Memo to ASIO re spying on coal protesters

Today's edition of The Age carries my letter (see "Not cricket, chaps") responding to yesterday's piece by Philip Dorling reporting ASIO's spying on green protesters who are fighting the expansion of coal by Australian State and Federal governments. Here's the unedited version:

MEMO to ASIO: Chaps, I need to give you the nod about some dastardly characters conspiring as part of a secret organisation that poses a direct threat to the interests off all Australian citizens, our allies, and a few billion poor people you may not be too concerned about but it would be nice to look after. This nasty outfit is called the Carbon Party, and draws its global membership from the big polluters and mainstream political parties who think climate change caused by human activities is a lot of rot.

Two of the blighters, federal and state energy and resources ministers, Martin Ferguson (codename "The Fossil") and Michael O'Brien, somewhat carelessly gave a joint press conference earlier this year at a carbon capture and storage launch in Morwell, where an extension to meet its funding conditions was also granted to a rather grubby brown coal-fired power project (since given the "green" light by VCAT).

Usually, these darklings are more careful to veil themselves in talk of their flimsy support for renewable energy and aren't quite so brazen, but they're ramping up their efforts to destroy our climate and collect those dirty coal dollars.

Their Victorian colleagues have abandoned the State 2020 emissions target, removed the cap on emissions from new brown coal power stations, and announced plans to expand the industry, including coal-seam-gas - all to be sold by a publicly funded spin campaign to persuade Victorians that brown coal is good enough to sprinkle on their breakfast cereal.

Their Federal operatives are paying a private company (NOSIC), and now seem to be asking you guys and the Australian Federal Police, to spy on peaceful protesters they want everyone to believe are more dangerous than terrorists.

Hmmm. They're actually not more dangerous than terrorists, and it would be a tragedy if you let some real terrorists through the net while you were wasting your time spying on coal protesters who are working hard to protect the national interest.

You should also seriously consider looking into the organisation and support of the Carbon Party in Australia - they're well funded, well connected, and seem to have the run of the place as our carbon emissions climb endlessly higher. That's not cricket, chaps. They have to be stopped. Get on with it!

Related media

• Intelligence officers make home visits to green activists, The Age, 13 April 2012
• Protestor visited by "intelligence", 774 ABC Melbourne, 12 April 2012

Comments welcome.

Baillieu to spin coal fiction into "fact"

Yesterday, The Age reported the Baillieu Government's "Plan to head off protests on coal". This deceitful plan to sell brown coal expansion to the Victorian public itself acknowledges that "as part of action on climate change, many stakeholders expect to see a transition away from coal".

It's worth asking why, as we also note the fundamental obligation of any publicly funded government campaign to be based on truth.

Coal protest, which the so-called Coal Action Plan (CAP) aims to head off, is founded not just on the unavoidable high emissions from using coal - especially brown coal - as a fuel source, but on its significant health and environmental impacts, and on the clear threat posed to prime agricultural land.

There is no way (in the words of the plan) to "identify actions to address" these "issues" apart from leaving coal in the ground - the only form of carbon capture and storage we know that works.

Talk of "low-emission" or "clean" coal technology is self-contradictory, as there is no existing or foreseeable technology with emissions low enough to avoid a heavy contribution to climate change. Nor is there any such technology that comes even close to genuinely clean energy sources - such as solar and wind - that can be tapped by low or zero emission renewable technologies that are working right now around the world.

The government's "coal narrative" can only ever be a work of fiction; the narrative we need, one that can CAP our growing carbon emissions within safe limits, must be based on fact. The alchemy of turning coal fiction into "fact" does not become possible, even for Premier Baillieu, just because there are coal dollars to be made.

See also views by Lynn Frankes ("Next generation be damned") and Jo McCubbin in today's letters in The Age.

Comments welcome.

Labor among the merchants of climate doubt

Kim Carr was on the money when he wrote in The Age on Thursday that we need champions of science to battle the merchants of doubt. Borrowing the powerful expression of visiting US academic Naomi Oreskes, we can say the merchants of doubt are those who argue against necessary action - especially on climate change - even as the science should compel our emergency response.

They do this by suggesting doubt about the science that doesn't exist among those most qualified to understand it - the worldwide community that carries out peer-reviewed research.

So who, exactly, are these deadly merchants among us? As Oreskes explained in her excellent talk at the State Library on Wednesday, they began as ideologically driven cold war scientists, but came to include a multitude of free-market think-tanks and their spin doctors representing vested interests. In Australia that includes the coal lobby.

Yet, some of the merchants reside within Government itself, and doubt is a powerful lens through which to understand them.

You will no longer hear any Victorian Labor politician rejecting the reality of climate change. Instead, you will hear them sew doubt over whether renewables can provide baseload power (they can), or whether we really need to supplement our smattering of renewable energy projects by replacing Hazelwood - our dirtiest coal-fired power station - in the next term of government (we do).

You won't get any detailed response from the Victorian Government substantiating such doubts, but they all serve the purpose of justifying the continuing and disastrous exploitation of brown coal at the expense of global climate impacts, and of local ones, such as an increase in the frequency and severity of catastrophic bushfires.

As the world's leading climate scientist, James Hansen, has noted: “If coal emissions are phased out rapidly ... the climate problem is solvable.” If they're not, there's no doubting we're in trouble.

Zero emissions challenge to Australia's coal minister

Update: There's a great wrap-up of the event at Independent Media Centre Australia.

Tonight saw the launch of the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan before a packed house at the University of Melbourne. As the Australian Government sets itself to unveil a pre-election climate policy, the plan presents a realistic path to powering Australia with 100 per cent renewable energy by 2020.

Australia's energy and resources minister, Martin Ferguson, was absent, but in the audience was Labor Senator for Victoria, Jacinta Collins, who should be able to deliver some powerful messages to the minister - if he is prepared to listen.

The plan presented viable costings for delivering solar and wind power using proven technologies at an average additional household cost of just eight dollars a week.

Dispelling popular myth, Grattan Institute CEO John Daley pointed out that the cost of doing nothing will not only continue to grow our carbon emissions, but will lead to energy price rises anyway, as finance becomes more difficult with the increasing risk of investment in carbon-intensive generation - especially coal-fired power stations. Fewer plants with increasing demand would push prices up, so why not cut emissions for a modest weekly increase by switching to renewables?
 
Daley also pointed out that policy support should be offered to help deliver the plan. This should include a strong price on carbon that sets a high minimum price in terms of a base carbon tax that could be topped up with a variable permit price. Without a floor in the price, Daley said that increasing renewables could lead to an excess in available permits that would then fall in price and let emissions-intensive coal-fired generators back in the game.

He also said that efficiency measures and renewable energy targets would not by themselves deliver even the modest targets so far proposed by the Australian Government.

However, a far more obvious take-home message for Martin Ferguson is that proven solutions are available that can deliver baseload power to secure our energy future without destroying the global climate. Wind power and solar thermal with storage do not require "proving up", as the minister is so fond of suggesting.

Nor is it true, as he also likes to suggest, that so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) is anywhere near the renewable technologies presented in the plan in terms of the maturity and workability of the technology.

As well as providing some clear answers about renewable technologies, the Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan therefore poses a serious additional challenge to the minister: where is the comparable work that shows the viability of CCS in delivering zero emissions?

If the minister, with all the resources of government, can't put that on the table, we will be justified in thinking that CCS is only a stalling tactic to justify the continued gouging of coal from the ground while doing nothing to curb emissions, or the health and environmental impacts of exploiting fossil fuels.

If you'd like to ask the minister for his response, why not send him an email, or give him a call on (+613) 9416 8690.

Comments welcome

Fiona Richardson: climate change 'delivered'?

Labor's Member for Northcote, Fiona Richardson MP, has already switched into election campaign mode with a string of local visits to shops, including today's sales-pitch at Northcote Plaza.

Richardson is pushing local achievements she claims to have 'delivered', but Darebin Climate Action Network is making sure the community also makes the link with the climate track record of the Brumby Labor Government that Richardson represents.

With the Federal Government shelving emissions trading until at least 2013, the pressure is on the Victorian Government to fill the climate action vacuum. Yet the State Government is committed to expanding coal mining and addicted to coal-fired energy generation through plants such as the massively polluting Hazelwood.

DarebinCAN distributed fact sheets about our dirtiest power station, and to drive the message home, I presented Richardson with a letter asking that she tell Northcote voters where she stands on climate (click on the arrow at top right to expand).




Part of Richardson's promotion was a flyer indicating she could help constituents by 'Raising an issue in Parliament'. I call on my local State Member to raise in Parliament the issues communicated in my letter, so they can be heard by every Member of the Legislative Assembly, including Peter Batchelor and Premier John Brumby. I'll also be awaiting a written response from Richardson, as will other community members who presented their own letters to the MP.

Like Martin Ferguson, the Federal Member for Batman, Richardson is gearing her campaign to the local achievements she has 'delivered'. While these certainly need to be debated, we should also ask what else is being 'delivered' for Northcote. Emissions from Australia's fossil fuel exports and domestic power-generation are delivered to the global atmosphere, but the impacts of climate change will be localised - everywhere. Questioning politicians about climate change is therefore vital.

Fiona Richardson, where do you stand? Are the only issues you'll raise in Parliament those that are consistent with Labor Party policy? That's too easy for you, too hard on our climate.

Comments welcome

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 the real face of Rudd on climate

Yesterday Crikey published an article I wrote about my recent meeting with Martin Ferguson, local federal member for Batman and the energy and resources minister in the Australian Government. The following is an extended version of that article.

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You could say we’d hit the jackpot – four local climate campaigners scoring a meeting with their federal MP, who also happens to be the energy and resources minister in the Rudd Labor Government.

Martin Ferguson holds the eminently safe but greening Victorian seat of Batman. A couple of weekends earlier, his Preston electoral office – brightly lit in an otherwise dark industrial strip of High Street – had seen an Earth Hour demonstration complete with the surprisingly affable presence of the Australian Federal Police.

The call then was for a switch to renewables, and for public recognition of the link between Ferguson as local MP, and Ferguson as a federal minister championing emissions-intensive fossil fuel exports and domestic power generation. Australia is heavily dependent on coal for its domestic energy supply, and is the world’s largest coal exporter.

Now Ferguson was sitting across the table from us, a minder scribbling quietly beside him. The Government would go again with the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in May, but, he said, would fail again in the Senate and Labor would face the next election with no price on carbon. As for the future, Ferguson seemed to see a roadblock on every path to effective climate laws.

Why not strengthen the ETS, I offered, include science-based targets, and if necessary go to a double-dissolution on that basis? “Jobs,” Ferguson replied. I had never stood at the gates of a factory telling hundreds of workers they didn’t have one.

This notwithstanding the employment opportunities in a range of green industries, from energy efficiency, renewable retail and domestic power generation, even electric vehicle manufacture. To give just one example, the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 report on stationary energy projects 15,000 jobs in the transition to zero emissions, with 50,000 additional jobs in operations and maintenance.

Certainly few would dispute the need for a transition plan for workers displaced in the move to a green economy, but if restructuring is routinely justified by business on self-interested economic grounds, there is surely a case for it when seeking to achieve vital environmental goals in which everyone has a stake.

Ferguson’s jobs argument is, in fact, a sooty veil for the rejection of any climate strategy that would leave Australia without domestic and international markets for its huge coal reserves.

Yet the minister would not countenance any challenge on this front. “I’m not here to be cross-examined by you,” he replied when I attempted to put to him a pre-condition for a safe climate recently advanced by Dr James Hansen in his 2009 book, Storms of My Grandchildren. Hansen, arguably the world’s leading climate scientist, argues that the climate crisis is not solvable unless we capture coal emissions now, or leave remaining coal reserves in the ground.

What, then, of the Greens proposal for an interim carbon tax while agreement on climate legislation is hammered out? Ferguson offered two main objections. The first was a claimed lack of certainty for business; the second, the blunt statement that there would never be a “settlement” with the Greens on this issue.

On the first objection, it was put to Ferguson without response that the cost of rejecting any uncertainty for business was accepting the certainty of climate impacts for everyone else. I could have added that there has long been little doubt that business and industry would face a rising carbon price, and the Greens proposal would at least provide a baseline for that price on which planning could occur in the context of clear statements of intention by Government.

Nor is it unreasonable that, with the climate at stake, business and industry be required to operate within a market that typically calls for a variety of judgments about changing commercial conditions. When the world will share the damaging climate impacts but not the profits, why is certainty the prize of business but not a worthwhile goal for the environment?

On the second objection, Ferguson’s blanket exclusion of a climate settlement with the Greens seems at odds with claimed negotiations between climate change minister Senator Penny Wong and Greens Senator, Christine Milne. In the week following our meeting, in fact, The Age quoted Greens Senator Bob Brown as being “in a mood to do a deal” on the ETS.

Nothing, however, would be good enough for the Greens, Ferguson claimed – climate change was for them a political question, while for Labor it was an economic and environmental one. There was no reply to the argument that the Greens would be hard-pressed to reject for political motives any plan that actually reflected the climate science, in stark contrast with the measures currently proposed by Labor.

Unfortunately, such a plan would demand a Labor Government willing to be informed by that science, not intent on the half-measures it thinks will “bring the community along”. The suggestion that the public could in fact be persuaded to stronger climate action by more effective Government communication was met with the claim that “we’ve made it very hard for ourselves with political advertising”.

However, it was unclear how Ferguson would distinguish between a campaign addressing a public health threat based on medical science and a campaign addressing the threat of global warming based on the established science of climate. Why would one be legitimate Government communication, and the other “political advertising”? There could not be a campaign around a Bill in the Senate, was all he offered.

Closet sceptic?

So is Ferguson the Rudd Government’s “closet” sceptic? While, according to Ferguson, there is supposedly no debate within Government about the science, the question is almost irrelevant when their energy and climate policies paint Labor clearly as effective climate denialists, despite the progressive but ultimately empty rhetoric of Penny Wong.

It is true that Ferguson was expansive on renewable energy, apparently open to the possibility that the answer to our energy and climate challenges could well be a combination of some or even all energy sources currently on the table.

He spoke of the $1.5 billion Solar Flagships program, part of the Government’s $4.5 billion Clean Energy Initiative. He spoke of geothermal, and of an integrated solar, wind and biomass plant for King Island. Improvements to feed-in tariffs were put to him and discussed. It was not clear, though, how Labor’s 20% by 2020 Renewable Energy Target stacked up to what he suggested was equivalent to a $20 billion renewable feed-in tariff.

Yet the green turns to brown when the commitment to renewables is compared to that for fossil fuels. It was clear from the meeting, for example, that Ferguson is big on gas, which, despite its potential role as a transition fuel, is still a highly carbon-intensive energy source that is no substitute for the fast-tracking of solar, wind and geothermal with complementary efficiency and demand-reduction measures.

One suspects, however, that Ferguson’s enthusiasm for the massive North West Shelf Gorgon development is driven less by the role of gas in any climate solution than by its projected contribution of $40 billion in taxes to the Australian Government over the next 30 years. The same report in The Australian has Ferguson anticipating $100 billion of investment over the next 12–18 months following a $50 billion deal with China.

Again the theme emerges that, for Ferguson – and in reality, for Labor – there can be no solution that leaves Australia’s natural resources unexploited. Of course, that doesn’t mean that coal is going anywhere.

Despite Kevin Rudd’s $100 million “clean” coal research institute, for example, Ferguson asserted that carbon capture and storage (CCS), was a “proven technology”, challenged only by the “cost of deployment”. This contrasted with large-scale solar technologies already operational in Spain and the United States. Solar, according to Ferguson, needed to be “proved up”.

Yet for James Hansen, the world’s leading climate scientist, clean coal is an “illusion”. In September 2009, ABC TV Four Corners also questioned the beleaguered technology in its program, “The Coal Nightmare”. A few days after our meeting, it also aired “A Dirty Business”, a program exposing the health and environmental impacts of coal mining in the NSW Hunter valley.

As Al Gore points out in his recent book, Our Choice, without the elusive prospect of CCS coal is more than twice as carbon-intensive as gas, which itself is more than thirty times more carbon-intensive than concentrated solar thermal.

In spite of the profound challenges of such a massively carbon-intensive energy source, Ferguson said coal would be with us for “both our lifetimes”, echoing comments he made at a CCS conference in Bergen, Norway, in 2009.

This commitment to coal is, of course, played out front-and-centre in the current ETS proposal, which includes $1.5 billion compensation for the coal industry and $7.3 billion for fossil-fuel electricity generators.

To these billions of public funds can be added the slated $47 billion, five-year investment in an obsolete power grid that, according to Fairfax green business writer, Paddy Manning, “entrenches electricity generation from fossil fuels and will only accelerate climate change”.

Asked about network implications of the necessary shift to renewables, Ferguson said the Ministerial Council for Energy (which he chairs) is looking at “rules and regulations for connecting renewables to the grid”. Yet, in December, the Total Environment Centre published a statement that a communiqué issued by the Council “approved a business-as-usual approach to building more inefficient, carbon intensive infrastructure and accepts inefficient growth in energy demand as inevitable”.

There was, in Ferguson’s fondness for a grid that has “served us well”, a seeming nostalgia for dubious past glories, when accelerating warming calls instead for a questioning of the grid’s readiness for the renewables that will form the core of any solution to dangerous climate change.

That warming is already costing lives through the spread of disease, water scarcity, and extreme climate events such as the 2003 European heatwave that left 35,000 people dead. Warming is also increasingly implicated in a global trend towards more frequent and severe bushfire.

On this last point, Ferguson seemed to draw support for his multi-billion-dollar fossil-fuel grid from questions at the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission about the role of faulty power lines in the Black Saturday fires. A safe grid is, of course, a necessity, but one geared to fossil fuels will only promote global warming and a consequent worsening of bushfire risk in Australia.

By this stage of the meeting, however, Ferguson had relaxed. He sat back in his chair, smiling. Here, after all, was the minister for the prevention of black-outs, the voice of “sanity” standing against the extreme environmentalists he claimed would flick the switch on the super-polluting Hazelwood coal-fired power station tomorrow, without any plan for the workers, or to keep the lights on.

He wasn’t, it seemed, the minister for catastrophic climate impacts, for the Montara oil spill, or for the grounding of the coal-laden Sheng Neng 1 on the Great Barrier Reef. Get those fossil fuels out of the ground, spill them into our oceans and air – job done.

I met with Martin Ferguson on Friday 9 April 2010 together with representatives from Darebin Climate Action Now, organisers of the meeting, and of the Earth Hour event at Ferguson’s electorate office on 27 March 2010. These are my personal views. Comments welcome.

Ferguson's double-standard on renewables and coal

After reading energy and resources minister Martin Ferguson's 7 October letter in response to an article about the Solar Systems collapse in The Melbourne Times, the less well informed might take home the message that solar just can't cut the commercial mustard, that it's failing to achieve milestone after milestone, and that the Australian Government is bending over backwards to help the industry get off the ground to help tackle climate change.

To quote Ferguson, the financial state of Solar Systems 'is unfortunate but is wholly linked to the commercial viability of this company and not a reflection on government policy related to renewable energy'. Well, according to Paddy Manning writing in The Age, this is not the kind of tough-minded, financially accountable commercialism that is being applied to the coal industry.

Manning points out that up to $10 billion could be destined for the coffers of our dirtiest coal-fired power generators if we add to the $3.5 billion compensation under the existing CPRS the Opposition push for a further $6.5 billion in its bid to amend the scheme to make it even more coal-friendly.

And while - unlike renewables - coal-fired power makes a monstrous contribution to carbon emissions and therefore to climate change, in no way can it be said that so-called 'clean coal' technologies are anywhere near implementation on a commercial scale anywhere in the world.

This was recently highlighted by the Four Corners program, 'The Coal Nightmare', and one can only conclude that the sheer scale of the Australian Government's proposed compensation to the industry is a huge vote of no confidence in the viability of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. If CCS were viable and allowed low-emission commercial exploitation of coal even with an appropriate price on carbon, why would compensation be considered?

As Manning points out in his most recent column, the viability of combined wind and solar is a different story according to a recent Deakin lecture by Dr David Mills, Chief Scientific Officer with US solar thermal developer Ausra, whom he quotes as follows:

We are finding that solar and wind are a beautiful match for each other and together can carry almost the entire electrical load of a large economy

Ferguson is fond of referring to 'energy security', but this argument for dirty fossil fuels is rapidly disappearing, and in any case has always ignored the pressing need to secure our global climate. It is in fact viable to provide baseload power supply by combining wind and technologies such as molten salt storage for solar thermal generation, and thereby secure our energy and climate at the same time.

As the development of truly clean renewable technologies increasingly outpaces the empty promises of 'clean' coal, Ferguson will be forced to admit that he's not really talking about energy security at all, but instead protecting the profits of the coal industry. As I've said before, if the coal barons owned the sun and the wind, it would be a different story, but they can't stand to leave their dirty coal in the ground when there's profit to be had. Too bad for the global climate.

Further commentary on the Solar Systems collapse at the ABC and David, a worker from the plant, is interviewed onsite here.

Read more about Martin Ferguson on this blog.