Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to speak on this report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation, Between a rock and a hard place: the science of geosequestration. It is a report of substance that you will read a little more about in the media for other reasons this evening and tomorrow. It was very timely to look at the issue of geosequestration, for Australia at the moment confronts the challenges of its economic advancement and reliance on fossil fuels as well as its greenhouse gas emissions and its responsibilities to mitigate its effects on the climate.

Before I get too far into it, can I first compliment the chair of this inquiry, the member for Kooyong. A lot of wide-ranging and diverse views came before this committee. The evidence taken over many months and the amount of documentation submitted to the committee gave rise to different points of view being adopted by members of the committee. But I will come back to that a little later on. I would like to also acknowledge, if I may, Dr Anna Dacre, the committee secretary, Dr Alison Clegg and the other inquiry secretaries, Peter Keel and Michael Crawford. Many of us do take for granted sometimes the assistance, dedication and professionalism that is exhibited by committee staff. They work very hard to make us look, in many respects, a lot better than we are. I do thank them for the efforts they have put in on this report.

As I was saying, this is a significant milestone in looking at where we should go in terms of our energy production. One of the things we cannot deny is that the coal industry plays an important part in our economy. At the moment the coal industry directly employs some 30,000 Australians. It is also our largest export earner. Last year I think somewhere in the vicinity of $24½ billion in export earnings was generated through coal exports.

Currently Australia has 8.6 per cent of the world’s black coal reserves. That is in excess of a 200-year supply of black coal. There is something in the vicinity of an 800-year supply in the remaining reserves of brown coal—that is at current production levels. So Australia is very much dependent on our coal industry. Apart from everything else, presently 83 per cent of our total energy is produced from coal sources. One of the things we do need to address in this country, amongst other things in terms of a suite of technologies to take us further—and that includes renewable energies, of which, having worked within that sector, I am particularly partial to—is what can give us a real advantage in using our coal and protecting our environment. So clean-burning coal resources are essential to the future prosperity of this country.

One aspect of that is geosequestration, which is the capture and storage of CO with a view to allowing us to compete and exploit the benefits of our vast coal reserves, while also moving us in the direction of environmental protection and a reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions from our industries. There is no doubt we live in a carbon constrained world, despite what many might think. There is a real potential for Australia not only to fully participate in these industries but also to commercialise its carbon capture technologies.

We pride ourselves on being an innovative nation. It should not take us that long to work out that we are sitting on an abundance of the world supply of coal. If we have worked out that our economy is going to be heavily geared to the export of coal for generations to come, then we should have realised long before now that we should be the world leaders in clean-burning coal resources and technologies such as geosequestration.

There are a number of options that fall to us already in terms of geosequestration. There are a range of storage options that are available to us, including depleted gas and oil fields, unmined or unmineable coal seams and the injection of carbon dioxide into existing reservoirs, which is called enhanced recovery. That is something we have been doing in this nation for a long while, particularly in Western Australia, in trying to exploit the final reserves of oil. It is certainly a known technology.

It became very clear to us during this inquiry that the technologies which are being deployed are not new. They have been finessed and developed, but the whole notion of geosequestration or carbon capture and storage is not necessarily a new technology. We have been doing various aspects of it, including advanced oil and gas recovery by injecting CO into existing oil reservoirs, for some time. We now want to finesse the process to where we commercialise the technology, not to produce additional hydrocarbon but to ensure permanent storage of liquid CO at depth for centuries, if not thousands of years.

Whilst I had thought that most people involved in the inquiry were singing from the same hymn sheet in relation to this issue, to the surprise of most people, four government members of the committee—which is the majority of government members—chose to submit a dissenting report. It is the right of everyone to question, but when they question not the technology and its commercialisation and whether it is capable of doing something to reduce carbon emissions but question what goes to the very heart of this—whether human involvement is exacerbating climate change—I think the Labor members and other members who formed the majority on the committee find that very hard to accept.

There is ample scientific evidence now that indicates that human behaviour in the modern industrial period has contributed to the build-up of greenhouse gases which has contributed to climate change. I am not a scientist, but I would have thought—from the abundance of material submitted to this inquiry and the abundance of material that is on the internet and even what our children learn in school—that this is not a contested position. Yet a majority of government members on this committee challenge the very fact that human involvement has resulted in greater carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, which in turn is having an impact on climate change.

At this late stage, not of this report or this government but, quite frankly, of our industrial development, we have people in our elected positions now coming before us and questioning whether humans have impacted on the emission of CO and whether we need to take steps to reduce the production of greenhouse gases and saying the jury is out on that. I have to say that, if I were living in the electorates of any of those people, I would seriously consider my position coming up to the next election. I would want people who were actually going to sit down and look at what is good for our future. I endorse the geosequestration report and indicate that it does endorse a number of the existing policy positions already adopted by the Labor Party in terms of geosequestration and its investment in this country. (Time expired)

Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to speak again without closing the debate.

Leave granted.

There is dissent from the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation. Four committee members conclude:

Climate change is a natural phenomenon that has always been with us, and always will be. Whether human activities are disturbing the climate in dangerous ways has yet to be proven. It is for this reason that we strongly disagree with the absolute statements and position taken in this review regarding AGW—

anthropogenic global warming. The view is:

... most of the public statements that promote the dangerous human warming scare are made from a position of ignorance ...

There could be no clearer divergence from the committee’s view, which is:

There is now compelling evidence that human activity is changing the global climate. The majority of scientists, and the community at large, agree that global action is needed, otherwise we risk reaching a point where it is too late to reverse the damage.

Let me make my position clear. As chairman I totally affirm the committee’s conclusion that the evidence is compelling and that the link between greenhouse gas emissions from human activity and high temperatures is convincing. Equally, I affirm the right of others to dissent from this view and to believe that global warming and the human contribution to it is unsubstantiated. However, as chairman of the committee, I also have the responsibility of correcting a number of erroneous assertions made in the dissenting report. I will address three of the most substantial of these.

Firstly, the dissent says the committee ‘strays well outside its terms of reference’ by addressing whether global warming is a problem and human activities are contributing to it. This is not the case. The committee’s second term of reference specifically directs it to report on the potential environmental benefits of geosequestration. Axiomatically, this requires the committee to form a view on whether global warming is a problem and whether human activity has impacted on it. As the committee stated:

... the purpose of CCS ... is to reduce the negative impact of anthropogenic ... emissions on the environment ...

If the committee formed a view that there was no negative impact then it would have to conclude that CCS could not deliver any significant environmental benefit. As one witness bluntly put it under questioning:

... people all around the world are looking at capture and sequestration. If you did not think greenhouse was an issue, you would not be doing anything.

The dissent says that the committee did not take any evidence relating to anthropogenic global warming. This is not the case. The committee received 46 submissions. The evidence given in 94 per cent of these, 43 in number, related to anthropogenic global warming, the impact of greenhouse gases on the environment, the gases’ derivation from human action and the challenge of reducing these emissions. Only one of these submissions argued that global warming has no human cause. The evidence of all the other submissions either expressed concern about climate change, recognised it as a problem, emphasised the need for change to manage emissions or called for urgent action on the climate front. Let me quote some of the evidence tendered. The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s submission stated:

The clearest environmental benefit associated with geosequestration technology relates to the technology’s potential to make a contribution to significantly lowering the greenhouse gas emissions associated with fossil fuel ...

The Australian Coal Association attested that climate change is a global problem and stated:

... the ... industry acknowledges the challenge posed by climate change and recognises the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ...

The CRC for Greenhouse Accounting’s evidence was:

... all remaining credible scientific argument against human-induced climate change has evaporated—

and I am sure they did not intend a pun there.

Similar evidence was raised at every one of the public hearings by every organisation that contributed to the proceedings. For instance, Mr Alex Zapantis stated in evidence:

Rio Tinto unequivocally accepts the overwhelming scientific consensus that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are contributing to climate change ...

Dr Tony Espie from BP United Kingdom gave evidence that:

Without significant action, global greenhouse gas emissions are now projected to more than double by 2050, predominantly due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Similarly, Greenpeace’s evidence was:

... the driving force behind developing the technology is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere in an effort to reduce the impacts of human-induced climate change.

The dissenting report says that the committee used the pseudoscientific figure of more than 90 per cent certainty that human beings have affected the climate and said that it is ‘in the bureaucratic summary for policymakers, not in the actual technical reports’. This is not the case. The technical summary contained in the IPCC fourth assessment report, at page 23, says:

The standard terms used in this report to define the likelihood of an outcome or result where this can be estimated probabilistically are:

…                …                   …

Very likely         > 90% probability

The main body of the text, at chapter 9 and throughout, states:

Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed warming over the last 50 years.

The observed pattern of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling is very likely due to the influence of anthropogenic forcing …

I could go on, but I will just concentrate on what might be a lighter note. I have to say that the dissenting report’s criticism of the committee quoting Rupert Murdoch’s comment on climate change, saying it demonstrates the one-sided nature of the report, is misplaced. Undoubtedly, politicians have different attitudes towards Mr Murdoch’s various views and at different times. In this case, however, the majority of the committee simply believed that Mr Murdoch, as a nonscientist, nicely articulated an important point. It is worth while quoting Mr Murdoch’s words that the committee found illuminating and that the dissenting report finds objectionable:

I am no scientist but … I do know how to assess a risk. Climate change poses clear catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction.

I believe that is an eminently sensible line but, no doubt, Mr Murdoch is quite capable of defending his own views.

I believe in the right of my parliamentary colleagues to dissent. If some parliamentarians want to deny that human activity is changing the globe for the worst, they have the right to do so. It is important, however, that the record be set straight regarding the committee acting within its terms of reference, having taken evidence regarding global warming and the character of the IPCC’s substantive report and technical comments. I hope that I have done this. I thank the members of the committee. I thank the secretariat for an exercise that made substantial demands on the secretariat and on the committee. I commend the report to the House.

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

The minority report by the Liberal members for Tangney, Solomon, Hughes and Lindsay to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation’s geosequestration report shows exactly why we have had no serious action from the Howard government to address global warming for the past decade. This report rips off the veneer and reveals the rotten core beneath. The government wants us to believe it is serious about tackling climate change, but it is all a sham—it does not want to believe there is any problem; it simply does not want to know about it. It reveals a government infested with members who refuse to believe climate change is happening, refuse to believe the experts and even refuse to believe the evidence happening right around the world before our very eyes. Such a government cannot be part of the solution; it is part of the problem. This is not a government for the planet’s future; it is a government living in the past.

The member for Tangney says that he does not support emissions trading and that he sees no need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This is a reckless, irresponsible position from an MP who thinks he knows more about the science of global warming than do the 1,500 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The member for Tangney and the other climate change sceptics remind me of the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Graillying there on the ground with no arms and no legs, blood pouring from everywhere, and still wanting to fight on when the debate is over. It is as serious as it is amusing, because this attitude still lurks within the government’s breast, and it is this attitude which is responsible for Australia’s dreadful track record in tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

While the European nations are cutting their greenhouse gas emissions, at the present rate, by the year 2020, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions will have risen by 27 per cent over the 1990 levels. This dreadful prospect is the consequence of abject failure to take serious measures to introduce an emissions-trading scheme and to substantially increase the share of renewable energy. These things could, and should, have been done at any time during the past 10 years, but the government has deliberately and wilfully ignored them. Now, it says it will introduce an emissions-trading scheme, but it does not say what its emissions-trading target will be and it says it will announce that target after the next election. What an astonishing try-on this is.

The dissenting report is riddled with unsubstantiated assertions. It says the examples of the decreasing snow cover and ice extent given by Al Gore and others are ‘demonstrably wrong’, but then provides no evidence to support this. It asserts that the Stern review has been ‘thoroughly debunked in a scientific and economic sense’, but all we get is that assertion. The dissenting report is tricky with the facts. It produces a graph showing aggregate rainfall in Australia, suggesting little change over time. The problem for Australia’s rainfall is that it is drying up in the south. Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and the Murray-Darling Basin have experienced declining rainfall in the past decade, and the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are predicting even less in the years ahead. Do the members for Tangney, Solomon, Hughes and Lindsay think the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have got this wrong, or do they think that it does not matter if Perth, Melbourne and the Murray-Darling Basin dry out, provided there is more rainfall in the tropics? What a shocking abdication of their responsibility to their constituents. The member for Tangney represents voters in Perth, and the members for Lindsay and Hughes represent voters in Sydney. They should be urging action to prevent rainfall loss for their electorates, not hiding behind aggregate data to pretend climate change is not a problem for Australia.

The dissenting report claims that doubling CO will only increase the natural greenhouse effect less than two per cent and produce warming of one degree Celsius in the absence of negative feedbacks. This is dangerously misleading and irresponsible. It is intended to, and will, discourage action. But doubling CO is definitely risky business. Dr James Hansen from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Dr Makiko Sato from the Earth Institute at Columbia University say that the west Antarctic icesheet and the Arctic ice cover are at risk of melting if the earth’s temperature rises by another one degree Celsius. Dr Sato says that CO exceeding 450 parts per million is almost surely dangerous, yet the member for Tangney is relaxed about CO going to 750 parts per million.

Doubtless there will be some people rushing to defend the dissenting report on the principle of freedom of speech. The American judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, observed years ago that free speech does not mean a man can shout ‘fire’ in a theatre and cause panic. In this case, there is smoke wafting through the theatre and the members in question are telling everyone to remain calm and stay in their seats. Yes, the dissenters are allowed to express their view, but the rest of us are just as entitled to repudiate this monumental irresponsibility.

It is disappointing that the dissenting report by the greenhouse sceptics of the parliamentary Liberal Party will inevitably overshadow the rest of the report and make it that much harder for us to get to first base. But, as I said at the outset, you simply cannot ignore the dissenting report, not least because it has been signed by four government MPs. Four of six government MPs on this committee think global warming is a nonsense. This situation is really quite alarming. Do two out of three Liberal backbenchers really doubt climate change?

But we need to move from first base to second base through a serious investigation of ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and this is what our report is all about. It is about one particular possibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by capturing the carbon produced by coal and storing it permanently. This process is referred to as geosequestration, or carbon capture and storage. It is an excellent idea. The question is: can it be done? In particular, can it be done at a decent price compared with other energy technologies? Can it be done in time to meet our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Can it be done in a permanent way? What are the risks involved in long-term storage? Finally, are there environmental issues apart from climate change that carbon capture and storage will generate, and can they be resolved?

The committee has studied the evidence on these things and has studied the present state of play. The report contains useful information about carbon capture and storage demonstration projects around Australia. There are no large-scale projects in carbon capture, transport and storage generated by a coal fired plant, but there are a number of carbon capture and storage demonstration projects underway or planned in Europe, Africa and the United States, as well as in Australia.

The committee found that much of the carbon injection technology is already known and available but that there is a lack of experience in integrating the component technologies at the commercial scale required and in the Australian context. Multiple full-scale demonstration projects using different types of capture technology and storage conditions are urgently needed. More research and development is required across a range of applications under varying conditions and on a scale that would demonstrate commercial viability.

The committee considers that carbon capture and storage has a role to play in tackling global warming provided that there is appropriate regulation and scrutiny of environmental risks. We need a rigorous regulatory environmental risk mitigation framework for carbon capture and storage which covers assessment of the risk of abrupt or gradual leakage and appropriate response strategies as well as requirements for long-term site monitoring and reporting.

The committee notes that presently there is simply no financial incentive for power companies to embrace carbon capture and storage technology as this just increases the price of coal fired power. It notes that, if a carbon price were introduced and if the cost of CCS were at the lower end of the estimated range, then it is likely that incorporating CCS technology into the next generation of coal fired power stations would be competitive with other forms of low-emission power generation.

One area of great concern is the impact of the skills shortage on research into this technology. According to Anglo Coal:

This skills shortage arises initially from limited numbers of young geoscientists coming through our universities and being trained in petroleum and CCS expertise, but is currently being exacerbated by the competing demand for oil exploration geoscientists.

Australia has dropped the ball on skills over the past decade, and the impacts of this are far-reaching across a whole range of scientific and engineering endeavours.

I regard global warming as the most serious issue of our time. Given this, we need to consider all possible solutions, and geosequestration—carbon capture and storage—may indeed have a role to play as part of the mix. I regret that the government has firmly set its face against other elements of the mix, in particular renewable energy. I have little doubt that, if the government had put a fraction of the effort into encouraging renewable energy such as solar PV that it has put into denying climate change and scuttling and undermining efforts to tackle it, we would be much better positioned for the future right now.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I fully support the report Between a rock and a hard place inasmuch as it addresses the specific terms of reference given to the committee. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, as far as the report does deal specifically with these issues, it is actually a very good document giving a very good account of the technology, economics and other issues relating to the science of geosequestration.

The problem is that the report strays well outside the terms of reference and makes unequivocal statements about global warming and the evidence relating to anthropogenic global warming. One of the supports that anthropogenic global warming relies on very heavily is the issue of consensus. However, as Margaret Thatcher stated, consensus is the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes but to which no-one objects—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. The unequivocal statements about AGW are not acceptable.

Indeed, in the last few days the Goddard Institute for Space Studies under James Hansen has been forced to change the surface temperature records for the contiguous USA as a result of errors that had been conducted in the GISS analysis. Instead of 1998 now being the hottest year on record for the US, it is now 1934. What is more, four of the hottest 10 years in the US are now found to have occurred in the 1930s, as opposed to only three in the last 10 years.

Kevin Trenberth, IPCC coordinating lead author, as quoted in our dissenting report, has stated:

Therefore the problem of overcoming this shortcoming, and facing up to initializing climate models means not only obtaining sufficient reliable observations of all aspects of the climate system, but also overcoming model biases. So this is a major challenge.

He could not have known how major this challenge would be. The error of the US surface data was found by Steve McIntyre, the same person who discovered the errors in Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph in the third IPCC report. As an ex-scientist, it concerns me that in both these cases Hansen and Mann did not make their data and algorithms available for peer review. In both cases it was perseverance by dedicated scientists that brought out these flaws.

If the temperature record of the US is found to be in error—and the US would have to have had one of the most accurate and reliable records on the planet—how much store do we place on the rest of the record, where similar secrecy on data and algorithms holds? The politicisation of this issue is so problematic that potential beneficial effects of temperature increase appear not to exist as far as the AGW adherents are concerned.

It is interesting that the late Roger Ravelle, the mentor spoken of in reverent terms by Al Gore in his movie, stated:

… the evidence for global warming thus far doesn’t warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.

Indeed, in the case of Gore, the hypocrisy on energy use, where he uses 20 times as much energy as the average American, clearly indicates that Gore is pushing the issue for personal, financial and political gain. If he genuinely believed his polemic, he would use all measures possible to reduce his energy consumption. He is a hypocrite of the first order.

Unfortunately, the politicisation of this debate extends not only into Australia or into this parliament but indeed into this very committee. Witness the member for Wills, who wrote to leading Australian companies in a threatening way, asking:

Whether your company has donated any money to the Institute of Public Affairs—

and there were a variety of other institutes he named—

or any other body which spreads misinformation or undermines scientific consensus concerning global warming. If your company has donated such money in the past, is it continuing to do so?

Clearly, here is a member who not only lacks political judgement but clearly does not have a clue as to how the scientific process works. If he did have any idea, he would know that science advances due to scepticism and falsification, both of which he is actively attempting to quash. The problem with so much of the debate on this issue is that it is pseudoscientific, having scant regard for scientific process. If evidence contradicting the theory of AGW is produced, the AGW adherents quickly attempt to find some way of explaining away the contradictory evidence in such a way as to fit in with their paradigm rather than question whether their paradigm holds true. This is what is commonly known as ‘group think’.

People have asked me what it would take for me to accept the AGW hypothesis. I have thought long and hard about this. According to the adherents, the models are now so complete that there is no doubt that humans are the cause of most of the warming of the latter part of the last 40 years, as the models cannot attribute the temperature rise to anything else. If the models are so complete, then to satisfy me they should be able to predict for each of the next five years to within 0.1 degrees what the average global temperature would be. The only exceptions would be where there is some unforeseen, non-climatic event such as a large volcanic eruption. Given what Kevin Trenberth has said about modelling not being able to replicate current conditions, and given that by the IPCC’s own admission the understanding that six of the nine radiative forcing mechanisms are medium or low, I would not be surprised to find that the modellers are unable to make these predictions. That the chair of the IPCC has stated that Australia is correct in not setting CO emission reduction targets until the full details of the impact and implications of this are known indicates that the government is being prudent with its policy on carbon.

The point is that the costs are not minimal. The risk of this occurring has not been determined. It would be like Australia committing a very large part of the budget to examining ways of preventing an asteroid strike on the planet. Although the consequences of an asteroid strike would be catastrophic, the probability of its occurring is extremely low. As such, it would be imprudent to expend huge amounts of money on this. A similar sober assessment needs to be conducted with AGW. The problem is that it is not the Gores, Garretts or indeed members opposite who would suffer as a result of this.

Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The honourable member should refer to members by their electorate.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The costs would be borne—and make no mistake about this—by every man, woman and child in Australia. It would particularly impact on those who are struggling. That is why I am so concerned about the religious aspect that AGW has taken on, which has carried through to this very committee and this very report.

Stephen Schneider, one of the strongest AGW adherents now and one of the coming-ice-age prophets of the 1970s, has explained exactly how the AGW fraternity is approaching this. He has stated:

To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Therein lies the entire problem with the debate: being unethical in a scientific sense in order to forward an agenda. There is only a double ethical bind with dishonest scientists. An honest scientist would never bend the truth to push an agenda.

Harry Quick (Franklin, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is rather interesting to follow the member for Tangney. Sadly, with the launch of this excellent report today, a report that is long overdue, the emphasis was on the glitz rather than the substance of what appears in the report.

I urge those who are listening to this debate—and, from some of the emails that I have received, people are listening to what was said this morning and are trying to obtain the report—to get as many copies as possible so that they can read not just the dissenting report, which seems to be the focus at the moment, but rather the five recommendations of Between a rock and a hard place. I urge people to log on to the committee website. Read the transcripts of evidence taken at the many hearings that we have held in this house and around Australia. Read the submissions. As the honourable chair of the committee said, all but one of the submissions endorsed the belief that global warming was a serious threat to humankind.

One wonders if this is a great furphy. Some people talk about things coming from outer space and wiping civilisation out, and they say there is a greater chance of that happening than of global warming having an impact on your life. Why are there nine demonstration projects going ahead at such enormous cost? When you look at the report, you see there are the Monash Energy Project, the Gorgon Project, ZeroGen, the Fairview Zero Carbon Project, the HRL Ltd project, the Hazelwood project and the CS Energy project. These are costing in some cases a billion dollars and in most of the others hundreds of millions of dollars. Why in the name of creation are these organisations and industry expending this enormous amount of money if they do not have to? Are they are just doing it for their own self-satisfaction? Other speakers have mentioned the intergovernmental reports of the 1,500 scientists. Are those people crazy?

Even though we contribute only 1.4 per cent to global greenhouse gas emissions, Australia must set the example to the neighbouring developing countries—the Indias, the Chinas and the like. I am appalled by and disappointed with the dissenting report. It is basically the member for Tangney going off at a tangent, and there are sloppy contributions by the members for Solomon, Hughes and Lindsay, who—I hate to say it—really have not made a contribution to this whole debate and with regard to the evidence taken at our hearings.

I was somewhat amazed when I got back to my office just after question time and I got an email from someone who criticised my use of the word ‘sceptic’ in my speech when this report was tabled in the House earlier today. He said, ‘What about the Catholics in Nazi Germany, Nelson Mandela in South Africa and the Chinese in Tiananmen Square?’ These are the sorts of crazy things that can be linked to the so-called theological debate that seems to have been generated by the member for Tangney. He stated that the ordinary, average punter will not put up with the additional costs. I think that is totally false. Consumers will, I believe, be prepared to pay increased costs on their power bills to see this issue tackled and tackled sooner rather than later.

If you look at the evidence, you see that between 1970 and 2004, 34 years, there was an 80 per cent growth in global CO emissions, and between 1990 and 2004, 14 years, there was a 20 per cent growth. We are talking about serious problems. As I stated in my earlier remarks: go to Beijing on any given day; do you still reckon that we do not have a problem that we need to address?

This report is timely, concise and scientifically sound. I would like to compliment the secretariat for their hard work. As the chair said, it has not been easy putting this together. I would like to thank the other members of the committee and especially the chair for his guidance and forbearance as he put this together. I would like to urge members in this House—and others—to grab a copy and have a read, because I can assure you that in the upcoming election campaign a hell of a lot of people out there will be talking about this issue. What better than to give them a copy of this report, Between a rock and a hard place: the science of geosequestration, because some of the answers—not all of them—are in here and we need to talk about this. Take the politics out of it. We have had some of the politics inserted today, but this is too big an issue to be a Labor or Liberal or Greens or Democrats issue only and for one of those parties to have all the answers. That is a load of rubbish. We all need to work together, politicians state and federal. Industry want to work with us. The scientists want to work with us. We should be doing it for the punters that we represent.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have pleasure in rising in support of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation report entitled Between a rock and a hard place: the science of geosequestration. From the outset, I want to emphasise something that the whole committee appears to be agreed on—even when I look at the comments of the dissenting report—and that is that the report provides a very sound examination of the phenomenon of geosequestration and the uses that it can be put to and, therefore, how valuable it is to discussions on climate change.

However, I am very disappointed in the way in which members who are signatories to the dissenting report have handled this debate so far. We have had a contribution from only one of the signatories to the dissenting report; the other three do not appear to be joining in the debate. The principal signatory to the dissenting report has made his contribution and has now left the chamber. He is not entering into the discussion by listening to the views of others. It is important that a parliamentary committee report such as this engenders debate. It is not the debate that I have any problem with. Let us have the debate and not a series of set pieces that are put in a very flowery and definitive way.

Earlier this year I attended an international parliamentary union meeting in Nusa. The principal speaker at that conference on where we are at as a globe in relation to climate change was Dr John Zillman—a former president of the World Meteorological Organisation and head of the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia. He gave a very balanced outline of the work of the IPCC. He sought a debate which avoided overstatement of the science by greenhouse zealots and which had more informed use of the science by greenhouse sceptics. I believe that this report represents that middle ground.

If the dissenters from the report believe that there is insufficient evidence of anthropogenic global warming, I have a real problem. I am now not clear whether they support the sound basis of the report and its recommendations on geosequestration. The recommendations in the report reflect the committee’s terms of reference—that is, to look at the trigger points involved in the phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming and to look at how we, as policy makers, react to it and make decisions on it. We cannot come in here with our scientific hats on and say, ‘We’ll have a debate on the science.’ We are elected to the parliament to make good public policy decisions.

Over the past couple of decades, when I have had the opportunity in this parliament to talk about global warming, I have had to admit that, yes, I have a science background. It is a bachelor degree from the ANU. I was very lucky because it was a holistic course. It taught me to take the science and then aspects from different things, such as economic or social policy, and to put them together to come up with something that I believed was the response that should be made. That is what we have to do here.

When I supported the comments of Rupert Murdoch staying in the report, it was on the basis that these were comments that I had made in the parliament before. At earlier IPCCs there was a discussion within the scientific world about whether anthropogenic global warming was actually happening. But we cannot await the definite answer without doing the preliminary work. As each body of work is developed by those involved in the IPCC, there comes greater certainty. I have heard from people like Dr Zillman and, in Belize, Carlos Fuller—who made a presentation to a working group of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association on the environment and parliament that I was involved in—that they can look back on their body of work and go back to reference points that they flagged in earlier work to see the progression. This gives them confidence in the predictions that they make.

A lot of these scientists are meteorologists. They are in the business of making predictions and they die and fall by these predictions. They cannot say, ‘We just plucked it out of the air.’ They were the ones who looked at climate change as a phenomenon way back and developed questions to be answered, and they continue to do that. But it is for us, as policymakers, to say that we cannot wait until we are certain; it will be too late. On the basis of the things that the committee has raised as part of its report, I think there is every reason to map out this course of action. Our problem is that we should not be in business unless we say that there is evidence of the climate change phenomenon occurring and that we are willing to put in place incentives and disincentives—a whole suite of things—to ensure that we get a result.

Zillman said to the IPU that we really need to see a match between mechanisms of carbon pricing and the development of new technology. He went on to say that we could consider that climate change was a direct response to market failure and that, if we look at it this way, we have to develop mechanisms that ensure that we have suitable interventions in the case of market failure. Geosequestration—carbon capture and storage—which prevents carbon going into the atmosphere and other places and causing climate change and global warming is very important.

Like all my colleagues from the committee, we are quite happy to have dissent and to have debate, but let us make sure that it is robust debate about the facts and not sloganeering and calling people zealots, sceptics and a whole host of things. By implication, it is a bit rich for the member for Tangney to call the people who signed the majority report ‘zealots’. There are a heap of them out there. These people are, as Zillman said, in the middle and not out on the extremes. They looking at the evidence that is produced and going forward.

As part of the debate about geosequestration—carbon capture and storage, CCS—we have to analyse the importance of coal-produced energy. There had to be a base decision. The decision of the committee was that Australia needs to go forward for quite some time on the basis of energy being produced by coal. Having made that decision, steps should then be taken to ameliorate the effect of the carbon produced and released—that is the whole point of developing technologies that are put in place for carbon capture and storage. All the questions about the transport of the carbon that is captured—whether that economically stands up on the basis of the carbon emissions that might be used in the storage—are complex questions, and we rely on the input of scientists on not only the climate change phenomenon but also the steps involved in all the technologies that we might use.

People came forward to share their knowledge with the committee. They were not waiting around for some decision in black and white; they came forward on the basis that action should be taken. The Insurance Council of Australia has a clear policy on this because it understands that climate change is happening and that we have to take suitable action to prevent and ameliorate the effects. That is the important thing. The people that we represent and the people that are least able might take the economic hit on this. I asked the member for Tangney, ‘If we sit back and do nothing, will it be the same people and worse that take the hit as a result of the outcome of climate change?’ That is why we have to be in on it. We have to get businesses, governments and the community on board and we need to take action on the basis that there is certainty on the climate change phenomenon. I commend the report to the House.

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take this opportunity today to confirm my longstanding support for the coal industry and the Labor Party’s support for clean coal technology, like geosequestration, that will strengthen the domestic industry against future challenges. Australia’s coal industry is an integral part of the Capricornia electorate, which includes many mines and the largest coking coal export facility in the world. Central Queensland is the economic engine room of Queensland and certainly one of the anchors of the national economy. In 2006 alone there were over 30,000 people directly employed in coal mining, not to mention the many thousands more people in towns across my electorate such as Sarina, Moranbah, Dysart and Clermont who also benefit indirectly from the industry. Australia’s 2006 coal exports were worth over $23 billion—a large proportion of that coming from within my electorate.

Reliable and affordable energy supplies are a key element of Australia’s security, prosperity and competitiveness. Energy policy in Australia will be a major feature of the upcoming federal election—something which will show the significant differences between the policies of Labor and the coalition. Labor has always concentrated on supporting the coal industry by driving the development of clean coal technology such as geosequestration, while John Howard has been planning a nuclear future. There are now significant energy choices for Australia: do we stand up for coal and help the industry thrive in a carbon restricted future or do we simply start building nuclear power plants all over our country?

The international community is rapidly moving to confront climate change, and the Howard government has for years failed to recognise this challenge. It has wasted more than a decade, which could have been spent preparing our economy for a transition to a carbon constrained environment. The Howard government’s attitude is stifling innovation and the development of new technologies which will mean secure jobs and more exports.

Labor has consistently argued for the introduction of an emissions trading scheme that enables the market to put a price on carbon and find the most efficient way of reducing emissions without damaging the important mining industries in my region. This trading scheme would help reach the target of a 60 per cent reduction on 2000 levels by 2050. I would like to remind the House that this target of 60 per cent was found by the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change to be compatible with strong economic growth and not damaging to the industry. Labor’s emissions trading scheme is economically responsible. It would provide the right incentives to drive investment in low-emission technologies and renewable energy while keeping the total cost relatively low.

It is also very important that the emissions trading scheme is fair and ensures that those industries less capable of adapting to price changes are not disadvantaged. While my electorate is the coal capital of Queensland, there are other mining industries, such as magnesium, which are far less capable of absorbing the extra costs of carbon reduction. These other industries are also very important to the national economy and must be treated fairly in any trading scheme.

A Rudd Labor government would aim to start an emissions trading scheme by 2010, with the design to be finalised by the end of 2008. Labor recognise that this is an ambitious target and there is a lot of work to be done. However, we are committed to getting an emissions trading scheme off the ground and doing it right. The coal industry is facing specific challenges in Australia, and my electorate, being a coal-exporting heavyweight, is keenly interested in Labor’s policies. Our huge reserves of black coal are a massive economic asset for the nation. Black coal alone accounts for more than 12 per cent of our exports by value. However, the move to an increasingly carbon constrained international economy and the inaction of the Howard government to prepare the nation for the future threaten the prosperity of my electorate and represent utter negligence by the Prime Minister over the past 11 years.

It is also unfortunate but entirely predictable that, in the face of a complete lack of any vision for the future, Mr Howard and the federal member for Dawson are up to their old tricks: running a fear campaign on coalminers’ jobs. It has always been the way of the conservatives to strike fear into people and blame someone else for all their failings. However, like much of the world, Australia relies on fossil fuels for most of its energy, and Labor believes this will continue for decades to come. Australia’s economic and energy security interests demand that we protect the viability of our coal industry.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions while placing Australian coal exports and jobs on a sure international footing, federal Labor has also launched the Clean Coal Initiative. This plan includes establishing a national Clean Coal Fund, worth $500 million, to provide Commonwealth support for the development and demonstration of clean coal technologies and to generate at least $1.5 billion in new investment while working in partnership with the private sector. Labor has also pledged to significantly reduce emissions entering the grid by 2020 and for near-zero-emission carbon capture and storage technologies to enter the grid by 2030, as well as to increase Commonwealth funding for the CSIRO by $25 million over four years. These are the sorts of proactive policies to protect our energy interests and our export potential that the Howard government should have been pursuing for years.

Carbon capture and storage technologies involve the pumping of CO, in a compressed liquid form, into suitable geological formations deep underground. The most likely sites for carbon storage are depleted oil or gas fields, deep saline aquifers and deep coal seams. As the report Between a rock and a hard place points out, the technology for pumping liquid CO into oil or gas fields is well known and proven. In fact, the first commercial-scale project dedicated to CO storage in a geological reservoir has been in successful operation in Norway since 1996. However, there are a number of other examples across the world operating.

As the report sets out, there are a number of projects currently underway in Australia to test the feasibility and the commercial viability of various methods of capturing the carbon emissions released by coal-fired power stations. One of these is the ZeroGen project at Stanwell near Rockhampton in my electorate. This project, which will utilise integrated gasification combined cycle technology, has received significant backing from the Queensland government. On the other hand, I note it has yet to receive any such support from the federal government, even though, according to this report, an application for funding under the government’s Low Emission Technology Development fund was lodged in March 2006. This is in contrast to most of the other projects referred to within the report, which have between them received hundreds of millions of dollars from that fund. I have to ask: what is taking the government so long? Where is its support for this important project?

As part of its response to climate change, Labor is also investigating carbon offsetting, whereby companies offset their carbon emissions by planting vegetation or rehabilitating mining land. It is because of my strong belief in the future of the coalmining industry that I am surprised the Howard Liberal government has not taken up any of these initiatives and even today does not support the Labor Party’s initiatives. But one must only look at Mr Howard’s move—

Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member will refer to members of this House by their proper title.

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One must only look at the Prime Minister’s move towards nuclear energy and away from the coal industry to see the reasons why. The Howard government sees clean coal technology as a stopgap measure, something to tide the public over until the Prime Minister gets his 25 nuclear power stations built around Australia. Far from supporting the coal industry, the Howard government and its nuclear plans are the biggest threat to the coal industry. Despite that, the member for Dawson has kindly raised her hand saying that she wants a nuclear reactor in her electorate, much to the outrage of her constituents, many of whom are coalminers or work in associated industries.

I believe helping coal stay competitive is a far better alternative than throwing up your hand for a nuclear power station. The Howard government’s Switkowski report also found that nuclear power may only become economically viable in Australia if a carbon tax of up to $40 per tonne is levied on CO emissions. This would cripple at least one mining company in my electorate which employs over 350 people. The bottom line of the energy debate is that we start from a position of natural advantage. My state’s coal resources make us the envy of many nations. The policy distinctions between Labor and the government in relation to the coal industry remain stark, particularly on issues of leadership and what we see as a long-term future for the industry. I welcome the opportunity to take— (Time expired)

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Between a rock and a hard place is an extremely apposite title for a report of this kind, given that it has a dissenting report which, frankly, strains credulity, even in a place where extreme views are sometimes heard—and, I should say, always tolerated. But in this day and age it is unacceptable that elected officials, let alone government members, try, through their dissenting remarks in a report of this kind, to rubbish climate change science. The dissenting report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation inquiry into geosequestration technology shows where the government really is on this issue. It shows the government’s true colours, because the Howard government remains divided on the issue of climate change.

We have four government members prepared to put their names to a dissenting report and take the opportunity to express their climate change scepticism. I will come to the recommendations of the report in a moment, but let us consider the sceptics’ basis for dissent. The members for Tangney, Lindsay, Hughes and Solomon state that those who believe humans are causing climate change are ‘fanatics’. Perhaps the most extraordinary claim by the dissenting MPs is that evidence of global warming on other planets, such as Mars and Jupiter, makes it unreasonable for humans to take pre-emptive action on earth. This claim alone, I think, qualifies itself as one of the most ludicrous assertions ever made on the issues of climate change science in this parliament. The real question is: what planet is the coalition on? While the MPs are happy to accept claims about global warming on far-flung planets—planets that Australians can never hope to visit, much less live on—they continue to deny the very real evidence we see of climate change in our own backyards, such as more intense drought and extreme weather events, and a plethora of reports and studies of observable data and peer-reviewed material which show, clearly, the connection between human activity, CO levels in the atmosphere and consequential global warming.

The truth is that 1,200 of the world’s leading climate scientists contributed to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007, and found that temperatures on earth rose in the 20th century and will rise at an even faster rate in the 21st century. Today’s events, and the actions taken by these members in releasing this dissenting report, put the government even further out of touch with the common-sense position that Australians now have on climate change, which is informed by climate scientists both internationally and in Australia, particularly those in the CSIRO who have already reported to government on this issue. It is simple and plain: climate change is happening and we need to act now. To suggest anything else is a perverse nonsense.

The question raised during the term of this Howard government is: how can a government full of climate change sceptics deliver climate change solutions? That is not to say that the four members who have authored this dissenting report are alone. Senator Minchin, the Minister for Finance and Administration, has expressed his scepticism; Senator Macfarlane, the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources, has expressed his scepticism; and the Prime Minister fudges in his remarks on the impacts and likely consequences of climate change. All the while, the world’s scientific community and world leaders are responding to the climate change scenarios that have been identified by the IPCC, and they are starting to put in place those policies which we need to get in place in order to address dangerous climate change.

The dissenting report heavily emphasises the need for scientific training, method and history; however, it does not cite a single up-to-date peer-reviewed reference in order to back itself up. What a shambolic and, frankly, intellectually dishonest exercise. Instead, the dissenting report makes extensive and selective references to other climate sceptics, old academic work and unpublished nonscientific tracts. Frankly, this parliament and the people of Australia deserve better.

Where are the published peer-reviewed journal articles that dispute the IPCC’s conclusions? Where are the cited references to the peer-reviewed material that is being produced—on an almost weekly basis—that continues to validate the conclusions that have been reached by the IPCC? They are nowhere. This week we had the chair of the IPCC visiting us here in Australia. He stated clearly that climate change is real, that it is an issue we have to address with some seriousness and that the international community needs to get on with it. Yet we have a dissenting report that is little more than a polemic against anthropogenic climate change science.

If Dr Jensen and his colleagues are convinced of their mission, and in particular if Dr Jensen is convinced of the views he expressed this morning on the AM radio program, he should—and I challenge him to do this—in a peer-reviewed journal, publish his theory of climate change and the evidence that leads him and his colleagues to conclude that anthropogenic climate change is disproved. Failure to take that step renders this dissenting report farcical.

Labor looks forward to reviewing the majority report in detail. I note the comments from the member for Kooyong, the member for Werriwa and others, but I need to make some observations on that report as well. Firstly, the report takes up a number of Labor’s policies aimed at developing carbon capture and storage. The report calls on the Howard government to contribute to work being done to find suitable geological carbon storage sites in New South Wales. I note that Labor has committed the necessary $20 million to support this project, but the Howard government has refused to commit any funds. The report also calls for funding to support one or more new large-scale demonstration projects to test and perfect the technology. Again, Labor has committed $40 million for such a project, with the potential for the funding of further projects, and again the Howard government has refused to commit any funds. The report calls on the government to develop a regulatory framework to govern long-term storage of carbon underground. Labor has committed to developing such a framework as part of its carbon mapping and infrastructure plan; yet, despite promising over a number of years to introduce the necessary legislation, the Howard government has failed to do so. Today’s report effectively endorses Labor’s $500 million National Clean Coal Initiative, which will promote clean coal technologies.

The committee recommends that legislation be developed to define ‘financial liability’ for the ongoing storage of carbon dioxide. Liability is an important issue when it comes to industrial by-products, but it is of some concern to note that the legislative model proposed by the committee ultimately places liability with the Commonwealth. The environmental and financial liabilities associated with looking after teratonnes of CO in perpetuity are enormous and at this stage unquantified. This issue will need much more research before legislation can be drafted.

The report also highlights the lack of the necessary skills in Australia to do the job, especially in the science and engineering sectors. As in other areas of important economic endeavour around the country, the lack of necessary skills in the workforce to take on those tasks and to meet those future challenges has been a key failing of the Howard government, especially in this instance when we need all the technological assistance we can get to tackle climate change. I do note in passing that Dr Jensen, one of the authors of the dissenting report, is one of the most aggressive and enthusiastic proponents of nuclear power and nuclear energy for Australia; yet the Switkowski report, which showed amongst other things that the production of nuclear energy would be an expensive proposition here in Australia, also highlighted the lack of available skills and technological capacities that this country has.

The challenge of climate change is real. In addition, the need for us to develop and expand clean coal technologies is very real—it is a great need—as is the need for us to develop and implement renewable energy. We need to have a suite of policies that not only deals with the way in which we will produce energy in the long term by reducing emissions but also shows that we understand the scale of the issues and the challenges we face and that we are resolved—and, indeed, have the capacity—to take them on, as a Rudd Labor government would do. But I have to say that a government full of climate change sceptics can never deliver climate change solutions, and the dissenting report by the members I have mentioned here is the strongest evidence of that we are ever likely to see or hear.

Debate (on motion by Mr Neville) adjourned.