Lethal Heating: 04/04/19

04/04/2019

Australia Stops Payments To Green Climate Fund

Climate Home News - Karl Mathiesen

Australian budget offers nothing to flagship UN scheme as its board seeks replenishment, while climate shapes as divisive election issue

Despite broad public concern about rising drought and bushfire risk, Australia's government has failed to bring emissions down. (Photo: Commons/virtualsteve)

Australia will stop contributions to the UN’s major fund for battling climate change this year, according to government budget papers released on Tuesday.
With a federal election looming, the government followed up on prime minister Scott Morrison’s threat not to “tip money into that big climate fund”.
Since 2015, Australia has given $187m to the fund, which finances projects in the developing world that cut emissions or promote resilience to climate impacts. The budget document said Australia made its “final” contribution of $19.2m in December.
Around a third of Australia’s overseas development budget is spent in the climate-vulnerable Pacific. But the Australia Institute’s Richie Merzian said multilateral institutions, such as the Green Climate Fund, were able to leverage private investment in projects in “a way that the Australian Government has struggled to do”.
“The GCF has co-financing capabilities and regional coverage that Australia couldn’t possibly provide,” he said. Merzian also noted that Australia’s overall aid budget was dropping when measured against the growing economy.
In a statement, Oxfam Australia said the budget was a “catastrophic failure of leadership in the face of the climate crisis – which is out of step with a majority of Australians – and growing inequality and it undermines the future of our Pacific neighbours”.
The Green Climate Fund formed part of a compact between poor and rich countries that was the basis for the Paris climate agreement. Having spent nearly half of its original $10.3bn allocation, the fund has signalled it intends to start raising new finance from developed countries this year.
By the time the hat is passed around, Australia’s position may have changed. The country is expected to hold elections next month, with the major parties sharply divergent on climate policy.
In a speech last year, shadow foreign minister Penny Wong said “it goes without saying” Labor would “be willing to work with” multilateral organisations including the Green Climate Fund to combat global warming.
This week, Labor gave an indication of the domestic climate package it will take to the poll. The partial release indicated it will try to revive the national energy guarantee, formerly a government scheme that saw Australia’s last prime minster overthrown in favour of Morrison.
The Labor version is more stringent and would cut emissions in the electricity sector 45% on 2005 levels by 2030. (The now-dropped coalition government plan aimed for 26%.) Labor also pledged that half of all new cars sold would be electric by 2030.
Polling puts the opposition Labor party, with leader Bill Shorten, in the lead. The government, on the defensive, has called Labor’s climate policy a “Trojan horse for a carbon tax” and announced tax cuts in a bid to win back voters.
In its budget, the Liberal-National coalition announced $2bn over 15 years to finance what treasurer Josh Frydenberg called “practical emission reduction activities”. These include funding farmers and indigenous land managers to store carbon in the soil.
“Through our measures, as we have done in the past, we will beat our international emission reduction targets,” Frydenberg said on Tuesday.
Australia’s emissions grew last year by 0.9%, according to the latest government data. The country has been criticised for using a system of pollution credits from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to meet its targets while allowing real emissions to continue rising. Labor has said it would close that loophole.
The Australian Conservation Foundation’s chief executive officer Kelly O’Shanassy said the scheme needed reform to close loopholes that could see some of that money spent upgrading old fossil fuel plants.
The amount available for climate projects pales in comparison to fuel tax breaks for businesses, O’Shanassy added. “In this budget the government plans to spend $4.36 subsidising pollution for every dollar it spends on climate action.”

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Labor's Climate Change Policy Explained: Here's What We Know

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

As the partisan debate roars back to life with Coalition claims of ‘carbon tax 2.0’, these are the facts

Bill Shorten charges an electric car after launching Labor’s climate change policy in Canberra on Monday.
Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Just days before the federal election is called, Labor has released the final component of its climate change policy. Scott Morrison has promptly declared it is carbon tax 2.0 and the regulations will impose massive costs on Australians. Given this partisan debate, which has paralysed Australian politics for a decade, has been characterised by hyperbole and misinformation, let’s work through this latest policy instalment, sector by sector, and then consider the implications.

Energy
Labor says if it wins the coming election it will try to implement the national energy guarantee abandoned by the Coalition, with a higher emissions reduction target – 45% by 2030. The government’s electricity target was 26%. If the Coalition in opposition declines to support the Neg, Labor will pursue plan B. Plan B involves topping up the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to the tune of $10bn and a new $5bn fund to modernise ageing transmission infrastructure. The objective of the intervention is to drive higher take-up of renewables in the grid. Labor has a target of sourcing 50% of electricity from renewables by 2030. Coupled with this, a Just Transition Authority will be established to help manage the retirement of the coal fleet, with generators required to give three years’ notice of closure.

Heavy industry
As well as reviving the national energy guarantee, Labor is borrowing another existing Coalition policy to bring down industrial pollution. It will use the current safeguard mechanism, which is part of the Direct Action scheme, but will extend coverage so that more companies are captured. The scheme works like this: companies are allocated baselines, and if they pollute above that level, they need to buy carbon credits (more about this is in minute), which imposes a cost on their business. Labor says it will reduce pollution in the covered entities by 45% on 2005 levels by 2030, but is planning to consult with firms on what their baseline should be, and about the specific emissions reduction trajectory for each entity. It is also planning to assist emissions-intensive trade-exposed companies with the transition.

Transport
The approach in transport is two pronged. Labor is proposing to introduce vehicle emissions standards “in line with” 105 grams of CO2 pollution per kilometre, which is the same as the US. The standard is imposed on car retailers (not manufacturers), which means car dealers will have to offset sales of high-emissions vehicles with sales of low-emissions vehicles. Coupled with this, Labor is setting targets for the take up of electric vehicles. It wants a national EV target of 50% of new sales by 2030, and a government fleet target of 50% of new sales by 2025, and it will also allow businesses to claim deductions if they buy EVs valued at more than $20,000. It will also require all federally funded road upgrades to incorporate EV charging infrastructure.
Given Labor will impose significantly tougher pollution rules than the Coalition, it also wants to boost the supply of carbon offsets. With this market becoming more important, Labor is flagging a new certification framework to ensure that carbon credits are sufficiently high quality. It will also strengthen the Carbon Farming Initiative, which allows farmers and landholders to generate carbon credits which they can sell on the carbon market. It will also allow heavy emitters to use international permits to meet their pollution reduction requirements, but Labor is not yet saying what limits might apply. It will not use carryover credits from the Kyoto period, which the Morrison government intends to use to help meet the Paris target.

Agriculture
Farmers are largely off the hook in Labor’s policy. On the positive side of the ledger there are opportunities to generate carbon credits, which generates income. The sting is land clearing. Labor is signalling it wants to extend the Queensland regime to other jurisdictions, working through the Council of Australian Governments process. That’s a principle though. There’s no detail beyond that in the policy.

Will the policy cut pollution by 45% on 2005 levels by 2030?
This is the big question. Unsurprisingly, given the toxic history, the Morrison government has resumed hollering about carbon taxes and environmental regulations that will bring Australia to its knees, but the fact is we don’t have a number of important details that would allow anyone to make fact-based conclusions. Labor says we’ll have a new vehicle emissions standard, but hasn’t said when that will apply, or the specific level of emissions reduction from transport it is factoring in as a consequence. Similarly Labor is arguing it will achieve a 45% cut from heavy emitters while allowing caveats like consultations on baselines and trajectories. Labor is not planning to release a carbon budget, which would make transparent estimates about the level of pollution cuts it is factoring-in in each sector. It is unable to say how carbon trading between the energy and industrial sectors might work because the proposed regulatory frameworks are conceptual rather than fully fleshed out. Given there are stakeholders sitting on the sidelines ready to go to war, and the Coalition is hoping that calling something that isn’t a carbon tax a carbon tax (again) represents a sound political strategy with an election in sight – the vagueness from Labor is deliberate. But there are significant unanswered questions here.

Will this policy happen, even if Labor wins?
Another big question. The Coalition is not showing any sign of having a substantial conversion on climate change. Labor will likely need the Greens to get various changes legislated and the Greens will want a higher level of ambition than is evident in this policy. The Greens will want Labor to execute a faster transition away from coal, and they are already saying no to the use of international permits. So it’s entirely possible that the long unproductive deadlock will continue. We have a long way to go.

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Coalition's Climate Solutions Fund Must Last A Further Five Years

The Guardian - Paul Karp

The $2bn promised for Australia’s greenhouse gas abatement projects will be spread over 15 years, not 10, Tuesday’s budget revealed

Emissions from a coal fired power station. The Coalition effectively cut funding to reduce emissions in Tuesday’s budget. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Getty Images

The Coalition plans to spend its $2bn “climate solutions fund” over 15 years, not 10, as promised when it unveiled the rebadged emissions reduction policy in February.
The decision, revealed in Tuesday’s budget, effectively cuts the amount spent per year from $200m to $133m over the life of the fund, which pays polluters to implement greenhouse gas abatement projects.
Labor’s climate spokesman, Mark Butler, has accused Scott Morrison of already cutting the “main policy to deliver his weak 2030 pollution reduction targets”, while the Greens attacked the Coalition for spending just $189m over the first four years.
The $2bn relaunch of the Abbott-era emissions reduction fund was part of the Morrison government’s effort to bolster its environmental credentials in the face of rising community concern about the impact of climate change and challenges from independent candidates targeting the Liberal party on its climate record.
In February the prime minister’s office briefed journalists, including Guardian Australia, that $2bn would be invested over 10 years in the climate fund to build on the ERF’s record of reducing emissions by 193m tonnes.

On 25 February Scott Morrison told Sky News the Emissions Reduction Fund was a $2bn investment “over the next 10 years”, a comment he repeated in a speech the following day.
But in the budget papers released on Tuesday, the climate solutions fund is allocated $2bn over 15 years from 2019-20, including $189m over four years.
Butler said: “This was the policy that was meant to do the heavy lifting to deliver the government’s 2030 emission reduction targets, even though government data projects Australia will fail to meet even this government’s weak emission reduction targets.
“This is a budget from a government that has given up governing, and never tried to deliver real climate action.”
The Greens climate spokesman, Adam Bandt, said the government planned to spend just $189m over four years on “its signature climate ‘policy’”, noting “there’s more new money for the Cairns ring road than for climate change” in the 2019 budget.

Labor’s climate policy is to reduce emissions in the electricity sector by 45% by 2030.
On Monday Labor added a target for the rollout of electric vehicles, the promise to introduce vehicle emissions standards and to beef up the safeguard mechanism to impose new pollution reduction requirements for the aviation sector, cement, steel and aluminium, mining and gas, direct combustion and the non-electricity energy sectors.
The budget showed that the balance of the Coalition’s $3.5bn climate solutions package includes:

Up to $1.38bn in equity over six years for the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project and $5.5m for oversight of that project
$61.2m for the energy efficient communities program
$56m for a feasibility study for the second inter-connector between Tasmania and the mainland
$18m on energy efficiency; and
$400,000 to develop a national electric vehicle strategy

An investigation by Guardian Australia last year found it was often difficult to determine if the emissions reduction fund was offering value for money.
Malcolm Turnbull, who once branded the approach “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale”, let the ERF dwindle to almost nothing as he pursued policy alternatives, including the national energy guarantee resisted by conservatives and dumped by Morrison shortly after he took the Liberal leadership last year.

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