Low Emissions Target: On Carbon Schemes, No One Says The Same Thing For Long

Fairfax - Peter Martin

If you don't know the difference between a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme, or a low emissions target and an emissions intensity scheme, it's time to wise up.
On Friday Malcolm Turnbull gets the report of the Finkel review of the electricity market and later this year the report of the official review of his government's climate change policies.

Know your product
Anyone would think we had all the time in the world to decide which carbon pricing model will work best for us. Artist: Matt Davidson.

What he does next will affect how much we pay, how much we use, the types of electricity we use, how quickly we cut emissions and how often the system breaks down.
But if we don't even know what the words mean, we'll be in the dark.
So here's a quick (opinionated) guide. And a warning: no one seems to say the same thing for long.

Carbon tax
It had the advantage of being simple, so simple that Tony Abbott actually backed it in his early days as opposition leader before reversing course and opposing it, and being swept to power.
"If you want to put a price on carbon, why not just do it with a simple tax?" he asked back then. "It would be burdensome, all taxes are burdensome, but it could certainly raise the price of carbon, without in any way increasing the overall tax burden."
It's what Julia Gillard did, and was martyred for. Exemptions from the tax and overcompensation in the form of income tax cuts and direct payments meant every cent it raised was handed back. And it cut emissions. Each year for more than a century through two world wars and the great depression Australia had used more electricity than the year before, until the lead-up to the carbon tax when both electricity use and electricity emissions began to fall and then fell sharply until mid-2014 when the tax was abolished by Abbott himself.

Illustration: Matt Davidson 

Turnbull gets the argument for the tax. "If you want people to do less of something, you tax it," was how he described another measure during the 2016 election campaign.

Emissions trading scheme
It's like a carbon tax (in fact, the carbon tax was designed to transition into one) except that it uses carrots as well as sticks. The government issues a limited number of pollution permits, but then leaves the polluters free to buy and sell them from each other. If one manages to cut emissions easily and no longer needs its permits it can sell them to another who needs them more, perhaps for a profit. It means the market sets the price of the permits, and the price is no higher than it needs to be.

Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel will deliver his electricity market report on Friday. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

US President George H. W. Bush issued tradeable sulphur dioxide pollution permits to cheaply halve the incidence of acid rain. In his last days in office John Howard promised to use tradeable permits to cheaply meet Australia's carbon emission reduction obligations. Kevin Rudd got to work on the details with the then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, then Turnbull was rolled, the Greens said no, and Rudd baulked at taking the plan to an election. It would be painted as a big new tax. Voters would remember the electricity price hike but not the compensating tax cut, as Gillard later discovered.

Emissions intensity scheme
Long championed by Turnbull and independent Nick Xenophon and Greg Hunt as environment minister, an intensity trading scheme would have the advantage of raising no money whatsoever, and not pushing up prices much. Each industry would be given a "baseline" for its emissions intensity. For the electricity industry it would be a certain number of tonnes emitted per megawatt-hour produced. Plants that were above the baseline would have to buy permits from plants that were below it. As a result coal-fired plants would become more expensive to run and get less business, and gas and wind-powered plants would become cheaper and get more. All without anything that looked like a tax.

What Malcolm Turnbull does next will affect how quickly we cut emissions and how often the system breaks down. Photo: Jonathan Carroll

Critics say it would give gas a leg-up when what's needed is to move straight to renewables. This year Turnbull ruled it out partly because it could be presented as the emissions trading scheme he promised not to introduce. The real downside is that it wouldn't be an emissions trading scheme. By not moving prices much, it would do little to reduce electricity demand, working only on the sources of supply.

Low emissions target
Described by the Climate Change Authority as a second-best alternative to its preferred option of an intensity scheme, a low emissions target would operate pretty much in the same way as the current renewable energy target. Electricity suppliers would be required to source a certain proportion of their power from renewables or other very low emission sources such as highly-efficient gas or even coal plants, should they ever be built.
Its biggest drawback is that if it's all there is, there's no guarantee it won't change. The government might be lobbied to weaken it (making lobbying a very cost-effective proposition) or another government might impose a grander scheme on top of it. Potential investors in new plants might be forgiven for holding back. Given the dizzying array of changes since Howard first proposed an emissions trading scheme 10 years ago, it would be hard to blame them.

Links

• Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market
• Review of Australia’s climate change policies
• Emissions intensity scheme – another act in tragic comedy of errors
• Towards the next generation: delivering affordable, secure and lower emissions power
• 'Somewhat surprising' survey on Australian attitudes to renewables
• Frydenberg hits phones to keep colleagues in line over climate
• Fact Sheet: 10 Basic Electricity Facts To Help You Navigate the Finkel Review 
• At least Trump is true to himself about climate change

Climate Change Is Real. So Why Won’t The Right Admit It?

The Guardian - Marcus Nield

From hard Brexiters to Donald Trump, nationalists who deny the existence of manmade global warming will eventually have to face the facts

‘Nationalists, gripped by an isolationist logic, are unable or unwilling to face the reality of global warming’. A protest against Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement in Chicago.
Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images 

Around 97% of climate scientists confirm the existence of manmade global warming, and public opinion is steadily catching up. In the UK, a recent poll suggested 84% of British people want Theresa May to “convince Trump not to quit” the Paris climate agreement. According to a survey spanning 40 nations, 78% of people support their country joining the global agreement.
Consensus on manmade global warming has never been stronger. Yet climate denial remains strong among a particular ideological group. Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement last week provides the strongest evidence yet that nationalists, gripped by an isolationist logic, are unable or unwilling to face the reality of global warming.

Yet American nationalists are not the only ones to resist action on climate change. Ukip’s general election manifesto pledges to pull the UK out of the Paris accord. More concerning, however, is that Eurosceptic Conservatives include prominent climate sceptics such as Lord Lawson.
Theresa May closed the Department for Energy and Climate Change within 24 hours of becoming prime minister. Having received £390,000 in donations from senior oil executives since she came to power, her manifesto now pledges to “build on the unprecedented support already provided to the oil and gas sector”. An entire Conservative election campaign is premised on the brand of “strong and stable”, while May keeps quiet about climate change – described by the UN as a threat to global stability “unprecedented in scale”.
Climate denial extends from the Brexit ringleaders to the voters who support them. A ComRes poll found that leave voters are twice as likely to deny manmade climate change as those who voted remain. The same poll found that Brexiters exhibit a general “distrust towards scientists”. In other words, they’ve had enough of experts.
Across the world, nationalist programmes – the French Front National, the BNP, Donald Trump, the Danish People’s party – have tried to cripple credibility in climate science, which requires collective action between states and is thus, for them, what Al Gore and others have called an inconvenient truth.
But there’s another explanation for climate denial among leave voters. Climate sceptics and hard-Brexiters share the common denominator of right-leaning free-market ideology. Over the past decade, various studies have found that conservatives and economic liberals are considerably more likely than other people to reject anthropogenic global warming, presumably because this is a problem that the market cannot solve.

Eco-nationalism, woven with contradiction, turns environmental discourse into a geopolitical blame game

The true danger from nationalist framings of climate change, however, is not denial, but the weaponisation of the environment in the service of self-interest. Trump famously called global warming a Chinese “hoax”, but less well known is that climate denial in China also arises from a nationalist distrust, in this case towards the west. A study published in the journal Environmental Sociology found that climate scepticism resulted from a patriotic “conspiracy theory that sees climate change as a western plot to constrain China’s development”. Similarly in India, the nationalism of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, is tied to the continuation of dirty coal as well as the excuse that western countries aren’t pulling their weight.
But Marine Le Pen is perhaps the politician to have taken environmental nationalism the furthest. In 2014, the Front National leader launched what she called the New Ecology movement, promising to ban wind farms and reduce France’s dependence on oil, but condemning the environmental movement as a “communist project”.
This eco-nationalism, woven with contradiction, turns environmental discourse into a geopolitical blame game. Eventually, Brexiters must come to realise this dissonance, along with the unalterable reality that air – and the carbon dioxide in it – does not respect national borders.

Links

• Denial by another name: The Trump administration’s climate rhetoric is just weasel words
• The Republican party – not Trump – is the biggest obstacle to climate action
• Alan Kohler: no political future for climate denial
• Scientists are testing a “vaccine” against climate change denial
• Articles on Climate change denial
• Climate change denial

Australians Want Focus On Renewables Not Coal, Lowy Poll Finds

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Australians overwhelmingly want governments to favour renewable energy over fossil fuels even if it costs more, and concerns about climate change are strengthening, a new Lowy Institute poll finds.
The survey of 1202 adults during the first three weeks of March found 81 per cent of respondents wanted policymakers to focus on clean energy sources such as wind and solar, even if it costs more to ensure grid reliability.

Fossil fuels deserve less government support than renewables, a Lowy poll finds. Photo: AP

Just 17 per cent backed a focus on "traditional energy sources such as coal and gas even if this means the environment may suffer to some extent".
The finding was one of Lowy's highest results for a two-option answer and "somewhat surprising" since the poll was conducted soon after blackouts in wind-power dominated South Australia and the heatwave that stretched power supplies in coal-dependent NSW, said Alex Oliver, Lowy's polling director.

No bull: Australians strongly support more renewable energy. Photo: AP

"I wasn't expecting the response to renewables to be so positive in the context of that very heated debate," he said. 

The poll results come just days before Alan Finkel, Australia's chief scientist, is due to release his review of Australia's energy security on Friday.

The report is widely tipped to offer a range of options to support the transition away from coal-fired power including a so-called low emissions target that would reward less polluting energy sources.

The Turnbull government has touted the need to provide energy that is reliable, affordable and sustainable, particularly the first two traits. Ms Oliver said this year's poll and those in recent years suggest the government would be at odds with public opinion if it downplayed environmental outcomes.

Solar panels: Demand is expected to continue to grow with 303 gigawatts installed globally at the end of 2016. Photo: Rob Homer

For instance, some 57 per cent of those polled this year listed climate change as "a critical threat", behind only international terrorism at 68 per cent and North Korea's nuclear program at 65 per cent.
"A majority think [climate change] is a critical threat to our national interest," Ms Oliver said. "It's a policy challenge that's not going to go away."
Climate's ranking as the third-most important threat is up from sixth spot in 2014. The 11 percentage-point jump since then has raised concerns about global warming above fears over cyber attacks, foreign investment in Australia and asylum seekers.

More bang, fewer bucks
The world's nations added a record 161 gigawatts of renewable energy in 2016. But falling prices of wind turbines and solar panels meant total investment in the sector retreated 23 per cent from 2015 to $US241.6 billion ($321 billion), according to the REN21 Global Status Report released on Wednesday.
Australia added 900 megawatts of new solar photovoltaic panels last year, the eighth-most in the world, behind China's leading surge of 34.5 GW.
By accumulated capacity, Australia had 5.8 GW of solar, ranking it ninth behind such nations as Germany, Italy, Britain and France. China was easily the largest, with 77.4 GW installed in a global total of 303 GW.
​About 30 per cent of dwellings in Queensland and South Australia had solar PV at the end of last year, the report noted.
A survey by Lowy in 2015 found 43 per cent of Australians expected solar to be "our primary source of electricity 10 years from now".
That compared with 17 per cent for coal, 13 per cent for nuclear, 10 per cent for gas and 7 per cent for wind. At the time of that 2015 survey, solar provided only about 2 per cent of Australia's electricity.

Links

• Almost all Australians favour renewables over coal and gas, and want more investment in energy infrastructure
• Majority of Australians believe global warming a serious problem
• Low emissions target: On carbon schemes, no one says the same thing for long
• Frydenberg hits phones to keep colleagues in line over climate
• At least Trump is true to himself about climate change