Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I do not have a pecuniary interest in Woodside. I want to speak briefly to the Offshore Petroleum Amendment (Greenhouse Gas Storage) Bill 2008 and  related bills in the wake of the comments of my colleague Senator Christine Milne. The legislation needs amendment, because it is legislation to facilitate carbon storage—carbon being captured and transported to places under the seabed off Australia—without liability. There needs to be liability, and it ought not to be public liability. We are talking here about private enterprise moving to ameliorate the impact of the burning of fossil fuels in an age of climate change, with the public again being the guarantor.

The position of the Greens is that carbon capture and storage is a long way off. It is certainly not the immediate answer to the need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions in this country. We should, as a priority in this place, be dealing with a bill to end the logging of native forests and woodlands in Australia, which would reduce greenhouse gases by 25 per cent straight off. But politics gets in the way of common sense when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. What we have is this legislation to facilitate some future storage of greenhouse gases under the ocean. The question arises: if you have a hole from which petroleum or gases have been removed so as to be burnt to produce energy for society, will we in the future see the capture of carbon, or indeed other greenhouse gases, from the burning of coal or fossil fuels onshore being transported back out through pipes and deposited in those same vacated holes under the seabed? If that is possible and it can be safely done, the next question that arises is: what about guaranteeing that, once plugged, the greenhouse gases deposited in that hole will stay there? If they are not guaranteed to stay there, the whole exercise becomes pointless. If, in the future, there is leakage, then ameliorating action will have to be taken.

We know that due to human, industrial and other actions over the last two to three centuries, we have increased enormously greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They are increasing now at the greatest rate in history; it is accelerating. We are moving past the point of no return as far as the onrush of cataclysmic climate change is concerned. A further question arises: if the technology is found to store the carbon, who should be the guarantor for that? We maintain that the guarantee should come from the people, the entities, who are making the profits from burning fossil fuels and who put it under the ground. It is as simple as that. That is how it should be.

I want to make it very clear that the Greens do not believe this technology is available. We know it is not available. Everybody knows it is not available. We do not believe it is going to help us get to the very urgent challenge which scientists put to us: to be past the peak emissions of greenhouse gases and rapidly reducing them within the next two, three, four, five years. That is the critical thing. We should be more urgently dealing with legislation on an end to native forest logging and on energy efficiency for this country and with Senator Milne’s program on behalf of the Greens for retrofitting every house in Australia with energy saving devices like hot water services which could reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of this country by 10 per cent in one go and create tens of thousands of jobs and businesses—not least in rural and regional Australia—right across this country, as well as add to export income.