Tony Abbott’s speech on the environment contains some nice but anodyne sentiments, the odd pointed barb at some of the apparent systemic weaknesses of the Rudd government, one big idea – transferring powers to manage the Murray-Darling to the federal government, by referendum if necessary – and that mouldy oldie of green gimmicks, the “give the kids a shovel” Green Corps.
But, when you boil it down, there’s only one thing you need to know from this speech. Tony Abbott thinks that other environmental issues, like the Murray-Darling, are more important than climate change.
If climate change is not mitigated, by the end of this century there won’t be a Murray-Darling Basin – certainly not one that supports any significant irrigated agriculture. The radical shifts in climate zones will mean that just about every native species in Australia will have to either find a new home or become extinct; try picking the “invasive species” in that context. There won’t be a Barrier Reef to protect. As for Queensland’s wild rivers that Tony is so keen to see development around, who knows what radically altered form they will take?
Climate change is the most important environmental challenge of the time. Almost no other environmental issue, even the local ones Abbott blathers on about in his speech, has a long-term solution, until and unless climate change is mitigated. And, as Malcolm Turnbull pointed out, until the Liberals get that, they have no environmental credibility whatsoever.
Update [by MB] Possum examines what the polls can tell us about “Abbott’s Green Army”.
Well it didn’t take long for Tony’s new found “green” veneer to be shattered.
His recent proclamation to overturn Queensland’s Wild River protection laws are not, as he previously stated, about creating new opportunities for indigenous Australians in those areas, but in fact all about opening up those areas for mining…
FEDERAL Opposition leader Tony Abbott has backed mining in Cape York wilderness as he attempts to override Queensland’s Wild Rivers laws.
Mr Abbott told The Courier-Mail yesterday he backed mining in the area despite the fact it would jeopardise any push for World Heritage listing and called the Rudd Government “cowardly” for not stepping in earlier.
The move by Mr Abbott, a powerful advocate of federal intervention, is seen as his first attempt to steamroll over state rights, as flagged in his book Battlelines.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26582434-952,00.html
Can the “clean slate” really be trusted on anything at all?
Just a Minchin Muppet if you ask me…
Have I got their new policy position right: Turn back the Rivers and mine the whales?
One can only hope the ordinary voter who is not that engaged with politics can see through this latest Abbott stunt. It worries me they might not.
Its too stupid to unpack in detail, I reckon, but just one minor point, given the Mad Monk’s suspicious and unfeeling record on welfare:
Green Army = Work for the dole and/or a replacement for Newsrart nation wide.
Or am I just being paranoid?
Update [by MB] Possum examines what the polls can tell us about “Abbott’s Green Army”.
You can never be too paranoid Paul.
Mistah Rabbit, as he’s been referred to by a few letter writers in the Age, has to pull some sort of policies out of his arse. This one looks particularly tired and irrelevant. Especially when unemployment doesn’t seem to be a bad a problem as previously predicted. He’s in a corner. He can’t devise his own ‘great big tax’ to fix climate change and he has to show some sort of environmental credentials. But this ain’t gunna work.
Yep, it’s Greenwashing, pollie style.
So…we are going to fight climate change by painting rocks white?
No, we’ll be pinting them yellowcake yellow.
Did I understand Abbott correctly on the ABC 7:30 Report last night?
Abbott seemed to suggest that the Greens should be directing their preferences to his party (not ALP). Because he has always been a Gre.. um, er,… environmentalist.
The interviewer seemed as astonished as I was. Can’t wait to see what the cartoonists make of all this.
Stephen Robertson’s reply to the wild rivers policy throws some inconvenient facts into the Abbot wild rivers notion.
On a different tack I have long been a supporter of some form of direct action so I was encouraged to hear Tony say on the 7.30 report last night that “you don’t have to put a price on carbon” as part of his spiel on direct action. Also look forward to the details of Greg Hunt’s direct action plan. Looks like I am going to be faced with the choice of voting for a party with a good climate action policy and questionable commitment (plus a few other wee problems) and a party with more credibility while insisting that their lousy CPRS policy is the only way to go.
I keep hoping that Labor will use the expected rejection of the CPRS as an excuse to put the CPRS to one side forever and get some serious direct action in place before the next election. Unfortunately, most unlikely to happen while Wong is Minister – She is showing no signs of being able to accept that she has done a very good job of demonstrating that CPRS is a dog of a scheme and it is time to let go and move to plan B.
John, even if you want an alternative to the CPRS, what’s driving the Coalition is that much of their backbench doesn’t believe that there is a problem with greenhouse emissions, and consequently they dosn’t want to do anything – cap and trade, a carbon tax, subsidizing alternatives, you name it – about it.
Yes, but, Paul, noone cares about the bludgers so that won’t count against him!
The coal-lition doesn’t want business to pay for it’s negative externalities, NO!
Sometimes Tony Abbott is so ingenuous when at his most disingenuous one feels quite fond of him. His response when asked why this new green emphasis was immediate and very clear:
“Because it is a vote changer and I think that I can put together a more attractive environmental package than Mr Rudd.”
So, if the environment were not a vote changer would he have spent the last few weeks putting together his, please-everyone-and-particularly-the- Greens, attractive new policy?
I think the word you were after was ingenious, PatWA.
PatWA, noone missed that it was a vote-changer! Very Very queer that he would put things like that: perhaps he is acknowledging that the Fibs are certainly odds on to lose and that he should still remain leader material as this election was never winnable?!!?
I almost fear for the Libs with language like this…! (lol)
Tony Abbott’s “Green Army” might have been a great idea by him…had it actually been his idea. Sound familiar? Well that might be because Premier Anna Bligh announced it almost a year ago during the Queensland election campaign. Abbott might do well to use his own brain.
http://www.greenarmy.qld.gov.au
In 1995, Ian Macfarlane was Shadow Environment Minister and focused on “brown issues” as a way of outflanking Labor and the Greens. I believe the Murray-Darling was mentioned. If you’d had Alan Ramsey or one of the old hands reporting here (or if Paul Kelly and Michelle Grattan were earning their “contributing editor” loading), they would be calling bullshit on this whole policy.
Suffice to say that in the whole period 1996-2007, the only member of the Howard government who did a damn thing about it was an ex-merchant banker from Sydney’s eastern suburbs. What’s worse is that Turnbull still has a stronger record of achievement on the issue than the Rudd government.
Lovely play on words there, KeIthy, if one had time for another go at the Loop comp!
Something about Tony being a genius at pretending to be ingenuous ‘cos he really is ingenious in ways to seem so generous when we know he’s disingenuous and generating lies!
And Bob Brown may be Green but he’s not cabbage looking!
Sorry, FDB, it was your ingenious intervention which sent me rocketing away there!
Lying of course suggests “congenital” which is very uncongenial. And what about genetic engineering?
I must stop this. My dog is looking very p..d off! Time for a walk.
@18 -
That’s right, Brent! Did she actually do anything about it post-election?
http://theland.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/political/rudd-advised-to-reconsider-ets/1724959.aspx?src=enews
.
I appreciate that many readers have a jaundiced view of artciles in what they perceive to be the conservative press but this piece caught the eye.
Abbott is playing politics not arguing the science or the worth of ETS schemes and misrepresenting his policies as being other than a political play may miss the appeal to the voters.Hat tip to Paul Burns on this one.
What chance is there that Wong and Rudd will be able to walk over the ‘We must have an ETS’ paint they have used to corner themselves with?
Such an about-face could be presented as being realistic and pragmatic in the face of the almost complete failure of international negotiations.
We can only hope, murph. There’s endless political cover for junking the ETS and for Labor to come up with something that actually works. But I fear that’s not KRudd’s style.
RM@11: You say:
I tend to agree, hence my comment about Abbot’s credibility. He has been all over the place on climate change which makes you wonder what he would actually do if he ever got into power. I have this touching hope that Labor might actually pull its head out of the CPRS hole and have an open minded look at the alternatives. If nothing else, the political gains of arguing that CPRS is the only real option is gettin weaker and weaker and may look sick if Greg Hunt comes up with something that people can actually understand.
John D et al
Do we have an alternative for the ets which treats climate change for what it is, a global problem needing a global approach?
If we come up with a stand alone idea, however brilliant, that doesn’t mesh with what the rest of the world is doing, I’m not sure that it will have much practical value.
I thought the advantage of an ETS was that it let us work directly with other countries, and (to some extent) prevented the ‘shifting the problem overseas’ churn so many environmental policies create.
We could have a decent ETS, mehitabel, that actually achieves something, and isn’t just a huge giveaway to industry and shuffling paper back and forth between us, Indonesia and China.
Mark, sorry about my facetious response to Tony Abbott’s green conversion but like others I can’t seem to take him seriously.
Isn’t it possible though that with Abbott’s shift your hopes for an ETS which actually achieves something can be realised? Not with the Greens joining the Coalition on preferences whom surely they can never trust, but still more strongly with the ALP if the right does gain ground on the environment.
If votes do move with this appeal to the hip pocket and the populist idea of the Green Army surely the ALP and the Greens will have to cooperate to reach more realistic targets which do achieve change. Bob Brown has very clear goals but he is a very experienced politician and pragmatic negotiator, and if needs must Rudd too will surely give ground.
Though the more informed punter will remember Abbott’s vacillating on climate others have short memories. As Andrew E points out some of the old guard of the press gallery are no longer there to call the Coalition on the b.s. of their shifty climate policy of over a decade ago. Annabelle Crabbe and Co. simply see politics as a spectator sport with points allocated for smarts rather than integrity.
Abbott appeals to their love of a bit of biffo which makes a good story. He is a very convincing media performer if you take him at face value. He is also very ambitious and entirely without scruple. Lean Cassius personified! As the climate issue moves from critical to calamitous the mob mentality could find the idea of a strong populist party very “attractive”. No accident that word! Coalition campaign strategy after brainstorming informed by their own polling?
Aren’t conviction politicans already working out how to combine to defeat them?
Patricia, the question is whether the ALP prefers no ETS at all (and, despite John’s views, if we do something about climate change it will have an ETS at its core), to the ETS that the Greens would find minimally acceptable.
Looks like writing on the wall to me, that the illiberal party might finally be reading, 30 years after the fact.
A green army of sorts has been active in Australia for over 30 years, and for the most part Abbott and co have been actively antagonistic and abusive towards it. IMO this ‘green army’ has been mostly self-motivated, self-funded and full of thinking informed and often courageous active citizens. Unfortunately for the illiberals, and fortunately for the people and environment here, some of them already formed their own party that hopefully renders the illiberal party irrelevent.
Abbotts bleating suggests to me that they’re stuffed, at least in regard to this real and present problem concerning the destruction and dismemberment of the natural ecological systems upon which we all depend.
Actually I kind of find a sense of shadenfreude at Abbotts words.
If the illiberals feel the need to put the environment at the centre of political debate, and try to up the ante and take the moral high ground on the basis of saving our ecological systems, then we’ve come a long way in 30 years, at least in regard to this aspect of life.
Once were feral warriors and anti-social ratbags, now recognised as contributing to saving of our national ecological heritage?
Though it is worth noting that when a book of interviews (with all sides) marking 25 years since Terania was published, some of the ‘losers’, ex-forestry folks, could still not bring themselves to actually appear at the launch with the ‘protestors’ and demanded their own launch event. No ferals allowed…
Incapable of reconciling the facts 25 years later?
Despite the enormous ecological and eco-tourism benefits that flowed to local communties from those events over 30 years ago now.
One of my mates, who I certainly wouldn’t describe as either radical or socialist, told me yesterday that Tony Abbott remimds him of a wet sewer rat.
Just sayin’.
I went to a Newcastle Beach yesterday. I counted 27 coal ships.
Gee CS, that’s fewer than usual. I can normally spot between 30-40. Record was 45 but I think that was during a coal-loaders’ dispute.
Mark24,
I’m encouraged that one of the clearest political thinkers is voicing support for flexibility in our GWA approach.
BilB:
Mark @27: You say:
Sure, you could get rid of some of the compensation, special exclusions etc without having much effect the economy. However, if what you are proposing is an ETS with a rigid cap, no compensation, no free permits etc. there will be economic damage and there will be blackouts and other crisis because potential investors have underestimated future demand for clean electricity or the price of permits is too uncertain.
The real tragedy is that many of the ETS driven price increases will be unproductive because, for various reasons, they won’t drive reductions in emissions. The cap driven shortages are necessary as well. For example, you can avoid blackouts by directly driving investment in clean electricity at the required rate while still allowing dirty power to be used to deal with unexpected demand. For more about what is wrong with the ETS see here
Given that we could halve Australia’s emissions by cleaning up electricity and reducing the fuel consumption of cars there is simply no justification for saying that direct action cannot be used to drive our emission reduction program for at least the next 10 to 20 years. Much the same could be said for the world as a whole. In other discussions on this topic I have asked for one example where the use of carbon credits would produce a better result than appropriate direct action I am still waiting for an example.
To some extent, Copenhagen was a failure because it concentrated on the big vision issue of legally enforceable targets instead of looking for common ground. There was the potential to commit to a range of actions that would not wreck economies or increase hardship such as driving down the average fuel consumption of new cars. There was also the potential to commit to other, specific actions that are a bit harder. We may, for example, have been able to get most countries to agree to a freeze on new coal fired power stations other than those that will be fed on carbonaceous waste. My take is that it would be easier to get agreement on specific actions that are easy to verify rather than generalized, legally enforceable action requiring army of bureaucrats.
Now pause for a moment. What would have happened if the objective of Copenhagen had been to set up a world wide version of ETS? I rest my case.
Mercurius @ 33: It was a bit hazy, there were probably more further out that I couldn’t see.
I dare say more carbon leaves Australia on a ship than is burnt domestically.
Why not simply legislate for a ramping down of tonnes CO2 emitted/kWh generated, and simultaneously allow a ramping up of energy prices (electricity and gas)?
By the way, we now have about 84 MW of solar PV capacity, most of it installed in the last 2 years.
That comes from about 1% of Aussie households with grid-connect solar.
What percent of households would we need to connect, to replace the generation capacity of a high-emission coal-fired power station? 4% or 5%? How hard is that???
And before someone jumps up and down with the comment about solar only providing peak daylight power, we do have the ability to use gas turbines on the large scale and BlueGen units on the household scale, to provide variable 24/7 capacity.
Jumping up and down: Yes, we’d need to build the same capacity in gas turbines as we’ve built in solar PV. i.e. build the grid twice, with technologies that are vastly more expensive than coal.
I’d love to believe otherwise but I can’t delude myself.
carbonsink
but all the alternatives are vastly more expensive than coal, which has always been the problem, so if we’re going to knock back solutions on that basis, aren’t we in the basket anyway?
And – although all drops in the bucket are welcome – is household usage the problem?
(mutters to self, ‘Good one…now I’ll have to go away and google it…”)
Elise: Features of a good system for driving investment in clean electricity include:
1. Drives the installation of clean electricity capacity at a predictable rate.
2. Provides confidence for both potential investors and the operators of fossil fuel fired power.
3. Gives priority to the use of clean electricity.
4. Average price of electricity only ramps up slowly in line with increases in average costs.
5. Avoids power shortages due to artificial restrictions on the use of dirty electricity capacity.
ETS fails all of these criteria. The use of competitive tendering to set up a series of contracts for the supply of clean electricity combined with regulations to ensure priority for the use of clean electricity satisfies all of them. What would you need to do to your proposal to satisfy them all?
Carbonsink: Demand for power is much higher during the day compared with the night. For this reason the WA Smartpower system pays my PV solar friends about 3 times as much for daytime power compared with someone putting power into the grid at night. There is considerable scope for increasing solar power before the point is reached where something would have to be done about the daytime only problem.
Oh, and before I trundle off to google, can anyone provide me with an answer to my previous question – is there an alternative to the ETS which would work globally? – other than just ‘the ALP’s ETS is crap’, which I tend to take as read anyway.
Not demanding, just asking.
Short answer, Mehitabel, no. And the ETS…is…crap. It will not work globally either, simply because there is far too great a disparity between the least and the most. A globally linked ETS effectively puts a globally uniform price on carbon. This will not work for countries where people live on one dollar a day. And there are far more countries (and people) in that band than there are countries in the $200 per day band. The notion that poorer countries have the most to gain from carbon trading is the standard lie put forward by those who really do have the most to gain, the traders, the elite land owners, corrupt government officials, etc. A globally uniform price for carbon is just another form of enslavement for world’s lower incomed.
Carbonsink40,
“Yes, we’d need to build the same capacity in gas turbines as we’ve built in solar PV. i.e. build the grid twice, with technologies that are vastly more expensive than coal”
Not so. There are a number of other alternatives. The most stable of which is CSP Hybride with Heat Storage. This is the most fexible power generation system with the least redundency of all systems other than geothermal and hydro. The heat storage capability of CSP makes it the most the optimal load levelling system for Wind, PV, and Demand. The Hybride gas burner gives full delivery back up without the duplication of turbines and other infrastructure.
Oh goody, so there’s no solution, BilB? I’ll just get my bunker ready now then.
That is not what I said, Mehitabel. There is no solution based on globally integrated carbon pricing,…is what I said. There are very good solutions which are incredibly simple and nowhere near as expensive as we have been led to believe.
I will spell one promising mechanism out in short form, yet again.
Australia consumes 220 billion kilowatt hours annually at present.
Now get your calculator out and multiply 220 billion by 3 cents (per kilowatt hour). You should be looking at a figure of 6.6 billion dollars. That is the cost for the elimination to 50% of Australia’s CO2 by 2040 (30 years).
How does that work? Well if there is a levy of 3 cents per unit (kilowatt hour) applied to the retail price of electricity nationally then this provides a fund of 200 billion dollars available for the progressive replacement of all of Australia’s fossil fuel based electricity generation infrastructure.
What? That is too expensive? 3 cents per unit is the size of the price increase for electricity applied just 6 months ago in NSW, and most people didn’t even know that their electricity had gone up. They thought, as did my sister, that they had used a little more than usual. This logic is valid for all western nations, nations which account for 80% of global CO2 emissions.
So there is the solution for 50% of Australia’s CO2 emissions. All gain, no pain. The other 50% is the difficult one as this takes in agriculture and many industrial processes. It is for this sector that carbon pricing may be a necessary mechanism, but on a national basis, not a global one.
I really think the Greens have lost the perception of being an independent party to the majority of voters and are simply put into the category of being a Labor alternative, and perhaps that was what Tont Abbott was on about. If just once the Greens had given preferences away from Labor they migh have some credibility as independent.
I have to say that the accusation that Abbotts plan to take controll of the Murray Darling System at federal level is about increasing mining in Queensland has to be the absurdist thing i have ever heard when the Queensland government (Labor) has already allowed mining to become the dominant land use anywhere in Queensland superseeding the Good Quality Farming land and rural living designations on land use and even considering handing over rail coridors to private mining opperators to remove them from having to answer to the people and comply with various planning processes which are public in government hands but can be kept under the rug in private hands until EIS and approvals are given.
The Labor Government in Queensland has a policy of utilising Public Private Partnerships to exclude the public from knowledge and the processes in so many planning issues especially where the government can make millions in revenue.
I don’t see that Abbott’s plans are any worse.
If you vote for a politician, don’t complain when you elect a stinking politician.
Elise wasn’t talking about CSP with heat storage, she was talking about residential solar PV.
mehitabel @ 41:
Sure everything’s more expensive that coal, but solar backed by gas is probably the most expensive alternative.
John D @ 42:
Yes we use more power during the day, but that doesn’t change the fact that the power supplied by solar PV has to be covered by equivalent capacity in gas. Solar PV is nice to have, and it means the gas turbines need to run less often, but we still need to build an equivalent gas capacity for when the sun doesn’t shine. This makes an already expensive technology even more expensive.
The cartoon in Saturday’s SMH says it all about Abbott’s Green Corps proposal. Sorry, but it just does.
Carbonsink: You say:
This is simply not true at the current level of solar power generation. We are currently using fossil fuel to supply most of this peak power. While this situation persists there is scope for replacing fossil fuel power with solar without any need to have backup. The situation would change to what you said when solar power exceeds the difference between base and peak power and we insist on using gas instead of thermal storage to provide power when the sun is down.
Mehitabel@43: I suspect that there isn’t any grand overall scheme that provides a sensible way of driving down emissions. As we have seen with ETS, (and would also see with carbon taxes if someone did the homework properly) simple ideas tend to end up requiring a very complex system once you start thinking through the details. Then there is the problem of getting agreement given that it is most unlikely that various countries will see themselves as special cases that need more leeway than others.
This doesn’t mean that we should all sit back and start concentrating on our living with a stuffed planet plan. There are a number of things that can be done to reduce world emissions apart from fixing up our own backyard. Possibilities for Mexico include:
1. Focus on tangible, finite actions that could be taken in the next 5 to 10 years instead of grand schemes.
2. Accept that the world is not going to agree to legally enforceable targets and continuing to pursue this in the Mexico conference is a waste of time.
3. Look for actions that would attract widespread agreement. Climate action will become a lot easier when people begin to see progress. We need to do the homework.
4. Recognize that the barriers to climate action and opportunities are different for different countries. For example, China may agree to actions that would reduce the fuel consumption of cars and the emission efficiency of a wide range of equipment but is unlikely to agree to action that will prevent it raising its standard of living. The US economy would probably benefit from a campaign to clean up electricity provided that it is allowed to do this in a way that doesn’t make its trade deficit worse. Once again, we need to do the homework.
5. We need to recognize that climate action interacts and sometimes is in conflict with the desire for social justice, free market purity and the world economy. Conversations are required to sort out these conflicts.
There may be a case for preparing draft world climate action plan before the Mexico conference.
Going back up the thread a bit, John D @ 10 you linked to some said “inconvenient facts” given in Stephen Robertson’s response on wild rivers.
There is always contestation of specifics on this issue. Robertson’s main contention, however, is that a range of small-scale economic developments can still occur. The response to this would be, “Yes, but…”
We are working on a post on wild rivers that hopefully goes beyond the superficial argumentation.
Similarly @ 1 reb of hobart links to a Courier Mail article which asserts that Noel Pearson is “an advocate of mining and other development on the Cape”. From what I’ve read I think advocating mining might come as a surprise to Pearson, although it has been asserted by The Wilderness Society. In return Pearson asserts that TWS ran dead on opposing a particular mine as part of the deal they did with the Bligh Government.
There are all sorts of accusations flying on this one. Let’s suspend belief until we get a chance to look at the real issues.
Carbonsink @49: “solar PV has to be covered by equivalent capacity in gas…”
So bloody what??? If we are using solar PV then we are not using gas, so our carbon footprint is less. Having a power station with excess capacity isn’t the end of the world, you know.
To give a simple parallel, most people have a car with more speed and power than they are using to tootle down to the shops. They paid for that extra capacity, even though they don’t need it most of the time. Why? Just in case they might need it occasionally. Try telling most blokes that the extra capacity is wasted money?
JohnD @42. how does my proposal satisfy your list:
“1. Drives the installation of clean electricity capacity at a predictable rate.
2. Provides confidence for both potential investors and the operators of fossil fuel fired power.
3. Gives priority to the use of clean electricity.
4. Average price of electricity only ramps up slowly in line with increases in average costs.
5. Avoids power shortages due to artificial restrictions on the use of dirty electricity capacity.”
I’ll have a go, but my point was to throw up a concept, rather than to claim to have a unique final answer.
1. If the ramped CO2 emissions/kWh was legislated, with reasonable warning and a reasonable ramp rate, then it answers your Point 1. A predictable rate of installation of clean electricity capacity would have to be installed, to ensure that the supplier met the ramped target.
The simultaneous ramping of energy prices would ensure that the suppliers were not seriously out of pocket, while allowing users a chance to arrange for a range of responses: rationalisation of usage, energy efficiency measures, economisation, substitution.
2. The legislation provides confidence to potential investors and operators about the future requirements for continued operation. Everyone would know what their respective projected costs and responsibilities were.
3. The ramped reduction in emissions intensity would give a priority to clean energy. Users efforts in e.g. domestic substitution with solar PV and BlueGen, to avoid higher costs from their energy supplier, would also give a priority to clean energy.
4. Ramped costs would obviously need to be devised at a rate which ensures a politically manageable amount of screaming and lobbying from various quarters.
5. Power shortages might be a political weapon that unscrupulous power generators might use. They might in any case let their coal-fired power stations run down, with inadequate maintenance, so that power shortages and brownouts occur anyway. There would have to be a contractual penalty for this established in advance.
My main point was that we may not need a massive ETS machine, to drive a change in emissions intensity.
A simpler legislative process might be possible, to achieve 80% of what is required, for 20% of the potential cost to the economy.
Elise: As you well know market projections can be wrong. So I guess my question to you is what happens to the price and demand for clean electricity when the demand for electricity is above or below projections? The other question is what happens if the supply of electricity if the requirement for clean electricity (to meet your target) was underestimated? Do you put up with blackouts of say “stuff the target” and allow unused dirty power to be used even though this means that you fail to meet target and rob the clean power industry to make the short term killing that was probably factored into their investment decision? (My understanding is that Penny Wong uses the $40 carbon credit cap to get around this problem so what are you proposing?)
Both bilb@47 and I are proposing systems that directly control investment and indirectly control emissions. This is the opposite to ETS and your system which directly control emissions (or emissions/kWh) and indirectly control investment. The big advantage of indirectly controlling emissions is that the problem of shortages is avoided.
John D @ 51:
Solar PV can’t supply peak demand on a cold winter’s night, so it has to be backed up by gas.
Elise @ 54:
No, but its a monumentally expensive way to reduce carbon emissions.
JohnD @56, Aren’t you uncomfortable with the basic idea of controlling on something other than what you are trying to achieve? All sorts of distortions could happen if you don’t directly control for your primary objective.
We want emissions to reduce; we don’t want the government to get heavily tangled up in the investment decisions about how this should be achieved. Despite cynicism about free markets, I have enough faith that we would get a better result if we let private enterprise figure out how to reduce emissions.
My main objection to the Rudd/Wong ETS, and to them controlling investment decisions in clean energy, is that it will bog the whole system down, without achieving significant results.
Slow government process is bad enough already, with red tape costing up to 4 years (FOUR YEARS) delay on simple extensions of dirt-moving operations in the Pilbara. Australia could really do without a further layer of red tape and government approvals, binding our industry hand-&-foot, if we want to be internationally competitive.
However, why object to the concept of a limited ETS, in principle? The problem is a phony ETS which doesn’t encourage emissions reduction, and bogs our economy down in red tape, due to:
1. Buying “reductions” in 3rd world countries (as per Rudd/Wong’s CPRS projections)
2. Totally compensating the biggest emitters (coal-fired power companies).
3. A massive bureaucracy and highly-intrusive government system, which will add costs to all levels of our economy.
Elise,
For starters…”if we want to be internationally competitive”….Australia is already internationally competetitive where electricity is concerned, and it is so not because we use coal, but by how we went about setting up our generation system.
Post Global Financial Collapse…..”cynicism about free markets”…. free markets have no credibility at all. Markets work well enough in sorting out details, but not in deciding strategic directions.
The trouble with any ETS at all is that its is inefficient on the one hand, and because of the contractural nature of the beast is difficult to unwind when it is found to be ineffective, on the other. Not to mention the critical time frame for Gloabal Warming Action the we are facing.
“We want emissions to reduce; we don’t want the government to get heavily tangled up in the investment decisions about how this should be achieved”
There is a simple objective here,….get rid of CO2 emitting energy sources and replace them with solar sources. But our government has already soiled their hands by trying to skew the solution towards furthering the use of coal by backing the notion of Carbon Dioxide Sequestration. That in conjunction with a clearly discredited CPRS they have achieved a Fail, Fail, track record.
If there was another 50 years within which to experiment, then a market driven solution “might” appear, but there isn’t that time available. We are into sudden death overtime with Climate Change, there is no room to be wrong.
Privately funded electricity supply will always be more expensive than publicly (user) funded system of the type that we have enjoyed for the past 30 years. But even the publically funded system is market connected as it is the market that supplies, builds and instals the hardware to make the system. The only thing that the government is doing in this alternative to CPRS is defining the build rate and in small part defining the form of the solution. But even the form of the solution is a variable because it is inevitable that improved technologies will appear during the time of the build programme and these technologies would certainly work to drive the direction of the build solution.
Even now I have become aware of a technology that can create 10 Kw of solar electricity for every new house for a little as $15,000 dollars, offering a return of $3000 per year for those households. That technology has been available for several years and wil have a significant impact on distributed electricity generation capacity, but because its introduction will be linked to the house building rate its impact will be to limit the growth in demand on the national electricty generation network.
Even an agressive electricity infrastructure rebuilding programme will be struggling to keep ahead of the growth in electricity demand. But that is one key advantage of the levy funding process, as well as being user pays growth in demand increases the flow of funds which improves the build rate without applying new costs to the economy.
BilB, what is this solar technology of which you write? (Clearly there wasn’t enough space in the margins … )
It is a high efficiency silicon converter, but is not in the familiar form of photovoltaic panels. We are still working out how to utilise these devices. The resulting units are not of a thin flat shape, so the house rooves have to be built slightly differently to accomodate the system with out the units being visible from other than above. One of the problems with the system is that we have to dispose of a lot of heat. The upside of that is that winter heating is free for both the house interior, and the pool (summer as well for the pool). I am designing the units to be a basic 10 Kw module, though 6 Kw would be viable for very small dwellings. One of the peculiar feature of the system is that it is seasonally self compensating, so winter solar drop off only partially affects the output. I am working on the information for Sydney at 240 solar days with an average 7.5 solar hours per day to yield around $3000 at 16 cents per unit.
That is as much as I can reveal at this time. But if you are planning a new house I will offer information on the necessary alterations to the roof design.
BilB @59, totally agree with most of what you are saying there!
I have just been to a MOST depressing meeting this morning, of ASA (Australian Shareholders Association) members. The topic was Climate Change and the Environment, and its relevance to investment opportunities.
It should have been an interesting discussion, as many members are retired (so not time-poor, and they have time to properly investigate the data) and have sizable SMSF investments, due to a lifetime of professional jobs (so not a clueless, uneducated mob).
Should have been a lively discussion and information exchange, right? Utterly, utterly depressing. At least 60% and possibly more, on a show of hands, agreed that climate change is a load of crap and grossly oversold.
They agreed that:
- the data was inconclusive (quoting Plimer and friends). I was asked to stop when trying to briefly explain that there are a large number of scientific disciplines that have recorded significant changes.
- no ice was melting (proof from recent Himalayan glacier debate),
- no temperature changes have occurred (someone claimed that satellite data proved it),
- the sunspot activity proved we were in a global cooling period (not warming, so IPCC people are wrong),
- the solar PV industry has “died out” (I was prevented from giving the online reference to solar installation data which shows continued growth, even through the GFC and with reductions in rebates),
- that the cost of adaption was negligible, and
- that solar PV systems cost at least $30,000 and didn’t cut your power by much (at least I was allowed to give some data to correct that part)
I spent two hours looking at the conservative rump of a bunch of ostriches. Utterly depressing.
If this is indicative of the retiree baby-boomer bulge, and they get to dominate the agenda for the next election, then Abbott is a shoe-in.
Yes, Elise, I have experienced similar. A guy in the year ahead of me at high school received an OA for services to government in the Carr administration. And I detected similar sentiments from that quarter in a discussion a year ago. And the arrogance that goes with it! Fortunately it is not a universal attitude.
BilB, I’m going to be building a new house on my paddock in a few years (2 – 3, I hope) so I’ll be very interested then. I’ll almost certainly have to get a solar or solar/wind system in, as the closest powerline is about $40k away.
BilB @63, it was enough to make me wonder if the ASA is a low wattage outfit, and their meetings a waste of time.
Better half pointed out that Buffett’s philosophy is that the more others are clueless, the more opportunity exists for those that understand.
I retorted that it was all very well to have a good retirement fund, as long as you weren’t also in the same car as the clueless ones, headed for a cliff with them driving.
Elise@58: I am a process engineer Elise so I am used to designing control systems involving cascades where what is directly controlled is not what I am ultimately trying to control. It is all a question of what is going to work best for a particular problem.
You have may have noticed that from time to time, I talk about regulating to control the average fuel consumption of new cars. This approach is essentially the same as what you are talking about doing for power production. So I have no fundamental objection to the type of system you are proposing. The only difference is that I think that directly controlling average fuel consumption is the best approach for dealing with part of the car emission problem but not the best approach for power production. It is a practical issue.
In the case of power production the ultimate objective is to control emissions. My proposal is to achieve this by directly controlling the rate of installation of new clean electricity capacity. The background to my thinking on both cars and electricity can be found in setions 2 and 3 here
In the mean time I would be interested in your answers re how your system responds to under and over estimation of future power needs.
Clearly, John, there would have to be a very special PID function of some kind that funnelled extra capital to the nearest to completion private power generation facilities when the feed forward gain was negative, or pulled the payroll funding from the most efficient power facilities if there was a projected overshoot of performance. Obviously the merchant banks are going to be the moderators of the new energy order.
Quite right Bilb. The finance sector will be trying to design the PID’s to maximize profits to the finance sector. That’s why they are so supportive of CPRS.
That is so depressingly true.
So what you two (JohnD and BilB) are saying is that our climate policy is likely to be dictated by the same coin-clippers who’ve already damaged our financial system so badly.
joy.
JohnD @66: “I am a process engineer Elise so I am used to designing control systems involving cascades where what is directly controlled is not what I am ultimately trying to control.”
I am an engineer also, John, by original training. It is my experience, however, that you cannot assume that a bunch of people can be controlled by the same logic that you use to operate equipment. There are more variables in play (people have a wide range of drivers for their behaviour); some of them are highly non-linear and non-logical.
If you have experience that a company, a country, or heaven forbid the world, can be controlled successfully and predictably using process control theory, then I would be very, very keen to see the data. Methinks you are too much the engineer!
Unfair Elise! I am well aware that you are an engineer hence the attempt to point out that the best control system is not necessarily the one that tries to control what really matters directly. This is why cascades are so widely used.
ETS is a brilliant example of poorly applied control theory. You have this elegant, simple theory that pushes all the right buttons from an economists point of view. It is also very simple in the sense that it uses the cap to directly control emissions. However, in the case of power generation we have a very rapidly changing signal (carbon credit price) trying to control investment that takes years to actually make a difference to emissions. Not a very sound basis for a simple control system. Much better to use a cascade that uses a relatively fast response (set up contracts for the supply of clean electricity) with the slower response resulting change in emissions being used to modify the contract target. I would argue that control theory can be a useful tool for looking at proposals for reducing emissions and separating out what should be directly controlled.
You are quite right to say that control theory is not the complete answer. One of the other obvious problems with ETS is that it assumes that people’s behavior will conform to economic theory. However, think about cars. The average car consumes about 1500 litres/yr. So a 10 cent/litre increase adds about $3.00/week – it is just not enough to drive serious behavior change. Ditto for power costs.
Still waiting for the answers to my questions.
Yes, I know about cascade control. Sometimes it is great, sometimes not. I also have seen “hunting behaviour” in action, and cascade controllers being surrupticiously switched off by plant operators, because they were a pain in the neck and bad for their shift results.
For non-process control people on here, roughly speaking, “hunting” refers to the output variable fluctuating wildly up and down, due to response lags. It is a bit like trying to control the shower temperature in the old days, when the inline heater took time to switch on and off, or with low water pressure when better half is trying to shave with hot water at the same time. Alternatively, it is a bit like oversteering a car on a gravel road.
Not sure if this is an answer JohnD, but the WA Energy Regulator has just announced approval for ramped electricity prices, concomitant with a requirement on “infrastructure improvements” with electricity generation.
If “infrastructure” only means upgrading the grid, then I will be disappointed. If it includes a plan for more CCGT power generation and more SmartPower, then it would be roughly as I had suggested.
Try again, that was surreptitious. Sheesh, my spelling has gone to pot!
I blame it on old age and trying to learn other languages. All the different spellings seem to go to porridge in my aging brain.
Well, Elise, what you say is wrong, and right at the same time. The government attempts to moderate the economy with interest rates. The government in the past further controlled the balance of the economy with mortgage deposit requirements. But the 0% interest rate that the US has resorted to demonstrates that the economy can over whelm the control system.
But the CPRS is very much a commercial animal (dog) which will be manipulated to advantage by the merchant banks and the insurance company investment funds guaranteeing that the system will be paid for at least twice. The government says that this is the way things are done these days.
Stop and think about that for a moment. The insurance funds represent peoples retirement savings. The thick end of that wedge, the people who will benefit most, are those who have reached retirement or are near to retirement. So that means that the government is in the process of institutionalising a process (the replacement of all of the country’s electricity generation infrastructure) which primarily serves the interests of the people who created the mess, which is now requiring rebuilding. Those same people who benefitted the most from the years of excess and waste. These people who drove every where, flew every where, wasted freely and wanted not. Now it is the primary responsibility of the upcoming generations to clean up, cut back, do without, reimburse, and payoff the very osterich generation that has put all future generations in jeopardy? And do all of this using the failed economic thinking that compounded the disaster of depleted resources, compromised environment, crippled biosphere and choked atmosphere? Oh, heaven forbid that the oldies should suffer at all, or bear any responsibility, because “they didn’t know”. YES THEY DID. They chose to ignore the polution, the sprawl and the extinctions. They chose to follow the dream to the big paid off million dollar house, the comfortable annuity, the 2 new massive cars five televisions and the hourly watered lawn. Heaven forbid that the next generation should bypass the system that supports that gilded life style of the wastrels and fund the new generation directly, completely avoiding paying double for the added fiscal drag.
The levy system. Low cost. User pays. Pay-as-you-build. End result: paid up system without mortgage offers lowest cost possible for future alternative energy; with zero CO2 emissions; and restored reputation for Australians.
JohnD @72: “However, think about cars. The average car consumes about 1500 litres/yr. So a 10 cent/litre increase adds about $3.00/week – it is just not enough to drive serious behavior change. Ditto for power costs.”
Sorry about hogging the blog thread here, but I would like to concur with your comment above.
Just musing, it seems that we put a defacto price on something, when we divert investment towards one technology rather than another? How much is the price, if we don’t specify it, but simply legislate for contracts for clean energy and fuel efficiency for cars?
Agree that $0.10/litre or $3/week ($156/year) doesn’t drive serious change.
Say we legislate for cars that do 5.5 L/100km or 125 g/km emissions (to give people some choice of model, other than Prius)?
These efficient cars may currently cost an extra $20,000 compared with the existing fleet of “clunkers”. They will, however, save you half your fuel bill.
What does the inferred fuel bill have to be, to drive the change logically? What defacto carbon price is equivalent to that fuel price?
BilB @75, yes, totally agree with you!
See my unhappy comments about the ASA meeting (full of retirees) @62. I may as well have banged my head on the wall for 2 hours.
I don’t want the CPRS. I don’t want the ETS as proposed. I think as you do, that they are both dogs.
My clumsy comment about a “limited ETS” was due to intuitively thinking that we would be defacto going to “cap” carbon emissions, by legislating for a certain amount of clean energy. We would also be defacto putting a “price” on them by directing investment towards the alternatives, especially if that is ahead of normal replacement time &/or at a higher cost. However, it is not a “cap and trade” system as proposed by Rudd/Wong.
In a way, it is like Australia not ratifying Kyoto, but managing our affairs such that we could meet it anyway if need be, in the future. As per the Howard era. We defacto signed up to the concept, but went about it another way.
By all means correct this intuitive concept if I am wrong.
Elise, you make the point well @76 that a behaviour changing approach, particularly a price penalising one, is doomed to failure. Doomed because our style of living is structural as well as cultural, and because there is just insufficient time to change habits along with the hardware at a pace to achieve carbon emission reduction milestones. Further, any such attempt will have significant negative and unnecessary effects on the economy.
I will argue that the energy levy approach more than adequately addresses the stationary energy and the motive energy (50% combined) sectors. I argue that there is little point in penalising motive fuels until there is an alternative for people to change to. I think that the comment about promoting hybrides over other vehicles at this stage is emminantly sensible, simply because it is the only solution along with E+ fuels available in any volume at this stage, and a reinforcing method is more likely to drive change rather than a punitive one.
If you see any value in the levy approach for the electricity alternative energy restructure funding, then I suggest that all creative energies should now be focussed on solving the industrial process and agricultural CO2 emission problem. This is the sector that the complex CPRS was intended to integrate but failed dismally address.
It is in addressing the OTHER 50% of emissions were the true ingenuity will be found. I will give you an example how ideas in this sector might look. I have been musing lately (largely because I took a punet of absolutely delicious Indian curry down to have beside the Nepean River the other week and noticed the nature of the water weeds choking many parts of that river as being very tall and standing like trees. It occured to me that if these plants could be genetically modified (and I have to say that I am usually dead set against GM crops-hypocrite) to splice in some of the properties of oil algae thereby making the plants an energy source, then there would progressively become a commercial return for clearing our rivers of the weeds. Of course I can think of 5 dozen ways in which that could go horribly wrong, but I am just thinking out loud here.
I saw the farmers talking of a green drought the other day and it reminded me of the “k” line farming method which was designed to, and proven to, reduce runoff and retain water in the soil for more sustainable farming in our dry land. The Chinese have been using this method for thousands of years for their rice farming but what has that got to do with Australia. Well maybe it is about time that farmers really take notice of such practices to increase permanently retained vegetation.
I have no doubt that there are hundreds of practices that will both reduce CO2 emissions, cut back the need for fossil energy inputs while improving productivity and sustaining land use even with the drying trend. And there will be the same equivalents for industry. An example from Christchurch NZ has to do with liquid waste handling. Cristchurch has a truly advanced sewerage system. The council there applies a waste release license for many small businesses allowing these businesses to release many classes of waste into the sewerage system. The fees collected pay for the extra processing to handle the material which comes through the pipes. By this method the cost to business is small, and the council is prewarned for what they need to process. The sewerage works there also has a huge canopy over their primary settling tank and the methane collected is used to power the parts of the process as well as some vehicles. All gain, very little pain. The Christchurch City Council is very proud about their ability to perform many advanced services to the community at the minimum cost. They provide a green waste service which turns a healthy profit from the compost produced and sold back to the community. The Ashburton City Council, 90 kilometres south of ChCh is proud about its tree planting programme. The council there plants commercial trees in the many pockets of land that it has under its management. They plant trees such as Black Walnut which has a log value as much a $40,000 for its value as a veneering timber. The figure that I remember from the past was that the council rates were 17% lower as a result of the commercial returns from this one programme.
The future will be a rich environment for awake minds, as long as we can dispose of the political deadwood.
Elise the hardest circuits to tune are those where there is a long delay between the action being taken and the effect actually being felt. This is what is wrong with using CPRS to drive the clean-up of electricity. We are trying to invest the funds necessary to keep emissions under the cap in several years time using a rapidly changing permit price to dive the change.
Agree with what you are saying with cars but would point out that there are lots of cheap cars on the market that can meet this target. I am in favour of controlling the average consumption rather than using a cap because it gives buyers of new cars three choices: Buy a small car, buy a larger car with the technology to keep fuel consumption below the target or arrange to balance the above target consumption against the purchase of a new car(s) with below target consumption or buy a large second hand car. The other advantage is that it makes it harder to plead for special treatment since there are not all that many people who really do need a large car.
It may be worth thinking about a campaign to limit tax concessions for company cars to those with very low fuel consumptions. Might get rid of all those big cars carrying one important person to work each morning while adding to the supply of fuel efficient second hand cars.