Where coal sales trump climate
Australia lags world in use of clean energy
Few places better illustrate the tension between pursuing profit and tackling climate change than Australia’s Abbot Point port in northern Queensland. It’s here, 50km from the Great Barrier Reef, that Adani Enterprises wants to increase capacity so it can ship more coal from a new A$2 billion ($2.16b) mine nearby.
Environmentalists say the expansion will endanger the reef, but it has been backed by the Federal Government. Under Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Liberal-National coalition, political and economic arguments in favour of fossil fuels are overpowering popular interest in tackling climate change for now. The coalition was keen to disburse A$1b in taxpayer-funded loans to help Adani build a rail link for the project, but the plan was vetoed by Queensland’s Labor-controlled state Government.
Though Australia is one of the world’s biggest sources of coal and natural gas, a decade of political dithering and policy mis-steps have saddled the country with rising power prices and sometimes unreliable supplies.
The Government is primarily focused on mollifying voters hit with higher electricity bills and sees coal as the solution. Yet those same voters also want more action against climate change.
“The challenge is largely political,” says Mark Howden, director of the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University (ANU). “We have a range of barriers both in terms of policy, or lack of policy, to incentivise change.”
Many Australian lawmakers find the economic argument for supporting coal more compelling than avoiding possible environmental Armageddon. Coal is overtaking iron ore as Australia’s largest export earner this fiscal year, with taxes from more than US$40b a year in overseas sales boosting government coffers. Australia generates about 80 per cent of its power from coal and gas, compared with the global average of about 59 per cent, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
That looks unlikely to change under the current Government. Morrison, who in 2016 brandished a lump of coal in Parliament to show his support of the fuel, is considering using taxpayer dollars to subsidise new coal-fired plants.
“We can’t run an energy system that relies on intermittent power sources like wind and solar,” Morrison said last month. “They’re never going to be what keeps the lights on.”
Unlike the Trump Administration, Australia has not formally withdrawn from the Paris climate framework. But Morrison’s Government is refusing to legislate or regulate measures to ensure the targets will be met. The nation is the world’s number one carbon emitter on a per-capita basis and its renewables capacity is among the lowest in the developed world.
“It’s hard to decide to invest in long-life assets when you don’t know what the rules of the game are around carbon constraint,” says Sarah McNamara, chief executive of the Australian Energy Council, which represents companies in the wholesale and retail energy markets.
Howden of ANU says Australia’s lack of action on climate change is perplexing to many of his international colleagues. “When other countries look at us,” he says, “they wonder why we’re not aligning ourselves with what they see as our own self-interest.”
Coal is overtaking iron ore as Australia’s largest export earner this fiscal year.