns emerging. At that point you get into risk management or put your head in the sand and hope it all goes away.
Meanwhile if you look at what is happening to real people in Bangladesh there would seem to be three explanations, the water is rising, the land is sinking, both. One way or another people can’t live the way they used to and many leave.
But if you move out to the general level you’ll find that the rate of sea level rise is inexorably increasing. Then there is the paleo evidence and the reality that the process has in the past been nonlinear.
But frankly I don’t want to go further in this direction on this thread. If we want to go down that track let’s set it up properly by laying out the evidence.
FYI: Its Guy Pearse (with an ‘s’), Guy Pearce is the actor from Priscilla, LA Confidential, Memento etc.
I really don’t know why you engage the flat-earthers like Craig. It just wastes time and energy, and they won’t change their minds.
FWIW, I reckon we should do away with MRETs, clean energy targets, subsidies for solar, low interest loans etc etc etc and just tax carbon.
Oh no CS, you’ve got me all wrong. I’m a flat water-er.
As far as the generator throttling, it’d be interesting to see if there’s any actual numbers available on this.
carbonsink, thanks for the spelling correction. I’ve corrected the post and the comment.
As for engaging people I was brought up to be polite to people and to take them seriously. Nevertheless I can get rid of someone on the phone trying to sell me a Gold Coast holiday in about 5 seconds. Politely too, my wife won’t let me be rude. There is merit in what you say.
There have been a few people advocating a carbon tax recently. The most curious I recall was Ross McKitrick on Counterpoint the other day, who wants a carbon tax determined by the temperature in the troposphere ten miles up over the tropics.
Robert, yes some numbers would be helpful. Monbiot usually goes into things fairly thoroughly and he tells of the firing up problem, for example a few minutes after the finish of the FA Cup final when everyone puts the kettle on. He says it happens and he reckons that already some electricity utilities have contracts with institutions who have reserve generators in case of power failure who undertake to start up their plant and supply energy to the grid within x minutes of receiving a signal.
Of even more interest, he reckons that no-one has seriously designed a system that depends on more than 20% renewables. From memory he took a guestimate that the max would be about 50%.
The CSIRO has begun firming up climate change predictions for the NSW Northern Rivers recently.
As I live in a street that is likely to be one of the earliest affected by seawater inundation and, this is likely to occur between the time I reach late middle age to old age, I am more than a little teed off at John Howard continuing to offer little more than words when it comes to green energy targets etc.
The man must think we are all fools.
Perhaps his pre-election pork barrelling should include a snokel and water wings subsidy for coastal residents. At least that would be a more honest manifestation of his attitude to climate change.
Clive Hamilton had an interesting piece in Crikey yesterday about Downer’s speech to the UN meeting in New York.
Hamilton says that Downer’s speech over there is very different to what he says here for domestic consumption. He is smart enough to know we have zero credibility on this issue internationally and realises that after the failure of the APEC strategy, Kyoto is the only game in town.
The really interesting bit is that Hamilton thinks that Howard may do a backflip and ratify Kyoto before the election, blindsiding Labor.
Brian, while I agree with a lot of what Monbiot says, he’s totally wrong on renewables not being able to go beyond 50%. There’s nothing special about using fossil fuels, it’s simply a prejudice based on the status quo.
The obvious example that trashes the theory is large hydro. Until recently, large hydro powered all of Tasmania, for example. Now it is supllemented by wind power, and by brown coal via Bass Link when there’s not enough rain. Austria is powered some 80% by renewables, mostly being large hydro.
All you need for reliable energy supply is something to strongly and reliably turn a turbine (except for PV). Whether that’s water boiled by burning coal, gas or biomass, or whether it’s water pushed by gravity or tides or waves, or whether it’s water boiled by the sun’s concentrated heat or by nuclear reactions is all simply a matter of relative efficiencies.
tim, I should have explained that Monbiot was talking in the context in his book Heat where he tries to get emissions down by 90% in Britain by 2030. He’s handicapped by ruling out nuclear. He doesn’t talk at all about concentrated solar presumably because the sun doesn’t shine enough. Hydro’s potential seems to be no more than single figure percentages. Solar photovoltaic is not much use to him because the available radiation is significantly below Germany’s.
He does look heavily to wind, including well offshore out of sight where the wind is stronger, and suggests extensive pumping water uphill for energy storage. The relevant chapter is worth a post on its own because he rounds up all sorts of energy sources, eg. growing wood on poor land, low intensity geothermal for home heating and chicken shit.
Nor does he consider access to concentrated solar from Africa via the TREC network concept.
If in Australia we are going to virtually pick coal as a winner because of our extensive resources it would seem logical to give similar attention to concentrated solar and geothermal, both of which are abundant and seem to have the potential to come on stream in a significant way within Howard’s chosen time frame.