Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The minority report by the Liberal members for Tangney, Solomon, Hughes and Lindsay to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation’s geosequestration report shows exactly why we have had no serious action from the Howard government to address global warming for the past decade. This report rips off the veneer and reveals the rotten core beneath. The government wants us to believe it is serious about tackling climate change, but it is all a sham—it does not want to believe there is any problem; it simply does not want to know about it. It reveals a government infested with members who refuse to believe climate change is happening, refuse to believe the experts and even refuse to believe the evidence happening right around the world before our very eyes. Such a government cannot be part of the solution; it is part of the problem. This is not a government for the planet’s future; it is a government living in the past.

The member for Tangney says that he does not support emissions trading and that he sees no need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This is a reckless, irresponsible position from an MP who thinks he knows more about the science of global warming than do the 1,500 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The member for Tangney and the other climate change sceptics remind me of the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Graillying there on the ground with no arms and no legs, blood pouring from everywhere, and still wanting to fight on when the debate is over. It is as serious as it is amusing, because this attitude still lurks within the government’s breast, and it is this attitude which is responsible for Australia’s dreadful track record in tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

While the European nations are cutting their greenhouse gas emissions, at the present rate, by the year 2020, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions will have risen by 27 per cent over the 1990 levels. This dreadful prospect is the consequence of abject failure to take serious measures to introduce an emissions-trading scheme and to substantially increase the share of renewable energy. These things could, and should, have been done at any time during the past 10 years, but the government has deliberately and wilfully ignored them. Now, it says it will introduce an emissions-trading scheme, but it does not say what its emissions-trading target will be and it says it will announce that target after the next election. What an astonishing try-on this is.

The dissenting report is riddled with unsubstantiated assertions. It says the examples of the decreasing snow cover and ice extent given by Al Gore and others are ‘demonstrably wrong’, but then provides no evidence to support this. It asserts that the Stern review has been ‘thoroughly debunked in a scientific and economic sense’, but all we get is that assertion. The dissenting report is tricky with the facts. It produces a graph showing aggregate rainfall in Australia, suggesting little change over time. The problem for Australia’s rainfall is that it is drying up in the south. Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and the Murray-Darling Basin have experienced declining rainfall in the past decade, and the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are predicting even less in the years ahead. Do the members for Tangney, Solomon, Hughes and Lindsay think the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have got this wrong, or do they think that it does not matter if Perth, Melbourne and the Murray-Darling Basin dry out, provided there is more rainfall in the tropics? What a shocking abdication of their responsibility to their constituents. The member for Tangney represents voters in Perth, and the members for Lindsay and Hughes represent voters in Sydney. They should be urging action to prevent rainfall loss for their electorates, not hiding behind aggregate data to pretend climate change is not a problem for Australia.

The dissenting report claims that doubling CO will only increase the natural greenhouse effect less than two per cent and produce warming of one degree Celsius in the absence of negative feedbacks. This is dangerously misleading and irresponsible. It is intended to, and will, discourage action. But doubling CO is definitely risky business. Dr James Hansen from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Dr Makiko Sato from the Earth Institute at Columbia University say that the west Antarctic icesheet and the Arctic ice cover are at risk of melting if the earth’s temperature rises by another one degree Celsius. Dr Sato says that CO exceeding 450 parts per million is almost surely dangerous, yet the member for Tangney is relaxed about CO going to 750 parts per million.

Doubtless there will be some people rushing to defend the dissenting report on the principle of freedom of speech. The American judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, observed years ago that free speech does not mean a man can shout ‘fire’ in a theatre and cause panic. In this case, there is smoke wafting through the theatre and the members in question are telling everyone to remain calm and stay in their seats. Yes, the dissenters are allowed to express their view, but the rest of us are just as entitled to repudiate this monumental irresponsibility.

It is disappointing that the dissenting report by the greenhouse sceptics of the parliamentary Liberal Party will inevitably overshadow the rest of the report and make it that much harder for us to get to first base. But, as I said at the outset, you simply cannot ignore the dissenting report, not least because it has been signed by four government MPs. Four of six government MPs on this committee think global warming is a nonsense. This situation is really quite alarming. Do two out of three Liberal backbenchers really doubt climate change?

But we need to move from first base to second base through a serious investigation of ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and this is what our report is all about. It is about one particular possibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by capturing the carbon produced by coal and storing it permanently. This process is referred to as geosequestration, or carbon capture and storage. It is an excellent idea. The question is: can it be done? In particular, can it be done at a decent price compared with other energy technologies? Can it be done in time to meet our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Can it be done in a permanent way? What are the risks involved in long-term storage? Finally, are there environmental issues apart from climate change that carbon capture and storage will generate, and can they be resolved?

The committee has studied the evidence on these things and has studied the present state of play. The report contains useful information about carbon capture and storage demonstration projects around Australia. There are no large-scale projects in carbon capture, transport and storage generated by a coal fired plant, but there are a number of carbon capture and storage demonstration projects underway or planned in Europe, Africa and the United States, as well as in Australia.

The committee found that much of the carbon injection technology is already known and available but that there is a lack of experience in integrating the component technologies at the commercial scale required and in the Australian context. Multiple full-scale demonstration projects using different types of capture technology and storage conditions are urgently needed. More research and development is required across a range of applications under varying conditions and on a scale that would demonstrate commercial viability.

The committee considers that carbon capture and storage has a role to play in tackling global warming provided that there is appropriate regulation and scrutiny of environmental risks. We need a rigorous regulatory environmental risk mitigation framework for carbon capture and storage which covers assessment of the risk of abrupt or gradual leakage and appropriate response strategies as well as requirements for long-term site monitoring and reporting.

The committee notes that presently there is simply no financial incentive for power companies to embrace carbon capture and storage technology as this just increases the price of coal fired power. It notes that, if a carbon price were introduced and if the cost of CCS were at the lower end of the estimated range, then it is likely that incorporating CCS technology into the next generation of coal fired power stations would be competitive with other forms of low-emission power generation.

One area of great concern is the impact of the skills shortage on research into this technology. According to Anglo Coal:

This skills shortage arises initially from limited numbers of young geoscientists coming through our universities and being trained in petroleum and CCS expertise, but is currently being exacerbated by the competing demand for oil exploration geoscientists.

Australia has dropped the ball on skills over the past decade, and the impacts of this are far-reaching across a whole range of scientific and engineering endeavours.

I regard global warming as the most serious issue of our time. Given this, we need to consider all possible solutions, and geosequestration—carbon capture and storage—may indeed have a role to play as part of the mix. I regret that the government has firmly set its face against other elements of the mix, in particular renewable energy. I have little doubt that, if the government had put a fraction of the effort into encouraging renewable energy such as solar PV that it has put into denying climate change and scuttling and undermining efforts to tackle it, we would be much better positioned for the future right now.

See this speech in context