Gas lobby seizes Covid moment, and declares war on Australia’s future: RenewEconomy

Green Deal

'The history of war tells us that such events are usually launched on doubtful and fabricated pretexts: The US war in Iraq, the German invasion in Europe at the start of WWII, all the way back to Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain, and just about every war in between.

And so it is with the extraordinary attack launched on Australia’s future by its incumbent fossil fuel industry, and the gas lobby in particular. Its casus belli is the Covid-19 pandemic, and the fossil fuel industry has been enabled to do this after being invited by the Morrison regime to do more or less at it pleases and design its own future.

The reach and sheer audacity of the proposals unveiled over the past week is extraordinary, and the lasting impact on Australia’s future may dwarf anything that Tony Abbott and his Far Right cheerleaders may have done; notwithstanding his white-anting of the Carbon Pollution Reductions Scheme more than a decade ago, the scrapping of the carbon price in 2014 and the unceasing campaign against science and engineering.

This is the critical decade. Scientists tell us, repeatedly and with a near unanimous voice, that serious emissions reductions must be achieved in the next 10 years if the world is to flatten the emissions curve and give itself half a chance of capping average global warming at less than 2°C. A target of 1.5°C may already be out of reach.

Australia finds itself at a critical juncture. It benefits from the stunning cost reductions in solar, wind and battery storage, and key institutions have mapped out a path to a high renewable energy grid. Experts are shining the light on a future of green manufacturing and “green energy exports” that could enhance the position of the country as a significant energy superpower.
But the fossil fuel industry and its backers, with their focus almost entirely on short-term profits and ideological claptrap, have other ideas. They have decided to throw a live grenade into Australia’s own economic bunker, and its environment, and put the future of the current and emerging generation at risk.

Consider the list of what has emerged from the government-appointed gas-industry led reviews in the past week, including the King Review, the Covid Commission, the technology investment roadmap, and from the intense pressure being put on energy regulators.


– Bastardising the remit of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency in an attempt to to force them to invest away from renewable and smart and enabling technologies and into gas and carbon capture and storage

– Polluting the already controversial and ineffective Climate Solutions Fund by creating a “base-line” that industry experts suggest will allow big polluters to increase their emissions and get paid for doing so.'

– Delaying critical energy market rule changes and reforms that might have encouraged smart new technologies such as battery storage and demand management, and end the rorting of the current system by incumbent coal, gas and hydro generators.

– Pushing the case for gas and CCS in a “technology investment roadmap” that otherwise clearly identifies wind, solar, storage and other technologies such as EVs, heat pumps, energy efficiency and demand management as the cheapest and most reliable options.

However, none of these quite reaches the breadth, depth and cynicism of the so-called Covid-Commission, which appears entirely possessed with the narrow interests of the gas industry, from where many of these commissioners have emerged.


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The UK government was ready for this pandemic. Until it sabotaged its own system: UK Guardian

"We were second in the world for preparedness. Then Boris Johnson et al deliberately de-prepared us.

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"Exercise Cygnus, a pandemic simulation conducted in 2016, found that the impacts in care homes would be catastrophic unless new measures were put in place. The government insists that it heeded the findings of this exercise and changed its approach accordingly. If this is correct, by allowing untested patients to be shifted from hospitals to care homes, while failing to provide the extra support and equipment the homes needed and allowing agency workers to move freely within and between them, it knowingly breached its own protocols. Tens of thousands of highly vulnerable people were exposed to infection.

In other words, none of these are failures of knowledge or capacity. They are de-preparations, conscious decisions not to act. They start to become explicable only when we recognise what they have in common: a refusal to frontload the costs. This refusal is common in countries whose governments fetishise what we call “the market”: the euphemism we use for the power of money.

Johnson’s government, like that of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, represents a particular kind of economic interest. For years politicians of their stripe have been in conflict with people who perform useful services: nurses, teachers, care workers and the other low-paid people who keep our lives ticking, whose attempts to organise and secure better pay and conditions are demonised by ministers and in the media.

This political conflict is always fought on behalf of the same group: those who extract wealth. The war against utility is necessary if you want to privatise public services, granting lucrative monopolies or fire sales of public assets to friends in the private sector. It’s necessary if you want to hold down public sector pay and the minimum wage, cutting taxes and bills for the same funders and lobbyists. It is necessary if corporations are to be allowed to outsource and offshore their workforces, and wealthy people can offshore their income and assets.

The interests of wealth extractors are, by definition, short term. They divert money that might otherwise have been used for investment into dividends and share buybacks. They dump costs that corporations should legitimately bear on to society in general, in the form of pollution (the car and road lobbies) or public health disasters (soft drinks and junk food producers). They siphon money out of an enterprise or a nation as quickly as possible, before the tax authorities, regulators or legislators catch up.

Years of experience have shown that it is much cheaper to make political donations, employ lobbyists and invest in public relations than to change lucrative but harmful commercial policies. Working through the billionaire press and political systems that are highly vulnerable to capture by money, in the UK, US and Brazil they have helped ensure that cavalier and reckless people are elected. Their chosen representatives have an almost instinctive aversion to investment, to carrying a cost today that could be deferred, delayed or dumped on someone else.

It’s not that any of these interests – whether the Daily Mail or the US oil companies – want coronavirus to spread. It’s that the approach that has proved so disastrous in addressing the pandemic has been highly effective, from the lobbyists’ point of view, when applied to other issues: delaying and frustrating action to prevent climate breakdown; pollution; the obesity crisis; inequality; unaffordable rent; and the many other plagues spread by corporate and billionaire power.

Thanks in large part to their influence, we have governments that fail to protect the public interest, by design. This is the tunnel. This is why the exits are closed. This is why we will struggle to emerge.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist"

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While the world looked the other way, corporate giants abandoned coal: SMH

"The decisions to exit coal by big financial institutions is carefully tracked by Australian energy finance analyst Tim Buckley, who says 133 globally significant financial institutions have announced their exit from coal, 10 in the past two weeks. That, he says, is "triple the run-rate of last year".

On April 17 Austria eliminated coal from its grid when it closed its last coal-fired plant. "Coal power in Austria is history," said the utility chief. 

"The future belongs to renewable energy."
In the same week Sweden closed its last coal-fired plant two years earlier than planned. The two countries join Belgium celebrating coal-free status."

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"On the last day of the month Allianz, one of the world’s biggest insurers with an astronomical investment book, said it would not invest in coal or insure it.

Coal-fired power would be verboten. It will exclude dealings with any corporate that derives more than 30 per cent of its revenue from coal (in two years to be 25 per cent). Farewell also to any partner owning infrastructure that services coal, such as ports or rail, which it now views as long-term toxic and stranded assets.

Once a huge financier of coal, Allianz confirms a massive pivot to renewables."


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Australia’s most senior former public servants and scientists reveal their anger about climate policy failure: ABC

"For more than 30 years, Australian politics has been grappling with climate change and the nation's most senior public servants have been there through it all.   

Usually they keep their thoughts private, rarely making a foray into public debate, even in retirement.   

Now, after the devastating "black summer" fire season, the former heads of the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of the Treasury, along with former chief scientists, have decided they can no longer stay silent. 

They believe there has been a colossal failure by politicians of all stripes to comprehensively tackle climate change.

These senior policy makers and scientific minds describe climate policy as perhaps the greatest public policy disappointment of their generation, and a story of power and personal ambition triumphing over the national interest.

Martin Parkinson, who served as secretary of the Department of Climate Change between 2007 and 2011, described politicians as "incapable of grappling with this".

"I don't know how many reports have been put in front of them," he said.

"No politician … has any grounds for saying, 'Oh well, we didn't see it coming'.""

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#jailclimatecriminals  #climateemergency   #climatechange

How climate change impacted the world 2019: CNN video

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False Solutions to Climate Change: Agriculture: Resilience

"A veritable cornucopia of false solutions is being pushed these days, not only by corporations and think tanks but by the UN’s IPCC, the international body responsible for research and action on climate.  We could have made a gentle transition if we had begun when we first became aware of this problem decades ago, but for various reasons we did not. There is no time left for barking up one wrong tree after another; no time to waste in false solutions. Hence this series pointing out the fallacies behind such proposals as electrifying everything, carbon trading, geoengineering or switching to “gas—the clean energy fuel!”

I’ve divided the issue into sectors: electricity generation, transportation, agriculture, buildings, and then there are two sections on false solutions that aren’t part of an energy sector—geoengineering schemes, and some other policy options. Finally, we look at real solutions. I am not an expert on anything except maybe gardening, so my hope is to spur discussion.

Part 3: The Agricultural Sector"

Read the excellent complete Resilience article