12/06/2021

(Australia Institute) Australian Manufacturing At Risk From Morrison Resistance To Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism At G7 Summit

The Australia Institute


New analysis by the Australia Institute Climate & Energy Program shows that the use of carbon border adjustment mechanisms, to be under discussion at the G7 Summit this week, will put Australian industry and manufacturing processes – mainly steel, aluminium and alumina, at risk if Australia continues its recalcitrant role on the global stage.

At the G7 Summit, which runs from June 11-13 in Cornwall, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has indicated he will warn world leaders against the use of carbon tariffs at the G7 Summit, questionably labelling the carbon border adjustment mechanisms being considered by world leaders at the G7 as ‘protectionist’ without justification.

Key findings

  • A carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) is a levy by a country with its own carbon pricing on the carbon content of emissions-intensive imports.
  • The UK has confirmed that the G7 Summit will include discussions on CBAMs.
  • The CBAM proposed by the EU is not a tariff and unlikely to be considered protectionist, as it is designed to comply with World Trade Organisation rules.
  • To date, the Australian Government has not been able to justify its claims that CBAM and carbon pricing are ‘protectionist’ measures.
  • Australia is exposed to a potential CBAM implementation as one of few high-income countries without a carbon price and having energy-intensive trade products that will be taxed by other countries.
    • Australia is most exposed for primary metals manufacturing: emissions-intensive alumina and aluminium are valued at $12 billion in exports.
    • Australia’s alumina and aluminium are highly reliant on coal or gas for production and would benefit from switching to clean energy.
  • It is in Australia’s best interest to engage constructively in the design of CBAMs and invest in clean production methods for products such as aluminium and steel to prevent economic damage and support a resilient manufacturing sector.
    • Australia could benefit from the global transition to net-zero emissions economies if it chose to be proactive in cleaning up exposed sectors and building clean export industries.

“The Australian Government has repeatedly attacked Europe’s proposal as protectionist but not backed up this claim with serious analysis.  It is Australia’s lack of climate ambition and failure to price carbon that will be viewed as protectionist by countries making greater efforts to reduce emissions,” said Frank Muller, international climate policy expert and lead author of the report.

“Australia’s natural endowments and human resources position it better than most countries to prosper in a low carbon world.  Carbon border adjustments in destination markets will assist Australia to develop new zero emission export industries,” Mr Muller said.

“Some sectors of the economy are going to be highly vulnerable if Australia doesn’t act. Almost all Australian aluminium and alumina goes to export. Australia needs to ensure the competitiveness and future of these industries, and our broader manufacturing sector, by investing in clean production methods,” said Dr Hugh Saddler, Honorary Associate Professor Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU.

“All G7 members have locked in net zero by 2050, increased their 2030 targets and have or plan to price carbon. Border adjustments are the next logical step and in my decades of working on these issues I’ve never seen this much broad interest in the idea,” Dr Saddler said.

“The Australian Government claims that it’s approach to climate is dictated by technology not taxes. Make no mistake, if Australia continues to stonewall its trading partners and allies on climate, the taxes will come anyway. But the revenue is going to be collected outside of Australia,” said Richie Merzian, Climate & Energy Program Director at the Australia Institute.

“This isn’t trade protectionism by the G7. It’s climate protectionism. Australia needs to engage constructively on carbon border adjustment mechanisms in the interests of our economy and climate,” Mr Merzian said.

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(AU The Conversation) Tracking The Transition: The ‘Forgotten’ Emissions Undoing The Work Of Australia’s Renewable Energy Boom

The Conversation -  | 

Shutterstock

Authors
  •  is Honorary Associate Professor, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy, Australian National University
  •  is Director, Centre for Climate and Energy Policy, Australian National University     
World leaders including Prime Minister Scott Morrison will gather in the UK this weekend for the G7 summit.

In a speech on Wednesday ahead of the meeting, Morrison said Australia recognises the need to reach net-zero emissions in order to tackle climate change, and expects to achieve the goal by 2050.

So has Australia started the journey towards deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions?

In the electricity supply system, the answer is yes, as renewables form an ever-greater share of the electricity mix. But elsewhere in the energy sector – in transport, industry and buildings – there has been little or no progress.

This situation needs to change. These other parts of the energy system contribute nearly 40% of all national greenhouse gas emissions – and the share is growing. In a new working paper out today, we propose a way to track the low-carbon transition across the energy sector and check progress over the last decade.

Energy emissions from buildings, such as from gas cooktops, have largely escaped scrutiny. Shutterstock

A stark contrast

     The energy sector can be separated into three major types of energy use in Australia:
  • electricity generation
  • transport and mobile equipment used in mining, farming, and construction
  • all other segments, mainly fossil fuel combustion to provide heat in industry and buildings.
In 2018-19, energy sector emissions accounted for 72% of Australia’s national total. Transition from fossil fuels to zero-emissions sources is at the heart of any strategy to cut emissions deeply.

The transition is already happening in electricity generation, as wind and solar supplies increase and coal-fired power stations close or operate less.

But in stark contrast, elsewhere in the sector there is no evidence of a meaningful low-emissions transition or acceleration in energy efficiency improvement.

This matters greatly because in 2019, these other segments contributed 53% of total energy combustion emissions and 38% of national greenhouse gas emissions. Total energy sector emissions increased between 2005 (the reference year for Australia’s Paris target) and 2019.

As the below graphic shows, while the renewables transition often gets the credit for Australia’s emissions reductions, falls since 2005 are largely down to changes in land use and forestry.


Let’s take a closer look at the areas where Australia could do far better in future.

1. Transport and mobile equipment

 Transport includes road and rail transport, domestic aviation and coastal shipping. Mobile equipment includes machinery such as excavators and dump trucks used in mining, as well as tractors, bulldozers and other equipment used in farming and construction. Petroleum supplies almost 99% of the energy consumed by these machines.

Road transport is responsible for more than two-thirds of all the energy consumed by transport and mobile equipment.

What’s more, prior to COVID, energy use by transport and mobile equipment was steadily growing – as were emissions. The absence of fuel efficiency standards in Australia, and a trend towards larger cars, has contributed to the problem.

Electric vehicles offer great hope for cutting emissions from the transport sector. As Australia’s electricity grid continues to decarbonise, emissions associated with electric vehicles charged from the grid will keep falling.

Electric vehicles would slash road transport emissions. Shutterstock

2. Other energy emissions

Emissions from all other parts of the energy system arise mainly from burning:
  • gas to provide heat for buildings and manufacturing, and for the power needed to liquefy gas to make LNG
  • coal, for a limited range of heavy manufacturing activities, such as steel and cement production
  • petroleum products (mainly LPG) in much smaller quantities, where natural gas is unavailable or otherwise unsuitable.
Emissions from these sources, as a share of national emissions, rose from 13% in 2005 to 19% in 2019.

These types of emissions can be reduced through electrification – that is, using low- or zero-carbon electricity in industry and buildings. This might include using induction cooktops, and electric heat pumps to heat buildings and water.

However the data offer no evidence of such a shift. Fossil fuel use in this segment has declined, but mainly due to less manufacturing activity rather than cleaner energy supply.

And in 2018 and 2019, the expanding LNG industry drove further emissions growth, offsetting the decline in use of gas and coal in manufacturing.

How to track progress

Over the past decade or so, Australia’s emissions reduction policies – such as they are – have focused on an increasingly narrow range of emission sources and reduction opportunities, in particular electricity generation.
Only now are electric vehicles beginning to be taken seriously, while energy efficiency – a huge opportunity to cut emissions and costs – is typically ignored.

Our paper proposes a large set of new indicators, designed to show what’s happening (and not happening) across the energy sector.

The indicators fall into four groups:
  • greenhouse gas emissions from energy use
  • primary fuel mix including for electricity generation
  • final energy consumption including energy use efficiency
  • the fuel/technology mix used to deliver energy services to consumers.

Our datasets excludes the effects of 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. They’re based on data contained in established government publications: The Australian Energy Statistics, the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory and the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ national accounts and population estimates.

By systematically tracking and analysing these indicators, and combining them with others, Australia’s energy transition can be monitored on an ongoing basis. This would complement the great level of detail already available for electricity generation. It would also create better public understanding and focus policy attention on areas that need it.

In some countries, government agencies monitor the energy transition in great detail. In some cases, such as Germany, independent experts also conduct systematic and substantial analysis as part of an annual process.

The road ahead

 Australia has begun the journey to a zero-emissions energy sector. But we must get a move-on in transport, industry and buildings.

The technical opportunities are there. What’s now needed is government regulation and policy to encourage investment in zero-emissions technologies for both supplying and using all forms of energy.

And once available, the technology should be deployed now and in coming years, not in the distant future.

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(USA NYT) Our Response To Climate Change Is Missing Something Big, Scientists Say

New York Times - Catrin Einhorn

Yes, planting new trees can help. But intact wild areas are much better. The world needs to treat warming and biodiversity loss as two parts of the same problem, a new report warns.

Credit...Jens Meyer/Associated Press
Some environmental solutions are win-win, helping to rein in global warming and protecting biodiversity, too. But others address one crisis at the expense of the other. Growing trees on grasslands, for example, can destroy the plant and animal life of a rich ecosystem, even if the new trees ultimately suck up carbon. What to do?

Unless the world stops treating climate change and biodiversity collapse as separate issues, neither problem can be addressed effectively, according to a report issued Thursday by researchers from two leading international scientific panels.

“These two topics are more deeply intertwined than originally thought,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chairman of the scientific steering committee that produced the report. They are also inextricably tied to human well being. But global policies usually target one or the other, leading to unintended consequences.

“If you look at just one single angle, you miss a lot of things,” said Yunne-Jai Shin, a marine biologist with the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development and a co-author of the report. “Every action counts.”

How we got here

For years, one set of scientists and policymakers has studied and tried to tackle the climate crisis, warning the world of the dangers from greenhouse gases that have been building up in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. The lead culprit: burning fossil fuels.

Another group has studied and tried to tackle the biodiversity crisis, raising alarms about extinctions and ecosystem collapse. The lead culprits: habitat loss because of agriculture, and, at sea, overfishing.

The two groups have operated largely in their own silos. But their subjects are connected by something elemental, literally: carbon itself.

The same element that makes up heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and soot is also a fundamental building block of the natural world. It helps form the very tissue of plants and animals on earth. It’s stored in forests, wetlands, grasslands and on the ocean floor. In fact, land and water ecosystems are already stashing away half of human-generated emissions.

Another connection between climate and biodiversity: People have created emergencies on both fronts by using the planet’s resources in unsustainable ways.

For the last couple of decades, the climate crisis has largely overshadowed the biodiversity crisis, perhaps because its threat seemed more dire. But the balance may be shifting. Scientists warn that declines in biodiversity can lead to ecosystem collapse, threatening humanity’s food and water supply.

“Climate change of four or five degrees is just such an existential threat to people, it’s hard to imagine,” said Paul Leadley, one of the authors and an ecologist at Paris-Saclay University.

And, he continued, “if we lose a really large fraction of species on earth, that’s an existential threat.”

What’s not working

Businesses and countries have increasingly looked to nature as a way to offset their emissions, for example, by planting trees to absorb carbon. But the science is clear: Nature can’t store enough carbon to let us keep on spewing greenhouse gases at our current rates.

“A clear first priority is emissions reductions, emissions reductions and emissions reductions,” Dr. Pörtner said.

Just last month, the world’s leading energy agency declared that if the world wants to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, nations would need to stop approving new coal, oil and gas projects immediately.

Credit...Khalil Mazraawi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

To make matters worse, some measures being used or proposed to address climate change could devastate biodiversity.

“Some people are out there selling this message that if we cover the whole planet with trees, that will solve the climate problem,” Dr. Leadley said. “That’s a mistaken message on many levels.”

In Brazil, parts of the Cerrado, a biodiverse savanna that stores large amounts of carbon, have been planted with monocultures of eucalyptus and pine in an attempt to meet a global reforestation goal. The result, researchers have written separately, is an “impending ecological disaster” because they destroy the native ecosystem and the livelihoods of local communities, including Indigenous people.

Europe once hoped to lead the world in biofuels until realizing they led to deforestation and increased food prices. Another kind of bioenergy, wood pellets, is currently booming in the southeastern United States, despite concerns about pollution and biodiversity loss.

Climate interventions tend to hurt biodiversity more than the other way round, and some trade-offs must occur, the authors wrote. Solar farms, for example, eat up wildlife habitat, a particular concern for places with threatened species. But, critically, they generate clean energy.

The report highlights ways to mitigate the damage to biodiversity, for example by grazing livestock around them, improving carbon soil stocks and avoiding intact habitat. Pollinator gardens on solar farms can help nurture insects and birds. While wind farms can hurt migrating birds, the authors note that modern turbines cause much less damage.

The solutions

By protecting and restoring nature, the report said, we can safeguard biodiversity, help limit warming, improve human well being and even find protection from the consequences of climate change, like intensified flooding and storms.

In the Casamance region of Senegal, for example, local communities restored mangroves and adopted sustainable fishing measures, improving their catch, bringing back dolphins and 20 species of fish, storing carbon and protecting their coastline, said Pamela McElwee, an environmental anthropologist at Rutgers University who was one of the authors.

Credit...John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Mangroves are a really special type of ecosystem,” she said, “in that they do it all for humans.”

While mangroves are themselves vulnerable to climate change, Dr. McElwee said they appear less threatened than once thought, because restoration efforts are working.

In the Hindu Kush mountains of South Asia, a project has conserved an area about the size of Belgium, restoring high-altitude forests and rangelands and protecting threatened snow leopards and musk deer, the report says, while keeping carbon out of the atmosphere. The 1.3 million people who live there, straddling Nepal, India and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, have seen enhanced household incomes through tourism and sustainable farming.

Urban areas, too, can do their part with native trees, green spaces and coastal ecosystems, the researchers said.

The report was the first collaboration between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

John P. Holdren, an environmental scientist at Harvard University and a former White House science adviser who was not involved in the report, called it “a must-read for our time.”

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