But look we must and, if we look now, we are able to chart the consequences of abject failure in highly specific ways.
What Australians are experiencing now – rising prices, rising emissions and a grid that creaks and sputters in extreme weather – is the logical consequence of a decade of unconscionable public policy failure.
This isn’t some freak accident that’s been visited on the country, we are not the unwitting victims of a natural disaster that has blown in unexpectedly. We are reaping now precisely what has been sown.
Everybody wears a share of the blame in this debacle – Kevin Rudd for putting Malcolm Turnbull in a corner in 2009 and then dithering when decisiveness was required; the Greens for voting down one carbon trading scheme because it was too favourable to polluters then voting for another one that was actually marginally more favourable to them – but, if there was a gold medal for blame, you’d give it to Tony Abbott.
Abbott used climate policy to wrest the leadership of conservative politics from Turnbull, then he doubled down on stupid with his hyperventilating, eardrum-splitting, “axe the tax” bollocks.
Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, has recently admitted that fight was manufactured, that the whole shrieking bunfight was, in essence, an opportunity crime.
“It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in nomenclature terms but we made it a carbon tax,” Credlin said on Sky News in mid-February. “We made it a fight about the hip pocket and not about the environment. That was brutal retail politics and it took Abbott about six months to cut through and, when he cut through, Gillard was gone.”
Enough about the environment, more about Tony, and Tony’s brains trust. Inspirational stuff, right? And, as usual, the joke of whack-a-mole hyperpartisan politics, is squarely on us.
You can feel the fatigue and frustration right around the energy sector, the business community and climate activists but the Finkel review is presenting fresh opportunity to right past wrongs.
A range of stakeholders have rallied to have a go at trying to get sense from their elected representatives. The energy sector and big energy users are very clear about what’s gone wrong and what we need to do to fix it.
If we summarise their views, they tell us the lack of a stable, bipartisan policy framework has created an investment strike in big generation assets at a time when some of our coal-fired power stations are reaching the end of their operating life.
A consequential gap is now opening up before us.
Power companies work on planning horizons of 30 and 40 years, not the shallow dips and dives of politics. Energy companies have found themselves in an invidious position: they know that, over the medium term, policymakers will impose rules requiring them to reduce emissions but they don’t know what the rules are.
They are forced to guess, with billion-dollar assets.
Coupled with those problems, the gas market is “dysfunctional”, as senior executives from AGL put it this week.
Prices are soaring. Supply on the east coast of Australia is tight. AGL told a Senate inquiry things were currently so dire the company was considering building its own LNG hub in Queensland to help secure reliable gas supply downstream – a development climate policy veteran and respected economic professor Ross Garnaut characterised quite reasonably as “nuts”.
While the Turnbull government in Canberra has been bloviating up a storm about renewables, and intermittency problems, to try and manufacture a fresh, shallow, partisan point of difference with Labor, the energy sector and business groups have been clear that gas is a more pressing present issue.
Why is gas an issue? Partly because we currently export two-thirds of our product, partly because the market isn’t competitive enough and partly because the states have locked gas down in response to political activism.
The lock the gate campaigns have put the Nationals astride the barbed wire fence in the bush, which makes it hard for a Coalition government to argue forcefully in favour of turning the supply tap on (although, in fairness to the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, he has been attempting to run that gauntlet).
There are also different views inside the government on the merits of a domestic gas reservation, which would ringfence a percentage of gas supply for local use. The gas industry doesn’t care for it.
Perhaps that’s why we’ve heard more about renewables and about “clean” coal (a technology that looms regularly in the energy debate like a unicorn, despite the fact experts tell us it won’t be commercially viable before 2030 and is not financeable without substantial government intervention) and less about gas.
The Australian energy market operator on Thursday did the equivalent of grasping politicians by the lapels and shouting in close proximity to their face.
AEMO has warned declining gas production could, on current indications, result in a shortfall of gas-powered electricity generation impacting on New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia from the summer of 2018-19.
Some in the industry think we might not get to summer, that the gas shortages may manifest in the winter.
A week ago, the Australian Workers Union asked the prime minister to sit down with the gas companies to fix what is a blindingly obvious problem. Turnbull said on Thursday he would call a meeting of east coast gas company chief executives.
Energy companies want more than a polite conversation with the prime minister. Their strategic thinking is clear when it comes to the national electricity market. They want a clear market signal, they want clear rules to govern an orderly transition to secure energy with less emissions.
They want considered intervention by the government. They do not want another round of whack-a-mole. The country cannot afford another round of whack-a-mole.
Yet, in Canberra, the Turnbull government has shown every sign of revving its engines for another manufactured political fight.
The government has already ruled out pursuing the specific market signal that pretty much everyone says we need to drive the transition in orderly fashion at comparatively least cost to energy users – an emissions intensity scheme.
Now why has this happened? Because Abbott and a bunch of conservatives with operatic feelpinions didn’t like it and Christopher Pyne saw opportunity to run another “axe the tax” campaign at the next election.
A carbon trading scheme is only one component of the required policy changes. But the early panicked decision on the intensity scheme means the government has sent the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, off with a hunting licence to fix the problem, with one hand tied behind his back.
It has taken a long time in this country to build any sort of durable industry consensus behind carbon pricing and, just when it appears, the government chooses not to take advantage.
Stakeholders no longer care. They are laying out their rationale. If that strands the government, so be it.
Turnbull says very often he wants to take the ideology out of energy and focus on practical solutions. It’s an excellent sentiment and it’s past time for him to actually get serious about it.
Original Article
Source: theguardian.com
Author: Katharine Murphy
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