Lenore Taylor theguardian.com, Friday 14 November 2014

These myths are endlessly repeated and sure won’t be accepted in the wake of the US-China climate deal

Tony Abbott at the opening of the Caval Ridge coalmine in central Queensland. Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP

1. Australia’s policy is fine because other countries are using direct action, too, and not emissions trading schemes

This one was trotted out most recently by the treasurer, Joe Hockey, who said he welcomed the US-China climate deal because “the United States and, in fact, China both have direct action plans”.

“I might’ve missed it ... but I don’t recall either the president of China or the president of the United States saying they were going to introduce a carbon tax,” he told the ABC.

This myth – accepted by many in the media – confuses the actual point of comparison between different countries’ climate policies – how much they reduce greenhouse gases – with the domestic policies by which those countries choose to do it.

If you define “direct action” as any policy to reduce emissions that isn’t a trading scheme it could include any regulation, or subsidy – covering ones that have a real chance of cutting greenhouse gases, like Barack Obama’s power plant regulations and ones that most experts think will struggle, like Australia’s “reverse auction” emission reduction fund.

Suggesting that any kind of policy that isn’t a market is equally effective just because it isn’t a market – without considering its merits – is not only weird for a liberal politician, it’s also patently silly.

2. Australia’s policy is fine because we might meet our 2020 target to reduce emissions by 5%

Most modelling exercises suggest this is in fact unlikely, but Australia is at least in with a better chance because the job keeps getting easier before Direct Action has even started. In 2012 the promise to reduce emissions by 5% of 2000 levels by 2020 was calculated to require the cumulative reduction of 755m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Last year new government calculations reduced that figure to 431m tonnes. Now calculations by Frontier Economics say the figure could be as low as 225m tonnes, if the renewable energy target stays in place to drive investment into clean generation, or somewhere around 300m tonnes if the government succeeds in paring back the RET. Official figures are soon likely to confirm this drop.

Whether we meet the 5% target or not, the real problem with Direct Action has always been that it doesn’t prepare the economy for the deeper cuts that must inevitably follow after 2020 – the ones the US and China have just promised to make and that Australia is going to have to make by next year. Making deeper cuts only using the “emissions reduction fund” will be prohibitively, ridiculously expensive.

This point was made succinctly by Malcolm Turnbull in 2010 after he was deposed as Liberal leader, when he said direct action-style schemes were “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale” and would be “a very expensive charge on the budget in the years ahead”.

The “blue book” prepared by the Treasury for a possible incoming Coalition government in 2010 made the same point, saying “a market mechanism can achieve the necessary abatement at a cost per tonne of emissions that is far lower than alternative direct-action policies”.

3. Australia’s policy is fine because China and the US emit more greenhouse gases than we do

Even more bone-headed than the previous myths, this was advanced most succinctly in recent days by Liberal National party senator Ian Macdonald, who famously wore a hi-vis “Australians for Coal” vest in the Senate chamber, and who said in a statement on Friday:

“China emits 24% of the world’s carbon emissions. The US emits 15% of the world’s carbon emissions. Australia emits less than 1.5% of the world’s carbon emissions. When the US and China get down to our level of emissions then we should join their plans. Until then, we should compete with the US and China in trade and local jobs terms by doing what we and the previous government both committed to and that is reducing our 1.4% of global emissions by 5%.”

It is true that the US and China are the two biggest emitters in the world, and therefore critical to a successful international agreement – which is why Wednesday’s announcement was so important. But it is also quite obviously true that no international agreement will ever be possible if countries like Australia opt out forever, which is what Macdonald is effectively suggesting. The senator also falls for another of the myths …

4. Australia’s bipartisan target for 2020 is 5% with no increase on that ever contemplated

Before the election Abbott and the environment minister, Greg Hunt, repeated a Coalition commitment to increasing Australia’s emissions reduction target by a minimum of 5% rising to 25% under specific conditions for global action set down in 2009 and accepted by both major parties.

The range of targets and conditions under which Australia’s target would be raised above 5% were repeated by Hunt in the Australian Financial Review in which he wrote “the Coalition is committed to a target of a 5% reduction in emissions and the conditions for extending that target further, based on international action”.

In a speech to the Grattan Institute think-tank Hunt said “we also accept, and we gave support to the government for the targets, not just the 5% but also the conditions for change ... we accept the targets, clearly, categorically, absolutely”.

And Abbott stated the Coalition’s commitment in a letter to former prime minister Kevin Rudd in December 2009, subsequently released under freedom of information laws, in which he requested information on the costs of the proposed emissions trading scheme, but also wrote “the Coalition’s position of bipartisan support for emissions reduction targets – subject to the conditions that were earlier outlined – remains unchanged”.

But since the election, Abbott insists he never promised anything other than 5%.

Whether or not 5% is a “fair share” of global emission reductions for Australia is debatable. If you adjust the starting years to allow for a fair comparison, it is broadly comparable with the US. But when the independent Climate Change Authority (which the government would like to abolish but hasn’t been able to yet) analysed the question, it found the conditions set down in 2009 had been sufficiently met for Australia to treble its 2020 target to 15%.

5. Australia’s policy is superior because it is happening now and the pledges being made by China and the US are for target dates that are ages and ages away

This astonishing argument was advanced by the prime minister on Thursday in response to the US and Chinese president’s announcements.

“It is all very well to talk about what might happen in the far distant future but we are going to meet our 5% reduction target within six years. So, we are talking about the here and now ... We are talking about the practical; we are talking about the real. We are not talking about what might hypothetically happen 15, 20, 25, 30 years down the track,” he said.

Actually, they made 2020 commitments as well, and did stuff to meet them. This is about what Australia will do after 2020, which we need to announce by early next year and well in advance of the UN conference in Paris next December, so not in the far distant future. That pressure is even more intense after the US and Chinese announcement of their post-2020 targets.

And contrary to the argument advanced by Greg Sheridan in his article snappily entitled “US-China emissions caper won’t change a thing” where he argues the announcement doesn’t “actually require Beijing to do anything for a long time in the future”, shifting to a low emissions economy takes time and meeting a target in 10 or 15 years’ time requires changes to start now. That’s the whole point of the negotiation. There’s plenty of room to analyse whether the US and Chinese pledges require adequate greenhouse reductions, but suggesting that they should be “taken with a pinch of salt” because the target years are in the future misses the point of having target years.

6. Australia’s policy is not out of step because China and the US want to reduce emissions by using coal-fired power stations with carbon capture and storage, and by switching to lower emission fossil fuels

Carbon capture and storage is in fact the only way the world will be able to continue using coal-fired power in the long term, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it is a key part of the US-Chinese agreement.

You would think this would make it a priority for any Australian government, especially one that believes “coal is good for humanity”, and that would bear a similarity with the China-US announcement.

But in the budget the government cut $459.3m over three years from its carbon capture and storage flagship program, leaving $191.7m to continue existing projects for the next seven years. (The program had already been cut by the previous Labor government and much of the funding remained unallocated.)

And the coal industry has “paused” a levy on black coal producers, which was supposed to build a $1bn industry fund to also finance research and demonstration into clean coal technology. It cited low coal prices for the halt. Some $250m has been spent from the fund on demonstration plants and a further $46m worth of grants are under assessment.

The objectives of Coal21, set up in 2006, have also been changed to allow the industry to use funding already collected to promote the use of coal. Its constitution now allows money to be spent on “promoting the use of coal both within Australia and overseas and promoting the economic and social benefits of the coal industry”. About $50m has been set aside for “energy literacy”, but only a small amount has been spent.

Six myths about Australia’s climate policy that never did wash | Environment | theguardian.com