Minimum Something (Part 3 – Transport and Power)
Navigation
- Part 1 (Introduction and Targets)
- Part 2 (Safeguard)
- Part 3 (Transport and Power)
- Part 4 (Exports and Conclusion)
- Full Version
Audio files here, or visiting Soundcloud, here.
Moving nowhere
Cars, trucks, planes, buses, trains. They’re a big chunk of Australia’s climate problem. Things were bad before the pandemic, and they’re bad after the pandemic. The latest projections suggest transport will take the lead as the highest emissions sector once the electricity sector dips below it in 2028.
Those projections, for the first time, revised projected transport emissions in a worse direction, compared to the previous year. Ditto for projected growth of EVs. Labor’s target of 93 MTCO2-e of emissions in transport for 2030 is looking hard to reach without strong new policy.
In what should have been good news, the government announced it is planning to introduce a fuel efficiency standard in the near future. The worse the climate impacts, the greater the penalty. It’s simple and effective, and should incentivise more EVs.
The two key problems: that policy is insufficient even if it works well, and it may not work well if it’s compromised by fossil industry lobbying. Despite these standards having been in place in other countries for many, many years now, there will be months, and months of further consultation before Labor make any final decisions about where the policy lands. That makes the ‘compromised’ possibility worryingly likely.
Just like Safeguard, the ‘Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries’ (FCAI), lobbyists for fossil car sellers in Australia, are pushing weak and ineffective policies as a way to simulate concern about climate action while their members continue to worsen climate change. Labor have all but laid out the welcome mat by creating such a wide stretch of time for them to lobby hard to get their way, and it seems likely the FCAI will be at least partially successful in their campaign.
Recently, InfluenceMap analysed FCAI’s playbook here. The overlaps with the fossil industry’s tactics are remarkable.
The researchers draw on more than 500 pages of documents revealed through freedom of information laws. They reveal that FCAI have been pushing for the use of – you guessed it – dodgy credits that reward insufficient actions and that will probably end up strongly discouraging any real actions to reduce emissions. “Carry-forward” credits mean companies selling lower-emissions cars sell credits to high polluters. Fundamentally, it’s the same market-mechanism philosophy that allows polluters to continue polluting as we saw with the Safeguard Mechanism. Also, plenty of noise about hydrogen and synthetic fuels; both unlikely to work in real life, but likely to work in delaying climate policies.
There’s a good chance that the car industry’s lobbying could also end up accelerating an already-worsening trend towards bigger, more dangerous cars. Part of the reason cars in America and around the world have been ballooning in size – causing death and destruction on roads – is the result of industry lobbying around fuel efficiency standards, as shown in this great thread by Michael Thomas:
It is far more profitable for a car maker to sell an obscenely over-sized car than a reasonably sized one. As the 2022 projections showed, even though there are some sales of electric vehicles in Australia already, the emissions reductions from those are being completely cancelled out by increasing sizes and higher emissions from fossil fuel cars – which means EVs won’t lead to any noticeable emissions reductions trend until at least 2025, if not later.
Car website Drive breathlessly reports the ever-worsening boom in the sales of massive American road tanks, designed to maximise threat to pedestrians, cyclists and smaller cars. Labor need to design a fuel standard that understands and fights this – if they don’t, any climate progress will just get run down by a Ford F-150.
Perhaps most important is the fact that even with aggressive incentives to get people to buy an EV for their next car, there are still many years between old and new cars for most people. In Norway, where I live, the impact of our world-leading EV policy has only just now begun to change oil consumption and transport emissions – after a decade of gradual change in new sales. Though we’re nearly at 100% of new sales being non-fossil, only about 20% of cars and kilometres travelled are electric. This comes as a revelation to many, because the ‘new sales’ metric gets the most attention.
And because our policy was so narrowly focused on consumer purchases, emissions from light and heavy duty vehicles (trucks) have risen in the meantime, countering the reduction from passenger cars and resulting in a stagnating trend in total road transport emissions:
An EV-only transport policy (even a perfect one) means an eventually-big but very slow reduction in emissions. If you didn’t start in the noughties like Norway did, transport policy needs to do much more, such as shifting people away from cars and towards public and active transport (that has the benefit of reducing mineral requirements for car batteries, too).
This, on top of supply chain issues, fluctuating battery prices and global under-supply means the combination of too-little-policy and industry-fuckery of what little there is will have either no effect on total transport emissions before 1990, or only a very small effect.
If nothing changes, Labor will put forward a policy in the ongoing spirit of ‘minimum something’. “This is urgent, which means you should quickly pass badly insufficient policy”, will be the strained logic. When there’s pushback, they’ll say: “If the Greens block this policy, it’ll be just as bad as when they voted against the CPRS”. Someone in a centre-left media outlet will shake their head sadly at the possibility of the Greens voting with the Coalition, despite Labor constantly voting with the Coalition. And eventually, Labor will chalk up the passing of their weak fuel standard as a massive win, and a mark of pride.
If nothing changes, that is. All of this could be mitigated if Labor choose to run with a decent policy from the outset, or if they’re strongly held to account when they don’t. That includes blocking policy designed to greenwash and delay climate action. That includes climate groups coming out just as hard against Labor doing climate delay as they would have against the Liberals doing climate delay.
The situation is dire. And for the one sector where I thought things might be in the bag, I was wrong.
Kill coal and energise clean
In 2010, I took my first real job – a data jockey at a wind farm control centre in Sydney. I never would’ve got that job had it not been for Labor’s ‘renewable energy target‘ (RET), which drove massive expansion in renewable energy for a decade. I certainly wasn’t alone in having my entire career established off the back of a successful, strong and genuinely ambitious Labor climate policy.
As I mentioned earlier, the RET over-performed. It had its doubters, but holy hell did it work, when it was operational and the target was rising. In 2020, the target was exceeded, which meant no more incentivised growth through the scheme.
In 2022, 35% of Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) came from clean power. Labor is targeting 82% by 2030, primarily through a policy to ease the construction of new transmission lines. But as I have said before, that is probably insufficient.
The ‘free market’ isn’t going to shut down coal-fired power stations. Yes, renewables are cheaper now, but even that has hit temporary speedhumps (regardless, when Labor established a strong RET policy in 2009, renewables were very far from cheap). And the view of business people and executives in the energy industry as ultra-rational actors is silly. Economic principles are regularly superseded by personal foibles, emotions and ideology. These people are happy to lose money, for instance, if they feel like it fucks the greenies.
Why don’t you ever hear about the RET? It’s baffling. Labor has memory-holed what is very comfortably its single most successful and impactful climate policy. There’s a decent chance that it worked far too well, irritating fossil fuel industries in the mid-2010s, and that freaked Labor out permanently. Whatever the reason, they need to get over it.
Why not formalise the 82% target as a real renewable energy target? The scheme is absurdly popular, and a greenwashing-free (um, mostly) legislative structure already exists. Every sign is pointing to renewable energy in Australia needing immediate, strong government intervention. The growth rate of clean energy is far too slow to hit the 82%:
The first quarter of 2023 was the first since the creation of the RET to feature $0 of financial commitments for renewable energy:
And just to illustrate the perverse priorities here, this drop in renewable energy projects is occuring in the context of an explosion in new carbon offsetting projects, with ever-worsening quality, and based on absurd schemes.
There are also growing signs that the required roll-out of large-scale new transmission lines is due to rub up against community friction. So many of the same issues that plagued early wind roll-out are re-emerging in similar forms, particularly people in rural communities feeling railroaded and excluded from major decisions. Groups like the Renewable Energy Alliance are trying to find ways through this growing morass. And Labor’s ‘rewiring the nation’ plan should help inject some much-needed momentum, here, with a transmission-focused body that’ll handle investment and work on community issues.
Worryingly, there are already signs that the slow-down in clean energy investment is providing cover for operators of the most polluting coal plants to cancel their commitments to closure dates earlier than ‘natural’ end of life. The closure of Origin Energy’s Eraring coal plant, for instance, was brought forward from 2030 to 2025 – cutting Australia’s total emissions by more than 2% for five years.
Except, Origin CEO Frank Calabria hinted at walking that back. Amazingly, the new Labor government in NSW is considering buying the plant purely to keep it running past 2025 – something Origin’s likely new owner Brookfield had to actively push back against. “The issue here with Eraring is that we need to make sure that the lights stay on in NSW”, said new Labor Energy Minister for NSW, Penny Sharpe. Then help accelerate new renewable energy.
Both the state and federal governments are struggling to accept responsibility and show leadership in laying out a timeline for coal’s shutdown. And Federal Labor is failing to canvass new options to accelerate renewable investment, despite all the worrying signs. A new, legislated clean energy target mechanism should be a no-brainer. But the maximum they will do is minimum something.
I think this one is maybe the hardest to take. I watched the success of the RET in real-time, more close-up than most. It wasn’t easy – we had to fight for it, both to keep it and to protect it from being weakened too badly. But it fundamentally changed Australia’s power sector for the better. What’s the reason that same spirit isn’t being summoned here? None that I can see, beyond a passionate desire to avoid meaningful actions.
There is a weird amount of time, effort and cash poured into the problematic vision of turning Australia into a ‘clean energy superpower’ – something that’ll require several times greater growth of renewables than we already have. Why is Labor leaning into this vision of a ‘clean superpower’, when their own policies are still insufficient to even reach the domestic clean power target?
I have a theory.
Ketan Joshi 
Comments are closed.