The Coalition today announced a weak and incoherent climate policy that will ensure pollution as usual. Reading through the document feels a bit like what I would imagine it would be like to eat styrofoam – no substance, hard to swallow and leaves a bad taste in your mouth. For a ‘direct action’ plan, there isn’t a lot of action in there.
It is clear that both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott are tripping over each other to come up with a climate policy that sounds plausible to the electorate but that makes sure that we don’t actually have to reduce greenhouse pollution from Australian industry. They are united in their policy of ‘no polluter left behind’.
The Rudd plan relies largely on the ability to buy carbon credits in other countries, whereas the Abbott scheme relies largely on sequestering carbon in soil. One of the many problems is that it relies on science that is still so uncertain that there is no international agreement for sequestering CO2 in soil. In other words, soil sequestration is not recognised as legitimate under the Kyoto Protocol.
The Abbott scheme provides welfare to big business in the form of grants rather than compensation for emissions reductions – grants that will presumably be paid for by taxpayers and not the big polluters themselves. The funding for the ‘Fund’ is still unknown, but presumably it will come from cutting existing services. No mention is made of savings by eliminating the many subsidies that currently encourage fossil fuel use.
The incentives for renewable energy are piecemeal and insufficient to drive a serious renewable energy industry in Australia. Long-term industry development requires a clear, long-term framework such as a feed-in-tariff that pays large-scale renewable energy generators a premium rate for their electricity. Kevin Rudd is also failing to provide a strong policy framework to promote large-scale renewables and Abbott could have got the jump on him – but has instead resorted to a meaningless rhetorical flourish that includes the word ‘solar’. No vision, no plan to get there.
Imagine instead if Abbott (or Rudd for that matter) was serious about the problem of climate change and cutting greenhouse pollution. You’d start by acknowledging that greenhouse pollution is mainly caused by burning fossil fuels. You would then take ‘direct action’ to reduce the use of fossil fuels. Not exactly complex.
The first thing you would do is to stop making the problem worse and say no new coal power stations are allowed to be built (there are currently plans for 12 new coal plants in Australia). Next you would mandate worlds best practice energy efficiency standards. This wouldn’t be a voluntary thing, you’d just make it law for manufacturers so that consumers don’t even have to think about it. It would mean we wouldn’t need to build new power stations at all and could probably start closing down some of the dirtiest ones. Then you’d put in place long-term incentives to drive investment and innovation in large-scale renewable energy so that the industry can build up economies of scale and begin to replace coal power over time.
Putting an economy wide price on carbon would be very useful but it is ‘indirect action’ and one of the biggest benefits is that it would generate revenue for other programmes that would actually do the hard yards of cutting emissions. You’d also do lots of other things, like reducing car use through improving urban design and making large-scale investments in public transport. And you’d look at land management and try to make sure that we protect forests and landscapes that currently store lots of carbon, as well as providing incentives to land managers. And there are lots of other things as well, but first and foremost is the need to restructure our economy away from a dependency on fossil fuels. Anything else is just window dressing.
