16 February 2018, The Guardian, It’d be wonderful if the claims made about carbon capture were true. The International Energy Agency warned this week that, under current energy policies, Australia is unlikely to meet its 2030 climate commitments. While the agency had lots to say about the plunging costs of renewables and the need for strong market signals to encourage the retirement of old and inefficient coal generation, Josh Frydenberg, the federal environment and energy minister, seized on the agency’s support for carbon capture and storage (CCS) – despite the technology’s long history of big promises and meagre results. Last April, Frydenberg visited the newly opened Petra Nova CCS project in Texas. In a video posted to social media the minister, decked out in the obligatory hi-vis vest and hard hat, yells above the noise that the $1bn project is “helping to reduce the carbon footprint by some 40%”. It’d be wonderful if it were true. An estimated 6.2% of the Petra Nova power station’s emissions are captured, compressed and then piped 130km to help extract stubborn oil out of a depleted oil field. In the process, an estimated 30% of the carbon dioxide leaks back into the atmosphere, not to mention the emissions that will ultimately be released when the extracted oil is consumed. Last month, the Minerals Council of Australia was spruiking the “21 large-scale CCS facilities in operation or under construction around the world including in Canada and Texas”. Sounds impressive, if you still trust the MCA’s spin. You shouldn’t – 19 of the 21 projects have nothing to do with coal; there are exactly two “large scale” coal CCS projects globally. And, no, they’re not large. The Canadian project, Boundary Dam, has averaged only 0.591 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over each of its first three years. The $1.5bn project would need to be scaled up 31 times to capture the emissions of New South Wales’s Bayswater power station – an inconceivable investment. Read More here
Category Archives: Australian Response
11 January 2018, ABC News – Science: Forget Paris: Australia needs to stop pretending we’re tackling climate change. As the Bureau of Meteorology confirms another record-breaking year for temperatures in Australia, we should expect a sense of urgency to be creeping into Australia’s climate policy. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite. While 2015-17 were all within the hottest six years on record, our carbon emissions also continued to increase during the same period, including an all-time peak in 2017, when unreliable land-use data was excluded from the analysis. This is despite signing up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, which outlined a plan to reduce our carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030. Government data pushed out under the cloak of Christmas indicates that we will be about 140 million tonnes — or about 30 per cent — above that target based on current growth Government optimism at odds with UN: Despite last financial year’s continued emissions growth, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg remains upbeat about Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement. “If you look on a yearly basis that is true [that emissions went up]. But if you look on the last quarter, they went down. If you look at the trend, it is improving. And when you talk about the 2030 target, which is our Paris commitment, the numbers that were most recently shown, indicate that they were 30 per cent better than when Labor were last in office,” the Minister told RN Breakfast. But his optimism is at odds with a number of experts, and is contrary to what was reported in the United Nations Emissions Gap Report (see below), 2017. “Government projections indicate that emissions are expected to reach 592 [million tonnes] in 2030, in contrast to the targeted range of 429-440 [million tonnes],” the report states.. Read More here
19 December 2017, Renew Economy, Turnbull’s big climate fail, and no positive change in policy. The Turnbull government has declared its climate policies a success, in a self-generated review released alongside data revealing yet another rise in the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions – and no plans to do anything to reverse the “shameful and embarrassing” trend. In a statement on Tuesday accompanying the federal government’s 2017 Review of Climate Change Policies, environment minister Josh Frydenberg said the report showed the Coalition’s “economically responsible” approach to meeting its international climate commitments was working as planned. “The climate review found that …Australia is playing its part on the world stage through bilateral and multi‑lateral initiatives and the ratification of the Paris Agreement to reduce our emissions by 26 to 28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030,” he said. And indeed it does; declaring on page 6 that “we will meet our 2030 target and we will do so without compromising economic growth or jobs. Our current policy suite can deliver this outcome.” Read More here
14 December 2017, The Conversation, Instead of congratulating ICAN on its Nobel Peace Prize, Australia is resisting efforts to ban the bomb. Earlier this week in Oslo, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was officially givento the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a global campaign that was launched in Melbourne in 2007. ICAN lobbied to establish a special UN working group on nuclear disarmament, campaigned for the UN General Assembly’s December 2016 resolution to launch negotiations on a prohibition treaty, and was an active presence at the UN conference that negotiated the treaty. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull failed to congratulate the Australian faces of ICAN, adding to the growing body of evidence of his flawed political judgement. There were no political downsides to phoning ICAN, noting the difference of opinion on the timing and means to effective nuclear disarmament, but warmly congratulating ICAN for the global recognition of its noble efforts to promote nuclear peace. Out of step with the global nuclear order The global nuclear order has been regulated and nuclear policy directions set by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) since 1968. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal and North Korea’s unchecked nuclear and missile delivery advances show the benefits and limitations of the NPT respectively. The transparency, verification and consequences regime mothballed Iran’s bomb-making program by enforcing its NPT non-proliferation obligations. These will remain legally binding even after the deal expires in 2030. By contrast, the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear program has intensified within the NPT framework. Heightened geopolitical tensions in Europe, the Middle East and south and east Asia have further stoked nuclear fears. Meanwhile the NPT-recognised five nuclear weapon states have no plan to abolish their nuclear arsenals. Frustrated by the stubborn resistance of the nuclear weapon states to honour their NPT commitment to nuclear disarmament and alarmed by rising nuclear threats, on July 7 this year, 122 countries adopted a UN treaty to stigmatise and ban the bomb. Read More here