Response to comments at Crikey on Ferguson

I thought I'd offer a response here to comments on my piece on Martin Ferguson at Crikey. You need to register to view the (free) Crikey piece, but the comments and my response also relate to an extended version of the article published here, 'Ferguson the real face of Rudd on climate'.

First of all, as one comment suggested, I'd love to be able to offer a transcript of the interview, but I can't imagine there was ever any prospect of a recording being allowed - or of a frank discussion on Ferguson's part if it had been. Of course, if Ferguson has any argument with anything I've said here, he's either silent or letting others do the talking for him. He certainly knows about the piece, I can assure you.

On the Hansen supporting nuclear comment (and why did I only mention his views on coal), I did actually think about that while writing the piece. I guess his support for nuclear power really isn't any part of why he's right about climate change and the contribution of coal and other fossil fuels to the problem.

Barry Brook is another example of someone who is very strong on climate science but supports nuclear. Because I disagree with Hansen and Brook (and agree with Al Gore) on the nuclear issue, I don't think Ferguson is any part of the solution. There are just too many problems with proliferation, the risk of accident and waste - and too many sound alternatives - to think about nuclear energy as a (radioactive) silver bullet.

I suspect that, for Ferguson, a similar principle applies to uranium as with coal: it appears unthinkable for him to adopt any solution that entails not cashing in on a mineral resource. Keeping fossil fuels in the ground isn't destroying industry and jobs etc. as some commenters suggested, it's the action needed to avoid catastrophic climate impacts and the far greater economic costs of 'adapting' to them (we can't) rather than preventing them from happening in the first place.

The volcano argument - why bother about human causes when a bloody big volcano has erupted - I think is a red herring. Even if there were a net contribution from the eruption not 'offset' by the reduction in emissions from flights, would that really justify us continuing to increase our own massive emissions, or argue even more strongly to reduce them? The answer is pretty clear, in my view. It's an interesting example of the opportunism of climate denialism - unfortunately, there are millions of man-made carbon dioxide volcanoes all over the planet that we call coal-fired power stations, oil-fuelled transport etc. etc. that we can do something about and really should.

Commenter Michael James I think is clearly wrong that we climate campaigners brought nothing to the table in meeting with Ferguson. If Ferguson and other politicians listened to the climate movement, we would stand a much better chance of avoiding the worst climate impacts - pretty tangible, I'd say. The claim that renewables can't provide baseload is the old argument Ferguson likes to trot out, but it's dead in the water. A combination of renewables connected via a smart grid can readily supply baseload power. In fact Beyond Zero Emissions has a Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Project to prove it. They say a 60/40 solar/wind mix will do it, creating thousands of jobs in the process.

Finally, one commenter still bothered to quote Plimer I thought the excellent John van Tiggelen piece in The Age Good Weekend magazine a while back would have put a stop to that.

Firstly I'd say that there's very little doubt that we're markedly warming the planet because of our greenhouse gas contributions, despite their small percentage of the atmosphere's composition. To say there's so much more carbon trapped within the earth only supports urgent climate action. The carbon stored in the earth is naturally sequestered there, but we are releasing it and unleashing its warming effects through mining and burning fossil fuels, warming the frozen tundra that releases methane etc. etc. Our aim must be not to release carbon that is already stored safely, and to draw down the carbon that's already in the atmosphere.

Hansen, Gore, Four Corners and many other reputable sources have shown that the artificial (and unproven at scale) process of carbon capture and storage is not the way to do it - especially when the renewable options are abundant, especially in Australia.

What do you say, Martin? Anything at all?

Ferguson fuels the need for emergency climate action

Dangerous climate change starkly underscores the connection between the local and the global - when emissions-intensive brown coal burns in the Latrobe Valley to produce more than 90 per cent of the State's electricity supply, it fuels global warming and disastrous impacts that are felt around the world.

In the same way, a local politician can contribute to climate destruction through a broader role in government policy and the promotion of fossil fuels. That's the connection the residents of the federal seat of Batman need to make between their local federal MP, Martin Ferguson, and his role as energy and resources minister in the Rudd Labor Government.

Ferguson supports the continuing exploitation of brown coal even though he knows it is destructive to the climate. Claims that coal-fired electricity can be made cleaner are belied by the billions of dollars of compensation promised by the Government's so-called climate measures. Why would coal-fired electricity generators need to be compensated under carbon trading if they could cleanly exploit their vast coal reserves?

The answer is that they can't, so they claim the need to be compensated for a carbon price, even though they should have long known a change was in the wind. As well as continuing to exploit coal, they want to exploit taxpayers and monetise climate damage for their own profit and the world's detriment.

As Environment Victoria's Mark Wakeham pointed out on tonight's edition of Stateline Victoria, the priority seems to be to dig the brown coal out of the ground and burn it, or export it to India, before the 'social licence' to do so expires with the realisation of just how damaging the fossil fuel is to our safe climate future. For Ferguson, coal is simply too commercially valuable to be left in the ground.

Often there's an appeal about job losses in this context. It's a diversion. Not only are green jobs to be had in renewables, but the coal lobby is asking us to believe they want to protect workers, when in normal circumstances they'd be trying to cut their workforce to the bone. Surely it is possible to compensate and retrain workers rather than their polluting, profit-taking employers?

Fortunately, with tomorrow's international day of climate action, the local can also impact upon the global - albeit in a far more hopeful way. At Darebin Parklands, in Ferguson's Batman electorate, Darebin Climate Action Now will be holding a picnic from 3.00-3.50pm as its 350.org event, and will be asking participants to send a postcard to Martin Ferguson.

Unfortunately, the fossil fuel lobby is much more likely to be heard by Martin than his local constituents' valid concerns about the consequences of his short-sighted quarry vision.

As the champion of fossil fuels, and the defender of massive oil slicks, it's no wonder Ferguson likes to ride on the coat-tails of local green initiatives, is it? They're good PR.

Ferguson losing his climate PR war

Maybe it's because Kevin Rudd says 'arguments grounded in fact will always win the day', but Martin Ferguson appears to be losing his climate PR war to dupe locals into believing he's some sort of climate progressive.

Following a recent climate demonstration at HP Zwar Park in Preston, Martin got his nose out of joint when the protest sparked letters to The Melbourne Times. He responded with a misrepresentation of the protestors' arguments, and even letterboxed Preston locals specifically naming me as a 'Greens activist' - this when I am not and never have been a member of the Greens party.

Well, Martin's letterboxing efforts earned him coverage in Crikey, and today The Melbourne Times has published a strong letter by Anne Martinelli (OMG, isn't she with the Greens?), and my own response to Martin's earlier letter to the editor:

It is laughable that Martin Ferguson asserts the belief that 'science, not green faith, must form the basis of our response' to climate change. By that measure, if Australia's emissions reduction targets were adopted by all developed countries, we would come nowhere near the greenhouse levels science says we must achieve to avoid catastrophic global warming and further severe impacts such as the Black Saturday bushfires.

Ferguson also falsely implies that the climate change movement is uniformly prescribing zero emissions for Australia by 2020. While that is indeed a laudable aim, and has been adopted as a net community target by a newly progressive Darebin Council, it poses a considerable if not insurmountable challenge for the nation by that date. However, the transition to zero emissions that science does support as soon as possible surely calls for 2020 cuts far deeper than the token reductions being put forward by the Rudd Government.

Sadly, Ferguson does not support science-based solutions to climate change, and our resources minister favours renewable energy far, far less than the fossil fuels his mates in the coal industry gouge from the ground and flog for their massive profit at the expense of our relentlessly warming climate. If they owned the sun and the wind, Ferguson might have a change of heart. Until then, Australia is a quarry and our climate gets hotter.

All this coverage is tending towards a rather unpleasant outcome for our fossil-fuel-friendly energy and resources minister - constituents of his greening Batman electorate will increasingly make the link between the climate impacts of his ministerial actions and his role as their local federal MP. They might also begin to see the contradictions between the minister's climate recalcitrance and his riding on the coat-tails of worthwhile local initiatives to green up his image.

The unknown Batman Liberal – in search of Jonathan Peart

Who is Jonathan Peart, the Liberal candidate for Batman. I tried to find out.

Beyond a short piece on candidates' policy promises in last week's Northcote Leader, I've seen little about 27-year-old Liberal candidate for Batman, Jonathan Peart. There's been nothing in my letterbox and he certainly hasn't been in the neighbourhood door-knocking. So I thought I'd see if I could get any more response from him than the complete silence I received from Martin Ferguson. After all, the Liberals polled nearly 26 per cent of the first-preference vote in Batman last time around.

After an email bounceback from an incorrect address on the Liberal Party website, I sent Jonathan two emails to the corrected address requesting an interview for YouDecide2007, explaining that it was a citizen journalism project focusing on the election from local perspectives. With no response, I thought I'd do a web search on the candidate, and finally came up with a mobile number since removed from a live business web page but still captured in a cached copy retained by Google. Sure enough, I got the voicemail of the candidate and left a message. When there was no response, I left another.

Two emails and two voicemails later, I figure Jonathan isn't going to play ball, which is a pity because I had some good questions to ask him, which I will discuss here anyway. What I'll also do is email him this story to see if he will offer any response on this site. The only problem with that is readers won't know if it is Jonathan answering or a party spin doctor – just like his entry in the local paper, really.

Read the full article at YouDecide2007

Ferguson on YouDecide2007

My last post has now been published as an opinion piece on the YouDecide2007 website. YouDecide is publishing local accounts of the important issues in the 2007 Federal Election as part of an Australian Research Council-funded citizen journalist inititaive run by Queensland University of Technology. Let's hope Martin Ferguson is encouraged to respond to the issues I've written about, even if he does hold Batman on 71.3 per cent two-party-preferred as at the last election. He's welcome to comment here, and I'm more than willing to discuss these issues in person and report back on them.