future clean tech

No. Absolutely not. And yet the conservative Wall Street Journal yesterday implied that America should, in a column entitled, “Down Under: Can the US Learn From Australia’s Emissions Plan?”

It’s easy to see why the Journal is pumped about Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” (that’s what they’re calling the Aussie ETS): it’s a sop to heavy polluting industry and the conservative opposition that supports it. The amended legislation gives a free ride to the carbon mafia, delaying really significant cuts in CO2 and passing on the residual costs to the average punter. The minimum “guaranteed” reduction is 5% by 2020 – talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Only this time there won’t be an iceberg in sight.

Interestingly, conservative Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull chose to lay his leadership on the line over this issue. His Liberal Party is severely divided over the legislation and the Liberals’ usual political bedfellows, the Nationals, are united against it.

Turnbull is an ideological descendant of the old, pre-John Howard Liberal Party: liberal on social issues, and to a greater or lesser extent conservative on economic issues. Global warming is a social issue with serious economic repercussions (and, what conservatives tend to discount, serious opportunities) and so it is no surprise that an old-school Liberal like Turnbull would support a sort of diluted version of action on climate change – but action nonetheless.

Turnbull’s dilution of the CPRS bill is worrying enough, but the really interesting thing is that much of his party thinks he’s gone too far. Former Prime Minister John Howard was almost singlehandedly responsible for the conservatisation of Australian politics, and the conservative rump of the party Howard left behind is about to commit collective suicide by declaring war on Turnbull for being too progressive. Turnbull, whose leadership is in serious trouble, is probably the best hope the Opposition has of breaking through the Government’s approval numbers anytime before 2013.

There is no lesson for America here. Australia’s electorate is overwhelmingly in favour of action on climate change, whereas the American electorate is somewhat more divided. I’d like to be able to say that Australia offers a warning to conservatives overseas not to oppose climate change action, but it seems like the Liberal Party, much like the Republican Party, is trending rightward.

From a policy perspective, Australia’s recent experience is a total disaster. It represents a triumph of politics over policy. The US and the EU are both looking at 17% and 20% cuts respectively by 2020, which is nowhere near enough. We need to cut 80% by 2020. Australia’s promising 5%. No lessons here.

The Environment News Service reports that leaders of climate-vulnerable island nations met in the Maldives over the last couple of days, headed by Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, essentially to draw attention to the fact that they’re slowly but surely going underwater.

“We are a diverse group of countries. But we share one common enemy. For us, climate change is no distant or abstract threat; but a clear and present danger to our survival,” Nasheed said.

“Climate change is melting the glaciers in Nepal. It is causing flooding in Bangladesh. It threatens to submerge the Maldives and Kiribati And in recent weeks, it has exacerbated drought in Tanzania, and typhoons in the Philippines,” he said. “We are the frontline states in the climate change battle.”

… On Monday, he asked the Vulnerable Countries Forum to join in this effort, saying, “I think a bloc of carbon-neutral, developing nations could change the outcome of Copenhagen.

“At the moment every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first,” Nasheed said.

“This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide,” he told Forum delegates. “We don’t want a global suicide pact. And we will not sign a global suicide pact, in Copenhagen or anywhere.”

This reminded me of an email exchange I had with a good friend of mine who is an engineer back in Sydney, Australia, who questions climate change science. He asked me, on several occasions, “If the planet is warming then why am I constantly freezing cold?” I regard this, of course, as the stuff of conspiracy theory, and told him so, referring him to the IPCC’s website and the various national and international science academies, all of whom agree with the fundamentals of the IPCC’s raison d’être – namely, human-induced global warming.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that my friend wouldn’t even be capable of bringing himself to raise these questions if he lived in a low-altitude island nation.

Why are we not surprised about this latest report? The global energy lobby is working to kill progress on climate change, says the Huffington Post, reporting on a recently released study by the Center for Public Integrity.

Here’s the whole article.

Over the last couple of years, Australia’s territorial waters were quietly expanded for one reason and one reason only: the discovery of liquefied natural gas (LNG) off the Western Australian coast. A few stories have been seen and heard on the ABC and in the press over the past 18 months, hinting at vast, untold wealth lying within Australia’s newly extended borders, but now our new golden goose has begun to lay eggs.

Yesterday, a $50 billion deal was done to supply China with gas for the next 20 years. And this is certainly not the end of it: according to the Sydney Morning Herald, “the resources boom is far from over”.

While this is very good news for Australia, and while gas is the least dirty of the fossil fuels, the implications for the renewables industry remain unclear. The much-hyped “end” of the resources boom was a shot in the arm for renewable energy, an industry which suddenly had new relevance in an economic downturn as Australians were mourning the end of the gold rush.

But now, gas is challenging coal as king of Australia’s dirty fuels industry. With all this cash flowing in from China, there will be less of an incentive for the government to pump money into clean energy. Why put dollars into a hard sell like solar thermal plants when you can make billions by siphoning LNG out of the continental shelf?

Last week, Terry McCrann – “Australia’s foremost business commentator” – published a piece entitled The enormous cost of hot air. It would be charitable to call the title of the article ironic.

Terry McCrann, allegedly "Australia's foremost business commentator"

McCrann parrots the rest of the world’s skeptics in citing a Spanish paper whose most outrageous claim is that each green job created leads to the destruction of at least 2.2 jobs in the wider economy.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. The Spanish article makes this spurious claim simply by dividing the amount of renewables subsidies per worker (€571,138) by the average amount of resources the private sector employs per worker (€259,143). Voila, 2.2. The problem with this calculation are many, including, but not limited to, the following:

• No account is taken of the amount of subsidies given to the dirty energy sector, or any other economic sector for that matter.
• While government subsidies represent an opportunity cost, it is a stretch to call the use of those resources “job destruction” when no actual jobs are being destroyed.
• State subsidies are always going to be higher for nascent industries. Afterwards, economies of scale will accrue.

Here’s Terry McCrann’s credulous take on it:

While it would be inappropriate to translate Spain’s experience directly to the US, the Obama Administration’s claim that “green energy” could create 3-5 million jobs is likely to directly wipe out 6.6 million to 11 million jobs elsewhere.

Why? Because of the costs to production and employment, principally in metallurgy, non-metallic mining and the food processing, beverage and tobacco industries.

It is not clear whether the study factors in the jobs that would be lost from reduced consumer spending because of the higher power costs.

But don’t panic. Because none of this is real. It’s fiction in the mind of a skeptic. In reality, yes, some jobs will be lost. And that is no bad thing – jobs are in a constant state of destruction and creation. Punch-card computer operators were reskilled. Asbestos workers had to find other work when we finally figured out how toxic asbestos is. And now, as we finally acknowledge what we’ve known for a long time – that dirty industry is killing us and our planet – jobs in dirty industries will be lost.

But jobs will be created in clean industries, and they will far outweigh the number of jobs that will be lost in dirty old industries – no matter how much tricky mathematics some heretofore unheard-of academic and “Australia’s foremost business commentator” try to spring on the unsuspecting public. You simply can’t say that 2.2 jobs will be lost for every green job created on the basis that significant government expenditure is going into the clean energy space right now. Much of that is capital spending. To say that this initial spend is “destroying jobs” is to compare apples and oranges. It is doing nothing of the sort. The fuel costs of renewable energy are generally zero, and so in the long run, we’ll be saving money on energy and freeing up resources to create even more jobs.

Frankly the illogic is enough to give a man a seizure. But it is so silly that it has been taken seriously by the kinds of elements that take silly things seriously (to wit: the Washington Post (which deigned to sneer at the president’s press secretary for calling the premise of the article “weird” and “simply flat wrong”), the New York Post, and “Australia’s foremost business commentator”, among others) that I just had to take it on.

There’s more to say about this, but I’ll leave it for next time, because there will surely be a next time.

This week’s Australian federal budget was nearly as short-sighted as ever. What we saw on Tuesday was mostly greenwash. Bob Brown was right: this was not a green budget.

Federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan

The government pandered to narrow dirty business interests and dressed its actions up with a poorly-disguised sop to the environmental movement.

It is true that we’ve committed serious money to a national broadband infrastructure. But that should have been done years ago. The info tech boom is now a fact of life. And now we’re left lagging in the next crucial tech boom: clean tech.

A welcome initiative is the government’s $1.5 billion over 4 years that will go into building serious centralised solar generation infrastructure.

But this is a mere sideshow – it’s the sop to the greens. It is a smokescreen for the government’s real agenda: protecting carbon-intensive industries.

Out of total budget expenditures of roughly $340 billion, $4.5 billion is going into “clean energy”. That’s just over 1% of the budget. The lion’s share of this money is going into that oxymoron, “clean coal”.

“Clean coal”, or carbon capture and storage (CCS), is a largely unproven technology. Certainly more unproven than established renewable alternatives like wind and solar. It’s 10 years away from industrial-scale deployment. And it’s not “clean”.

But since coal-fired power and coal exports are entrenched Australian industries, it is easy for the government to fund relatively unproven CCS technology and get away with greenwashing it by calling it “clean” technology.

This, after last week’s delay in the emissions trading scheme, casts serious doubt on the government’s commitment to the environment and to green business.

What happened? The government should be investing many billions into true, proven clean technology. Where is the serious funding for wind, solar, smart grids, electric vehicles, and other clean technology infrastructure and R&D?

Our government doesn’t get it. While our most promising future jobs engine – clean energy and clean tech – is left to fend for itself, the government’s priorities are clearly reflected in, for instance, its increases in defence expenditures, its clear commitment to subsidising the fossil fuel industries (partly by greenwashed stealth), and its refusal to include petrol-induced emissions in the ETS.

Serious money needs to be pumped into this sector. Instead, the government has doled out $20 billion in frivolous cash giveaways (a vote-buying ploy spun as “fiscal stimulus”) and delivered an unnecessarily reckless and short-sighted budget.

Will we ever learn?