Extract from ABC News
Australia's carbon reduction efforts are receiving global scrutiny — and in a grassy paddock on the Mornington Peninsula, outside Melbourne, the impact is being felt right now.
Key points:
- The United Nations' climate conference COP26 will be held in Glasgow in a month
- Advocates are urging action to reduce emissions well before 2050
- Trading partners could soon place carbon tariffs on Australian exports because the cost of emissions has not been dealt with locally
Allison Hawke, director of development at renewable energy company Maoneng, gestures to where a $170 million battery will be built in the coming year to meet the needs of 40,000 households.
"The battery is intended to charge itself during the daytime, when there's rooftop solar and other forms of generation creating an excess of power in the grid, and then discharge it during that dinnertime peak period," she said.
Ms Hawke would like to see hundreds of similar batteries across the nation but says Australia's targets for reducing carbon emissions are too weak to provide businesses with enough incentive to invest.
"Greater policy certainty would help increase the rate of the investment in the industry, in what will be a very big industry with all kinds of businesses involved."
Referencing the world's greatest sprinter, she adds that Australia's energy market — and its high carbon emissions — will have to change.
"We're sort of plodding along, we're really just sort of picking ourselves up and getting moving," she says.
She says because Australia has been slow to shift, other nations are gaining the advantages of investment in green technology: jobs and a better environment.
'We're faffing about here in Australia'
It's a month until world leaders meet in Glasgow to discuss how to prevent runaway climate change from irrevocably altering the globe.
Ahead of COP26, the United Nations' 26th climate change conference, the leaders of some of the largest countries on Earth have been lifting their commitments to reduce carbon emissions.
"This year has also brought widespread death and devastation from the borderless climate crisis," US President Joe Biden has told the United Nations general assembly.
"The extreme weather events that we have seen in every part of the world — and you all know it and feel it — represent what the secretary-general has rightly called 'code red for humanity'."
"The scientists and experts are telling us that we're fast approaching a point of no return, in the literal sense," Mr Biden continued.
"To keep within our reach the vital goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, every nation needs to bring their highest-possible ambitions to the table when we meet in Glasgow for COP26 and then to have to keep raising our collective ambition over time."
Australia has endured more than a decade of toxic politics centred around putting a price on carbon pollution, arguably costing the careers of four prime ministers.
We are turning up to COP26 promising far less action than similarly developed countries.
"We're faffing about here in Australia," Carbon Market Institute chief executive John Connor tells The Business.
"We need to recognise we've got carbon prices, we've got carbon markets. Let's put the political posturing aside, evolve and reform those markets."
Risk of global capital going elsewhere
Investors are already making decisions based on climate action or inaction.
Earlier this year, the Reserve Bank governor told farmers the conglomerates that were buying their products were already asking what they were doing to reduce emissions and offset the carbon.
"I participate in many international meetings, often kind of late at night time, and a very frequent question that comes up in those meetings is what is Australian business doing to decarbonise," Philip Lowe has told the Australian Farm Institute Conference in Toowoomba.
The federal government is already changing its tune, setting up targets closer to what its international allies are asking for and trying to prevent investors from withdrawing from Australia.
"We cannot run the risk that markets falsely assume that we are not transitioning in line with the rest of the world," Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said last week.
"Were we to find ourselves in that position, it would increase the cost of capital and reduce its availability."
Mr Connor, from the Carbon Market Institute, says the creation of a carbon price — a concept that has bedevilled both major parties for more than a decade — will happen either by us or to us.
"We're effectively getting carbon prices through capital strikes (investors withdrawing) or higher financing costs," he says.
Additionally, countries are beginning to put "tolls" on exporters that aren't paying to deal with carbon-intensive products like steel and aluminium.
The most pressing is the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
"Europe is looking to implement them, but also importantly we're seeing Japan, Korea, and other countries looking at that," Mr Connor says.
"So that's another way in which we're going to have carbon pricing imposed upon us if we don't make the reforms here at home that suit the Australian economy the best."
Climate, not China or COVID, could dominate our future
Projects like the Mornington Peninsula battery show the great potential for Australia.
But there are huge difficulties too. We're the world's second largest exporter of thermal coal, which is used for making energy, and we're the largest exporter of gas.
Both create substantial emissions.
On a US visit, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said our role supplying fossil fuels to Asia for energy would eventually end.
"We have always been the primary exporter of energy into this region. Now that is going to change," he told The Australian newspaper.
"And we need to make sure we leap from one lily pad to the next in making that change."
But the federal government hasn't signed up to the target of net zero — achieving balance between the amount of carbon emissions produced and the amount removed from the atmosphere — by far-off 2050, much less targets for 2030 being pushed by business and advocacy groups.
The former head of the Australian Coal Association, Ian Dunlop, says it's not submarines, China or COVID-19 that will dominate our lives in the next 20 years, but rather climate change.
"Emission levels globally have to drop extremely quickly, and at the moment they're going up at worst-case levels," he says.
The co-author of a report about the risk climate brings to banking, Degrees Of Risk: Can the banking system survive climate warming of 3˚C?, Mr Dunlop stresses the urgency of acting now.
"What we do in the next three to five years is going to determine the future of humanity and that's the seriousness of the situation we're actually in," he says.
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