Reducing Gas Emissions by a quarter isn't giving 100% on Climate

Posted by Nathalie Cattaneo to EWB National, 07th April at 10:57 AM


- Below is an article written by Patrick Hearps - Patrick is the Technical Director for Beyond Zero Emissions, EWB members and former President of the EWB Melbourne Uni Chapter. This article featured in both the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald amongst other publications.

         PATRICK HEARPS 

       March 26, 2010

ClimateWorks Australia's carbon growth plan strives for mediocrity, writes Patrick Hearps.

Last Friday, the well-connected climate advocacy group ClimateWorks Australia released its Low Carbon Growth Plan for Australia to an audience of several hundred at Federation Square, Melbourne.

It was an interesting choice of venue considering the contents of the report are in stark contrast to the ambitious nature of Federation Square's architecture. The ClimateWorks plan represents nothing more than benchmarks for mediocrity that fail to deliver a safe climate.

The ClimateWorks report is basically a rehashing of the well-known McKinsey cost curve. It claims to identify and cost enough opportunities to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020. Some of these options are cost-negative, some incur an extra monetary cost versus business-as-usual, but overall the entire abatement task could be achieved with an average cost to society of $185 per household per year.

Sound like a bargain? Maybe, but why the 25 per cent reduction target? Why not 40 per cent, 80 per cent or even greater? As pointed out by the Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist Professor David Karoly at Friday's launch, a 25 per cent reduction is not enough to stop dangerous climate change.

Despite recent organised attacks on climate scientists from the well-funded climate denier lobby (aka grumpy old men), the laws of physics and atmospheric chemistry remain unchanged. Our climate has changed and will continue to change unless we take adequate steps to address the challenge.

An eye-opening analysis of the task we face comes from Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and advisor to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

According to his analysis, even if the entire globe emits no more than 750 gigatonnes of carbon between now and 2050, we have a 67 per cent probability of not exceeding global warming of 2 degrees. If this budget is to be allocated on an equal per-capita basis globally, high-emitting countries such as Australia and the United States will use up our portion before 2020.

In a previous life, I worked for one of the world's major petroleum companies, well known for both its safe, conservative approach to risk management, and its irrational denial of climate science. If the company identified a risk in any of their operations with even a one-in-100 chance of causing serious harm to a single employee, it was treated with the utmost priority, with no resource spared to reduce the danger. This approach is applied widely in industry and society - yet we are gambling on near-even odds for the future of our civilisation?

Thankfully, a closer analysis of the Low Carbon Growth Plan reveals that the 25 per cent reductions are by no means the limit of what we can achieve domestically. The opportunities listed are mostly a piecemeal, incremental approach that would not involve any serious structural change. With a little effort, much more is achievable.

Let's take a quick look at the power sector, the most carbon-intensive sector of the Australian economy. ClimateWorks propose an extra 4900 megawatts (MW) of wind turbines on top of what we're going to build anyway.

Decent-sized wind farms currently range from about 300MW up to the 1000MW project at Silverton, near Broken Hill. Is an extra five to 15 farms over the next decade the best we can do? China's current 2020 target is 100,000MW of wind, which it is likely to achieve by 2015 at the current rate of installation. Australia has vastly more potential than the plan outlines.

And what about baseload power specifically? ClimateWorks includes only a small amount of concentrated solar thermal power in its plan - the technology provides zero-emissions solar electricity 24 hours a day. Despite that fact and the Spanish solar thermal industry experiencing exponential growth, the authors envisage only 2500MW of solar thermal in Australia by 2020, even though Spain (with less sun than Australia) is on track to have 2440MW installed by 2013. Again, the plan undervalues Australia's renewable energy potential.

The Low Carbon Growth Plan will come to be seen as a missed opportunity. Instead of showing leadership, ClimateWorks falls into the trap of small-scale, incremental approaches to reducing greenhouse gases. If we are to face up to the risks of climate change, Australia needs ambition and leadership, or we will be left behind by nations who are getting to work changing their economies, not procrastinating. If 25 per cent is what we can achieve by striving for mediocrity, imagine what we could do if we get serious.

Patrick Hearps is technical director of Beyond Zero Emissions.

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