Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I might just table it for the edification of senators from all parties. As I said, people on the Left try to tell you that you can just do it with renewable energy and energy efficiency. People on the Right will say that you can do it with nuclear power. I put to the Senate that both of them are equally wrong. There is no silver bullet in nuclear power and there is equally no silver bullet in renewable energy or energy efficiency. The reality is that we need to invest and bring on technologies in all of these areas, in renewable energies and fuels. The Australian government are investing enormously in solar and in wind turbines, with $3 billion worth of cross-subsidies to wind energy. We approved one last week and another one today. We will build around 600 turbines under the existing program. Before 1996 there were 20; there will be 600 by the end of the current program, and we are investing more. We believe that we need to continue to build wind energy, so we are doing a wind-forecasting program to predict where wind turbines should be located so that they create the best efficiency and the best outcome. I will be taking to my ministerial counterparts at the Environment Protection and Heritage Ministers Council in Sydney on Friday week a proposal for a national wind farm code so that we can get a sensible planning approach to wind farming.

We know that we need to do carbon capture and storage. I welcome the Victorian and Queensland Labor governments coming on board and supporting the federal coalition’s Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, with $500 million being matched by the Queensland government and the Victorian government with lesser amounts and by the coal industry with $300 million, to see if we can get that breakthrough in capturing the carbon at the top of the smokestacks of coal-burning power stations and geosequestering it or in finding ways to make coal burn more cleanly.

We know that that is one of the technologies that you have to have. If you set that aside and say that you should not put money into cleaning up coal, you know that the problem cannot be solved. I refer to an eminent person on this issue, arguably one of the best informed in the world, and that is Eileen Claussen, the head of the Pugh Center’s climate change project which Australia participated in through Howard Bamsey and the dialogue at Pocantico, a two-year dialogue. She and a group of people from all around the world including Howard Bamsey, the head of the Australian Greenhouse Office, participated in this two-year project. Eileen Claussen, who was President Clinton’s climate change negotiator, said to me at a breakfast at the Montreal climate change function that she hosted that one of the immutable truths that she got out of the project was that if we do not get a breakthrough in carbon capture and storage of fossil fuels we will not solve the problem. She was not saying: don’t do all the other stuff. More than anyone else she would say that you have got to do all the other stuff. She would totally agree with this approach. But she said that one of the absolute do-or-die things for the planet is carbon capture and storage. So a member of the Clinton White House, a very well-informed person, says that you have got to do this. To those people from the Left or the Right who say it is wacky and you cannot do it and you cannot sequester carbon, firstly, I say: go to Norway and see where they have done it in Sleipner in huge quantities. Secondly, I say: go and look at the Gorgon proposal on the North-West Shelf where they intend the biggest sequestration ever anywhere in the world.

We also need a breakthrough in the efficiency of our vehicles. We need fuel efficiency, we need emissions efficiency and we need to transform our transport fleet in Australia and around the world, massively. We need fuel switching. We need to find a way to encourage people to move more to gas. The Queensland government has once again taken a lead in that area by creating a policy to move to gas. By switching to gas, you get a nearly 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases. We also need to globally—and this will be in the answer that Senator Allison is chasing—transform our landscape. We in Australia are leading in this area. We need to stop deforestation and to plant more trees not only for commercial reasons but also for environmental reasons.

As you would know, Mr Deputy President, we have revegetated something like 2.1 million hectares, we have invested $4 billion through our natural resource management programs, and Australia has a marvellous story to tell in relation to stopping deforestation and seeing more forests planted. Further, we need to transform our agricultural sector. We need to do all of these things. We need to move to low tillage to stop nitrogen and methane being released into the atmosphere. Senator Allison is absolutely correct about this: it is an incredibly serious issue.

We have got to get the economics of this right and we have got to get the environmental consequences of it right. That is why the Prime Minister has said that the security of the world’s energy supplies, Australia’s role in energy supplies and the greenhouse side of the equation are so serious and so important that you cannot leave one of these seven segments out of the equation. Anyone on the Left who says you have got to leave nuclear out of the equation is creating the same problem as anyone on the Right who says that renewables should be left out. They are both as bad as each other. You have to do nuclear as well. Imagine a world where we said no to nuclear. You would see France closing down 75 per cent of its power and reverting to coal or gas. That would be brilliant! Well done, Democrats—great idea! You would see the United States closing down the 20 per cent of its power that is coming from nuclear—as Senator John McCain told me on 2 January. How stupid it would be to say no to nuclear, which the Democrats would have you do, and to see the United States importing more coal, gas or oil to burn. It is the sort of idiocy that you expect from the Australian Democrats.

If this problem is going to be solved, you need to work in each one of these seven areas. You need to invest heavily in them, and the great thing about the Australian government—and all Australians should be proud of this—is that we are investing in renewables. We are investing in solar and we are investing in wind. We are investing in energy efficiency and we are investing in carbon capture and storage. We are putting massive investments into alternative energies and alternatives fuels, and we are putting massive investments into the biofuels industry, fuel switching, forests and soils. And now, because of the leadership of the Prime Minister, we are not shying from a debate that we have shied away from for too long, and that is: how do we use our uranium resources to help solve this global challenge of reliable energy, a clean future and a low greenhouse future?

I look forward to delivering to Senator Allison a comprehensive answer, diligently and honestly prepared, to all of those questions. I apologise for my office not advising me that she would get to her feet and raise this issue here today. There was clearly a breakdown in communications. My office thought that we had, through one phone call, given Senator Allison’s office a sensible and reasonable response to the query and that it would be entirely unnecessary for her to stand up here. But I do undertake to get that answer to her as quickly as I possibly can.

Question agreed to.