“We have shown that phase out of fossil fuel emissions is urgent. CO₂ from fossil fuel use stays in the surface climate system for millennia.”

– NASA climate scientist James Hansen and 16 co-authors

“We would be quite open to a discussion about a process that would lead to a negotiation for the thing, whatever it turns out to be, that follows 2020, and we are also fully willing to recognize that that might be a legal agreement.”

– US climate delegate Todd Stern

So here we are again, at the height of humanity’s annual cycle of talking about our response to the escalating climate crisis. This time around the stakes are higher than ever: the crisis has never been more pressing, yet the procrastination has never been more blatant.

I am, of course, referring to the 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban, South Africa, where world leaders are currently gathered. I use the term “leaders” to refer to the people who are in charge, rather than to imply they are demonstrating any actual leadership. On the contrary, by all indications the conference is heading for a catastrophic failure of leadership.

The only real leadership in Durban has been the protests from the reasonable voices who are being ignored: a broad coalition of the poorest countries (African and small island states), young people, the Occupy movement, and environmental groups. Collectively they form the “climate justice movement”.

They argue, fairly convincingly, that the talks are dominated by rich countries, in turn controlled by polluting corporations, who are attempting to dismantle the Kyoto Protocol and replace it with an even weaker voluntary regime. While Kyoto is weak, is riddled with loopholes, and has so far failed – global emissions have risen by half since the reference year of 1990, and by a record-breaking 6% in 2010 – it remains the only existing international treaty with a framework for legally binding emissions targets. And rich countries want to carry over from Kyoto the offsets and other loopholes which have made it ineffective.

At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 154 nations signed the UNFCCC, with the objective of preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (there are now 194 parties). The parties have met annually since 1995, leading to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. In Kyoto it was agreed that rich countries would cut their emissions by 5% relative to 1990 by 2008-2012, but the treaty became riddled with loopholes allowing creative accounting and offsets.

Since Kyoto came into force in Montreal in 2005, the negotiations are supposed to have been about a second commitment period of Kyoto after it expires next year. But while poor countries wanted a new treaty to complement Kyoto, rich countries wanted to replace it. In 2007, the Bali Roadmap called for an agreement by 2009. Instead we got the Copenhagen Accord, which poor countries allege was undemocratically agreed by a handful of rich countries who then bullied them into signing up at Cancun in 2010. The stated objective of the Cancun Agreements is to “hold the increase in global average temperature below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”.

Yet now in Durban, many rich countries are now refusing to sign up to Kyoto or any other treaty, instead advocating a “pledge-and-review” approach in which each country voluntarily pursues the emissions targets they put on the table at Copenhagen – targets far too weak to achieve the internationally agreed goal of preventing dangerous global warming – and delay discussion of the necessary scale of action until some later date.

In a pledge-and-review world, international climate negotiations are likely to bypass the UN process. Countries like Australia are seeking to establish bilateral emissions trading agreements between major emitters. At first sight bilateral negotiations might seem more promising than the UN consensus approach, where one stick-in-the-mud like the US can ruin the outcome for everyone. But in UNFCCC at least poor countries have a voice; bilateral agreements would mean even greater control by corporate and national interests.

Bilateral negotiations would be focused not on targets but on emissions trading. The climate justice movement sees carbon markets and offsets as scams to cover the lack of action by rich countries and shift the burden to poor countries (I am inclined to agree). Australia, for better or worse, is set to have an emissions trading scheme from 2015, and our Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says the Government’s most important priority in Durban is to discuss linking our emissions trading scheme with others. The Australian delegation is certainly not representing my views as an Australian.

The most concerning thing about pledge-and-review is the timescale for the “review” part. All except the poorest, most vulnerable countries, who have little clout in the negotiations, are completely ignoring the urgency of radical action. Many rich countries are seriously threatening to delay any global agreement until 2020, or they propose yet another “Roadmap” to negotiate a new treaty to take effect in 2020. The US delegation has gone so far as to say nobody will even consider increasing the ambition of their targets before 2020.

What planet are these people on?

Given how utterly useless the “political reality” is, there no justification for toning down my message. So here then is the truth.

The national pledges currently on the table would lead to not 2°C but 4°C global warming by 2100. Some countries, including Australia, have made further pledges that are conditional on international action; even if these are included global warming would still be 3°C by 2100. Note that these numbers are median values; the worst-case outcomes are considerably higher. 3°C or 4°C would also surely lead to greater warming from slow feedbacks.

4°C would be a global catastrophe. It is difficult to imagine how humanity could adapt. There is no precedent in human history: global temperature has varied by only a few tenths of a degree in the relatively stable climate of the last 10,000 years in which human civilization developed. When the Earth was 5°C cooler 20,000 years ago, New York was covered by an ice sheet. The last time global temperature was a few degrees warmer was 35 million years ago, around the time our ancestors split off from monkeys; there were no ice sheets at the poles and sea level was over 60 metres higher.

A 4°C future is not acceptable. The scale of action that is truly required can be summed up in two possible pathways, which I will call the Tripwire Pathway and the Safe Climate Pathway. Under the Cancun Agreements the world’s governments have agreed to achieve at least the Tripwire Pathway. However, many scientists, poor nations, and activists (including I) advocate the even stricter Safe Climate Pathway.

Tripwire Pathway: The objective is that of the Cancun Agreements: “hold the increase in global average temperature below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”. 2°C was previously known as the “guardrail” beyond which warming could become dangerous; now climatologists realise 2°C is quite dangerous in itself and is better described as a “tripwire” beyond which the climate could spiral out of control. To limit global warming by 2100 to 2°C, humanity must not exceed a certain budget of cumulative global emissions between 2010 and 2050. The budget for the Tripwire Pathway runs out in about two decades, meaning the world has four decades to get to near-zero emissions. To stay within the budget, global emissions must peak within the next decade (dubbed the “Critical Decade” by the Australian Government’s Climate Commission). If the peak in global emissions is delayed until 2020, then everybody will have until 2040 to get to zero emissions. If we choose the Tripwire Pathway, we risk some unmanageable impacts including the demise of small island states, and warming exceeding 2°C from slow feedbacks over centuries and millennia.

Safe Climate Pathway: The objective is to be sure of preserving a safe climate and preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. To avoid slow feedbacks that could lead to dangerous warming, humanity must return the Earth to energy balance, which means reducing atmospheric CO₂ to ~350 ppm. Because of the long lifetime of CO₂ in the atmosphere, to reduce its concentration humanity must stop emitting the gas so the oceans and vegetation can start absorbing it. In practical terms, everybody needs to cut fossil fuel emissions to zero or near-zero as soon as possible. A return to 350 ppm could be achieved by global fossil fuel emissions reductions of 6%/year beginning in 2013, followed by a large reforestation effort later this century. So on the Safe Climate Pathway the world has only two decades to phase out fossil fuels. There is very little time to shift away from business-as-usual: every year the world delays, CO₂ rises by another 2 ppm and the 350 goal slips further from our grasp. If we choose the Safe Climate Pathway, the peak in global temperature should be not much more than 1°C above pre-industrial temperatures.

The very immediate urgency of the problem has never been clearer. The extent of climate impacts centuries and millennia from now will be determined by policy decisions taken in the near future. On either of the above pathways global emissions need to peak and begin declining very fast very soon, preferably yesterday. Note that the emissions reduction rates mentioned above are global; the cuts in developed nations would need to occur even faster. At some point the required cuts become so steep they are practically impossible.

So here’s what I think should happen in Durban. The delegates should agree to aim for 350 ppm. All developed countries and emerging major emitters should make binding commitments which add up to the global target. There should be no international carbon trading or offsets; in particular land carbon measures should not be offsets for fossil fuel emissions. And there must be progress on a Green Climate Fund and technology transfer to help developing countries in mitigation and adaptation.

Voluntary pledge-and-review and bilateral agreements will not work. In the absence of a global agreement, most countries will continue to cite the inaction of others as cover for their own. A Roadmap to a treaty might sound good with a nice capital R, but after two decades of negotiations you’d think the world’s leaders could come up with an actual treaty that would solve the problem. There must be a legally binding framework for emissions targets; that framework could be a second commitment period of Kyoto.

Sound radical?

“We’re not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.”

– Bill McKibben, leader of 350 movement

The bill establishes a carbon price which will later become an emissions trading scheme. The policy is admittedly pretty awful and riddled with flaws, but unlike Labor’s old Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme I can at least say it is better than nothing. As before, Labor intends to “reduce” Australia’s emissions mainly by switching power generation to natural gas and buying carbon offsets from overseas, both of which I consider extremely dubious. However, the Greens and independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott have worked hard to tangibly improve the policy, to the point where it can be considered a first step towards a renewable energy future. These farsighted crossbenchers have won unprecedented, independently-managed renewable energy funding; and built in regular independent reviews which provide opportunities to lift Australia’s ambition later on.

Now we need to work on building support for that greater ambition. As I was drafting this post, I was encouraged to notice a post by Christine Milne on the Greens website titled “The carbon price is law. Now begins the campaign for serious climate action!” which mentions several things the Greens intend to lobby for in 2012 and beyond. Here are some of my own ideas.

Although the first independent review of the carbon price is not until February 2014, there is plenty more that can be achieved in the current Parliament.

Firstly, we should support the growing grassroots movement against coal seam gas. In a recent unexpected development, Tony Windsor has tied his support for the Government’s mining tax to funding for research on coal seam gas impacts. If we can get some anti-coal-seam-gas legislation through the Parliament, that would slow down the dash to gas.

Secondly, we must support the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and campaign for it to be ideally implemented. We should all support the Australian Youth Climate Coalition’s current Repower Australia petition, which aims to make the exact same improvements to the CEFC that I personally would make.

Thirdly, we need to build at least one concentrating solar power plant. This more than anything will debunk the baseload myth in the public mind.

Fourthly, we need to remove the remaining subsidies and incentives for fossil fuel burning, and instead spend that money and effort on renewable energy. If the carbon price is the first step, then one possible next step is a national feed-in tariff for large-scale renewable energy. We should also campaign for Australia’s Renewable Energy Target (currently 20% by 2020) to be retained and increased. And we must cut the billions of dollars of tax loopholes for fossil fuels.

In terms of messaging, we should replace our current message of “Say Yes” to a carbon price with a pro-renewable, anti-gas-fired energy message. Most political insiders are deluded that renewable energy is too expensive and unreliable, while natural gas is “clean energy”. In reality, we need to replace fossil fuel energy as soon as possible; gas is part of the problem and renewable energy is the central solution.

Looking beyond the current electoral cycle, the climate movement really needs to get serious. By the time the first Climate Change Authority review rolls around, we need to build public support for emissions reduction targets consistent with global action that will not just slow, but stop and reverse the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide. We must ensure the emissions trading scheme to commence in 2015 is not compromised by offsets and other loopholes. We need to scrap the free permits for polluters, though unfortunately the Clean Energy Bill makes this impossible to achieve before mid-2017.

In the long term we must build a movement not just in favor of renewables but also against fossil fuels. This is currently outside political reality, but if we don’t try to shift the political reality then nobody else will. Australian government and businesses plan to continue generating our electricity from and exporting to Asia an exponentially increasing amount of fossil fuels. We will need massive public support to overcome the massive profit motive and force government and businesses to change their plans. We should lobby banks not to fund fossil fuel investments. Our long-term goals should include a ban on new coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, and phasing out fossil fuel exports.

Beyond Zero Emissions is designing a comprehensive plan for Australia to transition to a zero-carbon economy in ten years, debunking the argument that it cannot be done. They have already completed a plan for a zero-carbon electricity sector. It is expected to be finished by 2013, so could be implemented by as early as 2023 if we can build the political will. Australia must make this transition as rapidly as possible, then we can export zero-carbon technologies to the world. Australia’s first concentrating solar power plant will be critical to building support for such a plan.

Of course, the most obvious thing we must do is defend the Clean Energy Bill against the Liberal-National Coalition’s threat of repeal. Unfortunately it appears near-inevitable that the Coalition will win the next election; the worst opinion polls this year put Labor’s vote at its lowest in eight decades. So we probably cannot keep the Coalition out of government, but if we can discredit them we might make them unpopular enough to not win control of the Senate. On the other hand, we should not get too close to Labor. In campaigning for real climate action, we must take the Government to task for its greenwash.

Over the summer I will have more to say about mistakes which I think the Australian climate movement has made – stay tuned. But today is the day to savor the small, limited victory that we have won in 2011.

A carbon price is a first step in Australia’s necessary transition away from its current fossil fuel economy toward the renewable energy one of the future. The Clean Energy Future includes significant improvements on the 2009 version – the creation of the independent Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) should provide some certainty for the renewable energy industry; and the built-in cycle of independent reviews provides opportunities to improve the policy later on. However, the legislation still has many fundamental flaws which we should not be reluctant to point out.

#1 Gas Is Not Clean Energy

The policy risks driving investment in gas-fired electricity generation. As a fossil fuel, gas is part of the problem, not the solution. The only realistic solution is to phase out fossil fuels. A two-staged transition, from coal to gas to renewables, would waste precious time.

For businesses, gas investments carry the risk of eventually being shut down to mitigate climate change. For humanity, the far worse risk is that we build a fleet of polluting gas power plants and run them for their full lifetime of up to 60 years. It is questionable whether gas is even a low-carbon fuel; when “fugitive emissions” (methane leaks) are taken into account, gas may be comparable to coal on a 100-year timescale, and far worse on a 20-year timescale.

#2 Free Permits for Polluters Guaranteed

Australia’s onshore emissions are ~1.5% of global emissions, but our fossil fuel exports account for ~3% of global emissions, and they are planned to double in the next decade. Australia’s carbon price will not cover the emissions from actually burning those exported fossil fuels, only emissions released to the atmosphere before they leave Australia’s ports. Yet the Government sees fit to compensate exporting industries for the majority of their covered emissions.

There may be a case for compensating industries for lost competitiveness in the absence of a global agreement, though this is very dubious: the Grattan Institute says a carbon price will be dwarfed by other factors. Labor’s free permits go beyond any justification. The Government has justified increasingly extravagant compensation as a “global recession buffer”, despite the recession itself having passed. The $23 price is diluted to $1.27 for the highest-polluting export industries. The steel industry is actually overcompensated and will improve its profits. And the compensation reduction rate is so minuscule (1.3% per year) it allows the total number of free permits to rise over time.

These ridiculous levels of free permits are locked in: changes with a negative effect on businesses cannot be made until mid-2017. Furthermore, there is a three-year notice period, meaning it won’t be possible to implement the recommendations of the 2014-15 Productivity Commission review until July 2018. Government should have the power to respond promptly when circumstances change. Any errors that are identified should be corrected immediately, with the funding redirected to ARENA/CEFC.

#3 Hiding Emissions Overseas

Australia will be linked to international carbon markets from 2015 (albeit with a 50% limit on international permits). This allegedly allows Australia’s domestic emissions to exceed our emissions cap while having no effect on net emissions to the atmosphere; but it is highly dubious whether it will achieve the same emissions outcome in reality as on paper.. The credibility issues with carbon offsets are well-known. There will be restrictions but it is difficult to tell how they will work in practice.

Australia’s 2050 emissions target is an 80% cut, compared to an 80% rise under business-as-usual. Therefore if the market takes full advantage of the 50% upper limit, there’ll be virtually no change in Australia’s domestic emissions by 2050. Offsetting emissions overseas is not a serious way to tackle Australia’s contribution to climate change; we can and should cut our own emissions.

#4 Renewable Energy Support is Weak

ARENA and CEFC are an integral part of the MPCCC agreement, yet the relevant bills weren’t passed with the rest yesterday. The Government mustn’t back away from its renewable energy policies.

Of the announced $10 billion for CEFC over five years, only $0.9 billion materializes in the forward estimates. It is not at all obvious how, in the remaining three years, the Government is suddenly going to find an average of $3 billion per year for the body. It would make more sense for CEFC to receive $2 billion per year from the beginning. Also, it should be renamed the Renewable Energy Finance Corporation and all of its funding directed to renewables; no fossil fuel or fossil-renewable hybrids. This is not “picking winners”, as there are many available renewable options.

#5 Independent Reviews Should Be Sooner

The many independent reviews are one of the best elements of the Clean Energy Future, providing regular opportunities to correct errors of judgment. However, the first reviews should occur earlier to get it right as early as possible. Given the Climate Commission has identified the 2010s as the “Critical Decade”, it is unwise to waste too many years trialing the carbon price.

#6 Too Low A Price

The $23 per tonne starting price is far too low to make renewable energy economically attractive. It should rise faster than a few percent per year, and there should be no price ceiling. Businesses must have certainty of a high carbon price in the future.

#7 Fossil Fuel Subsidies

A carbon price should make polluters pay, but existing policies will be working against it. Currently Australia spends $11.1 billion per year on perverse fossil fuel subsidies, including fuel tax rebates, non-indexing of fuel excise, aviation concessions, and depreciation concessions for fossil fuel assets. Although the Clean Energy Future introduces fuel tax credit reductions and equivalent carbon prices on some fuels, these measures only amount to $3.3 billion over the fixed price period.

The carbon price will raise $24.5 billion of permit revenue over the fixed price period, with $11.2 billion returned to fossil fuel industries as compensation. Carbon price compensation is also a fossil fuel subsidy. Altogether, the combined value of industry compensation and existing fossil fuel subsidies over the three years will be $41.2 billion, $16.7 billion greater than the revenue raised by the carbon price. (And this is a conservative estimate, since it doesn’t include the free permits for coal-fired electricity generators.)

Australia spends far more on fossil fuels than renewables, contradicting the Government’s stated vision of a clean energy future. The existing subsidies should be cut entirely and transferred to ARENA/CEFC.

#8 Cash for Coal

The Clean Energy Investment Plans to be made by coal-fired electricity generators should not include any investments in new fossil fuel generation capacity. Generators planning to invest in fossil fuels should not receive free permits. Coal power plants paid to close should be replaced with solar power plants, and the payments should be small.

#9 No Ban on New Coal Power

The Government claims the carbon price will rule out new coal-fired power plants. Instead of merely assuming so, the legislation should explicitly ban them.

#10 Hiding Emissions in the Land?

After 2015, companies can buy unlimited Australian carbon credits. These should be limited like international offsets, because not all tonnes of CO₂ are equal.

The atmosphere and land vegetation naturally exchange carbon on human timescales. There is an important distinction between moving carbon between these, and digging up fossil carbon that has been buried for millions of years. The fossil carbon will stay aboveground for millennia, but the land is a climate feedback so cannot store carbon permanently. Even if forest cover was returned to preindustrial levels, the carbon cycle would still be overwhelmed by fossil fuel emissions. It is fossil carbon we urgently need to stop emitting.

The Next Step

The Clean Energy Future could waste several years of the Critical Decade. It locks in polluter compensation, defers renewable energy funding, encourages gas investment, and even allows Australia’s emissions to rise. In my more optimistic moments, I think it has the dubious distinction of not being worse than nothing. In my more pessimistic moments, I have doubts about the effectiveness of any emissions trading scheme (but that’s a topic for another post).

It is disheartening that a policy so riddled with flaws is seemingly all that is politically achievable today, and the serious policy issues are obscured by the political shouting match in the media. Where can the climate movement go from here?

I suggest we replace our current message of “Say Yes” to a carbon price with a pro-renewable, anti-gas-fired energy message. You only need to read the newspapers to know most political insiders – journalists, politicians, think tanks, businesses, and economists – believe gas is the future and renewable energy is at best a small part of the solution. Myths like “Renewable energy can’t provide baseload power” are widely accepted as fact. In reality, we need to replace fossil fuel energy ASAP; gas is part of the problem and renewable energy is the central solution.

The specific policies we might advocate could be the subject of a whole separate post, but they include a national feed-in tariff for large-scale renewable energy, a ban on new coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, and phasing out Australia’s fossil fuel exports. If these things seem politically unrealistic today, then we need to make them politically realistic.

The above is an edited version of a submission I made to the Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation.

This is not unexpected, of course. Globally the fossil fuel industry has been campaigning hard for a transition to gas. In Australia the incumbent Labor Government have consistently taken the same line (at least, when they haven’t been rhapsodizing about the bright future of coal). The only reason why the policy announced on 10 July contains any support for renewables at all is because Labor had to negotiate with the Greens and independents.

The fashionable view of gas is as a transitional fuel on the world’s journey to a low-carbon or zero-carbon economy. But this is folly: the only realistic way to achieve the required rapid transition to a zero-carbon economy is to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible. As a fossil fuel, gas is part of the problem, not the solution. A two-staged transition, from coal to gas then to renewables, would waste precious time.

Gas may reduce emissions in the short term (though even that is questionable – see below), but after that we’ll be left with a fleet of polluting gas power plants we don’t want. From the perspective of businesses, gas investments carry the political risk of eventually being shut down by a future society more rational than us. For humanity, the far worse risk is that we build a fleet of gas power plants and run them for their full lifetime of 25-40 years. A recent study by the International Energy Agency says relying on gas would lead to a CO₂e level of 650 ppm, meaning 4°C global warming from fast feedbacks alone (and 4°C is surely enough to set off slow feedbacks causing far more warming after this century).

4°C might not sound like much, but global temperature has varied by only a few tenths of a degree in the relatively stable climate of the last 10,000 years in which human civilization developed. When the Earth was 5°C cooler 20,000 years ago, New York was covered by an ice sheet. It has not been 4°C warmer since Antarctica was ice-free 35 million years ago, around the time our ancestors split off from monkeys.

So what might 4°C of global warming mean? The continents warm faster than the global average. The record-breaking 2009 Victorian heatwave, which caused the unprecedentedly catastrophic Black Saturday bushfires, would be a cool day in the new climate. There would be widespread desertification; in southern Australia extreme drought would become the new norm by the end of the century. According to new CSIRO projections, Australia may have to import fruit, vegetables, and wheat after 2050. The poles warm most of all, bringing the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets above freezing point and causing potentially metres of sea level rise per century. Eventually all the ice on the planet would melt, raising sea level by 70 metres. Melting ice is itself a large positive feedback which could double the fast-feedback warming.

Ross Garnaut warns “beyond two or three degrees the challenges and costs of climate change […] are likely to overwhelm any attempts at adaptation to reduce the costs”. My local council says we can adapt to a 4-degree-warmer world, but I’d rather not find out.

The effects of gas are actually worse than stated above, because the IEA didn’t account for “fugitive emissions”, all the methane that leaks out along the journey from the ground to the gas plant. The oft-heard talking point “gas is 50% cleaner than coal” ignores fugitive emissions. These emissions are difficult to measure, but one recent study concluded when they are taken into account, gas turns out to be more or less comparable to coal on a 100-year timescale, and far worse on a 20-year timescale. (The timescale is important because methane is many times more powerful a greenhouse gas but doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide.) So whether you can call gas a low-carbon fuel in the first place is very questionable.

So why are businesses and governments so keen on gas? Gas is cheaper than renewables, but only because the market fails to take its climate costs into account, as a high carbon price would do. The costs of renewable energy technologies are coming down rapidly anyway. Gas is the cheapskate’s “clean” energy: it’s not really that clean, it’s just cheap.

It is not in Australia’s – or the world’s – interest to invest in gas. To avoid a nightmarish 4-degree-warmer world – let alone the 2-degree-warmer world that 194 countries in UNFCCC negotiations, including Australia, have agreed to prevent – we must invest in zero-carbon energy sources. Gas is at best a lower-carbon one.

Pros

• Finally Australia will have, from 1 July 2012, a price on carbon.
• Emissions targets will not be set until 2014, when the independent Climate Change Authority will recommend a five-year emissions budget to come into effect in 2015 when we move to an emissions trading scheme. If the Parliament cannot agree on the target, a default cap will be set for one year only. The Climate Change Authority will review the target annually and make updated recommendations on 28 February. This arrangement provides the promised upward flexibility, in contrast to the legislated lock-in of the old CPRS.
• In deciding on its recommended emissions reductions, the Climate Change Authority will have regard to global emissions budgets, climate science, existing targets, progress in cutting emissions, economics, social factors, and voluntary action. I’m happy about this because I assumed the authority would be working on Garnaut’s framework, which has a maximum target of 25%. As it is, the Greens say there will be no upper limit on emissions reductions.
• At least 50% of emissions reductions must happen domestically, and there will be some level of accountability criteria for offsets.
• The 2050 target has been raised from 60% to 80% unconditionally.
• From 2015 to 2018 there will be a $15 price floor in the emissions trading scheme, ensuring some level of investment certainty.
• An independent Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) will subsume every existing renewable program except the 20% Renewable Energy Target (RET), and will control a total of $3.2 billion funding. Meanwhile, the RET will be retained and will no longer include biomass.
• $10 billion over five years will go to a Clean Energy Finance Corporation. $5 billion of that is guaranteed for renewable energy, and the corporation will not fund carbon capture and storage.
• There’ll be a study on designing an electricity grid for 100% renewable energy by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). (Beyond Zero Emissions have already done this in their Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan.)
• The package includes a number of energy efficiency measures.
• Measurable voluntary actions will automatically be subtracted from the cap.
• There is a strong household compensation package – 90% will be compensated, 70% fully compensated, and 40% overcompensated.
• The mining fuel tax credit, a nonsensical fossil fuel subsidy, will be reduced. There will also be a Productivity Commission review of fuel excise policy, which may lead to removing many fossil fuel subsidies and covering petrol in the emissions trading scheme.
• No new coal power plants will be built. The Government will buy out 2 GW worth of coal power stations.
• Coal will get $1.8 billion less compensation than in the CPRS, and in 5 years instead of 10.
• Much of the coal mine compensation will be in the form of structural adjustment assistance, better than free permits.
• Compensation to trade-exposed industries will be reviewed and move towards a principled approach, as recommended by Garnaut.
• The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Australian Industry Group, Minerals Council of Australia, and Australian Coal Association oppose the policy, so there must be something to it.

Cons

• If the policy fails to be improved later, Treasury modeling reportedly says, the coal industry will continue to grow exponentially. So its success depends on its upward flexibility.
• Labor’s minimum 5% target is far too low.
• Interestingly the Liberals make one of the same criticisms of the new emissions trading scheme that the Greens made of the CPRS: Australia’s domestic emissions will rise while half of the 160 Mt in Labor’s target will be offset overseas. There is a large potential for fraud in international offsets – a rare point on which I agree with Tony Abbott!
• The 80% 2050 target is a long way off. The world needs to get to zero emissions by 2050 or sooner.
• Carbon prices of $23 and $15 are far too low to drive a transition to renewables.
• As well as a price floor there is a price ceiling: $20 over the international price. What if the international price crashes?
• There have been media reports that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation will fund hybrid gas/solar power plants. Why build hybrid plants when you can build the real thing?
• The carbon tax excludes petrol, a fossil fuel.
• It sounds like the coal power plants which are bought out will be replaced with gas, when of course they should be replaced with renewables (I’d make the same criticism of Liberal policy). Also, we should shut more than 2 GW of coal before 2020. And I’m worried that buying them out now sets a precedent – that the Government will have buy them all out eventually.
• The package retains unnecessary free permits for polluters, albeit temporarily, diluting the price signal and adding to the existing billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies. Notably the MPCCC did not agree to some of the compensation, but the Government will try to get it through Parliament.
• Coal electricity generators will still receive free permits, albeit fewer.
• Highly emissions intensive trade-exposed industries will receive 94.5% free permits, the same as in the CPRS. The compensation will include $1.3 billion to coal, $300 million to steel, and more. It will be locked in for five years, with an overlapping three-year notification period. This means there will only be a $1-2 price on trade-exposed industries until their compensation is reviewed in 2015.
• There are $250 million of land sector offsets which I’m not sure whether to include as a pro or a con. While it’s important to manage the land sector side of things, I’m worried it will undermine the even more vital transition in the energy sector.

Summary

Though starting low at $23 per tonne with a minimum 5% target, it looks like the carbon price has unlimited upward flexibility. It still has unnecessary free permits for polluters which are effectively fossil fuel subsidies – but these can hopefully be phased out in a few years, and with luck some might not even get through the Parliament. While petrol is excluded, there will be a review of fuel subsidies hopefully leading to finally getting rid of them. There is a level of support for renewables here which is unprecedented in Australia, and looks like it will provide certainty for the renewable energy industry. It is unclear how well the emissions trading scheme is designed – there are at least some limits on international offsets, but that would still allow domestic emissions to rise.

New details are being leaked out every day and it’s difficult to keep up with them all. So here’s a list of known or rumored decisions. Some of the details are hazy but will no doubt soon become clear. I don’t consider anything certain until the big announcement tomorrow.

• 1 July: The MPCCC have discussed buying out some coal power plants and replacing them, though it sounds like they will be replaced by gas, not renewables. Notably, this is similar to one of the Liberal Party’s policies.
• 3 July: The Government announced the carbon price will not include petrol, although it may be covered in the future. Oil is one of the three main fossil fuels, and excluding it halves the number of companies covered from 1,000 to 500. Liberal leader Tony Abbott complained the exclusion of petrol made it a “great disappearing carbon tax”, despite having campaigned daily for months against taxing petrol and credited himself with its exclusion.
• 5 July: 90% of households will be compensated, 70% will be fully compensated, and three million will be overcompensated.
• 5 July: Even Greens leader Bob Brown says Australia will not phase out coal in the next decade (though Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon rightly says it is possible).
• 6 July: The Government announced free permits for coal – the worst of the conventional fossil fuels. The amount is said to be smaller than the $7.3 billion over ten years for coal in the old CPRS, but instead granted over five years. Labor freely admits the industry’s size would double by 2050 under its policy.
• 6 July: CSIRO modeling says under a $26 per tonne carbon tax, fossil fuels will still supply half of Australia’s energy by 2035, and possibly even by 2050 with carbon capture and storage.
• 7 July: Though one of the MPCCC’s original principles was revenue neutrality, reports say the policy will cost $4 billion over four years, or $1 billion per year. Some of the funds will come from cutting fuel tax rebates (worth $5 billion in 2010-2011 but it will only be cut for some industries).
• 8 July: The Greens announced a new independent body called the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). ARENA will subsume $1.5 billion of existing renewable energy projects – the argument is management by an independent body will stop renewable energy money being constantly shuffled around. ARENA will also receive at least another $1.7 billion (apparently over ten years). It’s not clear where the money will come from – perhaps from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation will be funded by carbon tax revenue ($10 billion over five years). Thankfully, carbon capture and storage will not be counted as clean energy.
• 9 July: The starting price is reported to be $23 per tonne.
• 9 July: The Government will be able to buy $1 billion of carbon offsets in the land sector, but they won’t count towards Australia’s international target. Companies can also buy carbon offsets, but they will be capped.

More tomorrow…

The atmospheric level of CO₂ must be returned to 350 ppm to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Because of the long lifetime of CO₂ in the atmosphere, to reduce its concentration humanity must stop emitting so carbon sinks can start absorbing. Every year the world delays, CO₂ rises by another 2 ppm and the 350 goal slips further from our grasp.

The only realistic way to achieve the required transition to a zero-carbon economy is to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible. This seriously calls into question the fashionable view of gas as a transitional fuel. While renewables are a zero-carbon energy source, gas is merely a lower-carbon one. A two-staged transition, from coal to gas then to renewables, would waste precious time. And it makes little sense for energy companies to invest in gas power plants, when they will eventually have to be shut down anyway.

Australia should be a leader in climate change mitigation, not a follower. Australia must rapidly transition to a zero-carbon economy as part of a 350 ppm global mitigation effort. The Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan made a convincing case that Australia can create a 100% renewable energy economy in just ten years, by rapidly scaling up concentrated solar power technology (which has the storage capacity to provide power 24/7).

A carbon price should help to drive the transition to renewables. A badly-designed carbon price may be even worse than no price at all, if it locks in unlimited fossil fuel burning for another decade.

• A politically realistic carbon price, on its own, will not create the needed investments in renewable energy. It must be as high as possible, rise as fast as possible, and be complemented with other strong, effective renewable energy incentives to make large-scale solar power stations economically attractive. These can be funded by carbon tax revenue, and by cutting the $12 billion of fossil fuel subsidies. The Government could also invest directly in zero-carbon infrastructure.
• A badly-designed compensation package will decimate the intended price signal. For this reason a principled approach should be used for trade-exposed industries, and there must be no compensation to electricity generators except in the form of structural adjustment assistance.
• A badly-designed emissions trading scheme will not provide either price certainty or certainty that the intended net emissions outcome will be reached. This can be avoided by retaining the initial tax as a floor price; limiting dubious international “offsets” (hiding Australia’s emissions overseas is not seriously tackling Australia’s contribution to climate change); and handling land use separately to fossil fuels (even if the Earth had as many trees as it did pre-industrially, the carbon cycle would still be completely overwhelmed by fossil fuel emissions).

Here are some of the topics I’m thinking of covering:

• Updates on the progress of MPCCC negotiations
• The Garnaut Climate Change Review which advised the Government, including my criticisms of its recommendations:
• Why we should invest in renewable energy, not merely what is cheapest today
• Why I believe Australia should be a leader, not a follower
• Why radical climate action is urgently needed
• Why we need a carbon price
• How best to design a carbon price
• Possible combinations of starting prices and complementary measures
• Compensation to power companies, compensation to households, and whether it damages the price signal
• What to do about fossil fuel exports
• Flexibility, investment certainty, and the switch to emissions trading
• Price certainty and target certainty in the emissions trading scheme
• Compromises, centrism, and political reality
• The dynamics of the current Australian Parliament
• The Liberal Party’s policies
• Commentary on rhetoric from all sides, including the scare campaign against carbon pricing
• Putting the carbon tax debate in perspective
• Media coverage of climate change and the carbon tax
• Public opinion about climate change and the carbon tax
• And much more…

It is both necessary and possible to rapidly eliminate Australia’s, and eventually humanity’s, CO₂ emissions. If it is not currently politically possible, then it must be made so. The climate operates according to the laws of physics, and we cannot compromise with the laws of physics. If we try, we will all inevitably lose.

2011 is probably our best hope of getting meaningful action from the Australian Government on climate change. Four months ago it announced its new carbon price policy framework. It’s a framework because the policy is in the process of being designed by the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee (MPCCC), set up by the Labor minority government to secure the support of the Greens.

Only two things are definitely decided:

• The introduction of a carbon price before the next election. The legislation is intended to be introduced to the House of Representatives in August, the Senate in October or November, and come into effect on 1 July 2012. The Government says the start date is not negotiable.
• The mechanism: a hybrid tax/cap-and-trade scheme. It will begin as a simple carbon tax that rises over time, and is intended to transition to a cap-and-trade scheme in three to five years.

The interim carbon tax was advocated by the Greens at last year’s election, to break the deadlock while emissions targets are negotiated. As a Greens voter, it is part of the platform that I voted for, and I hope it will be an effective deadlock-breaker. However, the devil is in the details which are still being negotiated.

It’s only through an unlikely combination of circumstances that we’ve got this far. For as long as anyone can remember, Australian politics has been dominated by a two-party system, and both of the two major parties have represented the interests of industry.

Labor’s previous attempt at a carbon price, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, was aptly nicknamed the “Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme” (in future posts I’ll explore the problems with it and how to prevent the same thing from happening this time around). In contrast to the current situation, the Government refused to negotiate with the Greens and instead negotiated with the right-wing Liberal-National Coalition, who watered it down even further. At the last minute, the Coalition was taken over by global warming denier Tony Abbott, leaving the policy opposed by all sides except the Government. It was blocked by the Senate and quietly “delayed” by the Government.

If either Labor or Liberal had won a majority, there probably would have been no carbon price, or any other substantial climate policy, for the foreseeable future. Very unusually, Labor needed the support of crossbenchers to form a minority government, and it so happened that the crossbenchers in question were a Greens member and several independents in favor of a carbon price. While the minority government has received a lukewarm reception, I think it is the best thing that has happened in Australian politics for a long time. It has temporarily broken the dominance of fossil fuel interests, and allowed us a rare opportunity to get a real climate policy in place.

The Multi-Party Climate Change Committee is chaired by Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard and consists of Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan, Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, Greens Senators Christine Milne and Bob Brown, and independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. The MPCCC is receiving expert advice from Ross Garnaut, Will Steffen, Rod Sims, and Patricia Faulkner. The government is also holding regular roundtables with industry leaders and non-government organisations. The Liberal-National Coalition is not part of the negotiations because they oppose a carbon price. The current situation is basically the reverse of what it was in 2009 – now it is the Greens negotiating with the Government and the Liberals protesting on the sidelines.

To the Government’s credit, it continues to push onward with the negotiations despite daily attacks and negative polls. Gillard says the Government is not about to give up even if it will “get even tougher before it gets easier”. I started out rather cynical about Gillard’s motives – historically she’s changed her mind on carbon pricing depending on the political circumstances – but I have to admire her current determination. Nevertheless, we supporters of climate action must keep the pressure up to prevent the Government from changing its mind and dropping the whole thing entirely.

So how are the negotiations going? Each day there are reports in the mainstream media that the committee is considering this or that, but it’s not clear how much is accurate and what is mere rumor. We won’t know the exact outcome until the full policy is announced, which will be sometime in the next month.

Yesterday Rob Oakeshott said the deal could be sealed “in five minutes” if three details were settled: compensation to households, compensation to exporters, and the amount of renewable energy funding. I’m surprised that he mentioned the first two – I was under the impression that everyone on the committee agreed about compensating households, and had more or less settled on Garnaut’s approach to compensating exporters. (I intend to discuss all these matters in future posts.)

Today it was reported that the committee has reached agreement on some key points and is expected to clinch the deal within a week and a half. Garnaut proposed an independent committee to recommend an emissions target when the switch to an emissions trading scheme occurs (2015 at the earliest). Labor and Greens previously differed on what should happen in 2015 if the Parliament disagrees with the independent committee’s recommendations – Labor wanted a default target of 5%, while the Greens wanted the default to be continuing with the fixed price. Now they have reportedly agreed on a compromise: the switch will occur in 2015, but the independent committee will review the target each year. Assuming the reports are accurate, I think this compromise will go a long way towards getting a deal.

In future posts I’ll cover the issues in much more detail, and offer my opinions on why we need a carbon price, what a carbon price should do, and how best to design it.

It looks like the coming weeks will be exciting. Stay tuned for updates.

I started out, about eighteen months ago, writing posts debunking the arguments of global warming contrarians (you can find all those old posts here). However, in the past year I have transferred this effort to the Skeptical Science blog started by John Cook (you can find links to my Skeptical Science posts here), and Planet James was petering out. So now I have decided on a new role for Planet James from now on.

While I will continue to write about climate science on Skeptical Science in a politically neutral way, on Planet James I’ll be mainly blogging about climate politics in Australia. Now is a critical time, perhaps our best hope of getting meaningful government action, and I want to have my say.

In the past I wrote long and detailed posts that were few and far between. Now I intend to write posts that are shorter, sharper, more frequent, and to the point.

At the recent US House of Representatives Committee on Science Space and Technology climate hearing, the Republicans called Dr. John Christy as an expert witness testifying against the global warming consensus. Unfortunately, Christy spent his time repeating a long list of climate myths, including the common contrarian refrain that “climate model output does not match up to the real world”. Let’s examine this claim.

A tale of three climate indicators

Surface temperature observations are well within the range of model projections:

Figure 1: Observed global temperatures since 1980 compared to IPCC AR4 model projections for the business-as-usual A1B scenario. (Source: RealClimate.)

The observed rate of sea level rise is at the upper limit of the IPCC’s projected range:

Figure 2: Observed sea level rise since 1970 (tide gauges in red, satellites in blue) compared to IPCC TAR projections for 1990-2010 (grey band). (Allison et al 2009)

The end-of-summer extent of Arctic sea ice is plummeting far more rapidly than those “alarmist” IPCC models predicted:

Figure 3: Observed Arctic sea ice extent since 1953 compared to IPCC AR4 models for 1900-2100. (Source: RealClimate.)

These are three of the most important and discussed climate indicators. In all three cases, the reality so far has proven to be as bad or worse than the IPCC predicted.

Yes, the satellites agree

Christy might object that Figure 1 does not include his University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) satellite-based dataset of global troposphere temperatures. Yet the satellites are in broad agreement with the surface records. UAH differs from GISS by merely 0.05°C over three decades:

Figure 4: Comparison of surface temperature records (GISS, HADCRUT, NOAA) and satellite records (UAH and RSS). (Skeptical Science Climate Graphics) 

A 2006 report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, of which Christy was a lead author, concluded:

Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies.

The irrelevant tropical troposphere

There is one remaining discrepancy, which Christy has mentioned at a previous hearing. The models predict the tropical troposphere should warm faster than the surface, but the observations on decadal timescales are ambiguous. However, this phenomenon is not specifically a signature of anthropogenic global warming; it should occur no matter what is causing the warming. Briefly, it is caused by rising humidity which reduces the rate of cooling from the surface upwards. Basic physics tell us that more water is evaporated when the atmosphere is warmer, regardless of the cause of the warming. And we have observed humidity rising in tandem with temperatures. Thus noisy data are the probable source of the discrepancy.

The sky is rising

The graphs below show the modeled pattern of temperature change for a 2% increase in solar radiation (top) versus a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ (bottom):

Figures 5 and 6 (Source: RealClimate).

Notice the tropical troposphere warms in both scenarios. The big difference is what happens in the next layer up: the stratosphere. Solar brightening warms up all layers of the atmosphere. If instead CO₂ warms the surface, the stratosphere cools markedly – because more heat is being trapped lower down. This is the true fingerprint of anthropogenic global warming.

Satellite measurements find the stratosphere has indeed been cooling:

Figure 7: Observed stratospheric temperature since 1979. (NOAA NCDC)

This has caused the tropopause, the boundary between the warming troposphere and cooling stratosphere, to rise by several hundred metres. You could say that humanity has changed the structure of the Earth’s atmosphere.

We have found many more human fingerprints on climate change.

Observations versus models

The reality is that observations are completely consistent with anthropogenic global warming. Furthermore, the observed cooling of the stratosphere is not consistent with the warming being caused by various natural causes such as the Sun or volcanoes. And where they do diverge from climate models, the observations are usually even more alarming.