23/06/2020

(AU) Minerals Council Slammed For “Woefully Inadequate” Climate Action Plan

RenewEconomy -

 is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, RenewEconomy.
Some six months after being named on a list of the world’s top 10 most powerful climate policy opponents, the Minerals Council of Australia has unveiled its very own Climate Action Plan, in what it describes as part of an “ongoing commitment” to decarbonising Australia’s economy.

In a statement on Monday, the MCA said the plan outlined how the peak industry body and its members were taking action on climate change, and the minerals sector’s collective commitment to the Paris Agreement and its goal of net-zero emissions globally and in Australia.



The plan’s three core objectives, the MCA said, were to enable the potential of technology to decarbonise the minerals sector, to increase transparency in reporting from member companies, and to share practical knowledge on climate responses.

The Action Plan also underscores the myriad opportunities available to the sector in this transition to low-carbon technologies, which the MCA says “would not occur” without minerals and raw materials provided by the Australian mining sector.

“Sustained climate action across all nations is required to reduce the risks of human-induced climate change and to support world-wide decarbonisation as the world transforms to a lower emissions future,” a statement accompanying the plan said.

“With this plan, the sector acknowledges the critical importance of technology in reducing emissions. The minerals industry works with manufacturing and innovation partners to invent, develop and deploy new techniques and technologies.”

Minerals Council of Australia: Climate Action Plan (pdf)

But not everyone is convinced. After all, the MCA’s role as a local climate policy speed hump, and its strong ties with the climate policy lite federal Coalition government, are well documented in Australia and on RenewEconomy. Its former CEO and deputy CEO are key players in prime minister Scott Morrison’s advisory team.

The MCA handbrake on climate policy  has also been recognised internationally, with UK-based thinktank InfluenceMap ranking the Minerals Council at number 8 on its 2019 list of the world’s most impactful climate policy opponents.

And according to the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR), the MCA’s failure to articulate any tangible steps for its Climate Action Plan suggests that nothing much has changed.

In a scathing review of the plan, the ACCR points to the lack of any firm commitment to carbon pricing or any broader policies to decarbonise; any tangible dates and milestones for full decarbonisation, specifically beyond operations and regarding Scope 3 emissions from their products; any detail regarding the emissions from coal mining, and; any mention of phasing out coal mining or coal-fired power.

Instead, the plan makes vaguely worded commitments to “support zero emissions,” to “positively engage in relevant climate agendas and public consultation processes,” and to “engage productively in the business of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change including the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Minerals Council Chief Tania Constable. Picture Gary Ramage

“Renewable energy” rates less than half-a-dozen mentions in the entire document, most of which are focused on the sector’s continued embrace of solar and wind at the mine site (ditto to electric vehicles).

The focus, instead, appears to be on developing and deploying “low emissions technologies,” in line with both the federal government’s Technology Roadmap and the MCA’s own, which it says it has plans to develop.

Even more worryingly, these low-emissions technologies include “proven, safe and reliable Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS),” and “advanced nuclear solutions.”

All said, the plan falls well short of having any sort of substance, and well short, even, of the climate commitments of some of its more prominent members.

Just last week, leading iron ore company Fortescue Metals Group – controlled by billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest – announced a zero “operational” emissions target by 2040, and pledged to support the Paris “well below” 2°C climate target – suggesting that the whole Australian economy should do the same.

“What type of plan is this without any dates or targets?” Asks the ACCR’s director of climate and the environment, Dan Gocher, before answering his own question.

“This is embarrassing and woefully inadequate: the MCA can’t even commit to net zero emissions by any date,” he adds.

“Investors will be sorely disappointed. … This policy represents business as usual and further delays to action. Investors must call time on this farce.”

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(AU) Australia’s Devotion To Coal Has Come At A Huge Cost. We Need The Government To Change Course, Urgently

The Conversation - 

AAP/Lukas Coch


Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay
The Coal Curse: Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future
Because we are rich in coal and gas, Australia has been plagued with two decades of wars over climate policy. The wars have claimed three prime ministers: Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull. They have also, in the words of journalist Alan Kohler,
ruined Australia’s ability to conduct any kind of sensible discussion about economic policy and to achieve consensus on anything.
The response to the pandemic shows that consensus and effective, evidence-based policy are not impossible for Australia’s politicians. Faced with a crisis of life and death, they can put aside ideology and stare down vested interests.

The optimists among us hope they can do this with the life and death crises humanity is facing as the planet heats, and that the terrible fires last summer will have convinced our leaders climate change is real, and effective action urgent. So far, the calls for urgent action are louder from business than from political leaders. Innes Willox, the chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, has linked restoring growth after the pandemic to the achievement of net-zero emissions by 2050.

The federal government, by contrast, is championing gas as a “transition fuel” between coal and renewables. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s handpicked chair of the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission, Nev Power, has strong links to the gas industry.

Calling gas a “transition fuel” at least admits the need for a transition. But gas also contributes to the planet’s heating, and the federal government has no plausible plan to meet Australia’s Paris target, nor to ramp it up, which must be done for a safe future.

The grip that coal and gas has on our political elites goes back to the 1960s, when minerals replaced wool as the mainstay of our commodity exports. Iron ore and coal led the way.

About the same time, mining’s social licence was being challenged by Indigenous Australians, who objected to mining on their traditional lands, and by environmentalists concerned about mining’s destructive impact on natural habitats. The miners’ response was a concerted public relations campaign to align their interests with the national interest by convincing Australians their prosperity depended on mining and should not be curtailed.

In this, the miners have been spectacularly successful. First, in the 1980s, they stymied the implementation of the Hawke Labor government’s plan for uniform land rights legislation, which would include protection of sacred sites, the right to royalties and a veto over mining on Indigenous land.

In Australia, unlike other common law countries, the Crown owns the minerals, so the veto would have given Indigenous owners more rights than freehold owners. Miners launched a furious public campaign centred on the argument that Indigenous Australians should not have special rights.

A decade later, after the High Court determined in the Mabo and Wik judgements that forms of native title had survived European settlement, the miners fought again to make sure the resulting legislation did not include any veto over mining; and it didn’t.

Second, they have delayed effective government action on climate change. At the end of the century, as pressure mounted for a reduction in the burning of fossil fuels, Australia’s coal producers organised to prevent the federal government from signing international agreements to reduce carbon emissions. Their core argument was that mining underpinned Australia’s wealth, but they also spread scepticism about climate change amongst conservative elites, turning it into an identity marker for the Australian right.

A coal-fired power station in western NSW. The mining industry has delayed climate action. Daniel Munoz/AAP 

Under John Howard, fossil fuel advocates gained extraordinary access to government decision-making on climate and energy policy. This access was not given to environmental non-government organisations (NGOs) or climate scientists. So much for balance.

The power of the fossil fuel lobby was weaker after Howard lost the 2007 election. Later, it was unable to prevent the Gillard government from implementing a price on carbon and establishing a series of agencies to advance action on climate change.

But with Tony Abbott as prime minister, the industry’s power was back. Scepticism about climate science spread to science and expertise generally, undermining the federal government’s commitment to innovation and research. The fossil fuel lobby is not solely to blame for the Coalition’s philistinism under Abbott, but it bears some responsibility for its self-interested spreading of climate scepticism.

The mining lobby’s third success has been to capture the National Party and turn it into the party of coal and coal seam gas, even when extracting these destroys the good agricultural land on which our food security depends. This is an astonishing achievement.

In March 2019, on Network 10’s The Project, Waleed Aly asked Nationals leader Michael McCormack:
Could you name a single, big policy area where the Nats have sided with the interests of farmers over the interests of miners when they come into conflict?
Off the top of his head, McCormack could not name one. Mining has so successfully aligned itself with perceptions of the national interest that the National Party now champions the jobs of miners more energetically than the livelihoods of the farmers it once regarded as the heart of the nation.

The biggest lesson from the pandemic is that governments are our risk managers of last resort. Ours, both state and federal, have been prepared to inflict massive economic pain on businesses and individuals to protect our health, and we are grateful.

As we face the much larger but more slow-moving crisis of the heating planet, governments must stare down the fossil fuel industry and its supporters, for all our sakes, even if this inflicts on them some economic pain.

If they can do it for the pandemic, they can do it for climate change.

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Climate Crisis Threatens Future Of Global Sport, Says Report

The Guardian - 

Study says heatwaves, fires and floods, and rising sea levels pose major threat over coming years

The flooded Mosson stadium in Montpellier, southern France, in October 2014 after heavy showers led to flash floods. Photograph: Sylvain Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

The rapidly accelerating climate crisis threatens the future of major sports events around the world, according to a report that also says the global sporting industry is failing to tackle its own emissions.

The study found that in the coming years nearly all sports – from cricket to American football, tennis to athletics, surfing to golf – will face serious disruption from heatwaves, fires, floods and rising sea levels.

It also estimated that globally, sports’ own carbon emissions are equal to that of a medium-sized country, adding that sport administrators and stars had an important role to play in global efforts to tackle climate breakdown.

Playing Against the Clock
Andrew Simms, the co-ordinator of the Rapid Transition Alliance, which published the report, said: “Sport provides some of society’s most influential role models. If sport can change how it operates to act at the speed and scale necessary to halt the climate emergency, others will follow.”

The report found that in the next three decades a quarter of English league football grounds will be at risk of flooding every season, one in three British golf courses will be damaged by rising sea levels and the Winter Olympics will be increasingly difficult to stage because of rising temperatures.

It also highlighted how the climate crisis was already having an impact on major sports events. Last year’s Rugby World Cup was hit by a huge typhoon, while this year’s Australian Tennis open was disrupted by toxic smoke from the country’s devastating bush fires.

Commenting on the findings, Rosie Rogers, the head of Green Recovery at Greenpeace, said: “From flooding to sweltering heat, even sport can’t escape the climate emergency. But it’s also clear that the sector is playing a part in fuelling it.”

As it re-emerged from the Covid-19 lockdown the industry had a chance to think about how to do things differently and what a “sporting green recovery” would look like, she said.

“Whether that’s switching planes for trains, ditching single use plastic or cutting fossil fuel sponsorship, sport can show it’s on the winning side as we take the climate crisis head on.”

The study found that of hundreds of governing bodies, only five have a zero carbon pledge, with World Athletics, Formula 1 motor racing and the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which runs Wimbledon, having pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030.

The report’s author, David Goldblatt, said sport should be doing much more.

“Few human practices offer such an extraordinarily large, global, and socially diverse constituency as those playing and following sport. Making a carbon-zero world the common sense priority of the sports world would make a huge contribution to making it the common sense priority of all politics.”

Jens Sejer Andersen, the international director of Play the Game, the global organisation for good governance in sport, said the report underlined the need for the industry to take a lead in the fight against climate breakdown.

“We must be ready to revise the ways we organise our events and tasks … But we won’t stop here. Climate action must be an essential part of sports governance.”

He said the climate crisis would be a central topic at the organisation’s next international conference in 2021.

“We’ll do our best to engage our global network of reporters, sport leaders, athletes and officials in raising their game.”

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