24/05/2020

(AU) Carbon Road Map Winning Few Friends, Little Influence

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley | Mike Foley

Last December, as the world's horrified attention was drawn to the worst bushfires in Australia's known history, the nation was also making news for its efforts to dilute global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions during crucial climate negotiations in Madrid.

Breaking with diplomatic norms Costa Rica's environment and energy minister Carlos Manuel Rodríguez called out three countries as the chief wreckers: The US, Brazil and Australia.

Delaying tactics? Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor during Question Time. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

"I am deeply pained by the attitude of the current Australian government: that still after the worst disaster that has ever hit the planet, the bushfires in Australia, that this government is still denying climate change and denying the fact that there is a lot that Australia can and should be doing," one of the United Nation's top climate negotiators, Christiana Figueres, later told the ABC.

In January the 2020 Climate Change Performance Index, drafted by a group of think tanks including the NewClimate Institute, the Climate Action Network and Germanwatch, was published.

Of the 61 nations whose climate policy it considered it ranked Australia as having the worst.

One of the authors of that survey was Ursula Hagen of Germanwatch. Having read the government's so-called Technology Road map released this week in draft-form Hagen told the Herald and The Age that she sees no reason why the document would cause Australia's rank to change.

"It lacks any clear targets [for emissions reduction], it has no clear policy of how it might achieve any targets," Hagen says. "It is not a strategy."



The central criticism of the road map is that it is essentially a survey of (mostly) green technologies that the government may support at the advice of an expert panel in order to create an economy that emits less carbon, but which maintains growth and jobs.

"We do not need another survey of technologies that might save us in the future," says Associate Professor Malte Meinshausen, the founding director of the University of Melbourne's climate and energy college.

"We already know what the technologies are. We need regulatory reform and a plan to use them."

In his experience, says Meinshausen, surveys of emerging technologies have been used to delay real action.

Nor does the road map contain a quantifiable set of objectives. It does not outline how much less carbon the government wants Australia to emit over the coming years, or how it might meet such targets.

This is despite the fact that the entire global effort in combating climate change is predicated on setting and meeting targets.

Scientists tell us that to stave off the worst impacts of climate change we need to keep global warming under 2 degrees and as close to 1.5 degrees as possible. Australia agreed to this at the Paris climate talks in 2015.

According to the UN the world is currently on track for a 3.2C temperature rise. In order to pull back towards 1.5 degrees of warming the world now needs to cut its emissions by 7.6 per cent annually. Each year we delay action, that figure rises.
'We have all the technology already. We don't need to look at things that might save us in 10 or 20 years.'
Malte Meinshausen, founding director of the University of Melbourne's climate and energy college.
Due to Australia's reliance on coal it is among the highest per capita carbon emitters on earth, with 0.3 per cent of the world's population we release 1.07 per cent of greenhouse gases.

Nonetheless, and despite drought and bushfires already demonstrating how susceptible Australia is to climate change, our leaders have proved to be among the least ambitious in confronting the crisis.

Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor said the Paris agreement set a "joint target with other countries around the world to reduce emissions to net-zero in the second half of the century". The federal government has declined to set any earlier commitments.

Australia's global critics view this as not in keeping with the spirit of the Paris agreement.

Article two of the agreement locks signatories into following the "best available science" on emissions reduction and to pursue the "highest level of ambition" to act consistently with global action needed to keep warming in check.

This clause sets a de facto deadline on achieving net-zero emissions, Australian National University Emeritus Professor Will Steffen told the Herald and The Age earlier this year.

"To stay within two degrees we need to reach net-zero emissions by 2040-2045 at the very latest: 2050 is too late, we've already put too much carbon into the atmosphere," Professor Steffen said.

The Paris Agreement also includes an interim target. For Australia, that means reducing emissions by at least 26 per cent by 2030, based on 2005 levels, or a cumulative 695 million tonnes of carbon.

To reach this target Australia is insisting on counting the 365 million tonnes of "carryover credits" it earned by exceeding the target set in a previous international treaty – the Kyoto Protocol. It is this demand that prompted such fury at Australia in Madrid in December, and which is causing such concern around the world as nations prepare for the next round of talks in Glasgow next year.

Which brings us back to the road map announced this week.

Experts were cheered that it made no mention of coal. Some were shocked that it listed gas and carbon capture and storage as technologies that may win support, while others welcomed its recognition of the wide-scale technology reform needed to achieve net-zero emissions.

In a perfect policy world, experts argue, the government would help industry meet the target by investing in incentives for industry. That means offering subsidies to industry to adopt low-emissions technologies.

This creates a "push factor" for industry to change. The push factor would be complemented by "pull factors" – namely government-set quotas for products and services produced by the low-emissions industries.

For example, concrete produced through renewable power, low emissions heating and lighting in new buildings, electric vehicles in public transport, and so on across the economy.

"There is no space any more for any more fossil fuels," says Tim Baxter, a senior researcher with the Climate Council.

At next year's climate talks each nation is expected to present even more ambitious reduction targets, and a plan for meeting them. So far, the road map is the closest thing Australia has to such a plan.

According to Richie Merzian, who in 2013 was a lead negotiator for Australia at climate talks in Warsaw, the document will be viewed as inadequate at best.

"No one asked for this. There was no international body that wanted a technology road map, what people want is a target and a strategy," he says.

Merzian – now director of climate and energy policy at The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank – still recalls how isolating it was to represent Australia that year, shortly after Tony Abbott had come to power and denounced the UN climate system as socialism masquerading as environmentalism.

Each day during the bruising talks members of civil society groups would vote on which nation had played the most destructive role and present a representative of that nation with a "fossil of the day award". Australia took it out time and again.

"We were seen as a nation that was happy for domestic politics to undermine collective international action," he says.

Asked what a comprehensive plan would look like Meinshausen can rattle off a detailed framework from the top of his head.

It would begin with an optimistic vision of an Australia in 2030 with a bustling outwardly focused economy fuelled by renewable energy and meeting emissions reduction targets.

It would chart a course on how to achieve that goal based on four pillars:
  • Regulatory reform centred on some form of carbon price.
  • Outline how the government would help to strengthen the grid and buttress it with batteries and technologies such as pumped hydro to store and dispatch power.
  • Consider how our land management practices could arrest carbon emissions from forestry loss and boost the amount of carbon we stored in soil via agricultural practices.
  • Detail how the government would help Australia become a heavy industry powerhouse, supporting green energy intensive manufacturing.

"We have all the technology already. We don't need to look at things that might save us in 10 or 20 years," he says. "We need policy and regulatory reform and implementation now."

According to Herve Lemahieu, the director of the Lowy Institute's Asian power and diplomacy program, the cost to Australia of isolation on climate change extends far beyond climate talks.

He says Australia was facing further embarrassment at the Glasgow talks in November, before they were delayed due to COVID-19, and it has won something of a diplomatic reprieve due to its effective handling of the pandemic. He cites the support Australia was given at the World Health Assembly for its calls for an inquiry into the source of the coronavirus.

But he says soon climate change will again be the focus of the world, and Australia will again be isolated for its recalcitrant response.

"It is going to be harder for Australia to deepen its relationships with like-minded middle powers, which Australia needs to do in the absence of US global leadership."

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(AU) Australia's Gas And Electricity Producers Push Back On Government Intervention

The Guardian -  |

Subsidies should focus on early-stage clean technologies not energy sources that are already mature or commercial, Energy Council says

Gas producers have warned against the Morrison government underwriting a massive expansion of the industry, saying it could raise prices. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Australia’s oil and gas producers have warned against the Morrison government underwriting a massive expansion of the domestic industry, saying the country does not have a gas shortage and intervention could reduce supply and raise prices.

The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association said it welcomed some recommendations on gas in a leaked draft report by a manufacturing taskforce advising the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission, but it also included “ideas that just won’t work”.

The report suggested taxpayers should underwrite an increased national gas supply from multiple new fields and help build multibillion-dollar interstate gas pipelines, and the states should introduce “reverse auction” subsidy schemes for gas-fired power.

Andrew McConville, APPEA’s chief executive, did not say which recommendations he thought made sense and which he rejected, but said the country should “let gas markets work”. “Intervention is not needed and could be potentially counter-productive by discouraging investment, reducing supply and raising prices,” he said. “There’s also the question of what is the problem we are trying to solve?”

McConville said the Australian Energy Market Operator had found there was no gas shortage, and the taskforce’s recommendations would not keep prices to the historically low level of $4 a gigajoule as it hoped. He said Asian countries had managed to have strong manufacturing industries – the point of the taskforce’s report – with much higher prices.

The report to the NCCC leaked as the government kicked off the process of developing its much-vaunted technology investment roadmap with the release of a discussion paper flagging taxpayer support for innovation.

The Australian Energy Council, which represents Australia’s major electricity and downstream natural gas businesses, echoed the warning from APPEA about the perils of arbitrary government intervention. It welcomed the discussion paper, but warned the government it should reserve taxpayer support for early-stage clean technologies, not look to subsidise energy sources that are already mature or commercial.

Sarah McNamara, the chief executive of the council, said many of the directions set out in the discussion paper were sensible, including focusing potential support for carbon capture and storage (CCS) on hydrogen and gas production rather than retrofitting coal-fired power stations, which had not been commercially successful.

“But as a note of caution, funding should be reserved for genuine innovation and to help establish early-stage clean technologies,” McNamara said. “It should not subsidise already commercial or mature technologies. The latter would simply undermine private investor confidence and inhibit market efficiencies.”

She said it was a “concern” that the taxpayer-funded Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency would be used to support already mature technologies. “Customers need to be confident that taxpayer funds are being spent on technologies that require support, not those that are already self-sufficient,” she said.

Facing sustained pressure to adopt a 2050 target of net zero emissions, pressure it is continuing to resist, the Morrison government plans instead to develop the roadmap as the cornerstone of the Coalition’s mid-century emissions reduction strategy. The discussion paper points to a role for gas, hydrogen, renewables and, potentially, nuclear power.

Angus Taylor, the energy and emissions reduction minister, and the NCCC has also focused on gas as being at the centre of economic recovery plans from the pandemic. The leaked report to the NCCC does not consider cleaner alternatives to the fossil fuel, or mention climate change or the country’s commitments to the Paris climate agreement, raising the ire of the renewable energy industry and climate activists.

Australia’s resources industry has welcomed the positive signals from the government on CCS and on nuclear. The Minerals Council of Australia – historically one of the major opponents of carbon pricing to drive the transition to low emissions – said it supported a “genuinely technology-neutral approach to reducing emissions which embraces global best practice and the adoption of CCS and advanced nuclear technology as well as renewables, gas, coal with CCS and pumped hydro”.

But the Investor Group on Climate Change, representing institutional investors managing $2tn in assets, said it would be important for the government to set clear goals through a national climate policy that made it clear Australia was heading for net zero emissions by 2050, consistent with its international obligations. It said private investors would be reluctant to invest in the transition if it did not.

Its director of policy, Erwin Jackson, queried whether new gas investments were consistent with that objective. “Private investors are already making climate risk assessments in their portfolios about carbon-intensive fuels like gas as compared to zero-carbon alternatives like renewable energy and storage technologies,” he said.

“Governments will also need to assess whether further support and investment in gas projects are resilient to continued rapid cost reductions in clean energy options and an accelerated shift to truly zero-emissions energy options”.

Prof John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, said the government’s thinking was “five to 10 years behind the times”.

“Although the idea of new coal-fired power stations seems finally to have been abandoned, the report focuses heavily on technology options that seemed promising in the past, but have now been abandoned everywhere in the developed world, such as nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration,” he said.

But he said the roadmap’s most significant failure was that it did not recognise that gas-fired electricity generation was increasingly being supplanted by renewable energy backed by battery storage. “The policy remains fixated on extractible resources such as coal and gas, ignoring our massive endowment of solar and wind resources,” he said.

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Experts Urge Further Climate Action As Lockdown Triggers 'Extreme' Emissions Drop

Sydney Morning Herald - Miki Perkins

The coronavirus shutdown has triggered extraordinary reductions in global carbon emissions but the likely annual decrease is comparable only to the reductions needed year on year over decades to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, new research finds.

Government action and economic incentives after the pandemic are likely to influence global carbon emissions for decades to come, according to new peer-reviewed research and analysis published in Nature Climate Change.

Global carbon dioxide emissions decreased by up to 17 per cent by early April. Credit: AAP

There has been much speculation about the likely impact of COVID-19 restrictions on carbon pollution, and this is the first peer-reviewed research in a scientific journal to robustly examine the decrease.

It found global carbon dioxide emissions decreased by up to 17 per cent by early April, when compared with emissions in 2019. Surface transport, power and industry were the most affected sectors, accounting for 85 per cent of the total reduction in global emissions.

The changes were largest in China, where the COVID-19 confinement started, then the US and Europe.

But while these daily and monthly decreases in carbon emissions were "extreme and probably unseen before", the authors point out the annual decrease is likely to be much lower.

The emissions outlook for the rest of 2020 will depend on the duration of pandemic confinement and the degree to which life returns to normal.

But even if some restrictions remain in place until the end of the year, the report authors estimate it will lead to a maximum decrease of carbon emissions in 2020 of only 4.2-7.5 per cent.

These figures are comparable with the rates of decrease needed year on year over the next few decades to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees of warming.

According to the most recent UN emissions gap report, a reduction of 7.6 per cent is needed year on year to reach that target.

"What has been really shocking is that although we were shutting down the whole economy, we were still emitting about 92 per cent of the emissions we emitted before COVID," said Dr Pep Canadell, a co-author of the research paper and senior research scientist at the CSIRO.

"It shows the fossil energy system is so ingrained into the fabric of our society and economy that even when we shut down a huge part of it we still emit large amounts of carbon."

The changes are likely to be temporary because they do not reflect structural changes in the economic, transport or energy systems, the authors write.

"These numbers put into perspective ... the size of the challenge we have to limit climate change in line with the Paris Climate Agreement."

Despite the significance of carbon emissions, there are few systems to monitor global emissions in real time, and usually this data is released months or even years later.

The study authors gathered all the available data – from aviation to mobile phone statistics – to determine the extent that different coronavirus confinement policies affected emissions.

There are opportunities to set structural changes in motion by ensuring economic stimuli is aligned with low-carbon initiatives, they say.

These could include changes to surface transportation, says Dr Canadell. Surface transport accounted for nearly half the decrease in emissions during confinement, and active travel (walking, cycling and using e-bicycles) have social distancing advantages.

"Now, more than ever before, we need to be careful that anything we have to do with energy is well aligned with the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement," he said.

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