By Linda Kaucher
Minister for resources Warwick Parer released the government's "Sustainable Energy'" green paper over the Christmas period, obviously hoping that no-one would notice. It's a shocker.
In a cynical play on words, "sustainable energy" is turned around to mean sustaining high energy use. "Energy efficiency" translates into competition and cost cutting in energy production, to produce and sell more energy.
Energy-related predictions are based on "current trends" throughout the paper, and are accepted as inevitable, with no suggestion of any government action to affect any of the scenarios.
This acceptance of "current trends" includes accepting a 42% increase in energy demand in Australia over the next 25 years — despite the paper's references to the International Panel on Climate Change report.
Climate change
The IPCC has assessed that global emissions would need to be reduced by 60-80% in the long term to stabilise CO2 concentrations at twice the pre-industrial level, and that even stabilising at this level is expected to increase the mean temperature of the earth's surface (by 2100) by 1.5-4.5°C.
The green paper fails to deal with this contradiction in any way. By stating that "Australia produces only 1.4% of global greenhouse emissions", it attempts to underplay our disproportionately large contribution to global greenhouse emissions.
Another misleading suggestion is that the "enhancement of 'sinks' in the forestry, agricultural and land use sectors can ... play a part in greenhouse gas mitigation". In reality, a table in the paper showing that "Land Use Change, Forestry and Agriculture" presently produce 40.4% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, indicates that these sectors have a long way to go to become net "sinks" of greenhouse gases.
According to the paper, "Certainty for business planning and investment requires a long term policy perspective". Apparently the effects of greenhouse gas emissions don't. There is no reference to greenhouse gases in the section on "Mitigating Risk".
Although there is reference to the need to take account of the real costs of energy production and consumption, including the environmental costs, the paper makes no attempt to do it.
There are no pro-active strategies in the paper, beyond the intention to further deregulate, and increase energy use. The paper's only solution to the quoted predictions that Australian oil may run out in 14 years is to facilitate oil company exploration. There are no other strategies, such as conservation measures, alternatives or contingency plans.
The failure to address greenhouse gas emissions may be paving the way to telling Australians that the only way to deal with our enormous greenhouse gas emissions is to utilise nuclear power. Six new uranium mines are being fast-tracked in Australia at the moment
Uranium is listed in the paper as one of our "abundant energy resources". Renewables, such as sunshine, are not.
The bottom line in the paper is about keeping energy prices low, to maximise growth, particularly in energy-related exports — coal and uranium.
In fact, when the possibility of any reduction in energy use is mentioned, it is treated as a negative prospect.
The paper accepts the "current trends" prediction that the percentage of Australia's energy that will come from renewable sources will drop from a current 6% (including hydro) to 5% in 2020.
Again, with no strategies to affect this prediction, it is clear that the government has no intention of promoting the use of renewable energy or of increasing the tiny portion of research funding that goes in that direction.
Taxation, urban design and industry development are excluded as "matters more appropriately dealt with outside the compass of a sustainable energy paper". This is despite the fact that transport is the sector that uses the highest percentage of energy (38%).
These exemptions, for the purposes of public comment, don't seem to apply to the points made on the encouragement of ethanol/petrol blends, or to tax concessions for oil companies.
At the official closing date, January 31, 150 submissions on the paper had been received. More were "still pouring in", according to the Department of Primary Industries and Resources. This is unofficially pushing back the closing date for a couple of weeks.More growth