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in a UK journal, “New Political Economy” but in July, the CSIRO wrote to the editors, telling them the paper was being withdrawn, because it had not been approved through internal CSIRO processes.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.

According to the story in The Australian (thanks to John D for the tip) Dr Spash told the ANZSEE conference in Darwin last Wednesday that:

“The CSIRO is currently maintaining they have the right to ban the written version of this paper from publication by myself as a representative of the organisation and by myself as a private citizen.”

From the Oz:

In the paper, Dr Spash argues the economic theory underpinning emissions trading schemes is “far removed” from the reality of permit markets. “While carbon trading and offset schemes seem set to spread, they so far appear ineffective in terms of actually reducing GHGs (greenhouse gases),” he says. “Despite this apparent failure, ETS remain politically popular amongst the industrialised polluters.

“The public appearance is that action is being undertaken. The reality is that GHGs are increasing and society is avoiding the need for substantive proposals to address the problem of behavioural and structural change.”

Dr Spash said trading schemes did not efficiently allocate emission cuts because their design was manipulated by vested interests. For example, in Australia, large polluters would be compensated with free permits while smaller, more competitive firms would have to buy theirs at auction. The schemes were also flawed because: global warming was caused by gases other than carbon; emissions were difficult to measure; carbon offsets bought from other countries were of dubious value; and the schemes “crowded out” voluntary action by individuals. He concludes that more direct measures, such as a carbon tax, regulations or new infrastructure would be simpler, more effective and less open to manipulation.

John D’s comment:

We badly need more serious discussion of alternatives to CPRS before the government tries to bulldoze it through parliament. We don’t need to give the Barnaby’s of the world an easy target. And we certainly don’t need to see those that are qualified to make serious contributions shut down by CSIRO or the government.

Technically the issue is now being reviewed by Dr Megan Clark, the CSIRO’s chief executive. Clark was recently interviewed by Monica Attard on Sunday Profile. You might recall that the issue of censorship was raised when four scientists put in personal submissions to the Senate enquiry into the CPRS earlier this year. Attard worked her over pretty well and the transcript is worth reading.

Clark says she personally encourages scientists to speak out. But the borderline between science and policy is blurred.

Monica Attard: So in other words, if the CSIRO suddenly became aware or came to a conclusion, scientifically, that – for an example – an ETS was not the right way to go, you’d have no problems in putting that out in the public domain?

Megan Clark: The science? Absolutely. Our modelling will be out in the public domain. Our science will be out in the public domain, and we should have it out there.

So the issue might whether the paper is based on what Clark recognises as hard science.

I get the impression that Clark is willing to cut her people some slack in personal briefings, even in formal settings, but publication is another matter. But they have no private rights on matters pertaining to the discipline they are working on.

Dr Michael Borgas, president of the CSIRO staff association told The World Today that self-censorship is becoming a problem especially with middle management:

We’ve asked questions about this at high levels and have had assurances that much of the risk that is perceived here is in the imaginations of management.

Exactly.

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.

The accompanying opinion piece in the AFR is punchy

If the law requires honesty in how companies communicate to investors or consumers, why should we tolerate any lower standard in how companies lobby governments? Surely truth in the democratic process is as valuable as truth in the marketplace… After all, in return for the privilege of limited liability that corporations enjoy, the public is entitled to expect corporations will not seek to corrupt the process of public policy formation.

The shift from the marketplace as site of justice to the site of truth is a distinguishing mark of modernity according to some scholars, though the same could hardly be said of politics. We expect ‘non-core’ promises from our politicians. Government, according to my new preferred metaphor, is a ‘congenitally failing operation’ – a genetically impossible creature always subject to new, feverish techniques of assembly, connection and disassembly (and I’ll blog about the voluntary action workshop I attended recently when I get a chance). The persistent clashes between notions of a free person and one who’s the object of prediction and perfection through various modes of calculation are an essential dynamic to contemporary life. In this sense, political actors, like their theatrical counterparts, require massive infrastructure behind them – it’s not hard to think of the ways in which corporations and NGOs require a backstage, changerooms, crew, props etc. to manage their public image.

However, this shifting between backstage and frontstage needn’t imply some kind of relativism in the pejorative sense of not being able to distinguish any relations. As Mark has remarked, the expansion of the state under the Great Transformation was about ‘disembedding’ existing social relations until the public sector reached a critical mass – until the stage grew too big for the theatre. The neoliberal turn, to the extent that it is identifiable, was about aiding the fracturing of this space and shifting much of the work performed there to the backstage. Thus, whilst the size of government may have actually increased, our collective dreams of freedom have brought forth the multiplication of, often incommensurable, justifications for climate change action – utilitarian, industrial, ecological, etc. etc. The rise of the IPCC as a technocratic, globalizing project amongst a cacophany of others pushes against this tide, which is perhaps why consensus models have proven completely unworkable in the current reason of state.

Revitalisations of an idealised public sphere of yesteryear hardly seem like they’ll cut the mustard in this context, though it’s notable that that’s exactly what Third Way progenitor Anthony Giddens has called for as he saw the Third Way/New Labour project descend into a technocratic morass, reinstating the old divisions it was originally designed to liberate. Instead, Giddens argues, to meet the challenge climate change poses, “what is needed is not just an enabling but an “ensuring” state, a state that can actually deliver outcomes.” The increasingly empty promise of Carbon Pollution Reduction against a mythical ‘baseline’ combined with tawdry political managerialism suggests that we’ll see a lot more judicial machinations picking up the ‘ensuring’ slack.

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.

[Manager Richard Wrightson] said despite uncertainty about the scheme, Loy Yang wanted to support the development of a liquid secondary market for the trading of carbon so the coal-fired power station operator could effectively manage its carbon risk.

Caught on the wrong side of history much?

Elsewhere: John Quiggin reports on his Senate Committee testimony.

nb. Richard Wrightson’s talk to the UNSW Centre for Energy and Environment Markets annual conference is available here. Note especially his response to the question: ‘should we just impose a carbon tax instead’
Update: Just to clarify in response to comments below – the context of the question of whether we should impose a carbon tax was huge uncertainty about whether Loy Yang’s Stations would still be viable in the coming decade. The establishment of long term derivative markets in carbon would, of course, be one way of clarifying this would be one way of providing this certainty. Another way would be for politicians and regulators to make the decisions for them.

Update: Looks like that high leverage in the energy sector is starting to bite:

April 28 (Bloomberg) — AGL Energy Ltd., Australia’s biggest electricity and gas retailer, faces risks on the refinancing of debt held by the partly owned Loy Yang A power plant, Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch & Co. unit said.

The Sydney-based company may have to inject equity into the unit or “walk away” from it, Merrill said in an April 27 report. The refinancing will be hampered by a drop in the unit’s interest cover ratio, the exit of foreign banks from Australia’s debt market and the planned carbon trading system, it said.

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

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.

Actually from this report we learn that there is a third element, $1.3 million to research how climate change will affect the nation’s primary industries.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the funding will help establish a research network under the auspices of Land and Water Australia.

“This research network will help us adapt to climate change by building knowledge in areas including water use in agriculture, landscape management systems, and the capacity of plant and animal resources to adapt to climate change,” Senator Wong said.

The work is part of a broader $126 million climate change adaption program.

Tony Burke sees the soil carbon research as:

measuring carbon levels in agricultural systems, understanding the impacts of management practices in soil carbon, and the role Australian soils could play in sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The minister’s press release highlights:

Nine soil carbon research projects will sample a range of agricultural systems, including cereal crops, sheep and beef grazing, sugarcane and vegetable farming, irrigated and non-irrigated dairy, and sites which have changed from one farming system to another.

Nine nitrous oxide research projects will monitor emissions from soils in five key farming systems – sugar cane, cotton, dairy pasture, non-irrigated and irrigated cereal cropping. (Emphasis added)

(The ministerial has some routine chest thumping. If you want to read the irrelevant carping of opposition spokesperson go to the news item mysteriously penned verbatim by scribes simultaneously all around the country from the Tweed Daily News to the SMH. Presumably it was supplied by the AAP.)

You may recall that there was considerable discussion about soil carbon storage on this post, where we were informed variously by Ambigulous, myriad and murph the surf. Murph linked to work done by the NSW government on soil carbon and biochar. Here are some extracts from the Executive Summary of a scoping paper on soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration potential for agriculture:

SOC is part of the global C cycle and the global SOC pool (1580 Gt) is twice as large as that in the atmosphere and nearly three times that of the vegetation biomass carbon pool. Soil organic carbon sequestration refers to the storage of carbon in soil and is being considered as a strategy for mitigating climate change. Globally as well as for some individual countries, it has been estimated that SOC sequestration has the potential to mitigate 5-14% of total annual greenhouse gas emissions for the next 50-100 years. However, whether this potential is achieved depends on economic, social and political factors.

As a rough estimate, total SOC sequestration potential from pasture land, cropping land and rangelands amounts to 4.9 Mt C/yr (18 Mt CO2e/yr), which is equivalent to 11% of the total GHG emission from NSW in 2005.

In order to support a role for soil organic carbon in emissions trading, there is an urgent need to resolve several key research issues, namely developing low cost methods of accounting for soil carbon; quantifying net carbon sequestration under different management practices for different soil types, climates and agricultural systems by supporting existing long term cropping rotation trial sites and the establishment of new ones where appropriate; quantifying interactions of SOC sequestration with soil emissions of other GHG, namely N2O and CH4 and developing soil carbon models that can account for locally relevant agricultural management practices.

It is important to resolve outstanding research questions as a matter of urgency, to remove this barrier to inclusion of soil carbon in emissions trading.

Meanwhile farmers say that costs will rise from carbon trading, for example fertiliser, fuel and steel while beef producer Trevor Wilson, from the New South Wales North Coast, says:

scientists have figured his farm captures more carbon than he emits.

“(In) my pasture grazing system, which is a managed rotation, I have sequestered enough carbon in the last six years to cover my carbon emissions from my cows for 125 years.”

So there!

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.

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:

So 65% of people back the introduction of the CPRS, half wanting stronger targets and only 19% want it abandoned or delayed. Looks like Rudd’s claim of the middle ground has been pretty successful then.

Naturally, in Opposition Organ land Teh ETS is on the ROPES and just needs a knockout blow!! and we should all apologise to Emo Man Dr. Nelson!! Over to Tom Switzer for more!
With friends like that Turnbull hardly needs enemies…