The World Today yesterday ran a story today about the CSIRO blocking a paper that had been accepted for publication by the journal New Political Economy after being internationally peer-reviewed. The had been submitted by Dr Clive Spash, a CSIRO ecological economist specialising in the interactions between the environment and the economy.
In it, Dr Spash argues that carbon trading, like the emissions trading scheme being promoted by the Federal Government, appears to be ineffective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He says more direct measures, like a carbon tax or new infrastructure, would be simpler and more effective.
Earlier this year Dr Spash submitted the article for publication in a UK journal, “New Political Economy” but in July, the CSIRO wrote to the editors, telling them the paper was being withdrawn, because it had not been approved through internal CSIRO processes.
The World Today understands Dr Spash has been told not to publish the paper, because of political sensitivities. The CSIRO denies it’s trying to censor Dr Spash. A spokesman says there’s a long-standing policy of not publishing papers and reports that comment on policy, be it Government, or Opposition, or even that of a local council.
Continue reading ‘Censorship alert’
Today’s Fin led with the news that the upturn in consumer spending has put pressure on the market in RECs, whose price is a kind of scoreboard for the renewable industry cage match initiated under the Howard Government. Rudd’s reforms, discussed previously, saw the inclusion of solar hot water and ‘phantom’ PV certificates, however this effectively destroyed any pretense that a certificate represented a ‘real’ megawatt-hour. Continue reading ‘REC Market inundated with consumer credits’
So Woodside, Rio and Boral have responded to the Australian Conservation Foundation and Australian Climate Justice Program complaint to the ACCC about the yawning gap between the shrillness of public emoting and disclosures to the investment community, which increased even as the emos won greater concessions at each stage of the process. The EITEs have won some $16.4bn of public money in concessions at last count. That is an extraordinary amount of public money being handed over to pad their profitability: about 19 000 new buses, to take the Rooze’s benchmark, or 455 time-wasting, subjectively measured ‘energy savings’ schemes.
Rio Tinto’s response, that they’re not ‘battling’ a global emissions trading scheme, is laughable. How do they honestly expect a national – let alone global – scheme to gain traction if everyone keeps undercutting it? Business commentary, from the most hackneyed pining for a fanciful, counterfactual world free of political machinations (Carbontaxalia?) to more orthodox defences of industry have questioned the EITE concessions. eg. Electricity Supply Industry Apparatchik Keith Orchison has noted that, “… firms are hardly going to play up the negatives to the investment community, particularly as the legislation is still a moving playing field. However, as the analysts all read the papers, surely they must be asking these companies about their public utterances – how one wonders does the rest of that conversation go?”
One does indeed. The cut and thrust of the complaint is that with such a thoroughly impotent carbon price now firmly on the table, companies have an obligation under s52 of the Trade Practices Act to, well, make ‘the rest of that conservation’ redundant. The key issue for the ACCC will be whether the Statements ‘were made in trade or commerce’ or bear such a character. The complaint alleges that the statements were absolutely core to these businesses. Indeed, they were instrumental in delaying the scheme, increasing compensation etc. Continue reading ‘“It’s not like we’re battling it” Part I – EITEs’
One of the more interesting parts of the CPRS announcement was a collection of measures designed to address one of the louder criticisms from the various green groups (and notably by dk.au, I personally think it’s a peripheral issue). In essence, voluntary measures to reduce emissions by households – solar hot water, energy efficiency, and so on – just free up permits for other people to pollute, thus resulting in no reduction in net emissions.
There’s a couple of ways around this that have been floated – one is to encourage people to buy permits and rip them up as their additional contribution to ameliorating climate change, another is that additional emissions-reducing measures should result in tighter emissions targets. The government appears to be promising a little of both, with a voluntary fund to buy and retire permits, and a promise to explicitly take GreenPower purchases into account when deciding the scheme caps (that is, the year-to-year permit allocations).
However, this reveals one of the key weaknesses of the CPRS. Garnaut proposed a politically-independent “Carbon Reserve Bank” who would set year-to-year targets based on explicitly laid-out principles. The CPRS puts the year-to-year targets in the hands of the relevant Minister. Theoretically, based on my understanding of the White Paper and this new press release, the government is supposed to set the scheme caps for the next five, then knock off the appropriate amount based on the GreenPower purchased. The voluntary fund then results in yet fewer permits being available to emitters as they’re purchased and ripped up. But, on the track record so far, how can we have any confidence that the annual caps for the next few years won’t get peremptorily bumped-up to take these voluntary efforts into account? How can we be sure that the government isn’t just dumping even more of the burden of emissions reduction on to socially concerned individuals, without actually decreasing the level of emissions beyond what they otherwise would have been?
For this to work, it requires the government to be an honest broker when it comes to emissions reduction targets. But if they were taking emissions reduction targets seriously, the debate over voluntary measures would be irrelevant anyway.
Here’s an interesting sign of things to come. Loy Yang Power has bought 100 000 Certified Emissions Reductions in a pre-emptive strike on regulation of the electricity market under the CPRS. Two points worth making: this is a drop in the ocean (no pun intended) compared to the annual emissions of the power stations of ~14m tonnes. Also, the US Waxman Bill would only credit 4 from every 5 international offset credits imported into the country to cover compliance. This is largely because independent analyses of the CDM have come up with figures ranging from 20% to 50% of all projects approved being ‘non-additional’ – they would have happened anyway without funding. Continue reading ‘Loy Yang Power buys carbon offsets’
Two critiques of the CPRS today. First, Barry Brook and Tim Kelly have sent a submission to the Senate inquiry, discussing the problems they see with the CPRS. Most should be no shock to LP readers – Brook points out the ineffectiveness of voluntary actions under the CPRS regime, and, given that, calls for more consideration of the carbon tax alternative. Guy Pearse is in The Age discussing the subsidies to Big Carbon and the likelihood of most of Australia’s “cuts in emissions” being the result of purchasing carbon credits on the international market.
Pearse’s belief is that most of the purchased credits will be the result of avoided deforestation in developing countries, and he’s probably right. However, his argument seems to sometimes veer dangerously close to the position that only emissions reductions obtained by burning less fossil fuels are somehow legitimate:
Moreover, if cheap carbon storage in forests is done instead of cutting emissions, that enables industries to continue on their merry way and delays the hard task of cutting actual greenhouse pollution by another couple of decades.
Emissions not released because forests aren’t logged, and peat bogs are left submerged, aren’t any less “real” than ones released by burning coal or oil. We will clearly have to stop emissions from both sources.
Jane* doesn’t understand emissions trading. I’m bored by it. Snooze.
That was a journalist friend of mine updating her status on Facebook yesterday. Seems like she’s not alone. Polling by Mobium released today revealed that:
· One-third (35%) of those surveyed had not heard of the government’s
Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS);
· Two-thirds (65%) of those surveyed could not name the scheme’s
initial reduction target of five per cent;
· Fewer than one in ten (8.8%) said they have a good understanding of
how the federal government’s emissions trading scheme will work.
8.8% even claim to have a good understanding of how it will work?? The government obviously has to promote this informative video better…
Fwiw the best comment on the FB was ‘I always thought it was if you fart, then I have to fart back.’
*not real name
Previously: Essential Media polling on the ETS
Elsewhere: Penny claims the mandate!!
Ben Eltham at New Matilda
Last week at the ABARE conference Tony Burke Federal Minister for Agriculture announced two new research initiatives.
The Soil Carbon Research Program will be a $20 million project to look at changes in carbon in soil, how different climates effect carbon levels, as well as the effect of farm management and stocking rates.
A second initiative, the $12 million Nitrous Oxide Research Project, will look at the role these emissions play in the agriculture sector.
That much from the ABC report. It is clear that the research is intended to help farm productivity as well as help government decision making with respect to the CPRS. A decision will be made in 2013 about whether agriculture will be included in an emissions trading scheme after 2015. Clearly the government would like to move in that direction.
Continue reading ‘Sorting out soil carbon’
The draft of the CPRS legislation has been released, for your reading pleasure. As I understand it, the draft legislation pretty much exactly mirrors the White Paper, with all its often-discussed flaws.
As to what happens now, today’s Crikey email has a piece by Andrew McIntosh (not online) that contains the first rationale for blocking the CPRS that, to my mind, doesn’t involve hoping for political miracles a couple of years down the track. In the end, Australia’s influence on getting an agreement at Copenhagen will be limited. If there is an agreement, Australia will have a reduction target to meet. If so, something will have to be done, and we won’t have locked ourselves into a bad CPRS first and be left with buying out Big Carbon at enormous cost.
Discuss at your leisure! Interesting links appreciated.
Possum has the goods on Sunday Monday’s Essential Report which had Labor unchanged at 52/32 for a 2PP of 62/38. There’s also a special question for the ETS
Thinking about the Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme (called the carbon pollution reduction scheme) to address climate change by which the Government aims to reduce emissions by 5-15% by 2020 – do you think the Government should: Continue reading ‘Essential Report – ETS Edition’
Of all the supposed flaws in the proposed CPRS, the one that seems to have gained the most traction is the concern that, as Jeremy Sear puts it “the more you sacrifice at home – the more some corporate polluter can emit instead.” GetUp is planning to run a full-page ad in The Oz tomorrow demanding the government fix this issue.
This issue has been discussed a number of times on LP. dk.au has emphasised the importance (and apologies if I’m oversimplifying here) of the sociological aspects of the issue, and the need for people to be involved in the decarbonization process – if they see their voluntary efforts being lost, support for the process will vanish. I don’t think it’s a big problem, myself. Despite all this, I don’t think anyone who cares about climate change thinks it’s the biggest problem with the proposed CPRS. The biggest problem, by far, is the twin evils of locking in monumentally inadequate carbon reduction targets and too-low projected carbon prices. The second-biggest problem is the ladeling out of free permits to Big Carbon.
All the voluntary participation in the world isn’t going to make more than a marginal difference to Australia’s carbon emissions. Tighter targets will make a big difference. So why spend all this lobbying effort to fix problems at the margins of the scheme, rather than tackling the big one head-on?
As Anna Rose points out, The Dept of Climate Change has made an inauspicious start to the year, proposing to remove the public disclosure of Corporate level GHG figures. Their concern is as follows:
The label ‘energy production’ applies to a number of stages in the flow of energy through the economy, and as such it is very difficult to disclose meaningful, corporate level energy production information. Corporate level information may provide a snapshot of only a single point in an energy flow or, if aggregated, could combine a number of conversion processes. Because of these aggregation issues the current disclosure requirement for corporate level energy production information under the NGER Act is unlikely to provide meaningful information to the public and could be potentially misleading.
Yikes. It’s not hard to imagine how that meeting went. Continue reading ‘Department of Climate Policy Cave-ins and Keeping Things Private’
Short answer: big companies from The UK, America, State Gubbermints and some Aussie companies.
Beyond the headline figure of a unilateral 5% cut on 2000 levels, the numbers that will get us there look deeply disturbing. As I argued, there are effectively two carbon prices: a floating price capped at either $40/t or the CDM price for us (the suckers) and a vortex in the federal budget to stop Aluminium smelting, petrol refineries and coal fired power plants going all Howl’s Moving Castle on us and flying off to Neverland or something (their carbon price is zero).
The biggest handouts will be to EITEs and coal fired generators under the auspices of “[securing] today’s jobs while building the low pollution economy of tomorrow.” (don’t think about that one too hard) Continue reading ‘Who’ll get your CPRS dollars?’
A couple of billion dollars a year. That’s all it would have taken to make the CPRS targets much more attractive.
It’s actually a fairly simple calculation to figure out an upper bound on how much it would have cost to lower our emissions cap, because of the design of the trading scheme and the previous modeling done by Treasury. Essentially, companies are allowed to buy as many permits on the international market as they like. They’re not allowed to sell permits on the international market, however (another rort which I might also post about). So, the most it would have cost Australia to lower the emissions cap a tonne would have been the price on the international market.
But how much would a permit on the international market be worth?
Continue reading ‘Sold out for 2.2 billion a year’
I have a lot of reading to do over the next few days!
However, you don’t need to dig very far to find the massive unseriousness – and probably disingenuousness – in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme white paper.
Continue reading ‘Deeply unserious targets’
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