Regular readers will know I exist in a state of near permanent
despondency at the completely busted debate we have in this country
about climate and energy policy.
But this weekend I want to acknowledge a couple of green shoots.
Over the past month of so, if we hit mute on the nonsense posturing and just look at what the government is doing, we see stirrings of action in the right places.
We can thank the Australian Energy Market Operator for grabbing our politicians by the lapels and shouting that we could see a shortage of gas by next summer.
While many worthy people have been trying to hold a lantern over the gas problem for at least a couple of years, knocking ever so politely on the government’s door, clearing their throats delicately – the energy market operator screaming “no gas Malcolm” in the public square triggered an emergency summit, and a lot of fighting words by the prime minister, and, the stirrings of a verb.
You wouldn’t want to overstate Gas In Our Time, because, right now,
the verb is only gas for the domestic market during peak periods, and
gas during peak periods doesn’t actually help you much if you lack the
available generation capacity to translate the gas into electricity.
But at least we are finally talking about gas, which we do need as a transitional fuel.
In my book, that’s a start.
Now to the vexed matter of whether or not Jay Weatherill’s wind farms epitomise the wanton destruction of capitalism by rabid leftists.
But this weekend I want to acknowledge a couple of green shoots.
Over the past month of so, if we hit mute on the nonsense posturing and just look at what the government is doing, we see stirrings of action in the right places.
We can thank the Australian Energy Market Operator for grabbing our politicians by the lapels and shouting that we could see a shortage of gas by next summer.
While many worthy people have been trying to hold a lantern over the gas problem for at least a couple of years, knocking ever so politely on the government’s door, clearing their throats delicately – the energy market operator screaming “no gas Malcolm” in the public square triggered an emergency summit, and a lot of fighting words by the prime minister, and, the stirrings of a verb.
But at least we are finally talking about gas, which we do need as a transitional fuel.
In my book, that’s a start.
Now to the vexed matter of whether or not Jay Weatherill’s wind farms epitomise the wanton destruction of capitalism by rabid leftists.
It really wasn’t the high point of democratic representation, gotcha in the garage; kind of depressing, really – but the government in Canberra really had that one coming.
The Weatherill government has tried to play a constructive role in the energy council, the state and federal decision-making body which sits under the Coag umbrella. They’ve done that for years, in fact you’d categorise their efforts as a leadership role undertaken while Canberra roiled, raged and regressed – so they really don’t deserve whipping boy status.
And with an election coming up in 12 months, what premier in their right mind sits back and consents to being cast as a wild-eyed numpty intent on destroying his own state? If you look pick a fight in politics, generally, you’ll get one, and Weatherill has now resolved to give as good as he gets.
In any case, while Turnbull has pivoted constructively in acknowledging that gas is one of the current problems with our creaky energy market, the prime minister still maintains his periodic right to bag South Australian wind farms, and Weatherill’s latent hippy-dom.
Turnbull does this while asserting two things – he’s not being ideological; and he is the sensible soul championing a technology neutral energy policy.
This script from the prime minister has never rung true, because you aren’t technology neutral if you constantly frame wind as The Problem. Sorry to insist on residing somewhere proximate to a fact-based universe, but there it is.
Of course there are intermittency problems to solve with wind technology, and solar. That point, in substance, is reasonable.
But if this was a practical problem to solve, and nothing more, an engineering fix, you’d just get on with it, you wouldn’t elevate it to the extent Turnbull has.
So what might the prime minister be up to?
It is possible all this blather is about subduing his own internal critics – a small prime ministerial fan dance of distraction while you get on with the business of trying to set up what needs to happen.
I noted earlier this year the prime minister used the cover of a pivot to “clean” coal technologies at his parliamentary year-opening National Press Club speech in early February to commit a modest heresy against conservative culture warriors and climate sceptics – he tasked the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation with funding large-scale storage projects.
Storage matters, because if you solve storage, you solve the intermittency problems of low emissions technologies, and you move closer to decarbonising the grid.
Over the last couple of months, while maintaining the wicked Weatherill wind mantra on a loop, on an intermittent, lulling, frequency – Turnbull has been pursuing his favoured low emissions technologies, like pumped hydro, and also emphasising the importance of storage, even before the tweeting tech billionaires got involved.
This week, a head-turning move, a feasibility study examining whether it is possible to build a 2GW pumped hydro scheme in the Snowy Mountains.
If this ambitious project ultimately comes off (you did read the if in that sentence, right?) – it would be a very significant move in the direction of a decarbonised Australian energy grid, which is obviously no small thing.
By expanding the Snowy scheme, Turnbull was able to wrap a massive pro-renewables project in the cloak of Snowy mountain high nostalgia, which is obviously clever when you consider the delicate sensibilities of the regressive forces in his party room.
Who could come out and bag the Snowy scheme after all? That would be un-Australian.
So folks, a couple of green shoots.
But unfortunately, little pulses of reason are not the whole story, and they don’t change the fundamental problem we currently face. There’s still an enormous vacuum at the heart of the enterprise.
The vacuum is, of course, national energy policy.
Let’s be very clear. The reason Australia is in this mess is because we have zero certainty about future direction, and the reason we have zero certainty is because Tony Abbott, between 2009 and 2013, thought he could win an election by conjuring up a monstrosity called carbon tax, and promising to axe it.
So making this someone else’s failure, or someone else’s problem, really isn’t a viable option for the Liberal party.
We need them to fix the unconscionable mess they made. We need the government to get this right. They really do owe us that much.
Without the energy policy absence being addressed, the various bits and pieces fluttering through the daily news cycle are just fragments, which may be useful, or may be counter-productive, depending on how the government ultimately lands the energy policy plane.
Landing the energy policy plane is really the only test that matters.
And right now we have the deeply odd spectre of every major business group in the country (minus the Minerals Council, which can’t seem to find its constructive gene) telling the government that the market signal required to drive future investment in the energy market, and reduce emissions at least cost to households and businesses, is a form of carbon trading known as an emissions intensity scheme.
The man running the energy review for the government, the chief scientist Alan Finkel, has given tacit support to an intensity scheme as well.
If you’ve followed energy policy closely for a long time, you will know that the current in-principle consensus around emissions trading from what you might politely term rent-seekers row did not exist a couple of years ago.
Some of the groups now supporting carbon trading in the electricity sector ran a pitched campaign against it during the deeply inglorious axe the tax period.
If by some miracle, you have rent seekers in alignment with experts, rational governments know that’s an opportunity that you don’t squander. Not if you are sensible.
You grab that consensus and you go for it.
To grab that and go for it, Malcolm Turnbull needs only to agree with Malcolm Turnbull circa 2009. Hardly a revolution, or a thought crime.
You’ve even got Labor in alignment. The ALP has rowed their boat back from supporting a more ambitious scheme covering more sectors, to a trading scheme for electricity.
Bipartisanship. Who’d have thunk it?
But the government keeps ruling out an intensity scheme because the delicate sensibilities of conservative hold outs are apparently a more important consideration than the considered views of the energy industry, industrial users of energy, institutional investors in the energy market, and the expert views of the chief scientist, a bunch of market analysts and energy policy experts.
Delicate feelings can, in contemporary politics, triumph over facts.
We have the strange sense right at the moment that a Liberal government could emerge from this process arguing that regulation, or more boondoggles, like Direct Action, are preferable to a simple market mechanism. A curious posture for the party of free markets.
That dynamic isn’t cause for hope. In fact on a good day, it can lead to your head hitting the desk. On a bad day, it can make you lose all hope in politics.
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