03/05/2020

(AU) Australia Listened To The Experts On Coronavirus. It's Time We Heard Them On Climate Change

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

 Economic reconstruction is a chance to speed up decarbonisation, and the pandemic has shown a different kind of politics is possible

‘The energy market operator says Australia could accommodate levels of up to 75% “instant” wind and solar penetration in its main grid by 2025.’ Photograph: Tim Phillips Photos/Getty Images

Lenore Taylor is Guardian Australia's editor. She has won two Walkley awards and has twice won the Paul Lyneham award for excellence in press gallery journalism. Lenore co-authored, Shitstorm, a book on the Rudd government's response to the global economic crisis.
We’re already being swamped with ideas about “reforms” needed to recover from the pandemic crisis.

But the word reform is like gift wrap – a handy cover for any offering, thought-through or otherwise.

Perhaps we should ditch the word entirely, and with it the forest of feelpinions about what governments “must” do to advance an author’s previously-held ideological positioning in the post-corona world.

Imagine if we took just two lessons from the way Australian governments responded to the coronavirus: that good decisions are made when they consider the evidence and the best available expert advice; and that policy-making can accommodate reasonable differences of opinion, without becoming a “war”.

Think, as Laura Tingle did in a piece for the ABC’s 7.30 this week, of the difference it would make if interviewers and commentators allowed room for discussion of complex and competing ideas, before demanding that politicians rule them “in” or “out”, or before finding a backbencher who will say they might cross the floor on a policy that conflicts with their ideological prejudice – even if that policy hasn’t yet been outlined.

Now consider if those principles were applied to climate policy in Australia.

I concede that’s quite a leap given the past decade of mind-numbing debate, during which experts have struggled to get a look in. But in the background, some have been giving it a shot.

For six years now leading business, environmental, investor, union, farming and social welfare groups have been trying, largely in vain, to create a space for a sensible discussion about global heating, and to give Australian politicians a way to retreat from the self-defeating culture war that has scuppered all attempts at policy.

They wouldn’t put it this way, but in effect the environmentalists, desperate for Australia to make some meaningful move towards reducing emissions, and the business groups, desperate for some kind of investment certainty, have been trying to save Australia’s politicians from themselves.

The starting point for the Australian Climate Roundtable’s deliberations is that Australia needs to reach net zero emissions, and that delaying action just increases the cost of reaching that goal. Unremarkable propositions in any fact-based forum, but in some Coalition circles, still close to heresy.

Now the roundtable, including its business members, argues that this post-corona reconstruction is a chance to speed up decarbonising the economy.

The Business Council of Australia chief executive, Jennifer Westacott, argued in an opinion piece that the post-corona discussion should divest itself of “ideological constraints”.

“In resuscitating our economy, we can tackle some of our most vexed problems. Every dollar we invest in energy should be a dollar towards a lower carbon economy and lower energy bills,” she wrote.

And expert evidence about what might be possible has been flooding in by the day.

The Australian Energy Market Operator this week released its long awaited “renewable integration study”, which found Australia could accommodate levels of up to 75% “instant” penetration of wind and solar in its main grid by 2025 – that we have the know-how, but need to update market and regulatory settings.

Think about that next time someone starts burbling on about the impossibility of a renewable-dependent grid coping “when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine”.

Less than a year after an election in which Bill Shorten’s target of 45% renewables by 2030 was attacked for being “unachievable” and “economy wrecking”, the expert market operator says 75% is technically achievable – and in just five years time.

And then there was the advice from the International Energy Agency this week that renewable electricity will be the only energy source resilient to the biggest global energy shock in 70 years, triggered by the pandemic.

The Morrison government is supposed to be working on a “roadmap” towards some kind of long-term emissions reduction policy, understandably delayed while it deals with the pandemic.

It could draw on the work of a bunch of expert groups who have already had a go – the latest Climateworks report released earlier this month found that net zero emissions by 2035 is possible in Australia, using technologies that are mostly already mature and available.

The CSIRO’s roadmap released last year found there was no trade-off between economic growth and transitioning to zero emissions, and in fact strong action could lead to GDP growth, an increase in real wages and net zero emissions by 2050.

But then, apparently pre-empting his own policy, and contradicting his own government’s claim to be “technology neutral”, the energy minister, Angus Taylor, has spent the week calling for a “gas-fired recovery”, variously advocating more gas-peaking plants, more long-term gas supply for manufacturers and more onshore gas production.

The details of what he’s advocating remain opaque, but as the Grattan Institute’s energy expert Tony Wood points out, renewed suggestions of government intervention are only likely to deter investment, presumably the opposite of what Taylor is seeking.

If there’s a coherent policy in there somewhere, it really is time for the government to unwrap it. The experts have been waiting for years, and it turns out that listening to them is a good idea.

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