Kevin Rudd was wearing a green tie, and Brendan Nelson was emoting about a business supposedly destroyed by a budget decision on solar panels. Peter Garrett wants voluntary energy efficiency stickers on tv sets. Christine Milne throws her hands up in despair at all this, and quite understandably so.
The nightly news focused on the stunts from both sides of the aisle, and the politics, and maybe that’s the problem. Not dwelt on in coverage of World Environment Day in Australia are the comments from emissions trading architect Professor Ross Garnaut:
An observation of daily debate and media discussion in Australia could lead one to the view that this issue is too hard for rational policy-making in Australia… The issues are too complex, the vested interests surrounding it too numerous and intense, the relevant timeframes too long. Climate change policy remains a diabolical problem.
Garnaut is deeply pessimistic about whether we will be able to mitigate the harmful effects of climate change. Climate change proved very fertile political terrain for Kevin Rudd and Labor last year. Rudd’s argument that we had to go beyond the trivial and focus on difficult decisions and long term solutions caught the public mood. But has the ball been dropped? Garnaut’s remarks should - surely - be a wake up call.
Update: The text of Ross Garnaut’s speech is available on the Garnaut Review website [pdf].
Update: The text of Ross Garnaut’s speech is available on the Garnaut Review website [pdf].
I couldn’t believe my ears when I saw and heard Garrett on the 2 news and 7:30 report saying they had to bring in the means test on solar panels because it was too successful.
Yes, that’s right. Too many people were installing too many clean green renewable energy panels. So they brought in the 100k means test to snuff this out.
Garrett’s metamorphosis is complete. He is now just another politician. The best he can offer on World Environment day is a voluntary (read ineffective) energy labelling scheme for TVs. This is totally lame.
Rudd can’t stop subsidising the Australian car industry that continues to build petrol guzzling V6 and V8s and throws more money at them to build hybrids. Why not redirect existing subsidies to this?
How many more coal fired power stations will be built under the Rudd government, when we need to decommission 1 per year to meet emission reduction targets?
It didn’t take long for Labor’s “green spots” to fall off. Shysters.
Freiburg has shown what can be really done: [link]
Peterc, it is good to remember who introduced the solar panel subsidy and why.
I suggest that the gutse of the arrangement is still there, but made more fair. It might now just be up to solar panel providers to sell them to a different market where the need is greater for an economical and well used product.
Joe2, it is good to look at the German example where a non-means tested gross feed in tariff means they now have gigawatts of solar panels installed while Australia has about 40MW.
We need to forget about history and focus on the future.
The 100K household means test cuts out the vast majority of households who could afford to install panels. This is why they brought it in - as Garrett confirmed in parliament today. It has nothing to do about fairness or economics.
Talk to any solar panel installer if you want to find out about the real impact of Labor’s decision. It’s a disgrace.
Peterc, did those folks in Germany, that you mention, have an “up-front” non- means tested grant of the equivalent of $6000 aus?
Not sure about the equivalent grant, but they do have a non-means tested gross metered feed-in tariff with no 2kW cap on array size (like Labor in Victoria says they will bring in).
They also have legislated that dwelling must produce 10% of the power they consume - which drives efficiency and the installation of solar.
Labor in Australia has no policies like this. If they brought in the 10% energy production legislation for housing I would say we wouldn’t need the tariff. In the interim, I think the tariff is money well spent.
Labor has gone for claytons feed in tariffs (at State level) and removed effective incentives at Federal level.
Meanwhile, they throw serous money ($1b+) at the coal industry without qualification.
Peterc says:
“I couldn’t believe my ears when I saw and heard Garrett on the 2 news and 7:30 report saying they had to bring in the means test on solar panels because it was too successful.”
You may wish to think about this in a calmer manner, Peter. The non-means tested solar rebate was a form of middle class welfare. There is a wide range of much better ways of obtaining “more bang for the environmental buck” that doesn’t involve putting taxpayer dollars in the pockets of the well-to-do.
You are parotting Garrett and Labor’s line, and it is just not relevant. What about the welfare they direct to fossil fuel industries? $9b per year is a lot of our money. [link]
Bottom line: Labor is doing nothing of any consequence to get us fossil fuels. It looks like they will even squib out on emissions trading and give away quotas to the largest emitters such as - you guessed it - coal fired power stations.
Garrett said it all - “the solar rebate was too successful”. Can’t have that can we?
Peterc, as you well know, Labor did not invent that election bribe and it is reasonable for the new government to move the priorty base around.
I would personally prefer excellent solar power production, on top of houses, that contain folks who could actually use a financial break.
joe2, so therefore Labor will remove the existing subsidies/bribes for fossil fuel energy use too? They don’t show any signs of reducing this gross corporate welfare.
By the way, there are some subsidies available in Germany, albeit lower that $6,000.
[link]
“…supposedly destroyed by a budget decision on solar panels.”
No supposition about it, Mark.
What Peterc said.
Middle class welfare or not, this means testing has stopped the industry dead in its tracks, and many of the inner city businesses around the country are probably going under. Nationally, there were 400 people waiting to undertake the panel installers accreditation process. The budget announcements took care of that at least.
The rebate was effectively a hook for people planning to install 1kw systems who were then able to be sold larger systems.
Why are people surprised to learn that the ALP are not the Greens?
But on the topic of Garnaut’s pessism. Couldn’t agree more. If the science is right - we’re stuffed. It’s just not within our abilities to deal with it. Not when most of us still believe in The Fates.
I mean look at the way we are consumed with issues like Henson, Hillary etc.
I do as well, so not on a high horse here. But really, we kid ourselves most of the time. And it’s not a chew gum and walk problem. It’s that we can’t focus in a sustained way upon hugely complex, long-range problems. Our make-up is to get enough to eat today; and fight tomorrow’s battles tomorrow. Unfortunately.
Even I say this - deep down I know I’m thinking: hey, it’ll work out.
Thanks for the info, dk.au - I must say I’m disinclined to believe anything Nelson says in the absence of confirmation.
Mark, Nelson is just jumping on the bandwagon. Talk to anyone in the solar installation business. It is carnage; massive order cancellations. So the net effect is a dramatic increase in panel installation, which had a direct link to reducing emissions.
Labors reasons for this are class warfare (the ¨middle income¨ comments) and that they dont want to spend money on panels (its ¨too successful¨), but they do on coal.
Wbb, I share your pessimism. These idiots are taking us into dangerous climate change. The people of Kiribati are there already.
We need to take (in)action on climate change out of the politicians hands and setup a taskforce to deal with what is fast becoming and emergency of greater severity that a World war. Rather than class warfare, we need a revolution.
Its really, really disappointing to hear people at LP defend Labor’s progress on climate change since winning the election. Apart from the mainly symbolic gesture of ratifying Kyoto its all been unambiguously bad. Sure, subsidising rooftop PV might not have been the most efficient way of mitigating climate change, but ending the subsidy could have been handled so much better, by phasing it out over several years or by waiting until the ETS comes into operation. Just killing the PV installation industry overnight is poor policy and extremely poor politics.
As for the green car fund, words fail me. If Australia has competitive advantage in clean energy its in geothermal, solar thermal, and the like, not hybrid cars. I think Toyota and Honda might be a little ahead of us there! If the local car manufacturers had any sense they’d put some R&D money into CNG.
here here
I don’t think people have properly looked beyond the flashy names and sophistry of the Budget announcements. Although Labor didn’t break any promises in the sense of saying one thing and doing another, the devil was in the detail. The net effect of delaying subsidies and grants through the various innovation funds will be more money being pissed away by the coal industry on Potemkin-esque ‘demonstrations’ because they’ll be able to raise the money to be matched by the government in a flash.
It would be wrong to think that Labor is in any way serious about delivering the sort of structural reforms we need to tackle climate change. Sure the Greens had a different vision of what this would entail, but that’s what Labor promised to do.
I am as disappointed as the next person on the progress on climate change in the immediate term, but we also must remember that previous to November it was the only ‘term’ we had.
I do get a little irritated by the reference to this so called ’solar industry’ though.
This ‘industry’ is a collection of electricians who are buying a product from a multinational and sticking it on a roof.
The installations might be reasonably efficient if the roof is facing the right direction and pitched at the right angle, but if anyone can name 3 suburbs in Australia that have more than 50% of houses that fit that criteria I’ll eat my mouse mat.
This ‘industry’ has sprung up in less than 12 months on the projection of 3000 installations from the former government which was doubled by the present one. That electricians in the currently over-inflated building industry are finding the installation of pre-packaged PV units more profitable than regular work, when there never was a long term future in it, tells you more than a little bit about the profitability of this ‘industry’ that’s currently massively (up to 50%) subsidised.
This current system of subsidising installation alone, rather than incentivising efficiency is a stupid dog, and should definitely have been put down. There are already well developed incentive schemes (see Germany and California) upon which we can model our much needed scheme upon.
I just wish they’d hurry up and get on with it.
Coal industry - what have they done with their profits for the last century so that they need us to subsidise their potential future? Just bizarre.
Correction to my Jun 6th, 2008 at 7:31 am post:
So the net effect is a dramatic decrease in panel installation, which would have directly contributed to reducing emissions.
Carbonsink, I agree about hybrids - it is too little, too late and won’t be effective. The Productivity commission has pointed this out
[link], but apparently Rudd “knows better”!
GM Holden were trumpeting about exporting V8 utes to the US only weeks ago. Rudd/Labor should redirect all existing car industry subsidies towards cleaner low emission cars - both hybrid and electric.
The Government should also mandate these for there fleets - they have direct control over this. Unfortunately they choose to support the status quo.
Never confuse motion with action. Politics is failing us. Subsidised jobs wins out over climate change (e.g. logging & coal mining unions & a laggard motor industry)
The can put the solar panels on frames on top of the roof to orient them in the correct direction at the right angle. Some people do think its rather fugly, but people do it anyway - its also not unusual with solar hot water systems.
My main issue with essentially removing the rebate for people who would be considering installing solar PV is that it was done before the carbon trading or feed in tariffs had been established. It will be much harder to resurrect the industry in a few years time after sending the solar pv entrepreneurs bankrupt.
“The Government should also mandate these for there fleets - they have direct control over this.”
Peterc, from what i heard Rudd has plans for hybrid and electric government fleet car purchases. On the solar panel front it good to remember that up to, 10,000 dollar, low interest loans will be available to low income earners for energy saving schemes at the beginning of next year.
Chris
I’d agree with you if only the following was true:
But it’s not at all. The PV panel manufacturers can’t keep up with world demand - a few thousand less in Australia is meaningless.
As for these so called ‘entrepreneurs’ - they’re electricians at the moment. Nothing more, nothing less. They’re doing effectively the same as the plumber who installs your hot water system - buy it for you, plug it in, turn it on.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for a solar industry. What is happening now is not an industry. Electricians are definitely not going broke in the current environment.
There’s a very good chance current installations are in fact an environmental negative - why subsidise it? I agree it would have been better if it were seamlessly cancelled and replaced with an alternative, but that’s some serious policy work that obviously hasn’t been done yet and given that it’ll be permanent policy it’d better be done properly.
Bear in mind that the industry hasn’t been killed - the original subscription target is still expected to be reached easily by those on incomes <100k. Those crying now were gearing up for an industry that was never there.
Sure, maybe it should have been catered for in policy a long time ago, but it wasn’t. That’s hardly the current mob’s fault.
Which department was responsible for policy development and standards? that’s right, there wasn’t one, so one needs to be created, educated and briefed before a credible policy emerges.
An $8,000 subsidy with no questions asked might float some peoples boats, but it’s a waste of money in the big picture.
Lets hope they get the big picture right, or at least a credible alternative emerges before the next election.
onimod wtf are you talking about ‘not an industry’? There are specialist qualifications that go with being a PV installer. Those qualifications are now useless for hundreds of people for the forseeable future. They’re not all sparkies who can fall back onto other work.
Look, public money is supposed to go into renewable industries in the beginning. It’s what happened with coal, electricity generation and distribution infrastructure and countless other ‘public works’. The whole point is to define a broad, normative framework for the kinds of power generation we want to see and put the right sorts of policies place.
23 dk.au
Specialist qualifications???
Are you talking about the 3 day course required for BCSE?
It can be taken over 10 Saturday mornings if you want to drag it out….
Not all sparkies can fall back on other work - pull the other one mate!
Who is the sparkie signing off on the installation then?
I agree with the renewable push and I think the coal industry has made plenty enough money over the years to be pushed out of the nest to fend for itself. It’s the start-ups that require the R&D, not the established industry.
Wasn’t the problem that the subscription target was already reached and so they just wanted to kill it off without actually saying so? Would be interesting to see what what percentage of households who installed solar PV had incomes < $100,000 - given the cost of housing these days I’d guess its pretty small.
Wasn’t the Australian Greenhouse Office responsible for a lot of the previous policy and standardisation?
I’d like to see some justification for the claim that solar PV is an environmental negative (rather than just not the optimal approach) - you think its worse than burning brown coal?
The way that it has been handled is a reminder to small business out there about the risks of getting involved with new technologies - the govt may change its mind and won’t care how much it hurts the small companies. Better to leave it to the large companies which can afford the losses.
I’m not arguing that there aren’t better ways to spend the subsidy money, but that the transition should have been handled a whole lot better. There is enough skepticism about the viability of the renewable energy industry as it is, and this doesn’t help. Labor just saw an opportunity to save a few $$$s and indulge in a bit of class warfare at the same time without thinking about the other consequences.
“They’re not all sparkies who can fall back onto other work.”
There is a list of approved installers by the government and they are all electrical contractors, as far as i could see. Since the panels need to be, ‘grid hook up able’, one has no choice but to involve a sparkie.
Apart from the high cost of the actual gear the sparkies have a lot to answer for in bumping up the price of the overall package. They have pretty much a monopoly and have been swallowing up the grant bigtime IMHO.
Wbb #12
‘Enjoy life while you can’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
I thought we had dealt with the solar pv issue on the other thread.
I did hear the financial implications of no policy change and can’t recall the exact figures. But the subsidy was going to take a major slice of the allocated funds for renewable energy. So the Govt was faced with a significant distortion of their program in favour of a technology that has doubtful competitive and strategic worth, or pinch funds from elsewhere.
They weren’t voted in on a platform of taking an axe to Big Coal. That particular battle is further down the track, much as some of us would wish otherwise.
Germany is in an entirely different situation. They have committed to relatively deep interim targets, they chose to phase out nuclear some time ago and that position is difficult to turn around politically. They don’t have access to concentrated solar without getting it from North Africa or somewhere. Nor is geothermal a reasonable prospect. That leaves them with wind and solar photovoltaic, which they have to maximise.
I haven’t given up on Garrett yet. Penny Wong has the carriage of overall climate change strategy. Martin Ferguson is putting together a paper on energy security for the Government. Garrett is responsible for the nuts and bolts of climate change as well as for the environment portfolio generally.
The government does need a big wake-up call on the true nature of the task in climate change, but Garnaut’s report is the next item to watch. He has been making noises about the enormity of the task and the slim chance the human race has of getting through this one in reasonable shape.
Yet he too is not going to go one-out on this one if other nations don’t upgrade their approach. To do so would make himself irrelevant, unfortunately.
Friday’s AFR said that
It seems to me that the present government was faced with a serious distortion of their strategy.