Lethal Heating: 09/24/20

24/09/2020

(AU) By 2020 Standards, Angus Taylor's Low-Emissions Technology Statement Is Not Really A Climate Policy

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Australians are just expected to trust the minister and his advisers to successfully pick winners deserving a crack at $18bn in taxpayers’ money

Angus Taylor’s low-emissions technology statement makes no attempt to set a path to net zero emissions, the underlying goal of the Paris agreement. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The first point to make about Angus Taylor’s low-emissions technology statement, launched on Tuesday as the Morrison government’s primary response to the climate crisis, is an obvious one: it would be terrific if it worked.

We should all hope the technologies that Taylor says the government will prioritise – hydrogen, energy storage, low emissions steel and aluminium, soil carbon and, yes, even the much-mocked carbon capture and storage (CCS) – come off and allow deep, rapid, sustainable cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Dealing with climate change is an unparalleled global challenge and any solution that can help address the problem should be embraced. Big claims have been made about the future of hydrogen, perhaps more than evidence to date can justify, but its potential applications across industry, manufacturing, transport and electricity are so great it is an obvious focus for research and development.

Similarly, taking steps to bring down the cost of energy storage is a no-brainer. The statement mentions the potential of pumped hydro, batteries and solar thermal. Cheap and varied storage options would, in theory, allow an accelerated take-up of renewable energy while reducing the reliance on the gas-fired power the government seems so keen to impose on the market.

The world needs affordable green steel production as quickly as it can get it, and the more carbon that can be sequestered in soils through improved farming practices the better.

CCS – capturing CO2 and burying it underground – is more problematic given its lengthy history of grand promises, taxpayer support for fossil fuel industries and lack of results. The statement’s suggestion it could be used in power generation seems fanciful given the international experience, but serious studies have found it is likely to be needed to play a role in industrial processes that are otherwise hard to deal with – so let’s not completely discard the idea.

The second point that should be made is less positive. While the technologies chosen may have varying degrees of merit, next-to-no evidence has been provided to explain how they were chosen, or why they are most deserving of a crack at $18bn in taxpayers’ money over the next decade. Instead, there are a series of unanswered questions.

It is not clear why they were preferred to other possibilities mentioned in the statement, including energy efficiency, electric vehicle charging infrastructure or steps to cut potent methane emissions. Based on Tuesday’s evidence, voters are just expected to trust Taylor and his handpicked advisers to successfully pick winners deserving of public support where others have failed.

The statement makes a series of big claims, including that it is anticipated the technologies will lead to Australia beating its 2030 climate target under the Paris agreement, help support more than 130,000 jobs and “avoid” 250m tonnes of emissions a year – nearly 50% of Australia’s current annual emissions – by 2040. No evidence has been released to back them up.

It sets “stretch goals” for each technology – the price point, Taylor says, at which technologies are cheaper than the more polluting alternatives used today. It is not clear how they will be met – there are no pricing mechanisms to drive technologies forward, no requirements for industry to adopt them – and the goals themselves do not come with a timeframe. A cynic might be tempted to think it was designed so the Coalition could never be accused of having failed.

The final, and perhaps most important, point to make is that the statement is not, by 2020 standards, really a climate change policy.

It makes no attempt to set a path to net zero emissions, let alone net zero by 2050, the underlying goal of the Paris agreement backed by scientific consensus, business leaders, farmers, unions and investors, and more than 100 countries.

The statement uses vague terms such as “clean” and “low emissions” technologies. Asked to define these terms, Taylor said they meant reducing emissions to below current levels. Without a concrete test – a low-emissions intensity standard or emissions reduction benchmark – it could be interpreted as suggesting a small improvement on today’s high-emitting levels would be enough. But it’s hard to know.

The statement does make clear that projects with the potential for significant greenhouse gas emissions, including hydrogen and steel made with gas, could win backing from public agencies created to lift renewable energy, assuming the government can convince the Senate to change the legislation for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

It is possible there is a case for this – that using gas in the short term could help bring on the shift that would lead to fewer emissions overall. But it could be justified from a climate perspective only if it was part of a clear plan to get to renewably-based green hydrogen, steel and aluminium as quickly as possible.

Major investors believe that’s what global markets will want. The government has not said that’s where it wants to go and it continues to reject the sort of overarching policy – some form of carbon price – that experts maintain would help drive emissions cuts at lower cost.

Instead, the prime minister says he sees net zero emissions as an issue for the second half of the century, a more distant goal than nearly everyone (other than those on the anti-science far right) believes is necessary. And he just wants us to trust him.

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(AU) There Are More Horses In The Energy Race, But Are They Fast Enough?

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

The new details of the government’s emissions reduction road map announced on Tuesday are sensible, modest and pragmatic, says Frank Jotzo, the head of the Australian National University's centre for climate and energy policy.

In the long run, he says, they would drive down Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor during his address to the National Press Club. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

"But we are not facing a modest long-term problem, [in climate change] we have an immediate large-scale problem.”

The new elements outlined by Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor on Tuesday, “do not match the urgency of that problem,” says Jotzo.

Central to Taylor’s speech was the announcement of a hierarchy of funding priorities. Technologies seen as not yet mature but with the potential to have “transformational impacts” in reducing Australian carbon emissions and benefiting the broader economy will be placed at the top.

Technologies judged to be no longer in need of government support – such as coal, gas, wind and solar – are ranked last and would only attract funding in the event of market failure.

In energy and reductions policy, Taylor said the nation needs "more horses in the race" and identified clean hydrogen, electricity from storage [such as batteries], the development of processes to make low carbon steel and aluminium, carbon capture and storage, and increasing the carbon content of soil in agriculture as tier one priorities.

The problem is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the world must start significantly reducing carbon emissions now if it is to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and set a pathway to keeping global warming as close to 1.5 degrees as possible.

Many experts propose that to meet these targets nations should be aiming to cut their emissions in half by 2030 and in half again by 2040.

By then the key technologies identified may not yet have reached scale. Clean hydrogen may need years of work in the development of electrolyzers to produce the gas.

Green steel, says Jotzo, has huge potential for reducing Australian emissions and boosting our industrial output but could still be 20 years away.

Tony Wood, director of the energy program at The Grattan Institute says he is inclined to “give the government the benefit of the doubt” for the plan. He says the technologies identified by Taylor are those he would pick.

“Of course any one of those horses could turn out to be a dog, and the government is going to have to be disciplined about killing it off and taking it to the knackery if that happens,” he says.

He acknowledged the monumental political problem Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Taylor face in corralling their party room to support any carbon abatement plan.

Perhaps most crucially he says there is potential for carbon abatement to accelerate once breakthroughs are made, especially given the huge amount of resources going into it around the world.

But both men are frustrated by what is not in the plan.

A carbon pricing mechanism – either in the form of a carbon tax or incentives paid to clean industry actors – would significantly speed up the transition to clean, they say.

“You could just stick all the policies we’ve tried over the years on a dartboard and pick one,” says Wood. “They work.”

Similarly, there is no incentive mechanism to drive coal out of Australia’s energy system. At present major coal-fired power stations are still expected to be churning away as late as 2048.

A plan with a spirit of urgency would include these measures, Jotzo says.

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(AU) A Policy Of The Fossil Fuel Companies, By The Fossil Fuel Companies, For The Fossil Fuel Companies

Crikey - Bernard Keane

The government's energy policy has been written by fossil fuel companies, to promote the scams of the fossil fuel companies, with taxpayers handing money to fossil fuel companies.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

We’ve reported it before, but there’s no reason to stop reporting it if they continue to offer up evidence for it: the Morrison government is a clutch of climate denialists eager to reward its major donors in the resources sector as much as it possibly can without incurring political damage.

Its “Low Emissions Technology Statement” and its commitment of $1.9 billion to support it has been crafted with that goal in mind. All the chin-stroking commentary from the Press Gallery about how the government has abandoned coal won’t change that.

The statement was literally written by fossil fuel company executives: the panellists who advised on the statement include former Origin CEO and former head of the climate denialist Business Council, Grant King; and the CEO of the Gas Infrastructure Group, Ben Wilson, along with another BCA director, Coca-Cola’s Alison Watkins, who is also a director of the Centre for Independent Studies, which has hosted climate sceptics.

The statement itself is aimless: it offers no hard targets of any kind. The real purpose is the promotion of carbon capture and storage, a repeatedly debunked myth peddled by fossil fuel companies, to the status of a foundational goal of Australian energy policy.

There it is on page five: the four “Big Technology Challenges” guiding the statement are “more affordable, clean and reliable energy to households and industry”, “expanding production and increasing productivity”, “preserving and expanding onshore manufacturing of energy-intensive products” and “scaling geological and biological sequestration”.

They may as well have included giant orbital sunshields as the fifth challenge, for all that sequestration will ever be a workable climate strategy.

Even the statement admits, quietly, that carbon capture and storage doesn’t work unless you have a pure stream of carbon dioxide to easily bottle and store. There’s a “stretch goal” of $20 per-tonne of CO2 for this, but that “does not cover capture processes, noting the cost of capture technologies varies between applications and depends on factors such as the relative concentration of CO2 produced by an industrial process”.

Even so, the government intends multiple mechanisms for handing taxpayer funding to fossil fuel companies in the name of CCS. There will be a “King Review Co-Investment Fund” — reflecting that a review of the government’s discredited Emissions Reduction Fund run by King and another fossil fuel industry executive, which recommended the fund embrace CCS, a “CCS Deployment Fund”, as well as “Emissions Reduction Fund methods to support CCS and soil carbon within 12 months”.

Soil carbon — or, more correctly, “soil magic”, The Guardian’s Lenore Taylor’s term — is another scam that has seen huge amounts of taxpayer money directed to companies undertaking projects they would have undertaken anyway, and farmers claiming that they can permanently store carbon despite no evidence they can do so. Unsurprisingly, Australia’s emissions surged the Abbott government abolished the carbon pricing scheme and established the Emissions Reduction Fund.

To do this, the government will not merely need to remove the legislative limitation on the independent Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency that limits them to renewable and other forms of clean energy. It also promises it will force them to invest in non-renewables and scams like CCS and soil carbon. Angus Taylor’s plan promises the government will be “requiring key agencies (ARENA, CEFC and the CER) to focus on accelerating the priority technologies”.

That’s more or less all you need to know: an “energy” plan written by fossil fuel executives elevates fossil fuel industry scams to the foundation of Australian energy policy, with a government commitment to force independent renewable energy investment and program administration bodies to waste money of them, to the benefit of fossil fuel companies.

There’s probably a simpler word for it: fraud. And it comes at the expense not merely of taxpayers but of the generations to come who will suffer from our climate denialism.

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