Antinuclear

Stark climate policies on offer at this election but will voters bite?  SMH, By Peter Hannam, May 15, 2019 If our politicians are supposed to be driven by polls and focus groups, why is it that climate change isn’t a policy that attracts bipartisan or even tripartisan support?As we learnt again last week from the respected Lowy Institute, the threat of a warming world is of growing concern for Australians and now tops even terrorism or North Korean nukes.

While the full findings won’t be out until next month, support for renewable energy is likely to remain high, too. Last year, backing was 84 per cent – numbers “that we don’t really see on other issues”, Lowy’s poll chief Natasha Kassam told the Herald.

Britain, of course, offers good and bad models when it comes to governance of late, but the Conservative government under Theresa May cheered the fact that the country had gone a week without burning coal for electricity for the first time since those dark satanic mills started spinning……

With the Morrison government dropping the NEG, it is not clear what the Coalition is offering voters on the energy front.

Yes, investors have earmarked about $25 billion for wind and solar projects over the past three years of the Renewable Energy Target, and that is no small change.

However, there is little indication what will follow after 2020 if the Morrison government is returned, and the industry is fearful they are facing a cliff…..

Labor’s promise of securing 50 per cent of electricity from renewables by 2030 is a key arrow in its policy quiver. Even though it looks like a long shot – roughly doubling where we are now in the eastern states that make up the National Electricity Market – in fact it’s probably not much more than business-as-usual. ……

The likelihood is the surge in clean energy alternatives to coal and gas in power generation will continue, meaning there’s a reasonable chance that 50-50 target will be exceeded and then some by 2030.

The Greens say 100 per cent renewables should be the goal by then, and that a bonanza of new jobs – in the order of 180,000 – will offer employment opportunities to aid the transition for the Hunter and Latrobe valleys that will fare worst from the demise of coal-fired plants.

They also advocate a policy whose name the two main parties dare not utter – a carbon price. That’s despite seasoned commentators such as Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute supporting a market solution.

“The major parties seem to prefer an unproductive debate on cost [of taking climate action], while the Greens have arguably the best core policy – an economy-wide carbon price,” Mr Wood told readers of our sister paper The Australian Financial Review last week.

Labor’s climate policy will indeed generate a carbon price as companies face a “cap” on carbon pollution, with those able to reduce emissions more quickly able to trade their surplus achievements with laggards.

The problem is that Labor’s goal of cutting emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels will be complicated by adjustments for all the sectors or enterprises that will be partly or fully exempt. These include the agriculture sector and trade-exposed firms such as aluminium smelters – which is a key reason that Labor can’t come up with a pat answer to the question of what its climate plan will cost.

But Labor is at least taking a stab. It has a declared net-zero emissions target for 2050 and, although Australia arguably signed up for a similar goal when it agreed to the Paris climate goals, the Coalition appears not to have a policy to get there.

The Morrison government says its rebadged direct action plan – now called the Climate Solutions Fund – will earmark $2 billion over a decade to pay polluters to cut emissions to farmers – and other sectors – to sequester emissions such as boosting the carbon content of soils or restraining land-clearing.

The Coalition’s headline goal of cutting 2005-level carbon emissions by 26 per cent masks a couple of backtracks. Australia’s official Paris goal is 26-28 per cent, but the upper end of the range has quietly been dropped.

More contentious, though, is the Coalition’s plan to use expected carry-over credits from the current climate policy to which Australia has signed up, the Kyoto Protocol, as the Herald and The Age first reported last December.

Most nations with such credits, including Germany, Britain, New Zealand and Sweden, have voluntarily decided to extinguish any such “surplus” generated by exceeding goals up to 2020 when the Paris accord kicks in.

The consequence is that Australia’s abatement effort of 695 million tonnes of carbon dioxide shrinks to about 325 million tonnes at the stroke of a pen – assuming global negotiators don’t blow the whistle on this plan……..

Australia’s emissions are unhelpfully rising, reaching their highest quarterly rate in the year to September 2018 for seven years. The arc, therefore, is not yet bending down, and the longer they continue to rise, the harder for any future government to get emissions down to where they need to be.

The Greens, though, also highlight what they see as a sleeper issue masked by the Adani coal mine kerfuffle.

Labor plans to inject $1.5 billion into developing the gasfields of the Northern Territory and Queensland’s Bowen and, yes, Gallilee basins – site of that particular coal mine proposal and eight others.

The Greens point out that, even assuming a conservative leakage rate, the greenhouse gas emissions of the new gasfields will dwarf those of Adani’s Carmichael mine.

They predict trouble ahead for Labor if the Greens hold sway in the Senate, not least because soaring domestic emissions will make it harder for Australia to stem the rise of national carbon pollution, let alone hit targets such as net zero by mid-century. https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/stark-climate-policies-on-offer-at-this-election-but-will-voters-bite-20190509-p51lh7.html