Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to follow and support the remarks of the member for Makin. The Energy Efficiency Opportunities Repeal Bill will terminate the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Program on 29 June 2014 by repealing the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Act 2006.

The EEO program is designed to address market failure relating to the availability and use of energy efficiency information. The program requires large energy using businesses to assess their energy use and identify cost-effective energy savings opportunities. The EEO program has been effective in driving down emissions, and has saved industry approximately $323 million per year in power expenses.

The independent ACIL Tasman review of the program found that it has delivered benefits to participants well in excess of their costs. The 2013 full cycle evaluation of the EEO program found that: it has been successful in its objectives of raising awareness of and embedding energy efficiency practices in Australian industry since 2006, when the Howard government introduced it; the program has been effective in driving down emissions, and has saved industry significant money in power expenses; corporations found that government regulation was beneficial in providing a structure and framework for companies to embed energy management systems; it has delivered benefits to participants well in excess of their costs; and there is still more benefit to be gained by continuing with the program through the second cycle.

Australia's backtracking of climate policy progress has been highlighted by the release of the GLOBE Climate Legislation Study in February 2013. The study of 66 countries across the globe, in which the European Union was considered one entity, found Australia is the only country to be taking negative legislative action in climate policy.

This bill is an ideological attack on policies expressly designed to combat climate change. It is a retrograde step at a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released its working group III report and warned that efforts to reduce carbon emissions have not been able to stop greenhouse gases reaching unprecedented levels and that energy efficiency improvements have not kept up with economic growth. 'We have a window of opportunity for the next decade, and maximum the next two decades' to act at moderate costs, Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of a Berlin meeting of the IPCC, said.

IPCC scenarios now show that world emissions of greenhouse gases would need to peak soon and tumble by between 40 and 70 per cent from 2010 levels by 2050, and then close to zero by 2100, to keep temperature rises below two degrees Celsius. The IPCC says it is at least 95 per cent probable that man-made emissions, rather than natural variations, are the main cause of global warming. Yet here we are in this country with a Prime Minster and a government who want to repeal the carbon price Labor implemented and hobble efforts to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Cuts to renewable energy and energy efficiency risk keeping Australian workers and businesses using 19th century technology to address a 21st century challenge. Indeed even in the 19th century, physicists like John Tyndall demonstrated and quantified the fact that visually transparent gases—like carbon dioxide, the Prime Minister's 'invisible substance'—both absorb and emit infrared radiation. Tyndall used these results to explain the greenhouse effect in a public lecture that he presented in 1863 entitled 'On radiation through the Earth's atmosphere'. Tyndall stated:

… it is here pointed out that a comparatively slight change in the variable constituents of our atmosphere, by permitting free access of solar heat to the earth, and checking the outflow of terrestrial heat towards space, would produce changes of climate as great as those which the discoveries of geology reveal.

Mid-19th century scientists like Tyndall understood that slight changes in the quantity of atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide could produce changes in climate as profound as those of the ice ages, discovered a few decades earlier by Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-American natural historian. Yet, today in this country, despite the additional scientific evidence and understanding accumulated over a century and a half, we have a government whose leader, the Prime Minister, has ridiculed climate change, and said that carbon dioxide is weightless, invisible and cannot be measured, and claims that an emissions trading scheme is, 'a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no-one'.

In opposition, the Prime Minister promoted these irrational beliefs to the public. Disastrously, his government has introduced these same beliefs as policies and has directed government departments to reject the verifiable findings of scientists while accepting his delusions as fact. For example, the issues paper that informs the 2014 agriculture white paper omits any significant mention of climate change, despite the 2011 CSIRO report, Climate change: science and solutions for Australia that states, 'There is a national imperative to equip Australian agriculture to be prepared to adapt to climate change'. By comparison, the United States, a major competitor in the global market for agricultural products, accepts the reality of climate change. As the US agriculture secretary Tom Visack has said:

… the fact is, across America, farmers and ranchers and forest landowners are seeing the beginning chapter of what will be a long-term challenge posed by a changing climate.

And:

This problem is not going to go away on its own. That's why America must take steps now to adapt.

I doubt that there is even the slightest chance that we would hear such a statement from the Australian Minister for Agriculture.

Recently published evidence indicates the West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and will, with a high probability, in time produce a sea level rise of up to four metres. The evidence is being entirely ignored by this government. The government says its punitive budget measures will protect future generations from financial hardship. Can the government say what a sea level rise of four metres would cost present and future generations when billions of dollars of coastal assets, public and private, are likely to be inundated in the coming decades?

The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is not some ivory tower speculation; it is a process that has very likely been initiated and is now almost certainly being accelerated by global warming driven by carbon dioxide emissions. Note that I say 'very likely' and 'almost certainly' to describe the probability of those events, since the prediction of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is based upon verifiable evidence and that very serious conclusion is reached by inductive reasoning rather than the assertion of a belief or an unfounded opinion that is so typical of members of this government. The changes driving the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet are linked to the documented decline in winter rainfall in Western Australia, yet the Prime Minister who denies reality and preaches from a denier's handbook, is doing all that he can to dismantle measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

I note that the member for Forrest claimed in a speech made in this place on 26 February that the price on carbon and the tax on refrigerants—substances that are strong greenhouse gases—had a significant impact on costs in the dairy industry and that she supported the Prime Minister's intention to remove these imposts. She said: 'Let me tell you that the carbon tax had a significant impact on the dairy industry.' I wonder if the member for Forrest has a similar opinion about the costs of greenhouse gas emissions, given that the CSIRO estimates that global warming is almost certainly responsible for about half of the 15 per cent decline in rainfall in her electorate in south-west Western Australia since the mid-1970s.

Scientists from separate teams from NASA and the University of Washington are to publish peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research and the journal Science respectively that show that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is under way and is unstoppable. Those papers report that the collapse is being driven by climate change and is already causing sea-level rise at a much faster rate than scientists had anticipated. Both papers state that the contact between the glaciers that form the ice sheet and relatively warmer water produced by global warming was the main driver of the collapse.

Dr Eric Rignot, Professor of Earth System Science in the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has stated:

A large sector of the Western Antarctic ice sheet has gone into a state of irreversible retreat. It has passed the point of no return.

He warned:

This retreat will have major consequences for sea level rise worldwide.

It should be understood that the ice sheet melts as it retreats and the melt water then flows into the oceans, raising sea levels. What sort of a gift is that to give to the future?

The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is, as I said, linked to the same process that is driving the decline in rainfall in south-west Western Australia and the southern states, including my home state of Victoria. A report in New Scientist from 11 May states that Dr Nerilie Abram, who is a QE2 Research Fellow at the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, has shown that greenhouse gas emissions are helping to spin up a giant vortex of winds around Antarctica that are exposing the western parts of the continent to higher temperatures and dragging winter rain away from Western Australia.

Dr Abram's work is supported by an earlier paper published in the Annals of Glaciology in 2004 by Broeke and van Lipzig that shows that the strengthening of the circumpolar vortex results in asynchronous change, with cooling over East Antarctica and warming over West Antarctica, a process that is exposing the West Antarctic ice sheet to higher temperatures and driving its collapse. Together these reports reinforce the message that governments everywhere must take immediate action to rapidly curtail greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the consumption of coal, oil and gas and arresting land clearing.

It is regrettable that we need to build up our defences against the growing threat from global warming, but this is a government that has set about dismantling Australia's defences against climate change as it reduces funding for institutions like the CSIRO, shuts down altogether the Climate Commission, de-funds the Clean Technology Innovation Program, abolishes the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, abolishes the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, terminates the price on carbon and now seeks to undermine the renewable energy target, and repeals the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Program. It seems to me that this is a very seriously short-sighted and foolish approach. I regret that the government has been in the process of reducing our defences in this way. I hope it rethinks its position in the months and years ahead and enables Australia to be a good international citizen but also looks after our own citizens, looks after future generations, looks after our farmers, looks after people who will be adversely affected by sea level rise or by urban heatwaves, and takes a different approach than the one which is inherent in this bill.

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