Abbott sets up a panel hostile to renewable energy

Killing renewables softly with endless reviews , The Conversation Clive Hamilton, 19 Feb 14 Vice Chancellor’s Chair, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Charles Sturt University You have to feel sorry for people working in renewable energy. Their industry has been reviewed to within an inch of its short life, and the goalposts have been shifted so many times that they don’t know where to kick the ball.

And now they are to be reviewed again, this time by a panel that is hostile to them. The chair of the review, Dick Warburton, does not believe in human-caused climate change. So if there is no problem with greenhouse gas emissions, why would we need policies to reduce them?

He is joined, among others, by Brian Fisher, who has a long history of working closely with the fossil fuel industries. For many years he was the executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, a government research agency that was castigated by the Commonwealth Ombudsman for taking money from the fossil fuel industries to finance its work on climate change policy. Fisher did not agree that his work had been “compromised” or that he displayed “poor judgment” in having his agency’s policy work partly funded by Exxon, BHP and the Australian Coal Association.

Renewables under review – again

The last review of the Renewable Energy Target (RET) was published just over a year ago, and was conducted for the federal government by the independent Climate Change Authority. I was part of that review and remain one of the Authority’s members

The RET scheme currently mandates that electricity retailers must source 41,000 GWh of electricity from new renewable sources by 2020. During the six months that our review took, the most frequent plea from industry we heard was to provide investment certainty for the emerging companies.

Even the Australian Industry Group, no friend of strong greenhouse gas reduction policy, argued that any further change threatened to “reduce the credibility and reliability of energy policy as a whole”.

The Climate Change Authority published its findings in December 2012, concluding: Transitioning to a clean energy future will require considerable investment over decades. A stable and predictable policy environment is crucial to fostering the confidence required for such investment.

The Authority’s 2012 conclusions echoed those from a decade earlier.

History repeating?

Yet the meddling with the renewables industry has begun again. Even before the new Warburton review gets under way, the message has been sent to renewable energy investors: the coal lobby is back in town.

As former Liberal staffer Guy Pearse revealed in his shocking book, High and Dry, in the Howard years the fossil fuel lobby became so accustomed to setting energy policy that they bragged about vetting cabinet submissions.

The “greenhouse mafia”, as they called themselves, have certainly had the ear of the Coalition in the past. In May 2004, Prime Minister John Howard convened a secret meeting with Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane (in the same portfolio then as now) and energy executives to come up with alternatives to avoid expanding the Renewable Energy Target, which was then a piddling 2% objective.

Leaked minutes taken by Rio Tinto’s Sam Walsh show Macfarlane chiding senior executives of Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Alcoa, Origin Energy and others for their “roaring silence” and for letting renewables advocates set the public agenda. At the end of the meeting, the minutes noted Macfarlane: