How Australia failed the easiest climate test
Climate metaphors are a mess I know, but one of the least bad is the overflowing bathtub.
If you haven’t heard it before, it goes like this: Earth’s atmosphere is a bathtub that’s filling to the brim. Once the water overflows, the water tips over the edge. The only way to stop things getting worse is to turn the tap off. In reality, the atmosphere is a finite space filling up with gases whose impact is the trapping of dangerous excess energy inside the atmosphere we exist in.
Not turn it down a bit, not set a distant date in the future to turn it off, not to rush off and buy an experimental new mop – but to turn it off as soon and as fast as possible. We have, admittedly, managed to avoid a situation where we continue opening the tap even wider. But it’s still flowing, and the water’s still getting higher. Not really reassuring.
Every single additional tonne of greenhouse gas does damage. It’s almost weird how perfectly linear the relationship is between the extra tonnes we hurl into the atmosphere and the amount of warming that results, as show in this IPCC graphic:
There are already licks of water splashing over the edge – heatwaves, fires, floods. How fast we close the tap decides whether there’s some damaging overspill, or a catastrophic flood that wrecks the entire house.
The baby whose birth you saw announced on social media a few days ago? Their middle age will be either be a deadly catastrophe or a bad struggle; depending on what the powerful choose to do today.
This is the really really important bit:
The slower we act to reduce emissions, the more heat we feel on our faces.
A slow pathway to zero emissions – the tap completely turned off – does far more harm than the fast pathway, even though both end up ‘fulfilling’ the goal’s time-stamped directive:
When the consequences of climate change break out in these big, news-grabbing clumps, particularly during the Northern hemisphere summer and in El Nino years, there’s this widespread expression of fear and a common interrogation: how the hell did we get here?
We know how we got here: through denial of the fact that every single tonne of greenhouse gases does extra harm, added up to the total 2,500 gigatonnes in the atmosphere. Not just the obvious denial you’ve already heard about – but what we can call micro-denial, which involves saying the right thing, but continuing to act like greenhouse gases are essentially harmless; and that cranking the tap closed is something that can wait until far in the future.
One of those many instances is playing out right now in Australia, which has missed another opportunity to avoid adding even more water to the tub.
Australia’s leaders decide to cause some climate impacts to get some votes
The NSW Labor party won this year’s state election and immediately found themselves staring down the barrel at the impending closure of the state’s single largest power generator, the Eraring coal plant, due to close in 2025 after the owner, Origin Energy, brought it forward five years from 2030.
In response, the NSW government commissioned a former head of the power utilities lobby to review the decision. Naturally, they got what is essentially the perspective of Australia’s large electricity utilities: price and reliability come first, and any emissions reductions that occur are a distant third priority.
A long-running bugbear of mine has been the expression of this problem as a “trilemma”: a triangle consisting of those three priorities being in competition with each other. Because a low-emissions power grid can’t be cheap or reliable, right? It’s false trichotomy pro-fossil, pro-delay propaganda, but it became a talking point and never left the lexicon. That framing dominates the document.
You can see it embedded deep and prominently in the document produced by the ex-utilities lobby person chosen to write up the coal closure review. The document was “leaked” (the government emailed to selected journalists) to media weeks before being released, to ensure no critical scrutiny and pre-emptive framing.
“If the extension is temporary, the risk of deterring new investments is limited. Similarly, any delays to emissions reduction will be temporary and driven by the need to ensure reliability and affordability. In response to the challenges of the conflict in Ukraine last year, even climate leaders such as Germany decided to temporarily reopen coal plants”
This is a perfect illustration of micro-denialism. A “temporary” delay to emissions reductions is a permanent impact on Earth’s climate: those extra years of emissions cause damage. Australia’s electricity industry has been infected with this broken, dangerous misunderstanding of climate change for decades now, and it’s what’s behind this broad attitude of non-urgency and dismissiveness. There is no shortage of finger-wagging if you misunderstand the mechanics of dispatch or frequency control. But if you botch the single most significant safety threat for power technology? It’s broadly welcomed and accepted.
On the upside, climate change gets mentioned 26 times in the review. Oh wait: 25 of those are hyperlinks, or the name of the NSW government department. 1 of them is used above, wrongly asserting that Germany should serve as some kind of inspiration for keeping coal open in response to Ukraine conflict pressures (Germany is on track to badly miss its climate targets, by the bloody way).
A very good analysis by NexaAdvisory, led by Stephanie Bashier showed that the delayed closure of coal plants causes emissions budgets to blow out – visualising this as a cumulative amount of emissions over time. And the numbers are shocking.
As Nexa point out in that report, it is entirely possible to close the Eraring power station “on time” – ie, in the year 2025. A recent report by the grid operator, AEMO, shows that delaying the closure of Eraring for two years would decrease the amount of ‘unserved energy’ (blackouts due to generator and large transmission failures) from less than 0.001% to……0.003%.
There is a deep-set cultural dismissal of climate threat within Australia’s power and utilities sector. Nexa’s was the only analysis that examined the climate impacts, and it barely featured in any of the discussions, outside of RenewEconomy. Any time climate did feature, it was a backstory.
Think about how completely broken the national conversation has become; when a reduction in blackout risk so absurdly and obscenely tiny overrides an increase in emissions by 18.3 MTCO2-e (this is equivalent to doubling all flights in Australia for two years). Though the government’s newly suggested plan is to only keep half of the plant running, that’s still a significant change to Australia’s total emissions.
The AEMO report also shows that reducing the amount of ‘unserved’ energy to below the standard set for the grid would require building not-that-much new energy technology:
Replacing Eraring with clean power would be lower emissions, it would be cheaper, and given the rising failures in coal plants, it would probably improve reliability. But Origin Energy, the owners of Eraring, are fully aware that they’ll get paid extremely disgusting amounts of public money to keep the coal plant polluting for many extra years. They reported $1 billion in profit last year, and as energy prices start to fall, it’s likely they’re going to miss the smell of cash. Extending climate pollution and getting paid to do it seems like a handsome deal for them.
Australia is completely unique in the world – it remains the highest coal power consumer per capita, despite recent reductions. But it also has the most potential for action, because its coal power is concentrated in a few big plants, instead of across many small ones, as shown in this study,
Somehow, not only has that opportunity been missed, the absurd concept of turning coal into expensive-yet-publicly-funded flexible peaker plants has become widely accepted. It is absurd, and I don’t understand how it’s all being welcomed with such happy complacency by Australia’s power sector analysts and commentators.
Everything was in place to make the right decision here. It should’ve been a no-brainer, but the default reaction has been to worsen climate impacts, rather than prevent them. That’s going bleed through into every single coal closure decision in the future. If nothing changes, it spells a material worsening of disaster.
At the time of writing, NSW is suffering through a spring heatwave, including the outbreak of several significant wildfires – before summer has even begun. Schools were closed, regions were evacuated, and memories of the Black Summer disaster began moving from the back of people’s minds to the front of people’s minds.
The same interrogation will occur: how did it get this bad? Why is Australia burning in September?
We know. A million decisions like Eraring, around the world. All shrugged off as too small to matter, and all entirely avoidable.
One of those spring fires burned only a few hundred metres from Eraring coal-fired power station:
How much more obvious does it need to get? If this were a cli-fi book you’d slap it closed for being too ham-fisted.
Without a fundamental shift in thinking, every government – Labor or Liberal – will err on the side of coal-power climate delay. Every single utility will see dollar signs in keeping coal polluting as long as possible. Engineers, analysts and columnists will celebrate this as a hallmark of Sensible and Adult Decision Making. And Australia will continue hurting the world with its obscene fleet of deadly technology.
Header image – A photo I took of the decommissioned Munmorah coal plant in 2017, very close to Eraring. The last bits of Munmorah got blown up in 2019
Ketan Joshi 