Age
Monday 20/4/2009 Page: 15
Billion-dollar hand-outs to polluters won't create the jobs we need now.
IN Canberra last week, the gloves were off as Australia's leading climate scientists, representatives of heavy polluting industries and opposing senators squared off over the future direction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme. In one corner, industry representatives were claiming that their future and that of their workers was at stake unless the Federal Government added billions of dollars to the $9 billion (by 2012) already being offered to heavy polluting industries.
In the other corner, climate scientists from the CSIRO put their jobs at risk in order to inform Australians of the worsening threats to this country's economy and environment unless we strengthen our weak carbon pollution target of 5 to 15% cuts by 2020. The Government would appear to have given into pressure from the heavy polluting industries, despite the potential job growth and economic flow on that would result from Australia becoming a low-carbon economy of the future.
Green Gold Rush, a recent report from the Australian Conservation Foundation and the ACTU, found that Australia could generate nearly 1 million new green jobs by 2030 if we set in place the infrastructure today to expand six key green employment areas - renewable energy energy efficiency, sustainable water systems, biomaterials, green buildings and waste and recycling.
So why is the Government allowing industry to hold us back as a nation? It is not as though we would be going it alone if we set in place the infrastructure today to shift to a low-carbon economy. In fact, a much bigger risk to our future prosperity is that the US, Europe and Asia will leave its in their wake.
In his quarterly essay Quarry Vision, former Liberal Party adviser Guy Pearse recently debunked the notion that to move away from Australia's reliance on coal would sink the economy. Mining in Australia accounts for just 1% of the workforce: twice as many Australians work for McDonalds as work in the mining industry and Bunnings employs more people than the entire aluminium industry.
Barack Obama has said that he sees the growth of millions of green-collar jobs as the pathway to a strong middle class in America. British Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said there was a global race to create a low-carbon economy and that Britain must not get left behind, and Prince Minister Gordon Brown noted the opportunity to create hundreds of thousands of jobs at a time when unemployment is surging. Yet Australia remains grafted to the heavy polluting industries of the past.
At the heart of dramatically reducing greenhouse pollution is the chance to create jobs now for the low-carbon economies of the future. Treasury's own modelling shows that the proposed 5% domestic target would mean that Australia's emissions would be static until 2035 because of the unlimited opportunity for polluters to buy international permits.
Will the solar, energy efficiency, green building industries of the future hang around until 2035 waiting for business opportunities in a greener Australian economy? Will resource sector giants such as BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto clean up their act in Australia if they don't have to until 2035? No chance.
Last week Kevin Rudd launched his Global carbon capture and storage Institute. He is playing a high-stakes game by focusing Australia's global effort on the hope that carbon capture and storage - an untested and unproven technology - will be the silver bullet solution. The CSIRO's clean coal technology expert, David Brockway, also gave evidence at the Senate enquiry into climate policy, noting that it could take 20 years before clean coal technologies were ready for commercial use.
There are big risks involved in scaling up carbon capture technology to a level necessary to test its viability, he said, and there were currently no largescale pilot plants to do this. Brockway said an average coal-fired power station in Australia emitted 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, but it would be "a big challenge" for a pilot carbon capture plant to deal with just 10,000 tonnes.
Australia should be focusing on creating jobs and investment in technologies that are ready to go now. Where is Australia's Global Solar Energy Institute? Or its Global Renewables Institute? It is time to face the reality that neither clean coal nor billions of dollars in hand-outs to polluters will secure its an economically viable and environmentally sustainable future.
What we need now is for the Government to commit to science-based climate targets of 30 to 40% emissions reductions by 2020, and to a number of measures that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, stimulate alternative technologies and create a substantial number of jobs over the period relevant for tackling the current economic downturn.
James Norman is a communications adviser with the Australian Conservation Foundation.
0 comments:
Post a Comment