Labor Cites Climate, Solar And Storage In Budget Reply, Reopens Door For ARENA Funding

Renew Economy - Sophie Vorrath

Opposition leader Bill Shorten has put climate change and renewable energy firmly on federal Labor's economic agenda in his budget reply, while his party has re-opened the door to re-instating funds to the Australia Renewable Energy Agency, should it be elected.
Uttering those two words that were conspicuously absent from the Turnbull government's economic plan, Shorten told parliament on Thursday night that a Labor government would budget for "real action" on climate change, and help drive the new jobs and industries that would be created by renewable energy.
And he was quick to remind voters that his opposite number, Malcolm Turnbull, had seemingly abandoned his convictions on the issue, in accordance with the demands of the party's far right faction.
"Of course, advocating climate action is hard, and running a scare campaign against it is easy. Mr Turnbull should know – you've done both."
Beyond that, Labor's position on climate change and clean energy is shaping up to be in direct opposition to the Coalition's, which has consistently argued that too rapid a transition to renewables – and away from coal – would amount to economic suicide.
"Refusing to act on climate change will leave Australia isolated from the biggest economic opportunity of the next few decades," Shorten said in his speech.
"Taking real action on climate change will create new jobs, attract new international investment and power our industries and services.
"But delaying action will be a hit on Australians' cost of living, a drag on our nation's economic growth and an attack on our farmers' way of life.
"More than this – it would be a betrayal of the duty every generation owes the next – to hand down an environment in a better state than the one we inherited."
And on the subject of future funding for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency – the grant-based renewables support scheme that the Coalition wants to de-fund – the party appears to have had a rethink.
Labor, having helped set up ARENA, this week had a bizarre tantrum about continuing to support it, despite the fact that scrapping it would leave no avenue for government funding of the kind of early stage research that is vital to the development of better and cheaper renewable energy technology.
But the party has since clarified that it "will continue to support" ARENA, and was "committed to debt, equity and capital grant funding for the renewable energy sector" as crucial elements of its plan to reach 50 per cent renewable energy generation by 2030.
"ARENA's funding trajectory has been a political plaything of the Turnbull Government with the various changes over the term of this Government making it lumpy and sub optimal," shadow climate spokesman Mark Butler said in a statement.
"ARENA is fully funded for 2016/17 but we recognise that the balance of funds and programs needs further consideration to ensure that we have what is actually required to achieve our targets for the renewable revolution and deliver on the commitments in our Climate Change Action Plan.
"On winning government we will sit down with the ARENA board and work through exactly what is required.
Here is more of what Shorten said in his budget speech on climate and renewables:
"By 2030, there will be $2.5 trillion of investment in renewable energy in the Asia-Pacific. Australian workers should be collaborating with our universities and researchers to design, manufacture and export battery technology, solar panels and turbine parts.
"These are not niche markets or boutique industries. Embracing clean technology and renewable energy can revitalise advanced manufacturing in this country.
"In the last two years, the global economy added 2 million renewable energy jobs – but Australia lost 2,600. The world is powering ahead – and we are going in the wrong direction. It's time to turn things around. Which is why a Labor government will deliver 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030."

Links

• The argument for divesting from fossil fuels is becoming overwhelming | Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian
• Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation? | Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker
• Is Jonathan Franzen really asking us to shrug off the detruction of our world? | Robert Manne, The Guardian
• Fossil industry faces a perfect political and technological storm | Telegraph.co.uk
• Fossil fuel industry must 'implode' to avoid climate disaster, says top scientist | Guardian

Climate Change Authority Report Recommending 'A Mandatory Carbon Price' Held Back Until After Election

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

A report that recommends putting a price on emissions from the electricity sector has been held back by the Climate Change Authority until after the election, prompting calls from Labor and the Greens that it be made public to inform debate.
The independent authority, whose board is now dominated by appointments made last October by Environment Minister Greg Hunt, was to have released its policy options paper for the power industry by the end of April.
The board, though, decided to withhold the report - along with the large Special Review due out by June 30 - until after the election, "assuming it is called for early July," the authority said on its website.

Put a carbon price on the electricity sector, leaked report by the independent Climate Change Authority says. Photo: Michele Mossop

"Why would the authority not release something before the caretaker period?" a source said to Fairfax Media about the report on the power sector, which creates about one-third of Australia's carbon emissions.
Leaked details of the Climate Change Authority's electricity industry "policy options" report said "a mandatory carbon price of some form is desirable in the sector".
Mr Hunt, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other ministers have campaigned hard on Labor's plan to introduce a carbon price through an emissions trading scheme if election.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt during Question Time this week. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

That campaign stepped up a notch last week, after Labor revealed its climate policies, including setting up an emissions-intensity market to drive a shift to lower-polluting power stations.
Mr Hunt's first media release after Labor's policy was announced began: "Bill Shorten has announced a massive new electricity tax. It would have a devastating impact on the Australian economy, jobs, incomes and we would see power prices skyrocket."
Fairfax Media understands that board members - who number 10 in total and include Chief Scientist Alan Finkel - held a lengthy conference call on Thursday, April 29.
While Mr Hunt and his department did not intervene, his office was "very happy" that the electricity sector report's release was delayed, another source said.
A spokesman for Mr Hunt said his office had not seen the reports. He also dismissed the possibility that the government would have withheld a report favouring a wide-ranging carbon price on the eve of an election.
The CCA electricity report assessed the relative merits of different schemes, and found the emissions-intensive version (see "EI" in the following chart from the report) favoured by Labor to be among the cheaper options.
"The overall message is that an emissions trading scheme, even with serious caps or baselines, is not going to have big impacts on the economy, both immediately, and in the long term," one of the sources said.
A spokeswoman for the authority said: "The electricity modelling report has not been finalised and the authority will not be commenting on its internal deliberations."
However, it is understood some in the authority were wary that to release the reports so close to the election would inevitably expose the authority - and the validity of the carefully researched reports - to attacks.
Those wanting to scare voters about the cost of action would exaggerate the costs of any action, they said.
"A lot of people are very much in their bunkers [on this issue]," another source said. "There's a group of people who are still open to the issue", who might still be reached by carefully researched reports.
"Costs can be high but people have to remember that the costs of not doing something [to halt climate change] may be higher," the source said.
The authority was just trying to "give it the best opportunity for the report to be considered in a calmer environment", the source said.
Labor and the Greens, however, demand that the power sector report be released.
"If the government was confident that their Direct Action policy [to pay directly for carbon abatement] was effective, they wouldn't need to hide from this report," Mark Butler, Labor's environment spokesman, said.
"But Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull know their policy isn't the right policy and don't want that confirmed by the Climate Change Authority," he said.
"What else doesn't the government want the Australian public to know before going to the polls?"
Larissa Waters, the Greens deputy leader, said the authority should not "withhold information vital to Australians as they cast their votes during a climate crisis".
"It's crucial Australians have this information before the election, which falls at a tipping point for Australia to save our very way of life by embracing the clean energy revolution to create jobs and tackle global warming," Senator Waters said.
The Abbott government had tried to scrap the Climate Change Authority but was blocked in the Senate. The 2016 budget, released on Tuesday, does not include funding for the authority beyond next year.
Dr Finkel, the Chief Scientist, was not available for comment.

Links

• Labor announces climate policy

Climate Change: United Nations' Ban Ki-Moon Says Time To Scale Up Climate Change Action

ABC News

Two weeks after the signing of the Paris climate deal, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki- moon has stressed the need for fast action against climate change. (AFP: Timothy A. Clary)

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned action on climate change must be faster and broader in order to turn the Paris deal promises to combat global warming into concrete measures. "It is time to take climate action to the next level," he told a gathering in Washington that included the mayors of New York and Paris, environmental campaigner Al Gore, business leaders and members of the US Congress.
"We need to accelerate the speed, scope and scale of our response, locally and globally."
The meeting, dubbed Climate Action 2016, came two weeks after 175 countries signed the Paris climate deal at the United Nations, raising hopes the landmark deal would be quickly ratified.
The Paris agreement will come into force when 55 countries responsible for 55 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases have ratified it.
"We cannot afford to lose momentum because with each passing day the climate challenge grows," World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said.
"It seems that every time we look it's worse than we thought," he added, citing record hot temperatures that have now "become the new norm".
Economic growth had already been affected, with some regions seeing a 6 per cent drop because of water scarcity alone, he said.
Agreed by 195 nations, the Paris deal sets the goal of limiting global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, by moving to clean energy.
French Environment Minister Segolene Royal sounded upbeat, saying there was a new awareness from many countries that were not fully committed to climate change.
Ms Royal said she wanted the Paris agreement to come into force before the end of this year.
China and the United States said they would ratify the Paris deal this year and are pushing for others to follow suit so the agreement becomes operational as early as the end of this year.
Mr Ban said he was convening a similar meeting to the Washington gathering in Beijing in September on the sidelines of the G20 summit to keep climate change high on the world agenda.

Links

• Government spends $500m reducing carbon emissions
• 2015 'shattered' world temperature records
• What happens after this Paris climate deal is signed?
• Coral bleaching off Christmas Island 'as bad as it gets'

Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change

The New Yorker - Elizabeth Kolbert

A helicopter flies past a wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, on Wednesday. The blaze has spread through an area covering more than three hundred square miles. Credit Photograph by Jason Franson / The Canadian Press / AP

The town of Fort McMurray, some four hundred miles north of Calgary, in Canada, grew up very quickly on both sides of the Athabasca River. During the nineteen-seventies, the population of the town tripled, and since then it has nearly tripled again. All this growth has been fuelled by a single activity: extracting oil from a Florida-sized formation known as the tar sands. When the price of oil was high, there was so much currency coursing through Fort McMurray's check-cashing joints that the town was dubbed "Fort McMoney." Now Fort McMurray is burning. A forest fire that began to the southwest of the town on Sunday has forced the entire population—almost ninety thousand people—to evacuate. On Wednesday, Alberta's provincial government declared a state of emergency. By yesterday, more than fifteen hundred buildings had been destroyed and the blaze had spread through an area covering more than three hundred square miles. It was burning so hot that that it was easily able to jump major rivers. One Canadian official described the fire as "catastrophic." Another called it a "multi-headed monster."
No one knows exactly how the fire began—whether it was started by a lightning strike or by a spark provided by a person—but it's clear why the blaze, once underway, raged out of control so quickly. Alberta experienced an unusually dry and warm winter. Precipitation was low, about half of the norm, and what snow there was melted early. April was exceptionally mild, with temperatures regularly in the seventies; two days ago, the thermometer hit ninety, which is about thirty degrees higher than the region's normal May maximum. "You hate to use the ​cliché, but it really was kind of a perfect storm," Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told the CBC.
Though it's tough to pin any particular disaster on climate change, in the case of Fort McMurray the link is pretty compelling. In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record. All of the top five years occurred in the last decade. In some areas, "we now have year-round fire seasons," Matt Jolly, a research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, recently told the Times.
"You can say it couldn't get worse," Jolly added, but based on its own projections, the forest service expects that it will get worse. According to a Forest Service report published last April, "Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970." Over the last three decades, the area destroyed each year by forest fires has doubled, and the service's scientists project that it's likely to "double again by midcentury." A group of scientists who analyzed lake cores from Alaska to obtain a record of forest fires over the last ten thousand years found that in recent decades, blazes were both unusually frequent and unusually severe. "This extreme combination suggests a transition to a unique regime of unprecedented fire activity," they concluded.
All of this brings us to what one commentator referred to as "the black irony" of the fire that has destroyed most of Fort McMurray.
The town exists to get at the tar sands, and the tar sands produce a particularly carbon-intensive form of fuel. (The fight over the Keystone XL pipeline is, at its heart, a fight over whether the U.S. should be encouraging —or, if you prefer, profiting from—the exploitation of the tar sands.) The more carbon that goes into the atmosphere, the warmer the world will get, and the more likely we are to see devastating fires like the one now raging.
To raise environmental concerns in the midst of human tragedy is to risk the charge of insensitivity. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alluded to this danger at a recent news conference: "Any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster, I think there's a bit of a shortcut that can sometimes not have the desired outcome." And certainly it would be wrong to blame the residents of Fort McMurray for the disaster that has befallen them. As Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist who is a Green Party member of British Columbia's provincial legislature, noted, "The reality is we are all consumers of products that come from oil."
But to fail to acknowledge the connection is to risk another kind of offense. We are all consumers of oil, not to mention coal and natural gas, which means that we've all contributed to the latest inferno. We need to own up to our responsibility and then we need to do something about it. The fire next time is one that we've been warned about, and that we've all had a hand in starting.

Links

• Climate Catastrophe, Coming Even Sooner?
• The Siege of Miami
• If We Burned All the Fossil Fuel in the World

Climate-Exodus Expected In The Middle East And North Africa

Phys.org

Plagued by heat and dust: Desert dust storms such as here in Kuwait could occur more often in the Middle East and North Africa as a result of climate change. In addition, temperatures on very hot days could rise to 50 degrees Celsius on …more

The number of climate refugees could increase dramatically in future. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia have calculated that the Middle East and North Africa could become so hot that human habitability is compromised. The goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius, agreed at the recent UN climate summit in Paris, will not be sufficient to prevent this scenario. The temperature during summer in the already very hot Middle East and North Africa will increase more than two times faster compared to the average global warming. This means that during hot days temperatures south of the Mediterranean will reach around 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit) by mid-century. Such extremely hot days will occur five times more often than was the case at the turn of the millennium. In combination with increasing air pollution by windblown desert dust, the environmental conditions could become intolerable and may force people to migrate.
More than 500 million people live in the Middle East and North Africa - a region which is very hot in summer and where climate change is already evident. The number of extremely hot days has doubled since 1970. "In future, the climate in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa could change in such a manner that the very existence of its inhabitants is in jeopardy," says Jos Lelieveld, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Professor at the Cyprus Institute.
Lelieveld and his colleagues have investigated how temperatures will develop in the Middle East and North Africa over the course of the 21st century. The result is deeply alarming: Even if Earth's temperature were to increase on average only by two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold. By mid-century, during the warmest periods, temperatures will not fall below 30 degrees at night, and during daytime they could rise to 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit). By the end of the century, midday temperatures on hot days could even climb to 50 degrees Celsius (approximately 122 degrees Fahrenheit). Another finding: Heat waves could occur ten times more often than they do now.

Unbearably hot: In the Middle East and North Africa, the average temperature in winter will rise by around 2.5 degrees Celsius (left) by the middle of the century, and in summer by around five degrees Celsius (right) if global greenhouse …more

By mid-century, 80 instead of 16 extremely hot days
In addition, the duration of heat waves in North Africa and the Middle East will prolong dramatically. Between 1986 and 2005, it was very hot for an average period of about 16 days, by mid-century it will be unusually hot for 80 days per year. At the end of the century, up to 118 days could be unusually hot, even if greenhouse gas emissions decline again after 2040. "If mankind continues to release carbon dioxide as it does now, people living in the Middle East and North Africa will have to expect about 200 unusually hot days, according to the model projections," says Panos Hadjinicolaou, Associate Professor at the Cyprus Institute and climate change expert.
Atmospheric researcher Jos Lelieveld is convinced that climate change will have a major impact on the environment and the health of people in these regions. "Climate change will significantly worsen the living conditions in the Middle East and in North Africa. Prolonged heat waves and desert dust storms can render some regions uninhabitable, which will surely contribute to the pressure to migrate," says Jos Lelieveld.
The research team recently also published findings on the increase of fine particulate air pollution in the Middle East. It was found that desert dust in the atmosphere over Saudi Arabia, Iraq and in Syria has increased by up to 70 percent since the beginning of this century. This is mainly attributable to an increase of sand storms as a result of prolonged droughts. It is expected that climate change will contribute to further increases, which will worsen environmental conditions in the area.
In the now published study, Lelieveld and his colleagues first compared climate data from 1986 to 2005 with predictions from 26 climate models over the same time period. It was shown that the measurement data and model predictions corresponded extremely well, which is why the scientists used these models to project climate conditions for the period from 2046 to 2065 and the period from 2081 to 2100.

Largest temperature increase in already hot summers
The researchers based their calculations on two future scenarios: The first scenario, called RCP4.5, assumes that the global emissions of greenhouse gases will start decreasing by 2040 and that the Earth will be subjected to warming by 4.5 Watt per square meter by the end of the century. The RCP4.5 scenario roughly corresponds to the target set at the most recent UN climate summit, which means that global warming should be limited to less than two degrees Celsius.
The second scenario (RCP8.5) is based on the assumption that greenhouse gases will continue to increase without further limitations. It is therefore called the "business-as-usual scenario". According to this scenario, the mean surface temperature of the Earth will increase by more than four degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times.
In both scenarios, the strongest rise in temperature in the Middle East and North Africa is expected during summer, when it is already very hot, and not during winter, which is more common in other parts of the globe. This is primarily attributed to a desert warming amplification in regions such as the Sahara. Deserts do not buffer heat well, which means that the hot and dry surface cannot cool by the evaporation of ground water. Since the surface energy balance is controlled by heat radiation, the greenhouse effect by gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapor will increase disproportionately.
Regardless of which climate change scenario will become reality: both Lelieveld and Hadjinicolaou agree that climate change can result in a significant deterioration of living conditions for people living in North Africa and the Middle East, and consequently, sooner or later, many people may have to leave the region.

Links

• 2015 set to be hottest year on record: UN (Update)
• US, Mediterranean face extreme warming: study
• UN climate panel to explore 1.5-degree warming goal
• Earth's hot streak continues for a record 11 months
• Half-a-degree makes a huge difference
• Workers feeling the heat as climate change slashes productivity

Greens Pledge Almost $3b For New Batteries To Be Paid By Fossil Fuel Industries

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

As many as 1.2 million homes could have new battery storage systems within five years under a Greens proposal costing almost $3 billion to be paid for by the aviation and fossil fuel industries.
The Greens will use the storage policy in its negotiations with the government over its budget,  Greens energy spokesman Adam Bandt said.
To support people adding batteries, the Greens want a 50 per cent refundable tax credit for individuals to pay for as much as half the cost of a new storage system. The payments would taper off from a maximum of $5000 to $1500 over the five years to 2021 in line with an expected drop of battery prices.

A battery in 1.2m homes?: Tesla may be one beneficiary if Greens policy gets support. Photo: Patrick T Fallon

"Now is the time to jumpstart the battery industry, encourage the take up of storage and help make Australia a renewable energy leader," Mr Bandt said.
The nation's 1.4 million households with solar panels will be likely candidates to add batteries, especially as the price paid for exporting surplus electricity to the grid shrinks to a fraction of the retail price residents have to pay for power.
The Greens are hoping businesses will also take up the offer and will also direct the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to direct grants of as much as $5000 for households with less than $80,000 in annual taxable income to get batteries out to more families.

Homes with solar power are a likely target for a new storage plan.

The policy has been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office with the household policy totaling $2.85 billion and the business component $38 million over the forward estimates. The bulk of those funds will be paid for by removing the $2.75 billion accelerated depreciation permitted for aircraft and fossil-fuel intensive industries.
Mr Bandt said the battery plan would figure in talks with the Turnbull government over passage of its budget: "We'll be opposing most of this budget, which grows inequality and does nothing for clean energy, but if the government comes to us to talk about some of their less offensive measures, we'll want to talk to them about programs like this one."
John Grimes, chief executive of the Australian Energy Storage Council, said the cost of new batteries continues to tumble as new suppliers enter the market. On Wednesday, Chinas GCL group launched a 5.6 kilowatt-hour system for about $3000, wholesale.

Adam Bandt, Greens energy spokesman. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Still, the Australian market remains "at a standing start", with only about 200 systems added a month and in need of a boost, Mr Grimes said.
Mr Grimes, though, predicted that more consumers will be crunching the numbers on batteries particularly as feed-in tariffs in states such as NSW tumble to zero from next year unless residents negotiate a  deal with their utility.
"People will say, 'blow that, I'd rather install a battery and use the power myself rather than give it away'," Mr Grimes said.
Increased battery use would have other benefits such as accelerating the closure of emissions-intensive coal-fired power plants. Flatter demand for grid power would also reduce the case for gas-fired peaker plants, Mr Bandt said.

ARENA's billion-dollar hole
Separately, Labor has come under more pressure for its decision to support the Coalition's billion-dollar cut from ARENA's grant funding, as reported by Fairfax Media.
The Abbott government stripped out $1.3 billion from ARENA in its 2014 budget and Labor last week committed to putting back just a tad over $300 million as part of its pre-election climate platform.
On Tuesday, Labor joined the Coalition to vote down a Senate motion by the Greens to restore the agency's full funding.
"It's incredibly disappointing that Labor has [on Tuesday] confirmed its climate policy is to lock in most of the Liberal Party's cuts to ARENA, leaving Australia with a $1 billion black hole in clean-energy funding," Greens Deputy Leader Larissa Waters said.

Links

• How will solar batteries change the household?

Turnbull’s First Budget Ignores Climate Change, Dumps Clean Energy

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

Climate change, prime minister Malcom Turnbull once said, is the ultimate long-term problem that needs to be acted on urgently. But in his first budget as government leader, it is as though the issue does not exist.
Climate change was not even mentioned as a word, or a concept, or even an issue – despite Tuesday’s budget apparently being about growth and jobs for the future. There was no new money for climate initiatives and the only mention renewable energy got was to confirm that $1.3 billion in funds would be stripped from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
“There was nothing in the speech, not a word,” Professor John Hewson, a former leader of Liberal Party, told the SolarExpo conference in 2016.
“The slogan is jobs and growth. I would have though that one of the most significant sectors for economic and jobs growth is renewables – I am staggered that it didn’t get a mention in the speech or in the documents.” Hewson said the decision to remove funding from ARENA was an “absolute tragedy.”
In the budget papers, for instance, there is no extra funding for the Direct Action plan that Turnbull once ridiculed and dismissed as a “fig-leaf” for a climate policy and now forms the basis of the government’s emissions reductions plan, including the Paris agreement it signed just a few weeks ago.
Once the government has spent the current $2.5 billion allocation for handouts to polluters to do pretty much what they were doing anyway, there is zero extra funding for emissions abatement.
The Coalition government might have been expected to shift towards a “modified” scheme that would see Direct Action evolve with its safeguards mechanism to become a baseline and credit scheme. But that’s what Labor suggested last week, and rather than accept the tentative offer of a return to a bipartisan approach to climate policies, the government slammed the door.
It slammed the door, too, on renewable energy innovation. The $1.3 billion of unallocated funds for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency remains excised from the budget papers – even though it remains legislated – while $1 billion is transferred from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and rebadged as a new Clean Energy Innovation Fund.
Don’t expect Labor to stand in the way of that initiative. It voted with the Coalition earlier this week against a Greens motion to protect ARENA, and has since blamed NGOs for not standing up to the Coalition move to de-fund ARENA, so it won’t stand up either.
For his part, Australian Solar Council chief John Grimes was taking a stand on the matter, telling the Energy Storage Conference in Melbourne on Wednesday that the federal government had “taken a backwards step” in defunding ARENA, and not making the Agency’s competitive grants available any more.
“So they’ll only invest (in clean energy technology) on an equity or …a loan basis, which means that any money that’s given from the government has to be repaid with interest, and there has to be strong independent commercial case… and a risk mitigation.
“A lot of the blue sky research, the first research we might see out of somewhere like the CSIRO… you can’t make a commercial case to say, well lend me $1.5 million I’ll pay you back $2 million in three years (or) five years time.
“It just doesn’t work that way,” he said.
The Climate Institute was also critical of the budget, saying it “ignores the fact that if we do not invest in strong, effective action to reduce emissions now, it will simply cost us much more in the not too distant future.”
CEO John Connor said: “The consequences of ongoing failure to tackle climate change will be escalating energy, unemployment and other economic costs over the next few decades.”
“There’s no extra funding for the government’s current principal policy tool the $2.55bn Emission Reduction Fund now likely to be expended by the end of 2016 well before the policy review in 2017, threatening jobs and growth in the carbon farming and other emission reduction industries.”
He noted that support for climate adaptation research is to be slashed with no new money for CSIRO or the Bureau of Meteorology to fully redress CSIRO climate impact research cuts.
“Droughts, bushfires and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef are already major threats to jobs and growth, and weakening our knowledge base means we risk facing these threats blindfolded.”
He said the budget also contains no sign of extra climate finance commitments necessary to do our bit in assisting developing countries boost climate resilience and clean energy.
“We should be scaling up from the current $200 million annually to $1.5 billion by 2020 to help meet commitments made in Paris last year.
“Without a plan to end climate pollution with net zero emissions by 2050 the government doesn’t have a plan for the future let alone a plan for climate change.  This budget of delay is piling up the risks of shocks to electricity prices, energy security and the jobs that depend on both,” concluded Connor.
The Marine Conservation Society said the federal budget contains a mere $8.9 million a year year of new and additional funding over the next three years for the Reef. It noted that this compares with $7.7 billion a year for fossil fuel subsidies which have not been reduced in this Budget.

Links

• The argument for divesting from fossil fuels is becoming overwhelming | Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian
• Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation? | Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker
• Is Jonathan Franzen really asking us to shrug off the detruction of our world? | Robert Manne, The Guardian
• Fossil industry faces a perfect political and technological storm | Telegraph.co.uk
• Fossil fuel industry must 'implode' to avoid climate disaster, says top scientist | Guardian