THE reason why we are getting a second chance at climate change policy is that the Australian community didn’t want the political communities just to drop the issue.
THE reason why we are getting a second chance at climate change policy is that the Australian community didn’t want the political communities just to drop the issue.
There is greater community interest in this issue than in any of the other public policy issues on which I have worked on during a long career in public policy.
That mean that there is a base for action for a government that’s wanting to take a major step forward. But let’s not underestimate the complexity of an effective response to climate change.
I was commissioned to do the update of the review towards the end of the third quarter last year; it got under way in November.
We identified eight areas in which there seem to have been substantial developments since the completion of the earlier work where we should have a close look what has changed and its implications for policy ... and each of these eight areas will be the subject of special papers that will be released this month and next month, including in the following areas:
Methodology
One of these papers is the review of the methodology that I used in the original report. We will also be updating the review’s discussion of the international context of climate change mitigation ... because of course no-one can solve this problem on their own, even the big countries like the US or China can’t solve the climate change problem alone – the international effort will determine the effectiveness of what each of us does. A lot of the initial review – three chapters – is focused on refining what would be the contribution from Australia in various circumstances. The international paper will review all of that and it is an area where things have changed a lot in the last few years.
Science
One of the update papers will update the climate science, and the work the science upon which my review was based was some years old by the time my final review was published. There was a lot of reliance in the IPCC documentation ... because that is all based on peer-reviewed science.
A lot of the published science has its substantive histories a couple of years before that, so the update of the science will review the updates in the climate change science.
We have not had a new IPCC report since, but there has been a lot of very important published science since then.
Emissions
Another update paper will focus on the global emissions trends. There have been important developments over these past few years.
We’ve had the global financial crisis. The global financial crisis is important strategically in shifting the balance of strategic and political weight among nations. The big, the established, developed countries have lost protective weight and developing countries gained it, and that’s very relevant to the discussion of the international mitigation effort.
A lot of people will see that part of the update has been a paper on proposals for reducing emissions, including carbon pricing, and certainly that will be a major focus of our work.
That paper will need to look at the relationship between-carbon pricing and support for innovation.
It will need to look at the relationship between carbon pricing and income distribution and the various measures that can be taken to offset regressive effects.
Abatement
There’ll be one update paper on opportunity for abatement in the land sector and bio-sequestration; one of the more speculative chapters of the 2008 review was Chapter 22 on transforming agriculture and land use in Australia. There’s been quite a lot of work since then.
This is an area where Australian skills and research are very relevant to possible outcomes and the general importance of research and commercialisation of new technologies is going to be important in addressing the climate change challenge across the board.
Technology
We will have one paper on technological change in the local emissions industries and technologies. The review required assumptions about rates of technological change in a very large number of industries, including the low-emissions technologies, and one thing that we will do in the paper on technological development and innovation policy is review what’s actually happened to rates of change in costs of various technologies against what we assumed in the modelling. And the story is a pretty good one.
Take China; as they’ve poured larger and larger resources into the whole range of energy and transport technologies the costs have been coming down much faster than they expected, and this is giving them great confidence that they can go further.
In the US there also seems to be quite a lot of momentum towards reduction of costs in low-emissions technology. Here the gains seem to be coming not so much from different ways of manufacturing, improvements of manufacturing approaches, but from the fruits of new research and development of the technologies.
Electricity
There will be one update paper specifically on the transformation of the electricity sector. This has emerged for the time being at the pointy end of the politics of climate change, largely because it has nothing to do with how pricing, the electricity prices, have been rising. But it is a challenge, and one response to the challenge is to try to clarify the sources of increases in electricity costs, and then also the ways in which inefficiencies in our regulatory processes are producing increases in costs that are unnecessary.
One of the important areas where technological change is proceeding more rapidly than we assumed in the review is in the electrification of transport, where a number of the major industrial countries of the Northern Hemisphere things are moving faster than we had assumed. Of course electrification of transport, including of passenger vehicles, is helpful to production and emissions if in the meantime you have de-carbonised your electricity sector.
So we’re looking at those issues together and it may be that the successful de-carbonisation of the electricity sector, the electrification of transport will make a major contribution to reduction of emissions.
I have often been asked by the younger, strongly committed members of our team what the test of our success would be.
The test is that the Australian community and the government that makes the decisions understand the implications of those decisions. Well, I think I set the bar a bit high for myself (in 2008). Getting back into the saddle on that, I would like a result this time.
In Australia, it’s been common for people to say we only represent a small proportion of world emissions, 0.4 per cent, so if we do nothing then that it won’t affect outcomes.
Well, that’s not how we usually look at our participation, Australia’s participation, in the international matters in which we think we have an interest. You don’t hear people say: “We’ve got an interest in the success of the United Nation’s mission in Afghanistan but, because it won’t be noticed much if we’re not there ... we won’t be there.”
That’s not how we look at international relations issues. We think of doing out proportionate part in a collective effort that is associated with goals that our community is comfortable with.
But, more important, I think it’s a highly practical question, that if the country in the developed world with the highest per capita emissions – that’s us – is not doing its proportionate part, then it’s much less likely that countries with much lower emissions, but countries which need to be part of a global effort, will make that effort. We’ve got a sort of ‘veto’ power over an international effort and that’s the practical reason it’s important to play our proportionate part.
• This is an extract of an update to the 2008 Garnaut Climate Change Review, released in a speech given by Ross Garnaut in Melbourne on February 3.
