Contemporary politics, local and international current affairs, science and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
Truth never damages a cause that is just ~ MAHATMA GANDHI
Tuesday, 11 July 2017
No wonder the government tries to hide its emissions reports. They stink
As every greenhouse gas emissions report since June 2014 has shown,
the end of the carbon price has led to an increase in emissions. What’s
the plan, prime minister?
‘Whatever else you want to say about the Direct Action plan of the
government, it has utterly failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.’
Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Getty Images
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Last Friday, the Australian government finally released the latest greenhouse gas emissions report,
showing emissions have risen in the past year. When excluding emissions
from land use, 2016 saw Australia release a record level of CO2 into
the atmosphere. It confirms the failure of the government’s
environmental policy at a time when electricity prices – despite the
absence of a carbon price – continue to rise at levels above inflation.
The government has a history of being scared to release the
greenhouse gas reports. Last year it released the March 2016 and June
2016 reports on the Thursday before Christmas – not exactly peak viewing
time. It also meant the March report was released nine months after the
March quarter had actually finished.
And once again the government held off releasing the latest report.
But in a level of coincidence equal to that of Bill Heslop running into
Deirdre Chambers in the Porpoise Split Chinese restaurant, on the day
that the Australian Conservation Foundation released FOI documents showing that the government had been sitting on the report for more than a month, the government released the latest report.
And in an effort that rather stretches the meaning of “quarterly”,
the government “incorporated” the September quarter figures into the
December report.
It says something about how poorly this government values the issue of climate change that over a month ago we had the figures
on the entire production that occurred in Australia during the first
three months of this year, and yet here we are in July and we still only
know the level of greenhouse gas emissions up to December last year.
The
figures in the report quickly made it obvious why the government has
held off releasing them. They stink. And as every report since June 2014
has shown, the end of the carbon price has led to an increase in
emissions.
The poor departmental officials try to paint a happy picture.
The release leads with the line that “total emissions for Australia
for the year to December 2016 (including Land Use, Land Use Change and
Forestry) are estimated to be 543.3 Mt CO2-e.” They note that
this is 2.0% below emissions in 2000, and 10.2% below emissions in
2005. Oddly, they don’t note that is it 1.0% above the emissions in
2015.
The inclusion of land use, land use change and forestry is a fairly dodgy measure.
As Lenore Taylor and Graham Readfern have reported,
the inclusion of that measure in the Kyoto protocol in 1997 was
essentially an “Australia clause” – because then environment minister Senator Robert Hill pushed for it to be counted as it allowed us to take advantage of changes to land clearing after 1990.
But the benefits from those changes have finished (though pointedly the Paris agreement from 2005 still includes them):
Excluding the “LULUCF” means focusing on actual greenhouse gas
emissions rather than including the reductions in emissions from
planting trees or in agreeing not to clear land.
But the news on emissions excluding LULUCF is less able to be painted
in a positive light. In December, they increased 0.4% relative to
September and were up 1.4% compared to December 2015.
While looking at individual quarters is interesting, a better picture
is gained by looking at the sum of emissions over a 12-month period.
And here we see that 2016 recorded a record level of emissions:
The biggest contributor to our emissions is the electricity sector – around 35% of all emissions:
But in 2016 the biggest increase to emissions came from “stationary
energy” – that is emissions that come via combustion fuels used in
industry – and fugitive emissions which occur during the production,
processing, transport, storage, transmission and distribution of fossil
fuels:
The electricity sector however is the most important, not only
because it is the biggest, but also because it is the sector for which
renewable energy is most viable. In this sector, the impact of the
carbon price and its removal is particularly stark:
Whatever else you want to say about the Direct Action plan of the
government, it has utterly failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s a problem for the government because even on its “business as usual” projections, it expects electricity emissions to fall sharply in the next few years:
And those business as usual projections would see total emissions by
2030 at just 0.5% below 2005 levels, rather than the 26%-28% lower
level we are aiming to achieve under the Paris agreement:
And this is where the problem for the government really hits.
The Finkel Review recommends
implementing a clean energy target that would lead to a 28% reduction
in emissions from electricity by 2030. But that alone would not get
Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions down to the 26% target.
Were electricity emissions to fall 28% and the rest of the economy
continue on a business as usual cases, our total emissions would only
fall by around 8% below 2005 levels – and the biggest contributor would
be counting the falls in land use and land use change that occurred from
2005-2013.
If you excluded the LULUCF category, our emissions would have actually risen by 3%:
Clearly a 28% cut to electricity emissions alone is not enough. But
to achieve cuts in other sectors of the economy there would need to be
not just a clean energy target or an emissions intensity scheme which
targets the electricity sector, but an economy-wide carbon price.
Right now the government won’t even commit to a clean energy target,
even though the Finkel Review found that it would lead to lower
electricity prices as well as lower emissions compared to business as
usual.
A report by energy analysis firm RepuTex this week
also showed that that a more ambitious target of 45% below 2005 levels
would see even lower electricity prices by 2030 due to the increase in
renewable energy production and a lower reliance on gas – which is the
main cause of a 10% rise in electricity prices in Sydney over the past
year and a 7.7% rise in Melbourne.
At some point, this government will have to realise that if it wants
lower electricity prices the best way to go about is to also lower
greenhouse gas emissions. Because its currently policy is doing neither.
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