Page 2601 - Week 07 - Thursday, 2 August 2018
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
We know that the electricity sector is the easiest and cheapest place to reduce emissions. It is the easiest because we have technology readily available and a cost competitive approach. It is easiest also in the sense that politically it is probably the easiest place to cut emissions. If we do not do that and we have to get 26 per cent emission reduction from other sectors, such as transport and agriculture, it is going to be far more problematic and will place a significant burden on other sectors. It will either be more costly or the reductions will not be able to be achieved. I think it is more likely to be the latter, which means that Australia will not meet its Paris climate commitments. Any suggestions to the contrary are, frankly, deceptive.
Driving the emission reduction burden into other, more costly sectors will potentially also cause an unnecessary increase in costs in other areas of life. If we were to stand up today and say, “We are going to take this pro rata approach and require 26 per cent from the agricultural or transport sectors,” we know that that will push up the cost of, for example, food. We need to be very clear about what we are doing if we take this 26 per cent pro rata approach.
Another interesting point is that RepuTex modelling demonstrates that a 26 per cent emissions reduction target would almost certainly be met straightaway when the NEG starts. It will achieve nothing except to potentially stall the renewable energy sector because it will remove the drive for further investment in renewables if the target is met early in the decade. RepuTex have done the modelling. Others have examined this and made the same observation. They may be varied by a year or two, but the expert commentators who have looked at this have made the observation that the emissions reduction target, because of the work that has already been done in renewable energy, will undoubtedly be met in the first couple of years of the decade for which we are setting a 10-year target.
Climate change is a serious problem that will have increasingly severe impacts on our environment and also on our economy. We cannot solve issues in the electricity sector, including the issue of affordability, without properly addressing climate change. That is something that is being lost sight of here at times. What is the motivator behind this? We need to have a serious policy to reduce our emissions in line with what the scientists are telling us we should be doing.
If we are to go down this pathway, we at least need to avoid locking in this woeful target. One of the things we will need to look at is what review mechanism we can put in place that allows future reconsideration of this target. We need a review period that is frequent enough to respond, whether it is the review of the Paris climate change targets, which is due, or further scientific research. We need a mechanism that says that we cannot go backwards. We cannot have a yo-yo effect on the target where, as federal governments come and go, the target moves around. It can only ever go up. That is the direction the energy sector is heading in, and that is where we need to get to. We need to consider a mechanism where this can be done through some sort of notifiable or disallowable instrument so that there is flexibility to enable future increases in response to policy shifts.
One of the other key areas in the discussion is costs. It is clear that costs for electricity in the future will be cheaper with a more ambitious emissions reduction target. The
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video