SYDNEY, Australia — It will be remembered as one of the most ignoble moments in our history: On July 17, Australia became the first country to repeal a carbon tax.
The deputy leader of the Greens Party, Adam Bandt, said it was “the Australian Parliament’s asbestos moment, our tobacco moment — when we knew what we were doing was harmful, but went ahead and did it anyway.”
The tax, or carbon-pricing mechanism, had defined three elections, destabilized three prime ministers and dominated public debate in this country for eight toxic years. Finally, the leader of the center-right Liberal Party, Tony Abbott, won the last election in part by promising to “ax the tax.”
Mr. Abbott is famous for his fitness and muscular approach. As a student at Oxford, he won a “blue” at boxing for the university and was known for his all-out, flailing attacks. When the carbon-pricing scheme became law in 2011, he vowed to lead a “people’s revolt” and “fight this tax every second of every minute of every day.”
His political success was not, in fact, a result of the failure of the policy. The scheme was, in at least the most important sense, working, since emissions were declining. The initial public opposition was fading, but the Labor government that introduced the policy failed to sell it. Critics portrayed it as a burden that would hurt businesses and cost households, instead of one that would cut pollution and ensure a more secure future for our children.
It was the misleading old cliché — the economy versus the environment — but politicians staked their careers on it, and won.
In 2010, the Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, said she would look at carbon-pricing proposals, but also promised, “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” Then, under pressure to form a minority government, she made a deal with the Greens and agreed to legislate a carbon price: a tax by any other name.
The heat, anger and vitriol directed at her as a leader — and as Australia’s first woman to be prime minister — coalesced around the promise and the tax. It grew strangely nasty: She was branded by a right-wing shockjock as “Ju-Liar,” a moniker she struggled to shake. The political cynicism surrounding the carbon tax certainly reduced Ms. Gillard’s political capital, but it was a perceived lack of conviction in the policy itself that damaged the pricing scheme’s credibility.
Business leaders opposed what Mr. Abbott called a “useless, destructive tax,” even though just 0.02 percent of Australia’s three million businesses were affected (the top 500 polluters). But Australia is one of the world’s biggest producers of coal, and the industry is worth about $60 billion and supports an estimated 200,000 jobs.
A powerful triumvirate campaigned against the law: mining companies, the conservative coalition parties and Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. A study found that 82 percent of articles on the carbon tax in News Corporation’s Australian papers were negative.
Ms. Gillard now believes she made a crucial error in framing. After losing office in June 2013, she wrote: “I erred by not contesting the label ‘tax’ for the fixed price period of the emissions trading scheme I introduced. I feared the media would end up playing constant silly word games with me, trying to get me to say the word ‘tax.”’
George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed that “was a disaster.” It wasn’t just the T-word; even the term “carbon price” was a problem, too abstract and technical: “It does not evoke in the minds of the public the real human horrors and economic costs of climate disasters.”
“I made the wrong choice,” Ms. Gillard conceded, “and, politically, it hurt me terribly.” With Labor plummeting in the polls, her leadership was challenged and she lost the vote to the party’s previous leader, Kevin Rudd. (Mr. Rudd’s victory was shortlived; less than three months later, he was defeated general election by Mr. Abbott.)
Opposition to the carbon tax trailed away after Ms. Gillard’s ouster, and public concern about climate change has only grown. A recent poll found that almost two-thirds of Australians believe there should be carbon pricing for major emitters, but 42 percent agreed with the repeal of the tax (against 36 percent who did not). We did, after all, elect a government that promised to ax it. So we’re a hot mess of contradictions.
Mr. Abbott’s claim that households will be better off by 550 Australian dollars, or $520, a year following the repeal has been greeted with skepticism. Electricity prices did go up after carbon pricing came in, but this was mostly because of investment in infrastructure. Consumers are likely to see no effect now — unless they’re paying less simply by using less electricity. An Australian National University study reported that carbon emissions from the power generation sector had been cut by 1 to 2 percent as a result of the tax.
If carbon pricing was working, you might well ask why the law was repealed. The result is that Australia has no clear climate policy, though Mr. Abbott says he now believes climate change is occurring and he takes it “very seriously.”
The prime minister’s paramount concern, though, is still that taxing emissions should not “clobber the economy.” His government has proposed an alternative to the carbon tax, the Direct Action Scheme, that would provide incentives for businesses to cut emissions. But it faces fierce criticism — even from within Mr. Abbott’s own administration — because of loopholes, a lack of consequences for nonparticipants and its unfunded targets.
What’s clear is that Australia has proved again that politicians rarely choose to take the lead on tackling climate change. When the public is conflicted, our leaders too often whip up fear, and reason and evidence go out the window. The shame is that when the tax was axed, so were the facts.
Julia Baird is a journalist and a television presenter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and an author who is working on a biography of Queen Victoria.
Australian Climate Council chief Tim Flannery says he is optimistic world leaders will reach a global agreement on climate change during talks in Paris next week.
The council will release a report today outlining the growth of renewable energy in the past six years.
Professor Flannery said the booming industry was proof the world was willing and able to step up to the challenge of addressing climate change.
"Circumstances have changed between the Copenhagen meeting in 2009 and the Paris meeting in 2015," Professor Flannery said.
"We've seen a huge increase in the deployment of renewables, and an enormous cost decrease in those renewables.
"What that story tells us is the mechanism is there to honour the pledges that are being made at Paris."
He said while the world was moving to embrace renewable energy such as solar and wind, Australia had been hampered by government policy in recent years.
"We went through five electoral cycles at the federal level, where we had clear bipartisan support for an ambitious renewable energy target ... that bipartisanship was then blown out of the water," he said.
While the Government and the Opposition reached a compromise Renewable Energy Target, Labor has said it intends to raise it if it wins government.
"I think it'd be great to see bipartisan support for a much stronger target," Professor Flannery said.
"If you look at that target versus opportunity, you'll see Australia is still missing the ball. The opportunities here are so enormous," he said, pointing to Australia's wealth of wind, sun, waves and natural geothermal heat.
Paris talks 'won't be a make or break event'
Kane Thornton, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, was less optimistic about prospects for the international climate meeting.
"The reality is that Paris won't be a make or break event, but it could be an important demonstration of global momentum," he said.
"What is most important is the commitments that countries have already made, and will continue to make.
"And what is becoming abundantly clear is that the globe is heading towards a low-carbon future."
Both men agreed that the renewable energy industry had exploded globally.
"According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, more than 160 countries now have some kind of renewable energy target — four times the number there were in 2005," Mr Thornton said.
Professor Flannery pointed out that new investment in renewables had eclipsed investment in traditional energy sources and jobs in renewables had doubled in the past six years.
All of which "gives us cause for real hope that Paris will be a success," Professor Flannery said.
Pig effluent could be used to grow algae or seaweed that is fed back to pigs as part of a closed-loop system for intensive piggeries.
-- Key points:
* Researchers prove pig poo can be used to help grow algae
* Algae can be fed back to pigs or help to produce methane to generate electricity
* Pig manure can also help reduce use of costly fertiliser --
Researchers at Murdoch University's Algae Research and Development Centre have proven they can grow some aquatic species on untreated pig waste, despite the high concentration of ammonium.
Centre director Dr Navid Moheimani said algae grew naturally in harsh conditions and was a potentially protein-rich source of food for pigs and other animals.
"The algae normally contains one third carbohydrate or sugar, one third protein and one third lipid [fat]," Dr Moheimani said.
"A lot of algae do not produce a lot of cellulose, which means they are very easily digestible.
"The other very important thing for us is to find out what sort of other bacteria like pathogens are coming in with the feed and so we're also testing that."
Even if the algae was too contaminated to use as a feedstock, Dr Moheimani said it would greatly increase the production of methane in on-farm biogas systems.
Biogas systems capture methane from manure, turn it into electricity and export it to the national grid.
At Blantyre Farms near Young in New South Wales, they paid $1 million three years ago for such a system.
Edwina Beveridge, who runs the 25,000 pig operation, said her investment paid for itself in two and a half years.
"It used to cost us about $15,000 a month for electricity and gas and now we get paid about $5,000 a month for selling excess electricity," she said.
The farm is one of seven piggeries sharing $7 million a year from the Commonwealth's Emissions Reduction Fund for its greenhouse gas abatement through methane capture.
"So not only did the biogas project have good economical sense, it's good for the environment as well," she said.
"Who would think a pig farmer could also be a renewable energy supplier?"
Refined manure helping to reduce fertiliser use
Photo: Edwina Beveridge, from Blantyre Farms, says her biogas system paid for itself in two and a half years. (ABC News: Gregory Heap)
Despite producing just 0.4 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, the pork industry has been at the forefront of research into carbon abatement and finding other profitable uses for effluent.
Investments by Australian Pork Limited and the Co-operative Research Centre for Pork are yielding benefits for small and large piggeries and potentially for Australia's broad acre crop producers.
-- It used to cost us about $15,000 a month for electricity and gas and now we get paid about $5,000 a month for selling excess electricity. Edwina Beveridge --
In the West Australian wheat belt, early field trials showed crops grown with a combination of manure and synthetic fertilisers performed better than those using only fertilisers.
Dr Sasha Jenkins said wheat was grown with pellets of refined pig manure applied with varying rates of fertilisers in a conventional air seeder.
"Basically I think about 25 per cent of their costs are going into synthetic fertilisers, so if they utilise the manure, the refined manure product, we're hoping to reduce the amount of synthetic fertiliser they use," she said.
"That's obviously going to reduce the operation costs of the industry and increase their productivity."
The field trials found big differences in the amount of greenhouse gases released by the treated soil to what would occur in Europe.
According to Australian Pork Limited's manager for environmental research and development, Janine Price, those findings have been groundbreaking for Australia, which has until now relied on European models.
"That's extremely significant because that base-line data that's been generated from that project and other projects goes into the Australian accounts inventory," she said.
"So we can now actually say this is what's going on in Australian feedlots, in piggeries, on broiler farms, on egg layer farms. That's now going into the national accounts.
"It's also being upgraded in all our industry models so when we run our greenhouse calculators and our nutrient balance calculators we have up to date data into that."
Sean Murphy's report will [was] be on Landline on ABC TV on Sunday from midday.
There’s another way to combat climate change — but let’s not call it geoengineering
August 25, 2015 12.19am EDT
Geoengineering the climate may be more palatable if it supports natural processes.
No matter how much we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it will not be enough to keep global warming below 2C – the internationally agreed “safe” limit. This fact has been implied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and confirmed again recently by international research.
Does this mean we should give up? Not at all. There is a plan B to keep warming below dangerous levels: helping the planet to take more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
In his new book Atmosphere of Hope, Tim Flannery, Climate Councillor and Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (and co-author of this article), argues that these strategies will be necessary to combat climate change, but cannot substitute completely for reducing emissions.
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