There was muted outrage from the environment movement when Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd did a back flip a few weeks ago on his Government’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – a term often used synonymously with ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme‘ (CPRS).

Is this because environmentally-concerned people in our community have suddenly lost interest in climate change?

Have we joined the ranks of so-called ‘climate sceptics’: people so silly or arrogant they’d punt on their own hunch (or the hunch of their favourite shock-jock) about what’s necessary for biospheric security against the overwhelming consensus of the world’s professional scientists who’ve been researching – and freely discussing – the subject for years?

Dr Clive Spash - ex-CSIRO critic of the ETS, gagged by the Rudd Government

I don’t think so.

I’ll speak personally. By the time Rudd shelved the ETS as a legislative priority, I’d become so aghast at that revolting policy, the detail of which was developed by doyen of sneaky greenwash, ‘Climate Change’ Minister Penny Wong, that I saw it as worse than neutral.

Had the ETS gone ahead, in my opinion, it would have been a step backwards on grappling with climate change. That’s because it would have helped lock Australia into grossly unsustainable practices for a considerable period – and most likely would have ended in sheer fiasco, generating in the process widespread disillusionment about any kind of action on the crucial issue of climate change.

In other words, for me the ETS was not a CPRS at all. It was a fake. Doubtless emissions would have been traded under the scheme. But genuine emissions reduction? Once again, I think not.

To be even-handed, I’ll add that conservative Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s approach to the climate change issue is little more than ‘do nothing other than sneer and misrepresent the arguments’. That, of course, is seriously woeful. In Federal Parliament at present, the Australian Greens is the only politicial party to behave as though climate change is a real problem that requires genuine action.

Back in 2007, part of the promise of a Labor Government – after more than a decade of intellectual stultification under John Howard – was a more enlightened and open approach to public debate on important issues.

On climate change at least, it has not delivered this.

Not only did the Government develop a worse than useless policy – and squander yet more precious years failing to implement any significant changes to help shift our infrastructure and economy towards lower emissions.

It even persecuted informed voices that spoke out against its flakey policies.

The classic case is that of Dr Clive Spash, an environmental economist originally head-hunted by the CSIRO, then gagged and squeezed out of Australian academia when his work came to threaten the rose-tinted ‘consensus’ the Rudd Government was seeking to create around its proposals for an ETS.

Dr Spash’s work goes to the heart of what was, at the time, a crucial question. How effectively would an ETS reduce emissions and hence ameliorate climate change?

His conclusion was damning. It went beyond criticisms of detail in the Government’s policy (and needless to say, Senator Wong had made sure there was plenty of ‘devil in the detail’).

According to Dr Spash, the ETS is inherently flawed policy. It may have limited application in some cases, but as a general approach it would be a disaster.

Watch this video and judge his arguments for yourself.

Dr Clive Spash speaks on Australian Climate Change Policy, March 2010

Now ask yourself – whether or not you agree with the analysis presented by Dr Spash – what type of country gags voices such as his in the middle of a crucial policy debate?

The basic idea behind “Carbon Capture and Storage” is enticing: remove carbon-dioxide emissions when coal is burnt and store them safely – so we can enjoy cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy with no negative greenhouse impact. Fantastic!

The Greenpeace perspective on CCS

And there’s the problem… while a nice idea in principle, the proposal remains, in effect, a fantasy. It’s possible future technological breakthroughs will eventually make the fantasy reality. Such things have happened before. Even so, our boffins haven’t had 100% success in making science fiction come true.

Yes, we now have supersonic aircraft – even spacecraft – things Jules Verne and H.G. Wells could only dream about. But we still don’t have time machines. Some things are imaginable – but very hard, if not impossible, to achieve.

“Carbon Capture and Storage” is of that type. It’s clearly not easy. After all, the incentive to make it work is enormous. CCS would assure the coal industry a secure future in a world compelled reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this, the coal industry worldwide – with all its vast resources – has failed to develop large scale, affordable CCS. The most optimistic estimates for when CCS may become a working reality stretch out decades in the future. By any standards, it’s a long shot.

The case for spending public monies on CCS research and development is therefore very slim. Why should the public fund research that’s so strongly in the coal industry’s own interests? Coal is big business, after all.

Most legitimate environment groups in Australia have long opposed CCS, seeing it as a distraction at best. But a handful of influential conservationists have given it measured support. The Climate Institute, a relatively new lobby group, is one of organizations that has been supportive.

John Connor, Climate Institute CEO: wants to clear the air

Yesterday’s Australian budget promised a national taxpayer investment of $2 billion for CCS. The Climate Institute’s CEO, John Connor cautiously welcomed the expenditure on CCS R & D, saying: “We can’t let it hang around like a bad smell”. He means we must quickly resolve the issue of whether CCS  can be achieved on a commerical scale. (Clearly, if it can’t be done, coal has little future as a mass energy source in a greenhouse-constrained world.)

The problem with this strategy is that it can take a long time to prove a negative. Eternity, to be precise. If, meanwhile, we continue to export and burn coal at record levels, Australia remains a continuing (and worsening) part of the global greenhouse problem. Surely that’s not what the Climate Institute wants?

I suggest Mr Connor’s analogy is somewhat misleading. It’s not CCS that’s “hanging around like a bad smell”. Greenhouse gas pollution – much of it caused by coal emissions – is the ‘bad smell’.  CCS is more like a deodorizer.

The prospect that CCS technology will work in the future has a vital current use – for the coal industry. It helps rationalize its continuing expansion in countries such as Australia. It helps justify building more coal-fire energy plants, even in countries that claim to be  ‘greenhouse conscious’ such as Britain. It helps to cover up the bad smell about what’s really happening: growth of an emissions-intensive energy source at the very time irt should be constrained and wound down.

Vattenfall Pilot Plant: progress but no solution

I hope I’m wrong. I hope CCS will work. Some optimists point to power plants such as the new Vattenfall pilot plant in Germany. But it’s only a pilot – and the CO2 storage problems are as yet unsolved: “Vattenfall is currently searching for a suitable storage site to be connected to the pilot plant..”

Some folk hope we’ll invent a perpetual motion machine – but we don’t usually let zany optimists manage our national budget. Hope alone is not a sufficient basis for the deployment of enormous public investments.

As things stand, CCS is primarily a deodorizer for the coal industry. It’s PR. What’s more, it’s PR that coal industry lobbyists have pursuaded our government to fund, with billions of taxpayer dollars.

To my way of thinking, that really stinks.

The best mainstream media reporting I’ve seen on the Rudd Government’s greenhouse policies has been by Kenneth Davidson in The Melbourne Age.

Veteran Australian economic journalist Kenneth Davidson, who has retained his critical faculties

Davidson has become increasingly sceptical of the Rudd Government’s proposals for an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). He’s helped document fatal rorts embedded in the proposal, such as huge give-aways to some of Australia’s worst polluters. In general, Mr Davidson favours a carbon tax, which he sees as simpler to implement and less amenable to cheating.

But Davidson has also moved towards embracing the more radical view that ‘economic instruments’ have been over-hyped in the quest to control greenhouse gas emissions.

He’s part of an international shift in thought towards advocating massive direct government investment to bring down the cost of emissions-friendly energy and activities.

As concern has intensified over global climate change, commentators have often compared the challenge facing humanity to a war.

Yet real ‘wars’ were not fought, in the past, primarily by the use of ‘economic instruments’. Churchill and his team didn’t set up an economic strategy conducive in the long-term to the production of armaments – then sit back and let economic forces win their war.

They commissioned armaments and deployed armed forces – borrowing, begging (even stealing!) as required to achieve their war goals. That’s how to do big things if you’re serious. It applies to almost anything, really.

Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong: Expert at the 3-Card Trick

The millions of person-hours that has been invested in recent years – by some of the finest green-leaning minds on the planet- into considering the respective merits of competing ‘economic instruments’ – whether taxes or trading schemes – may be seen in historical perspective as time ill-spent.

In Australia, for example, I believe the ETS debate has been a grave distraction. While Professor Ross Garnaut and Penny Wong had held the limelight for much of the last year and a half with their confusing intellectual wizardry – the main game has been largely abandonned.

In Ken Davidson’s latest article – Time the sun set on carbon scheme – one paragraph stands out for me:

The HSBC produced a table that was published in The Economist (April 4). It measured eco-friendly spending as a percentage of total fiscal stimulus as at March 31 2009 and showed that apart from South Korea, China and France which plan to spent 80 per cent, 35 per cent and 25 per cent respectively of their fiscal stimulus on green policies, the other countries listed, including Australia, planned to spend 10 per cent or less of their stimulus on green policies.

Within the space of a few months, Kevin Rudd and his government have blown Australia’s Federal Government surplus and a long-term deficit beckons.

It may well have been a necessity. But instead of a getting major environmental and economic resilience gains from Australia’s counter-cyclical stimulus expenditure – like the canny South Koreans – Mr Rudd and his crew have focused on keeping the business-as-usual economy afloat.

It’s shocking policy and represents a dreadful lost opportunity. Let’s hope there’s time to turn it round.

Here’s more fromTime the sun set on carbon scheme:

Getting serious about change

A practical solution is proposed by conservative US economists, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenburger, in their essays called “The Emerging Climate Consensus: Global Warming Policy in a Post-environmental World“.

In his preface, Ross Gelbspan says we can’t negotiate the problem of global warming through market-based mechanisms: “Nature does not care whether our solutions conform to market-based criteria. So given the escalating pace of change, today ‘cap and trade’ has come to reflect an institutionalised failure of moral courage.”

He points out that during the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration could spend 30 per cent of gross domestic product on defence, compared with 6 per cent now, without any adverse consequences for the US economy, even though the expenditure on battleships, war planes and tanks was pure consumption, unlike the eco-friendly infrastructure required now.

“We are facing a new era of chaos … (which) unchecked could make WWII look, in retrospect, like a relatively stable period of human history. What we need, in short, is a global public works program to rewire the world with clean energy,” Gelbspan said.

According to Nordhaus and Shellenburger, “Environmentalists, perpetually certain that a new ecological age is about to dawn in America, have serially overestimated their strength and misread public opinion. Democrats must break once and for all from green orthodoxy that focuses primarily on making dirty energy more expensive and instead embrace a strategy to make clean energy cheap. For 20 years, the green climate agenda has embraced two insidious orthodoxies that are rooted in market fundamentalism: deficit spending is always bad for the economy and we should “let the market decide” our energy future. The result has been serial political failure, skyrocketing emissions, and stagnation of energy technology.

“Contrary to the old trope that government should not ‘pick winners and losers’ the actual history of technology innovation suggests government have a remarkable record of picking technological winners,” the authors said.

It appears that President Obama has got the message. Last week he proposed massive public investment to bring the price of renewables down to that of fossil fuels.

The question is, when will the Rudd Government get the message? There is an overwhelming case for Australia to abandon the ETS, especially in the form of the CPRS, and instead focus on Government-backing for base load renewable energy investments backed by an increase in the Renewable Energy Target from the present 20 per cent of total electricity generation to 40 per cent by 2020.

This policy could be backed up by a small, broad-based, carbon tax of $10 dollars a tonne. It would not be politically onerous and could raise about $5 billion a year for renewable energy development.

Yesterday Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd launched a new ‘Clean Coal’ Institute – backed with the injection of an initial $100 million in taxpayer funds.

James Wolfensohn: loves a challenge

The full title of Mr Rudd’s new initiative is the ‘Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute’. The Institute will have an advisory panel chaired by James Wolfensohn, formerly Head of the World Bank. It’s a nice touch; suitable employment for out-of-work investment bankers is hard to find these days. Wolfensohn’s last two much-feted public roles were ending world poverty and brokering a just deal for the Palestinians. ‘Clean coal’ gives him a go at the hat-trick.

Environmentalists and other nay-sayers have suggested the Government’s infatuation with ‘Clean Coal’ is merely a fig leaf for its pro-coal agenda. They claim ‘Clean Coal’ research is essentially a PR exercise that helps rationalize the continuing expansion of Australia’s coal production and exports at a time of escalating concern over climate change.

That’s an uncharitable view. Better to see the policy as a bold experiment in science fiction. Mr Rudd seems to be trying out the Improbability Drive described by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Real Games, Real Easy

$100 million is $5 per person for every man, woman and child in the country. Launching the new Institute is like forcing everyone in Australia to buy a Lottery ticket. It has about as much chance of paying out. Of course, the priesthood who will work on this obscure branch of improbable technology at public expense are all odds-on winners.

Will Kevin Rudd now launch a ‘Perpetual Motion Machine Institute’ to help round-out Australia’s credentials in wacky science? How about a ‘Time Machine Institute’? Does Afghanistan need a new Research Institute in Kabul, devoted to research into non-addictive opium?

After 18 months in office, the Rudd Government’s track record on climate change policy has disappointed even the pessimists. It has:

1. Failed even to maintain market continuity for household solar installation projects subsidized by the previous Government
2. Developed an Emission Trading Scheme proposal that’s already widely discredited and viewed as a scam favouring the nation’s worst polluting industries (fortunately – but no thanks to the Government – a Senate Committee has begun dissecting the proposed ETS in public).
3. Failed to introduce decisive new policies favouring renewable energy
4. Offset the benefits of stimulus package expenditure on roof insulation and other emissions-reducing investments by misdirecting public funds into old-style infrastructure conducive to emissions growth.

Rudd's Clean Coal Policy: $100 million of False Hope?

Now Mr Rudd and his colleagues have lavished $100 million on a technological experiment that the coal industry itself considers too risky. After all, if the industry believed Carbon Capture and Storage was feasible within a realistic time frame, surely it would have done the research itself and proved the case, years ago? Yet again, we see socialization of loss on behalf of profitable big business. In this case, the ‘loss’ is a large public relations bill, masquerading as science.

Human-induced climate change is a critical policy issue and these are perilous times. We real leaders – not spivs – to chart the course towards a sustainable future.

_________________________

See also the critque of ‘Clean Carbon’ technology in the May 2008 Greenpeace report:  False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate

The NeoClassical Perpetual Motion Machine

Cartoon with thanks to the brilliant toothpastefordinner.com team.