Lethal Heating: 02/26/19

26/02/2019

Scott Morrison Announces $2 Billion Climate Solutions Fund To Reduce Australia's Emissions

ABC - Jade Macmillan

Scott Morrison outlines his new climate change policy. (ABC News)

Key points

The policy is an extension of former prime minister Tony Abbott's Emissions Reduction Fund
Mr Morrison said the new scheme would play a "key" role in helping Australia meet the commitment to reduce emissions by 2030
Senior Liberals had flagged the need for new climate policies ahead of the expected election in May

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has launched a new pre-election climate change policy, pledging $2 billion for projects to bring down Australia's emissions.
The Climate Solutions Fund is an extension of former prime minister Tony Abbott's Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF).
"It's important to have a balance in your emissions reductions policies. You've got to have the cool head as well as the passionate heart," Mr Morrison said.
"Our Government will take, and is taking, meaningful, practical, sensible, responsible action on climate change without damaging our economy or your family budget."
The Prime Minister has repeatedly said Australia would meet its Paris commitment of reducing emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2030 "in a canter", despite recent government projections casting doubt over that figure.

Australian company directors have
started caring about climate change

Australian company directors nominate climate change as the number one issue they want the government to address in the long-term, in a survey of more than 1,200 business leaders.

Mr Morrison said the ERF had delivered 193 million tonnes of emissions reductions so far and the new scheme would play a "key" role in meeting the 2030 target.
"It's been an incredibly successful program, both improving the economy and supporting the environment," he said.
"It was always our intention that we would need to extend that out to ensure we met our 2030 targets, which we will."
Meeting the 2030 commitment also relies on counting old credits, left over from the Kyoto targets, a move criticised by some experts but defended by Environment Minister Melissa Price.
"We've never actually shied away from that, we're very open and upfront about that," she told The World Today.
"This will ensure that we actually meet our targets.
"Now, you and I can argue over whether carry over should be included or not, we say that we're entitled to include carry over and we say here are our policies with our target of 26 to 28 per cent that's going to ensure that we meet that target by 2030."
The Prime Minister also announced $56 million to fast-track the development of a second Bass Strait interconnector as part of an extra $1.5 billion package of measures.
Further details are yet to be announced, but Mr Morrison said the measures would include improving energy efficiency standards and developing an electric vehicles strategy.

Senior Liberals have flagged need for new policies

Banks increase exposure to fossil fuels

Australia's major banks have been getting back into fossil fuels over the past year, casting doubt on their seriousness in tackling climate change through their investments.

The Coalition dumped its proposed National Energy Guarantee in the wake of the leadership spill that rolled former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull last year.Senior Liberals, including federal president Nick Greiner, had flagged the need for new climate change policies ahead of the election, expected to be held in May.
A number of Coalition MPs are facing challenges from high-profile independents campaigning on the need for more action on climate change, including in Mr Abbott's seat of Warringah.
Shadow Climate Change Minister Mark Butler said a Labor government would scrap the Prime Minister's policy.
"What he's doing is again making [taxpayers] foot the bill for something that big polluters should be doing," he said.
"The question really here is whether people would trust a Government that has spent five years trashing climate policy, trashing climate science, led by a Prime Minister who brought a lump of coal into the Parliament, suddenly to have had some last-minute conversion in the shadow of an election campaign to take climate change seriously."
Labor has set its own emissions reduction target of 45 per cent by 2030, a figure Mr Morrison said was "reckless" which would put a "wrecking ball" through the economy.

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When The Polls Are Tight The Coalition Pretends To Care About Climate

Fairfax - Nicky Ison*

Scott Morrison with much fanfare has announced the Coalition’s climate policy – the Climate Solution Package. Unfortunately, for those 59 per cent of Australians who according to the Lowy Institute want strong government action on climate change, this announcement is not a climate hit, but rather to borrow the words of Propellerheads and Shirley Bassey, “a joke that is rather sad and just a little bit of history repeating”.

Scott Morrison announces the government\'s climate package at a function in Melbourne. Credit: David Crosling

We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again - every time the polls are tight and an election is coming the Coalition pretends that it cares about climate. For example, after a decade of refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol, John Howard announced an emissions trading scheme in the lead up to the 2007 election, yet when push came to shove in 2009 the Coalition rolled a leader over it. Then in 2013, Abbott announced the Emissions Reduction Fund, his alternative to the extremely effective Gillard Clean Energy Future package. Now in 2019, after toppling a Prime Minister over climate six months ago, Scott Morrison is trying the same old thing.
So what did he announce yesterday? The main commitment was the Climate Solution Fund, a plan to top up Abbott’s ERF with $200 million a year over a decade. Despite its nice name and the many times Morrison claimed that Australia will meet it’s Paris targets in a canter, the reality is that this rebranded Abbott-era policy is anything but a solution to climate change.
From its inception in 2014, the ERF has been the perfect policy for a political party that wants to say it has a climate policy, without actually taking any significant economic or policy measures to address the issue. It works by running competitive rounds to purchase voluntary climate pollution reduction, if reduction is achieved, the organisation planting trees or successfully capturing landfill gas gets paid by the government.
To date, Australian taxpayers have forked out $2.3 billion to purchase 193 million tonnes of carbon pollution reduction. This might sound like a lot, but the scheme doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny.
A key flaw is that the abatement isn’t necessarily permanent. For example if a bushfire goes through some of the trees planted under the scheme, then taxpayers have paid for nothing.
Second, a number of the projects funded would have gone ahead anyway. Just yesterday it came to light that the ERF has paid mining company Gold Fields to build a gas power plant that the company would have built it regardless of taxpayer funds.
The ultimate proof that this policy doesn’t work, of course, is the fact that Australia’s carbon emissions have gone up year on year while this policy has been in effect, and continue to do so. Yesterday’s announcement is just more of the same. Worse, its actually less than half the funding commitment that Abbott made leading up to the 2013 election.
Apart from rebranded ERF, the government’s policy announcement consisted of a grab-bag of ideas that might not agitate the Coalition’s hard-right faction too much. These include an extra $1.5 billion for some pumped hydro and a transmission line for Tasmania, an electric vehicle strategy, and energy efficiency measures.
While these measures are needed, they are vastly inadequate. The pumped hydro and transmission infrastructure is a tiny drop in the vast ocean of policy support needed to unlock the new renewable energy zones that the Australian Energy Market Operator is planning. The energy efficiency commitments have already been made in their 2015 National Energy Productivity Plan, which hasn’t had any substantial budget commitment in the last four years.

The Morrison government's electric vehicle strategy is unlikely to unsettle its hard right faction. Credit: NG HAN GUAN

And then there is the single most obvious fact that unravels the credibility of the whole policy – there is no acknowledgement that Australia’s single biggest source of carbon pollution is coal.
This is the simplest yardstick to assessing any policy on climate change, and a big moral question going into this election. How we reduce the mining and burning of coal?
It’s a question that the Australians who are already suffering the impacts 1 degree Celsius of warming are asking; that the school kids striking for our climate are asking.
Unfortunately, this policy doesn’t have any answers.
This announcement was the federal Coalition facing up to the inescapable fact that it can’t go into the election looking like, to quote one of its own, “homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers”. However, in the end the world keeps revolving, the Earth keeps warming, emissions keep rising and the Coalition continues to repeat its past mistakes on climate.

*Nicky Ison is the founding director of the Community Power Agency and a research associate at the University of Technology Sydney.

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If The Coalition Has Had A Climate Epiphany, I'm Beyoncé

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

Call the emissions reduction fund a ‘climate solutions’ fund if you like, but it doesn’t mean it is

‘Monday’s climate policy pivot reflects Morrison’s limited options.’ Photograph: David Crosling/AAP

Let’s start with the good news. Scott Morrison is talking constructively about climate change because he is intelligent enough to understand that failing to do that renders the Coalition unelectable in parts of the country, and with parts of its own base.
Compared with where we’ve been, a Liberal prime minister standing up at a podium, accepting the science of climate change and making the case for action, is progress.
We need to acknowledge it.
But this isn’t, ultimately, a test of talking points.
It has to be a test of substance, and a test of whether or not you are prepared to be a grown-up government facing up to a significant policy problem – and the truth is the Coalition has been here before.
Right on this spot.
John Howard had a very similar epiphany in 2007, delivering a speech in Melbourne within sight of an election in much the same way Morrison did on Monday. Like Morrison, Howard knew the Coalition needed to switch course on climate policy because Australians then, like now, were fretting about extreme weather and the droughts that never seemed to end.
Howard signed the Liberal party up to emissions trading during his 2007 pivot. But after he lost the election to Kevin Rudd, madness descended inside the Coalition, and raged in full public view for a decade, with that madness killing most of the optimal policy solutions for dealing with emissions reduction.

Morrison needed to put forward a serious policy program that is an implicit apology for past misdeeds. He didn't

While Morrison would like us to think that was all a bit of a bad dream, and the Coalition has actually been tremendous on climate policy despite all the compelling evidence to the contrary, the truth is the madness still defines the parameters of the policy.
Monday’s climate policy pivot reflects Morrison’s limited options. He’s unveiled a reboot of Tony Abbott’s Direct Action policy, kicking in more cash to the emissions reduction fund (although the cash only pans out at $200m a year), and giving it a new business card.
This mechanism will deliver some abatement, a significant chunk according to the government’s own projections, but the persistent question over the ERF as a mechanism (apart from why taxpayers have to pay, as opposed to big polluters) has always been whether it delivers any abatement beyond what would have happened anyway.
To put it simply: you can call the ERF a Climate Solutions Fund if you like, but giving it a reassuring sounding new name does not transform it into a mechanism designed to do the heavy lifting on emissions reduction that really needs to happen.
I could call myself Beyoncé too if I wanted to. It wouldn’t make me Beyoncé, sadly.
Other elements of the putative reboot include (probably) helping to build an interconnector between Tasmania and the mainland to maximise the potential of hydro (which is a useful development), and (presumably) pressing ahead with the Snowy 2.0 project that has been ready to go since last December. Despite not yet signing up to the expansion, the government has already built Snowy into its projections for meeting the Paris target. Nifty, huh?
There’s also something coming on electric vehicles, but there is no sign yet of an emissions standard for vehicles that would have any prospect of reducing pollution meaningfully from the transport sector. Flag that sort of thing and Nationals start rhapsodising about man’s inviolable right to his SUV.
The government is also failing to bite the bullet in other ways. We are building a big chunk of carry-over credits into our projections for meeting the Paris target, which you might be more sanguine about if there was evidence of a real emissions reduction plan, with real teeth, lined up against a bit of creative accounting to ameliorate some of the short to medium-term dislocation associated with transitioning a carbon intensive economy such as Australia’s to a low-emissions economy.
Just one more problem. You also have to line up Monday’s “climate solutions” pivot with the climate problem the government will create for itself if it proceeds to lock in more coal-fired power to Australia’s energy grid, underwritten by taxpayers, which is what the energy minister, Angus Taylor, keeps hinting he wants to do.
In order to hit reset on climate policy in a way that has some prospect of cutting through with the cohort of voters inclined to desert the government over this issue, and this issue alone, Morrison needed to do two things on Monday.
He needed to say sorry for all of that insanity. He needed to say I don’t know what came over us, but we aren’t going to do that again.
Prime ministers can do that in two ways. The first is to just say it, but that’s very hard for risk-averse politicians who equate public acts of humility with public acts of weakness.
The second is do it by implication: put forward a serious policy program that is an implicit apology for past misdeeds, and in so doing, project that you are prepared to stare down any internal brinkmanship that ensues.
That didn’t happen on Monday, and it didn’t happen on Monday because we all know what happens when the Coalition hits these particular tipping points.
Just ask Malcolm Turnbull.

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