Extract from The Guardian
The Abbott government is paying lip service to the renewable energy
industry because it knows speaking its mind would be unpalatable to the
public
Even to a long-term student of political ventriloquy, the Abbott
government’s capacity to speak out of both sides of its mouth on climate
policy is astonishing.
It claims to run a credible environment policy while pandering to those who would prefer to do nothing. It spends $660m, mostly to continue projects started under the former government’s carbon market or its state precursors, while maintaining as its chief business adviser Maurice Newman, who claims climate change is a UN-led ruse to bring about a new world order.
Greg Hunt continues to claim he has achieved “certainty for the renewable energy sector” with a revised renewable energy target while the prime minister admits the whole point of of the review (headed by self-professed climate sceptic Dick Warburton) was to reduce the number of “ugly … noisy” wind farms as far as the Senate would allow, and that he’d really like to cut them further.
As the well-funded, virulently anti-wind website “Stop These Things” boasted this week, possibly quite accurately, the prime minister’s words could actually achieve what he was unable to get through the Senate.
The site (its authors don’t name themselves and went to some lengths to register their domain name anonymously on Christmas Day 2012 through Arizona-based domainnamesbyproxyit) says that from its perspective, “the more attention the better. You see, the wind industry’s ability to roll out the 2,500 giant fans [it means turbines] needed to satisfy the latest [RET] … depends upon commercial lending institutions [i.e. banks].
“With all the sound, fury and bloodletting taking place in the media on a daily basis, no banker in touch with their earthly senses is going to lend so much as a penny to a wind power outfit to build any new wind farms from here on. The insurmountable obstacle to that event can be summed up in a single word: RISK.”
And if the prime minister’s public declaration that he’d really like to reduce “these things” even further wasn’t enough to kill the industry, a group of anti-wind senators are doing their best to impose enough red tape and regulation and RISK to finish off the job. As revealed in a letter leaked to Guardian Australia this week, Hunt has already agreed to establish a new “wind commissioner” and a new scientific committee to investigate, again, claims that turbines harm human health. With the vote on the RET not scheduled until Monday, the senators are using the weekend to try to win even more anti-wind concessions.
The Senate inquiry into the wind industry has heard evidence from people who genuinely believe their health has been harmed by wind turbines and some of the senators may be motivated by concern for them, but no scientific study has yet backed any asserted health claims, and many of the senators just want to shut down wind. They just don’t want to say so because renewable energy is popular, and in the case of the Coalition members, that is not supposed to be their policy, except if it happens to be a day when the prime minister is talking to Alan Jones.
Nor is it credible for the government to pretend they wanted more renewables – just not wind power. If that was their aim they would have “reserved” some of the RET target for different technologies when they came into office, instead of appointing a self-professed climate sceptic to conduct a review, stalling investment and starving the whole sector into submission. Yes, along with the wind commissioner, the government has agreed to ask the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to do more to fund large-scale solar, but that’s the same CEFC the government is committed to abolish, so one could be excused for not finding that promise hugely reassuring.
Hunt also can’t tell the chief UN climate negotiator, Christiana Figueres, that Australia is going to cut greenhouse emissions from industry and electricity generation when the prime minister made sure the only mechanism he had to do this – the so-called “safeguards mechanism” in Direct Action had no teeth.
He can’t pretend his Direct Action policy is capable of meeting whatever target Australia signs up to in Paris at the end of the year without some cap on industrial or electricity sector emissions.
And the prime minister can’t claim “climate change is real, humanity does make a contribution to it and we’ve got to take effective action against it” and at the same time say emissions trading is “a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one.”
Whatever policy a political party proposes to reduce Australia’s emissions, it has to be a real one, an effective one, that solves a problem that party actually believes is real.
Labor says it remains committed to a market mechanism to reduce emissions but has not yet taken even basic decisions about the policy it will propose at the next election. The government is utterly convinced it will be able to annihilate the ALP with a rerun of its “great big new tax on everything” anti-emissions trading scheme campaign.
The only reason the Coalition is talking out of both sides of its mouth is because it knows it can’t come right out and say “we don’t really believe this stuff, and even if we did, we don’t think Australia should have to do much about it and we don’t propose that our policy will force much real change”. The latest Lowy poll shows Australians’ concerns about climate change are rapidly growing. Voters know doing nothing is not an option.
The Coalition’s contradictions may soon become so obvious the ventriloquy act will stop working.
It claims to run a credible environment policy while pandering to those who would prefer to do nothing. It spends $660m, mostly to continue projects started under the former government’s carbon market or its state precursors, while maintaining as its chief business adviser Maurice Newman, who claims climate change is a UN-led ruse to bring about a new world order.
Greg Hunt continues to claim he has achieved “certainty for the renewable energy sector” with a revised renewable energy target while the prime minister admits the whole point of of the review (headed by self-professed climate sceptic Dick Warburton) was to reduce the number of “ugly … noisy” wind farms as far as the Senate would allow, and that he’d really like to cut them further.
As the well-funded, virulently anti-wind website “Stop These Things” boasted this week, possibly quite accurately, the prime minister’s words could actually achieve what he was unable to get through the Senate.
The site (its authors don’t name themselves and went to some lengths to register their domain name anonymously on Christmas Day 2012 through Arizona-based domainnamesbyproxyit) says that from its perspective, “the more attention the better. You see, the wind industry’s ability to roll out the 2,500 giant fans [it means turbines] needed to satisfy the latest [RET] … depends upon commercial lending institutions [i.e. banks].
“With all the sound, fury and bloodletting taking place in the media on a daily basis, no banker in touch with their earthly senses is going to lend so much as a penny to a wind power outfit to build any new wind farms from here on. The insurmountable obstacle to that event can be summed up in a single word: RISK.”
And if the prime minister’s public declaration that he’d really like to reduce “these things” even further wasn’t enough to kill the industry, a group of anti-wind senators are doing their best to impose enough red tape and regulation and RISK to finish off the job. As revealed in a letter leaked to Guardian Australia this week, Hunt has already agreed to establish a new “wind commissioner” and a new scientific committee to investigate, again, claims that turbines harm human health. With the vote on the RET not scheduled until Monday, the senators are using the weekend to try to win even more anti-wind concessions.
The Senate inquiry into the wind industry has heard evidence from people who genuinely believe their health has been harmed by wind turbines and some of the senators may be motivated by concern for them, but no scientific study has yet backed any asserted health claims, and many of the senators just want to shut down wind. They just don’t want to say so because renewable energy is popular, and in the case of the Coalition members, that is not supposed to be their policy, except if it happens to be a day when the prime minister is talking to Alan Jones.
Nor is it credible for the government to pretend they wanted more renewables – just not wind power. If that was their aim they would have “reserved” some of the RET target for different technologies when they came into office, instead of appointing a self-professed climate sceptic to conduct a review, stalling investment and starving the whole sector into submission. Yes, along with the wind commissioner, the government has agreed to ask the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to do more to fund large-scale solar, but that’s the same CEFC the government is committed to abolish, so one could be excused for not finding that promise hugely reassuring.
Hunt also can’t tell the chief UN climate negotiator, Christiana Figueres, that Australia is going to cut greenhouse emissions from industry and electricity generation when the prime minister made sure the only mechanism he had to do this – the so-called “safeguards mechanism” in Direct Action had no teeth.
He can’t pretend his Direct Action policy is capable of meeting whatever target Australia signs up to in Paris at the end of the year without some cap on industrial or electricity sector emissions.
And the prime minister can’t claim “climate change is real, humanity does make a contribution to it and we’ve got to take effective action against it” and at the same time say emissions trading is “a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one.”
Whatever policy a political party proposes to reduce Australia’s emissions, it has to be a real one, an effective one, that solves a problem that party actually believes is real.
Labor says it remains committed to a market mechanism to reduce emissions but has not yet taken even basic decisions about the policy it will propose at the next election. The government is utterly convinced it will be able to annihilate the ALP with a rerun of its “great big new tax on everything” anti-emissions trading scheme campaign.
The only reason the Coalition is talking out of both sides of its mouth is because it knows it can’t come right out and say “we don’t really believe this stuff, and even if we did, we don’t think Australia should have to do much about it and we don’t propose that our policy will force much real change”. The latest Lowy poll shows Australians’ concerns about climate change are rapidly growing. Voters know doing nothing is not an option.
The Coalition’s contradictions may soon become so obvious the ventriloquy act will stop working.
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