27 July 2015, The Guardian, Malcolm Turnbull undermines Abbott’s ‘electricity tax scam’ claim over ETS,. As the PM ramps up attack on Labor’s promised emissions trading scheme, the communications minister admits all emission reduction policies come at a cost: Malcolm Turnbull has cut through the slogans and semantics dominating the climate policy debate – pointing out that all policies to push low-emission electricity generation come at a cost to households, including the ones the government supports, and that the cost of renewables is falling. Tony Abbott on Monday unveiled a new three-word slogan to attack Labor’s promised emissions trading scheme – saying it was an “electricity tax scam”. The prime minister also labelled Labor’s promise to source 50% of electricity from renewables by 2030 “bizarre” and “unnecessary”, said it would cause “a massive overbuild in windfarms” and claimed it could cost “$60bn or more”. At his party’s national conference over the weekend, Labor leader Bill Shorten said Labor’s promised ETS was not a tax because it would have a floating price and would not begin with the fixed price like the former government’s scheme. “Let me say this to our opponents, in words of one syllable: an ETS is not a tax,” he said. Read More here
Category Archives: Australian Response
21 July 2015, The Conversation, One year on from the carbon price experiment, the rebound in emissions is clear: Just over a year ago, Australia concluded a unique public policy experiment. For the preceding two years and two weeks, it had put a price on a range of greenhouse gas emitting activities, most significantly power generation. Now, 12 months since the price was removed, is a good time to assess the results of the experiment. The immediate effect of the carbon price was to increase the costs faced by most electricity generators, by an amount that varied between individual power stations depending on that station’s emissions intensity (the emissions per unit of electricity). These costs were then passed on in higher prices to consumers.
Simple economics suggests that two effects should have followed. First, less emissions-intensive generators should have been able to increase their market share, resulting in an overall reduction in the average emissions intensity of electricity. Second, higher prices should have led consumers to reduce their consumption, cutting the total demand for electricity. When the price was removed, both of these effects should have been reversed. Let’s look at what happened in the National Electricity Market (NEM), which is the wholesale electricity market in every state and territory except Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
My analysis, using detailed NEM operational data from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) finds that emissions intensity, which was increasing until shortly before June 2012, fell continuously (see graph below) for most of the two years to June 2014. Since then, it has increased consistently. All these changes were caused by changes in the market shares the different types of generation, just as expected. Read More here
18 July 2015, The Conversation, Australia’s ‘Carnival of Coal’ – can you feel the love? As the latest State of the Climate report reaffirms 2014 to be “the hottest on record”, the NSW Liberal Party is pressing ahead with plans for a “Carnival of Coal” in August. The party’s upper house whip, Peter Phelps, has appealed to members to download a sticker for MP office doors in support of the upcoming carbon love-in. It says: I loved carbon before it was coal. The Liberal paleo-love for coal, which Tony Abbott has declared “good for humanity”, is at least a point of differentiation with Labor. Labor does not promote such slogans at all – even if, in Victoria, the Andrews Labor government is still issuing coal exploration licences. Both parties are capable of romancing the coal industry. But Liberal parties around the country have had much more success in convincing voters that either coal is more important than climate, or have decided that – with a population drip-fed on attention-deficit-consumerism and its reality television advertorials – their connection can be comfortably sublimated. Whatever its form, the love for coal in Australia is going to end badly, like all relationships based on fantasy. To slightly misquote a 19th-century philosopher: the demand to give up the illusion that coal is good for humanity is the demand to give up a condition which needs such an illusion. Read More here
17 July 2015, RenewEconomy, States reject Coalition and cross-bench crack-down on wind farms: State and territory environment ministers this week unanimously rejected a push by the Federal Coalition government and cross-bench Senators to regulate noise from wind turbines in the same way as pollution from coal fired generators, and to introduce uniform planning rules for wind farms.The proposals were presented by Federal environment minister Greg Hunt at a meeting of state and territory ministers on Wednesday. They part of a deal struck between the Coalition and the cross-bench Senators who oppose wind farms, and want tighter rules on their development. The cross-benchers wanted wind farm “noise” to be treated in the same way as the emission of particulates from coal mines and power plants, smoke stacks from factories and vehicle exhausts, and included in the suite of National Environment Protection Measures. The states rejected this unanimously, along with a proposal presented by Hunt for wind farm guidelines to become national-based rather than state-based, another recommendation from the draft release of the Senate inquiry into wind farms chaired by anti-wind Senator John Madigan. All the state insisted that planning was a matter for the states, and were not interested. Read More here