Greens MPs

This was published today at ABC Unleashed

The release on Monday of the Rudd Government's climate change white paper is a clear demonstration that this Government is intent on playing politics with climate change without actually doing anything about it.

The useless emissions reduction target and self-defeating design of the scheme tells only half the story. The Government pre-empted the announcement by throwing half a billion dollars at expanding coal infrastructure in the Hunter Valley, and followed it up with a badly-designed incentive scheme for renewable energy that will ensure it does not grow beyond a marginal player to challenge the dominance of the coal sector.

Today's Age newspaper's editorial put it clearly:

This post was published originally this morning at ABC Online

One of the most important numbers in Australia's history was revealed yesterday - a number that carries with it the hopes and fears of millions of people and embodies our priorities as a nation, our balancing of the relative worth of human beings.

It has been argued that the 5 per cent 2020 emissions reduction target that Prime Minister Rudd announced is no more or less than a political balancing act - navigating a midway path between the competing demands of business and scientists, of the Coalition and the Greens. But that is an extremely superficial view, and one that fails to see just how all-encompassing climate change is. There are much deeper choices at the core of any decision on emissions targets.

Perhaps the most obvious of these choices is the question 'do we value our children as much as ourselves?'

Yesterday the Rudd Government demonstrated very clearly where its climate and energy priorities lie - not with the proven renewable energy solutions, but with the geosequestration pipe-dream that Al Gore has recently called "too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate".

Fresh from burying Christine Milne's feed-in tariff Bill with a majority Senate Inquiry report saying it's a "great idea, but let's not do it", the Rudd Government went on last night to push through a Bill which gives a huge benefit to those who seek to bury CO2 under the sea floor - letting them make profits without having to carry the liability. This is a recipe for a new sub-prime crisis, telling industry that they can make significant profits safe in the knowledge that they will not need to carry the can for more than 20 years.

The debate on this bill is worth reading in its entirety if you have time. It exposes quite how blinded by industry rhetoric the Government and Opposition both are. Perhaps the pinnacle of this is to be found in

The thing I’ve found most fascinating about the responses to the Treasury’s ETS modelling
released yesterday is how, all of a sudden, a pile of big coal’s
biggest fans are agreeing with us that coal with geosequestration isn’t
going to come cheap!

Malcolm Turnbull, for example, told the media yesterday
that “The cost of carbon capture and storage is probably the biggest
single assumption in this whole analysis… There is no full-blown
demonstration plant employing carbon capture and storage so estimates
of its costs are speculative.”

Well-known climate naysayer, Brian Fisher, writes in today’s Australian
that “The Treasury’s assumptions on the capital cost of construction of
a CCS-ready coal-fired power plant appear to be about half those
estimated by well-qualified industry experts.”

This is a speech I delivered to the Sydney Institute last night. You can also listen to it here or download a pdf here.

Sydney Institute, October 27th 2008.

Green Politics, the Balance of Power and the Green New Deal.

Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening about Green Politics, Balance of Power and the twin global meltdowns of climate and finance. There has never been a more critical time to be a Green and there has never been a time when the philosophy and experience of Green politics - based on forty years of environmental, social justice, peace and democracy campaigning - has been more important. The decisions that will be made in the next five years are crucial for the future of life on Earth.

This article by Christine Milne was published in New Matilda on 24 September

In one of those perfect ironies, Prime Minister Rudd's announcement of his $100 million push to make Australia the global coal hub last Friday came on the same day that yet another so-called "clean coal" project, Santos' Fairview operation in Queensland, was scrapped.

The Fairview collapse "was to do with getting the funding balance right", according to a Santos spokesperson quoted in the Australian Financial Review last Friday. That, of course, is code for "we want more money from governments", tactfully argued by a company whose last half-year profits were $304 million and whose project has already been handed $75 million in taxpayer funds.

The Senate Inquiry into Christine Milne's Private Member's Bill for a national, comprehensive, gross feed-in tariff for renewable energy is closing its call for submissions this Friday, August 15.

Those of you who would like to see a strong, supportive policy framework for renewable energy in Australia, I would strongly recommend that you put in a submission to the inquiry as a matter of urgency.

Christine's last post on the issue, setting out what the Bill would achieve, is here, and you can find all the details about the Bill and how to make submissions here.

The Rudd Government's Emissions Trading Green Paper can now be downloaded from the Climate Change Department website here.

I've been trying to get to do a post on this since 12.30, but I'm alone in the office with Christine and the phone's been ringing off the hook - which is a good thing!

We will do a proper detailed post, but in the meantime, here is Christine's release from this arvo.

The upshot is that the Government has put their foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. The leak this morning about essentially keeping petrol out of the scheme (raising the price with one hand and dropping it by the same amount with the other!) is symbolic of the whole thing. An emissions trading scheme is about driving new investment, but this proposal would protect existing coal investments, shutting the door on efficiency and renewables and mass transit and alternative fuels.

Professor Garnaut is likely to be very unimpressed indeed today. His hard work has just been utterly trashed.

In the wake of the release Professor Garnaut's draft report, Stateline WA ran a well timed piece in which I was interviewed on the nuclear industry's unsightly scramble for a place at the climate change table.

The Senate Environment Committee is calling for submissions to an inquiry into my renewable energy feed-in Private Member's Bill, which we negotiated and were successful in having referred earlier this week.