06/05/2020

(AU) Australian Businesses Call For Climate Crisis And Virus Economic Recovery To Be Tackled Together

The Guardian - 

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australia Industry Group, says Covid-19 and climate are ‘urgent’ challenges that overlap

Chief executive of industry group representing more than 60,000 businesses says ‘Covid-19 and climate are bigger than any economic challenge we’ve faced in the last century’. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Getty Images

A leading Australian business group is calling for the two biggest economic challenges in memory – recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and cutting greenhouse gas emissions – to be addressed together, saying it would boost growth and put the country on a firm long-term footing.

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says economic recovery from the virus and the transition required to meet net-zero emissions by 2050 are overlapping issues that should be taken on together.

“There’s a lot that we can do to rebuild stronger and cleaner,” Willox planned to say on Tuesday, according to a speech released in advance.

“The need is urgent. Covid-19 and climate are bigger than any economic challenge we’ve faced in the last century.”

Willox is among a band of community leaders and industry groups urging governments to back climate solutions in the pandemic recovery rather than projects that entrench or increase emissions.

They include the Investor Agenda, a global group of institutional investors and managers with members responsible for more than US$55tn worth of assets.

In a statement released on Monday, it said governments should avoid prioritising “risky, short-term emissions intensive projects”, and that accelerating the shift to net-zero emissions could create significant employment and economic growth while improving energy security and clean air.

“The path we choose in the coming months will have significant ramifications for our global economy and generations to come,” the group, which includes Australia’s Investor Group on Climate Change, said.

In Australia, visions for a “clean recovery” or “renewables stimulus” will be the focus of two online industry summits this week. Speakers include the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and energy ministers from four states.

The emphasis of the summits differs from that of the energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, who has backed gas, a fossil fuel, as key to driving the recovery after a slump in global oil and gas prices.

John Grimes, chief executive of the Smart Energy Council, which is hosting a summit on Wednesday, said the country needed to tackle the current economic crisis and the climate crisis at the same time or it would “lurch from one major problem to another”.

“This is Australia’s moment to modernise and grow the economy, create hundreds of thousands of new future-proof jobs and position Australia as a global renewable energy superpower,” Grimes said.

Willox planned to tell a separate forum hosted by the Clean Energy Council on Tuesday that last summer’s bushfires had been a preview of what lay ahead due to climate change. His speech notes said a successful energy transition must leave no-one behind and extend beyond electricity generation to include heavy industry, transport, agriculture, buildings “and more”.

“There is immense scope for reform and investment to support that transition, and getting started during the crisis will contribute to faster recovery,” he said.

He said the industry group had consulted widely on “the most constructive directions for recovery and transition”. Opportunities raised included:
  • improving energy management in homes and buildings by plugging drafts, modernising equipment and backing local electricity generation and storage; 
  • boosting electricity networks by rolling out smart meters and moving edge-of-grid customers on to mini-grids; 
  • helping shift heavy industry to run on clean electricity and hydrogen; and 
  • supporting large and small energy storage.
On transport, Willox said it was an excellent time to prepare cities and major corridors for mass take up of electric vehicles by installing or preparing for charging points at service stations, in public and government car parks, and at apartment blocks.

He said governments would have different preferences on whether to use regulatory reform, tax incentives, grants or other approaches. Giving the example of electricity, he said settling on a sound long-term design for market rules and climate policy could do as much to boost investment as direct public financial support.

A report by the Clean Energy Council, also released on Tuesday, estimated that 50,000 construction and 4,000 ongoing jobs could be created, and $50bn worth of renewable electricity and storage projects built, if governments backed green policies and regulatory reform to “jumpstart” the economy.

It said it would require help to overcome policy and grid transmission roadblocks that led to large-scale wind and solar investments falling 50% last year, changes to electricity market rules so the full benefits of energy storage were reflected and support for renewable hydrogen.

On a smaller scale, it would mean governments removing barriers for renters, low-income households and community groups installing solar and supporting home batteries by either reducing costs or offering low-interest loans.

Kane Thornton, the Clean Energy Council’s chief executive, said there were hundreds of large-scale wind and solar projects with planning approval that could proceed quickly, create jobs and bring down prices.

“This isn’t about a handout for industry when government is directing scarce taxpayer funding to other essential services and areas,” Thornton said.

“There is an enormous appetite for private investment in clean energy that can be unlocked through smart regulatory reform, sensible energy policy and investment in the grid and energy storage.”

The International Energy Agency last week reported a “staggering” plunge in global demand for coal, oil and gas during the pandemic, with only renewable electricity proving resilient.

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In The Midst Of An Economic Crisis, Can 'Degrowth' Provide An Answer?

The Guardian - Lola Seaton

Degrowthers are susceptible to caricature – but their ideas raise important questions about how, how much, and why we work

‘Reading the current moment as a repudiation of degrowth is premature and unjustified.’ Photograph: Michael Brochstein/Sopa/Getty Images

Amid the misery and chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there are some short-term consolations.

The precipitous drop in road and air traffic has left the air cleaner and the skies clearer.

For advocates of a Green New Deal (GND) – a vast, state-funded green infrastructure project, including a total transition to renewable energy and the construction of mass transit systems – there are reasons to be optimistic.

As the severity of the unfolding global recession becomes clear – the IMF predicts a 3% global contraction – the GND looks like the best route to recovery.

The GND had been growing in popularity before the outbreak – including among establishment politicians, with all the leading Democratic presidential candidates expressing support for some form of it.

But with with 26 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the past five weeks alone, and given that green industries are more efficient job creators than fossil-fuel ones, there is a powerful, immediate economic rationale for some kind of “green stimulus”.

That is without even taking into account the longer-term economic case for decarbonizing: a 2018 US climate report calculated that the devastating effects of unchecked global warming will shrink the US economy by as much as 10% by the end of this century.

But the economic fallout of Covid-19 has cast a harsher light on another strand of the climate movement, commonly termed “degrowth”.

Influential among Extinction Rebellion activists, but often regarded as unrealistic by mainstream policymakers, degrowthers, as their name suggests, argue that uncontrolled economic growth is ecologically unsustainable and that to avert climate catastrophe we need to not only shut down the fossil-fuel industries but to reduce consumption overall.

Degrowthers insist that we must find ways of living and working that do not require our economies to endlessly expand.

Degrowthers have been particularly susceptible to caricature in recent weeks.

“The coronavirus crisis reveals the misery of degrowth,” the Spectator predictably argued.

 But current living conditions – sudden mass joblessness, confinement and isolation, widespread food and income insecurity – are not a meaningful foretaste of greener things to come.

The nightmare we are currently enduring is not degrowth’s secret dream come true; it is at most a grotesque parody of it, and one which is now liable to be weaponized by opponents of the movement.

Reading the current moment as a repudiation of degrowth is premature and unjustified. It overlooks the distinction between what we are experiencing now – an unplanned, abrupt cessation of vast swaths of economic and social activity – and what advocates of degrowth envisage: a thoughtful, democratic, managed and equitable downsizing of the economy.

Most degrowth advocates do not champion economic contraction as such, but argue for the necessity of adapting to the continuing, long-term global stagnation sometimes called “secular stagnation”.

 The fact that we can only think of slowing down our economies in terms of recession and austerity – with the associated cuts to public spending, growth in inequality and decline in real earnings – says much more about our political landscape than the economic facts.

Yet there is one important criticism of degrowth that has been decisively bolstered by the sharp reversal in global economic fortunes resulting from the coronavirus lockdowns: the consequences for jobs.

GDP is a notoriously crude and partial measure of a society’s wellbeing, failing to account for a whole host of indicative factors including equality, access to energy, the quality of healthcare, education and social support systems.

But when GDP falls or slows because workers cannot produce goods or offer services, unemployment surges.

Coronavirus has brought that reality dramatically home.

As the economist and energy adviser Robert Pollin has written: “the immediate effect of any global GDP contraction would be huge job losses and declining living standards for working people and the poor.

During the Great Recession, global unemployment rose by over 30 million. I have not seen a convincing argument from a degrowth advocate as to how we could avoid a severe rise in mass unemployment if GDP were to fall by twice as much.”

The twin crises besetting us – the public health emergency and the unfolding economic trauma triggered by the measures to contain it – have laid bare much about the configuration of our world that we already knew but rarely fully apprehend: its interconnectedness, its fragility, its stark inequalities.

But these crises have also brought into visceral relief the fact that employment is the heart and soul of the economy. As the British economist James Meadway has argued, the economic depression now upon us threatens “the most fundamental institution of all in capitalism: the labor market itself”.

Since we have so little time left in which to stabilize the climate, we must be ruthlessly pragmatic in assessing the limitations of green strategies. Degrowth is no exception.

The scale and speed of investment required to completely renovate the energy and transportation sectors does not seem conceivable without growth continuing, at least for the time being.

Politically, as long as a steadily rising GDP remains an electoral necessity, it is difficult to imagine a recovery that doesn’t involve desperate efforts to restore growth – and not necessarily through greener means – by politicians anxious to revive flagging ratings.

Yet to fixate on the question of growth risks exaggerating the differences between the Green New Dealers and degrowthers – elevating the former as practical-minded technocratic capitalists who want a return to normal economic activity, just motored by a different energy source, and dismissing the latter as abstemious, back-to-the-land utopians who want to deprive of us most of the luxuries of modern capitalist life.

This in turn could lead to our learning only some of the lessons of the current predicament, and taking only some of the opportunities it offers.

What both strands of climate thinking ask us to consider – and what the current crisis poses with special, brutal force, as phrases like “key workers” and “essential services” enter common parlance – is the question of what kinds of jobs we need, and what kinds our planet needs of us.

Which goods and services are indispensable, and which would we be better off without? Degrowth and the GND offer different answers to this question – from green infrastructure construction to the care economy – but they both pose it, as well as raising important broader questions about how, how much and why we work.

Once it is safe to emerge from economic survival mode, I hope we will have the wisdom to follow the lead of both movements by systematically reflecting on which kinds of productive activity actually enrich our lives – and which among these our planet can sustain.

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