Phil Ireland interviewed by One Climate’s Adam Groves
Posted on 07. Oct, 2010 by adoptanegotiator in Australia, bits
In addition to Phil’s recent video update, Phil sat down for a live interview with One Climate‘s Adam Groves to dig a little deeper into Australia’s role in the Tianjin meeting as well as some of the domestic political forces shaping that role for One Climate’s international audience. For more live-streaming coverage of the Tianjin talks, check out One Climate’s site here.
Phil, you obviously know more about what’s going on in the negotiations than I’m at, but I still disagree with some of the things you’ve said.
If we want to avoid becoming part of the commentariat, it’s important to be clear in pointing out the blocking points. Australia is a blocking point. The 15% reduction from 2000 levels that Australia has promised (although Gillard is now backtracking to 5%) is completely outside the range of the 25-40% required from Annex 1 countries which Australia agreed to as an aspirational target at Bali. It gives us the lowest 2020 targets of all the Annex 1 countries (the rest of which use 1990 as their baseline), and it’s also not believable, since Australia is building a dozen new coal-fired power stations across the country. The government hoped to use the CPRS to achieve the emissions reductions, so that it could count “reductions” from international offsets as its own and continue to increase Australia’s domestic contribution to climate change.
China is clearly also blocking the negotiations. But the two arguments (from the US/Aus/EU) and from China do not have equal legitimacy. As the second-biggest per capita emitter in the world behind Saudi Arabia (or the biggest if you count the coal exports which counts towards our balance of trade), Australia should definitely agree to increase its targets before the BASIC countries agree to buy in. The BASIC countries can legitimately fear being tricked by the Annex 1 countries.
The other point is that while there are different views on a legislated carbon price, at the very least it is not necessary to achieve emissions reductions. Australia can, through government policy, reduce its emissions. This is already happening (for example, the new emissions intensity guidelines for new power stations that conveniently are slightly higher than the project emissions intensity of eleven of the twelve planned power stations), but barely. The argument for a carbon price is that it would be “cheaper”. As we might ask in geography, the question is cheaper for whom and how? Would cheap emissions reductions create a lock-in effect for heavily polluting industries, if we avoid making the hard cuts first? Will the invisible hand of the market lead to just transitions, or will it produce effects that create a public backlash against action on climate change?
Regardless of what you think about a carbon price, the point is that there is nothing stopping the government from increasing our targets. Not the parliament, not a lack of funds, and not a lack of technology. Nothing except for an industry well used to using its financial and political muscle to overthrow political leaders whose policies it disagrees with.
A little mistake - the Umbrella group does not include China. It does include the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Russia, and it has consistently blocked binding targets. I have no doubt that Australia does want a binding treaty (because it wants to buy into the carbon market), but by blocking strong targets, it makes the treaty meaningless and its commitment a farce.
As far as I’m aware, verification of emissions reductions is very easy using satellite measurements. The only reason I can think of that the Umbrella Group is insisting on on-the-ground verifications is so that it can lay all of the blame on the BASIC countries like China for a failure to get an agreement. Imagine if the same verification standards were applied to REDD and CDM offsets - the carbon market would collapse (as well it should).
The Greens didn’t just block the CPRS because it was not ambitious enough. The Greens blocked it because its definition of pollution permits as property rights precluded any future raising of the domestic targets without paying tens of billions of dollars to heavy polluters to buy back pollution permits they initially received for free. In addition, the CPRS would have kept Australia’s domestic emissions rising until 2036 and poured huge amounts of money into REDD and CDM schemes that push Indigenous people off their lands. In policy and treaty land, we deal with abstractions, but on the ground, we deal with real human lives - that’s something that no conscionable politician could reasonably sign on to.
I’ve gotten to the stage where I no longer have faith in the UNFCCC process. Once people in Annex 1 countries have pushed their governments to stop fuelling emissions growth and emissions start to fall in Annex 1 countries, the main political barrier to global climate change mitigation efforts will have gone away. Until then, while rich countries keep playing real-politics at the UNFCCC, there is no hope of a global climate treaty.
Are you back in Australia yet?