Baillieu on target for risky brown coal push

A lot can be politically "justified" amid the fear of an economic downturn - cuts to spending, services and public sector jobs, the sale of assets, the short-sighted expansion of the brown coal industry, and now the abandonment of an emissions reduction target legislated with bi-partisan support under the former Brumby Labor Government.

Unfortunately, ideas that are bad even in good economic times remain bad in a downturn, especially when there is much more at stake than a resources windfall and the interests of powerful coal and energy companies heedless of their impact on a climate we all share.

On Tuesday, The Age reported the Baillieu Government's plan to greatly expand brown coal in this State. It is a move now cynically complemented by the announced scrapping of the legislated target to reduce emissions in Victoria by 20 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020.

The coal expansion is to be sold with a publicly funded "communications" strategy seeking to convince us of "the continued relevance of brown coal in a carbon-constrained environment". With the abandonment of the target, it seems even the constraints are now to be shed - at least in law, if not in terms of our global climate, where they are relentlessly tightening.

A big part of the "sell" of these changes is the protection of Victorians in an economic downturn, and the promise of future shared prosperity on the back of a brown coal boom. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to share the claimed benefits, but we are certain to share the risks.

Those risks are not confined to the threat to our climate - a threat already manifest in more frequent and extreme weather events and bushfires in Victoria. Also to contend with are the health impacts of particulate and chemical pollutants released by the mining and burning of coal in the Latrobe Valley, the contamination of the water table in coal-seam-gas extraction, and the potential loss of prime agricultural land we depend on for our food.

To these we must add the economic risks, of which it must first be said that the employment of Victorians in unsustainable, dying industries offers no formula for the future prosperity of local communities.

In July this year, Australia will have a modest but urgently needed carbon price. With at least the stated aim of reducing Australia's carbon emissions, such a carbon price, if it is to be at all effective, will need to rise over time to a level that precludes the very activities the Victorian Government now seems determined to encourage.

It can therefore make no sense to increase the dependence of any community on jobs that will disappear sooner rather than later. Instead, there is a moral obligation that rests largely with government to plan for the transition of those communities, and to create alternative employment in renewable energy industries that can also meet our power needs without the dangerous carbon emissions.

Moving away from an energy source so centrally implicated in dangerous climate change is admittedly hard. Our most emissions-intensive fossil fuel, brown coal currently provides over 95 percent of electricity in Victoria.

Instead of confronting that necessity, however, the Victorian Government has chosen the path of what may be termed "effective denial".

Such a term seeks to capture the phenomenon of governments that make statements - and even laws - purporting to address climate change, but in reality promote activities that render effective climate action impossible.

With its paltry 2020 target of a five per cent reduction in emissions on 2000 levels - on which the Premier seeks to rely - the Federal Government itself suffers a form of effective denial, but the disease has now clearly taken hold with the Baillieu Government.

We may suspect it has long been merely dormant. Effectively, the Premier's brown coal plan and the now-abandoned 2020 State target constitute a denial of climate change. They represent the policy equivalent of Tony Abbott's infamous description of climate change as "absolute crap".

Attempting to soften this stark contradiction is a baseless appeal to carbon capture and storage, a technology that is not only currently economically unviable, but technically unworkable at the scale or within the timeframe required. A question mark also hangs over the safety of buried carbon dioxide, while the energy required to drive the process is prohibitive and existing coal-fired power stations cannot be retro-fitted with the technology.

It's true that renewable technologies require incentives, including a higher carbon price, to become economic. There is no question, however, that a range of low or zero emission technologies is already available to safely deliver baseload power - as shown by the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan.

Victorians must call on Premier Baillieu to have the honesty and integrity to own the inherent contradiction of his claim to believe in climate action as he engages in the headlong pursuit of brown coal free of any real constraint on its emissions.

Like a burning coal in his hands, he surely cannot hold that contradiction in the face of sustained media exposure, and should then have cause to drop his disastrous plans.

Related media

• Victoria passes the buck on carbon
• No emissions limit on new coal plants
• Carbon target scrapped
• Baillieu set to boost brown coal
• Mining companies prepare brown coal bids
• Inconsistencies show confusion
• The quest to capture carbon
• Victoria's proposed mining boom

Comments welcome.

"Carbon Party" undermines Gillard on carbon price

John Brumby made a good case for carbon pricing and low-emissions economic opportunities in his Saturday opinion piece in The Age. In it he makes an admission that State and Federal Labor need to act on, not just acknowledge. Standing in the way is the "Carbon Party". Here's my letter, published today (scroll to "Green initiatives are totally cancelled out").

It's good to hear former Victorian Premier John Brumby acknowledge that "Australia won't always be able to rely on what we dig out of the ground". That's true not because of the exhaustion of our large fossil fuel reserves, but because under the inevitable global pricing of carbon, the market for fossil fuels will disappear, and products we produce from emissions-intensive energy sources will become very expensive, and therefore uncompetitive.

Given the greed of large corporations and the short-sightedness of our less reflective investors and shareholders, it is understandable they will seek to capitalise on fossil fuels to the maximum possible extent before this happens. Understandable, but not acceptable.

As they rush to squeeze value out of their dinosaur powerplants and fossil fuel reserves, they push Australia and the world towards or even across the boundary of dangerous climate change. Their misleading campaigns foretelling economic ruin and energy insecurity place dollars above disaster.

While John Brumby argues well for the economic benefits of low-emissions investment and development, the timeframe in which too many Labor governments see the transition would allow the exploitation of fossil fuels and their climate impacts to substantially play out. We are, in fact, expanding our search for oil, coal and gas, and we operate in a deluded two-climate economy - one where we invest in green initiatives, and one where we cancel these out through the headlong pursuit of fossil fuels.

It is this duality within Labor at state and federal levels that is undermining the argument for carbon pricing. With federal Labor MPs like Martin Ferguson, it is almost as if there's an implicit Carbon Party at work in Australia, drawing its members in lesser or greater numbers from Labor and the Coalition respectively. If we're not to lose the race - the human race - that has to stop.

Comments welcome

Climate sensitivity over jobs shows double-standard

Two letter-writers in yesterday's edition of The Age wrote about the "invisibility" of workers affected by a carbon price, despite many projections - including by the ACTU - of projected gains in green jobs in the shift to a low-emissions economy.

Today's edition carries my letter in reply, which questions why those opposing a carbon price are so concerned about selective estimates of job losses claimed as likely to result from action on climate, while they are less so to the business-as-usual job losses in the marketplace in pursuit of "efficiencies" and profit. Here's the unedited version:

It is unrealistic to suggest that the transition to a low-emissions economy will be without disruptions that will certainly impact on individuals and families. That's why a principled approach to implementing an environmentally necessary carbon price must take care of those in our communities who will be most affected - workers in the Latrobe Valley, but also in other areas where employment is currently carbon-intensive.

What Damien Cremean and Ben Dziekan fail to acknowledge is that we are routinely impacted by large-scale job losses through the quest of powerful corporates for cost-cutting and market efficiencies that in general have no climate benefits as their goal. It is perverse that many of those corporations, including the big polluters, now project undoubtedly exaggerated job losses from a carbon tax when their usual approach is to strive to cut their workforce to the bone.

Those who will be affected by job losses through pricing carbon should never be "invisible" as these writers claim, but the right to fair compensation would never be denied by the highly visible thousands who demonstrated for a strong carbon price on Sunday. We also know that if we do not act on climate the impacts will be felt by billions.

 Comments welcome.