Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have pleasure in rising in support of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation report entitled Between a rock and a hard place: the science of geosequestration. From the outset, I want to emphasise something that the whole committee appears to be agreed on—even when I look at the comments of the dissenting report—and that is that the report provides a very sound examination of the phenomenon of geosequestration and the uses that it can be put to and, therefore, how valuable it is to discussions on climate change.

However, I am very disappointed in the way in which members who are signatories to the dissenting report have handled this debate so far. We have had a contribution from only one of the signatories to the dissenting report; the other three do not appear to be joining in the debate. The principal signatory to the dissenting report has made his contribution and has now left the chamber. He is not entering into the discussion by listening to the views of others. It is important that a parliamentary committee report such as this engenders debate. It is not the debate that I have any problem with. Let us have the debate and not a series of set pieces that are put in a very flowery and definitive way.

Earlier this year I attended an international parliamentary union meeting in Nusa. The principal speaker at that conference on where we are at as a globe in relation to climate change was Dr John Zillman—a former president of the World Meteorological Organisation and head of the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia. He gave a very balanced outline of the work of the IPCC. He sought a debate which avoided overstatement of the science by greenhouse zealots and which had more informed use of the science by greenhouse sceptics. I believe that this report represents that middle ground.

If the dissenters from the report believe that there is insufficient evidence of anthropogenic global warming, I have a real problem. I am now not clear whether they support the sound basis of the report and its recommendations on geosequestration. The recommendations in the report reflect the committee’s terms of reference—that is, to look at the trigger points involved in the phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming and to look at how we, as policy makers, react to it and make decisions on it. We cannot come in here with our scientific hats on and say, ‘We’ll have a debate on the science.’ We are elected to the parliament to make good public policy decisions.

Over the past couple of decades, when I have had the opportunity in this parliament to talk about global warming, I have had to admit that, yes, I have a science background. It is a bachelor degree from the ANU. I was very lucky because it was a holistic course. It taught me to take the science and then aspects from different things, such as economic or social policy, and to put them together to come up with something that I believed was the response that should be made. That is what we have to do here.

When I supported the comments of Rupert Murdoch staying in the report, it was on the basis that these were comments that I had made in the parliament before. At earlier IPCCs there was a discussion within the scientific world about whether anthropogenic global warming was actually happening. But we cannot await the definite answer without doing the preliminary work. As each body of work is developed by those involved in the IPCC, there comes greater certainty. I have heard from people like Dr Zillman and, in Belize, Carlos Fuller—who made a presentation to a working group of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association on the environment and parliament that I was involved in—that they can look back on their body of work and go back to reference points that they flagged in earlier work to see the progression. This gives them confidence in the predictions that they make.

A lot of these scientists are meteorologists. They are in the business of making predictions and they die and fall by these predictions. They cannot say, ‘We just plucked it out of the air.’ They were the ones who looked at climate change as a phenomenon way back and developed questions to be answered, and they continue to do that. But it is for us, as policymakers, to say that we cannot wait until we are certain; it will be too late. On the basis of the things that the committee has raised as part of its report, I think there is every reason to map out this course of action. Our problem is that we should not be in business unless we say that there is evidence of the climate change phenomenon occurring and that we are willing to put in place incentives and disincentives—a whole suite of things—to ensure that we get a result.

Zillman said to the IPU that we really need to see a match between mechanisms of carbon pricing and the development of new technology. He went on to say that we could consider that climate change was a direct response to market failure and that, if we look at it this way, we have to develop mechanisms that ensure that we have suitable interventions in the case of market failure. Geosequestration—carbon capture and storage—which prevents carbon going into the atmosphere and other places and causing climate change and global warming is very important.

Like all my colleagues from the committee, we are quite happy to have dissent and to have debate, but let us make sure that it is robust debate about the facts and not sloganeering and calling people zealots, sceptics and a whole host of things. By implication, it is a bit rich for the member for Tangney to call the people who signed the majority report ‘zealots’. There are a heap of them out there. These people are, as Zillman said, in the middle and not out on the extremes. They looking at the evidence that is produced and going forward.

As part of the debate about geosequestration—carbon capture and storage, CCS—we have to analyse the importance of coal-produced energy. There had to be a base decision. The decision of the committee was that Australia needs to go forward for quite some time on the basis of energy being produced by coal. Having made that decision, steps should then be taken to ameliorate the effect of the carbon produced and released—that is the whole point of developing technologies that are put in place for carbon capture and storage. All the questions about the transport of the carbon that is captured—whether that economically stands up on the basis of the carbon emissions that might be used in the storage—are complex questions, and we rely on the input of scientists on not only the climate change phenomenon but also the steps involved in all the technologies that we might use.

People came forward to share their knowledge with the committee. They were not waiting around for some decision in black and white; they came forward on the basis that action should be taken. The Insurance Council of Australia has a clear policy on this because it understands that climate change is happening and that we have to take suitable action to prevent and ameliorate the effects. That is the important thing. The people that we represent and the people that are least able might take the economic hit on this. I asked the member for Tangney, ‘If we sit back and do nothing, will it be the same people and worse that take the hit as a result of the outcome of climate change?’ That is why we have to be in on it. We have to get businesses, governments and the community on board and we need to take action on the basis that there is certainty on the climate change phenomenon. I commend the report to the House.

See this speech in context