Greenhouse Denial: Australia’s
Kyoto Treaty ShameBy Norm Dixon
08 October, 2004
The Green Left Weekly
The clock is ticking. If global industry’s greenhouse gas emissions do not begin to be significantly and rapidly reduced within decades, humanity faces potentially catastrophic consequences. Yet, confronted with the world’s most pressing environmental problem, the Australian government has brazenly thrown its weight (and subsidies) behind the corporate polluters’ efforts to stall the measures necessary to avert the crisis.
The US and Australian governments have worked to prevent the introduction of mandatory international greenhouse gas reduction measures. Like the current US administration, the Australian government has refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, with its token goal of an overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012. This is despite the fact that under the agreement Australia is permitted to increase its emissions by 8% (not surprising, since Australia’s emissions had overtaken this allowance by another 8% or so by 2000).
In a welcome decision, Labor leader Mark Latham has affirmed that an ALP government would sign the Kyoto protocol, and promised to invest into renewable energy. How much this would mean is unclear — the protocol is inadequate — but it indicates the strength of popular pressure to do something about stopping the warming of the planet.
This could mean more because Russia agreed on September 30 to sign the Kyoto protocol. This means the signatories represent more than the necessary 55% of world emissions to trigger the protocol’s implementation.
The facts of global warming are straightforward. The concentration of industry-generated greenhouse gases — most significantly carbon dioxide (CO2) from the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity and fuel transportation — in the atmosphere is rapidly rising, trapping heat like a greenhouse.
The average temperature of the atmosphere in 2003 was the third warmest since records began in the 1860s, according to the UN World Meteorological Organisation. The hottest year was 1998, followed by 2002. Seventeen of the 18 hottest years on record have occurred since 1980, 10 since 1990. The average global temperature is already 0.6°C hotter than at the end of the 19th century and even if CO2 levels were stabilised today, the temperature would still continue to rise for 30 years.
For the 10,000 years before the industrial revolution, the concentration of CO2 in the air was around 280 parts per million (ppm). In March, scientists at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory recorded CO2 at record levels, peaking at 379 ppm (compared with 376 ppm a year earlier and 373 ppm in 2002). Current CO2 levels are the highest for more than 420,000 years.
In 2001, the 2500 international scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that unless CO2 levels are stabilised at around twice the pre-industrial level (approximately 550 ppm), the Earth's average atmospheric temperature will rise 1.4-5.8°C by 2100. To achieve stabilisation, total human-generated greenhouse gas emissions must be slashed by at least 60%-80% by 2050 at the latest. According to the IPCC, if unchecked, CO2 levels in the air will be between 650 and 970 ppm in 2100.
If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, the IPCC forecasts that, on the fragile assumption that the ice caps will remain largely intact, there will be a sea level rise of between 20 centimetres and 1 metre by 2100. Global warming will trigger more extreme weather events, including more severe storms and floods, worse droughts and increased desertification, severe shortages of fresh water and increased epidemics of dangerous tropical diseases. The world’s impoverished majority will bear the brunt.
Inaction
Yet, the governments of the rich capitalist countries refuse to seriously reduce greenhouse gases reaching the atmosphere. North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand are responsible for more than 80% of past emissions and 75% currently. The US government is the worst offender. With around 4.5% of the world’s population, in 1990 the US emitted 36.1% of all greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gas emissions in the US are predicted to be 30% above 1990 levels by 2010.
Australian big business is no slouch when it comes to spewing C02 into the atmosphere — Australia has among the highest per capita levels of greenhouse gas pollution in the world. With just 0.3% of the world’s population, notes Bryan Furnass in a paper on the In Search of Sustainability Online Conference website (<http://www.isosconference.org.au>), Australia consumes half the total fossil fuel energy used by India, which has 17% of the world’s population.
The US and Australian governments, while belittling the Kyoto protocol, have promoted a series of dubious schemes (perhaps that should that read “scams”?) and hugely expensive technological “quick fixes” that seek to sell the lie that overall greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced while at the same time industrial CO2 emissions can continue to increase. These “greenhouse band-aids” range from the use of environmental “sinks” to absorb CO2, such as planting new forests and reducing rural land clearing, to the resurrection of the nuclear power industry.
These utopian schemes are designed to protect the vast investments and huge profits of the powerful fossil fuel-related corporations, and to prevent or delay large-scale research and development into, and the rapid introduction of, the industrial-scale renewable sources of energy that are essential if the global warming crisis is ever to be averted. They are also meant to defuse public support for immediate and short-term measures such as energy conservation, regulations that require more energy-efficient products and services, and a massive expansion of public transport systems.
Geosequestration
The latest technological fad being hyped by the US and Australian governments, and the major corporate polluters, as the alternative to reducing industrial greenhouse gas emissions is geosequestration. This is the process of capturing industrial CO2 emissions before they reach the air, compressing them to liquid, transporting it by a network of pipelines until it is pumped at least 800-900 metres underground, where it must then be monitored for thousands of years in case it leaks out.
The largest source of Australia’s CO2 emissions — more than 80% — is its 24 coal-burning power stations, which consume some 250,000 tonnes of coal every day. Each day, 260 billion litres of CO2 gas is spewed into the air from those stations, the equivalent of a cubic-kilometre of liquid CO2.
Contrary to the impression being spread by the champions of geosequestration, this technology is not yet viable for use in coal-fired power stations and, even if it does eventually work, it will only be applicable to new-generations of stations built 10 years from now. It offers no solution to the CO2 released by Australia’s existing stations, many of which will continue to operate for another 30-50 years. Retrofitting existing plants, if the technology can be successfully developed at the cost of billions of dollars, would be prohibitively expensive.
Even for new power plants, according to the pro-industry International Energy Agency Greenhouse Research and Development Program’s estimates, the cost of capturing, transporting and storing CO2 underground would be at least US$45-50 per tonne. This would bring the cost of electricity generated with hypothetical “clean coal” to around 10 Australian cents or more per kilowatt hour, much more expensive than many currently available forms of electricity produced with renewable energy. Not only that, power stations that could remove CO2 emissions would be 6-12% less efficient.
Leaving aside the great uncertainty of whether the CO2 would remain below the surface for thousands of years, and not escape slowly or in one great deadly belch, there are limited practical storage sites in Australia. According the GEODISC project of the industry-controlled Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (which has swallowed millions in federal government funds to conduct its research), most suitable sites are far from where current power stations operate, especially NSW, which produces 37% of the country’s emissions. Liquid CO2 would have to be piped from the Newcastle-Lithgow-Wollongong triangle to sites beneath WA or offshore Victoria, adding significantly to costs.
The federal government’s chasing of the big-business-driven geosequestration dream is diverting scarce government research funds from the necessary development of renewable energy sources.
According to the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), “between 1997 and 2004, the federal government has been funding fossil fuel research and development to the tune of $92 million but has wound back renewable funding to a paltry $10 million”. Government-funded research centres into renewable energy have been closed down, while those devoted to advancing the fossil fuel industry have proliferated.
That trend deepened in June, when the federal government released its energy policy white paper, which backed coal as Australia’s primary source of power for decades to come. A $500 million “Low Emission Technology Fund” will ensure that profit-friendly schemes favoured by the big CO2 polluters such as geosequestration get the lion’s share of government research funds.
Corporate welfare
On September 7, ABC Radio National’s PM program revealed that the federal government’s hot air about geosequestration did not come out of thin air. Leaked memos and emails revealed that the energy white paper was drafted with the input of a secret committee — the Lower Emissions Technical Advisory Group. LETAG included representatives from Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Exxon Mobil, Alcoa, Holden, Boral, Amcor, Energex, Origin Energy and Edison Mission.
The corporate polluters’ control of “greenhouse policy” is also apparent in the fact that the government’s official science adviser Robin Batterham, who chairs the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) and a number of other influential advisory bodies, is on the payroll of Australia’s largest coal producer Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto is opposed to the ratification of the Kyoto treaty.
As a Rio Tinto board member, Batterham pockets an estimated $700,000 annually, which makes the $90,000 a year he gets from Canberra look like playlunch money. Batterham is also a former chairperson of Rio Tinto’s electricity-guzzling Comalco aluminium corporation. Not surprisingly, Batterham is a vocal public campaigner for geosequestration and the PMSEIC has recommended heavily backing the process.
Even with the hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare being plunged into geosequestration research (as well as a US$1 billion handout in the US), federal industry minister Ian McFarlane candidly told the March 24 Melbourne Age that, “Certainly 2015 would be optimistic in terms of a significant [geosequestration] pilot plant. If we can get to the stage were 20% of the electricity is being generated by zero emissions technology in coal-fired power stations by 2030, we will have done well”.
Macfarlane gives the game away. By 2030, when Australia should be well on the way to slashing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% if it is playing its part in halting the global warming danger, the Coalition government will be satisfied if 80% of the country’s coal-fired power stations are churning out CO2 as usual. Meanwhile, the economy will have been locked into its dependence on coal for another 50 years and the federal Coalition’s corporate backers’ source of continued profits firmly secured. It’s a shame we won’t be able to say the same for humanity’s future on this planet.
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