Labor to tighten emissions regime as it draws climate battle-lines

Extract from The Guardian

Greenhouse gas emissions

Land-clearing and vehicle pollution measures also expected in opposition’s final election offering on climate

Katharine Murphy Political editor

@murpharoo

Sat 30 Mar 2019 08.26 AEDT Last modified on Sat 30 Mar 2019 08.28 AEDT

Industries producing high levels of carbon emissions, including the cement, steel and aluminium sectors, will have more stringent requirements under Labor’s climate policy. Photograph: Julian Smith/EPA

Labor is set to unveil a climate policy that will beef up the Morrison government’s heavily criticised safeguard mechanism, creating new pollution reduction requirements for the aviation sector, cement, steel and aluminum, mining and gas, direct combustion and the non-electricity energy sectors.
Currently the safeguard mechanism applies to businesses with direct emissions of more than 100 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollution each year, and Labor’s policy is expected to lower that threshold to 25 kilotonnes, which means more sectors and businesses will be covered.
It is anticipated Labor’s policy will allow over-achievement on the new, more stringent, baselines, which will allow businesses who cut pollution more aggressively to generate carbon credits that can be traded with other businesses that cannot meet their targets.
In practice, this means the electricity sector, which Labor proposes to cover with a separate regulatory regime, will be able to sell carbon permits to heavy emitters.

The policy is expected to include new land clearing regulations – but nothing more concrete for agriculture – and curbs on vehicle pollution. It is likely to point to a target of reducing CO2 emissions from vehicles to 105 grams of CO2 a kilometre, and also introduce incentives for electric vehicles and support for electric vehicle infrastructure.

Labor is expected to unveil the remainder of its climate policy during the final hectic sitting days of the parliament, with MPs returning to Canberra at the weekend and on Monday for the budget session.
As well as delivering the economic statement it hopes will be a positive springboard into the election – which could be called next weekend – the Morrison government will use the remaining parliamentary sitting days to pursue legislation making it a criminal offence for social media companies not to remove violent material, with errant executives to face imprisonment for three years.
The prime minister met executives of social media companies earlier this week, and warned the government would legislate unless the companies gave assurances they would “immediately institute changes to prevent the use of their platforms, like what was filmed and shared by the perpetrators of the terrible offences in Christchurch”.
The government was unhappy with the response to Scott Morrison’s overture on Tuesday, so resolved to legislate.

The new offences would require platforms anywhere in the world to notify the Australian federal police if they become aware their service was streaming abhorrent violent conduct that was happening in Australia.
The government said failure to comply would be punishable by imprisonment for Australian or overseas executives, or fines that could reach up to 10% of the platform’s global annual turnover.
Morrison said social media platforms were being “weaponised by terrorists” so the parliament needed to take action.
“Big social media companies have a responsibility to take every possible action to ensure their technology products are not exploited by murderous terrorists,” he said.
“It should not just be a matter of just doing the right thing. It should be the law, and that is what my government will be doing next week to force social media companies to get their act together and work with law enforcement and intelligence agencies to defuse the threat their technologies can present to the safety of Australians.”

Morrison is expected to write to the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, at the weekend to seek Labor’s support.