Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move Australian Greens amendment (1) on sheet 5603 revised:

(1)    Schedule 1, item 2A, page 3 (after line 23), at the end of section 2A, add:

        (2)    Another object of this Act is to ensure the full liability into the future for any adverse impact, including any leakage from carbon storage projects, is borne by the entities undertaking those projects.

It is an additional subsection and the effect of this amendment is to include:

Another object of this Act is to ensure the full liability into the future for any adverse impact, including any leakage from carbon storage projects, is borne by the entities undertaking those projects.

The reason for this amendment is to make very clear in the objects of this legislation that the liability for leakage is borne by the entities that undertake the projects and cannot therefore be seen as being borne by the community. This is the most vexed issue of the whole thing around carbon capture and storage. Companies can go out and pump liquefied carbon dioxide into these cavities and get their closure certificate from the minister. But, as the current legislation stands, there is the question of liability. What if the liquefied carbon dioxide starts leaking out of these cavities 20 or 50 years later? You will then have massive volumes of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. There will be localised environmental impacts but the bigger picture impact is that every country has targets that it has to meet and, if you have large volumes of carbon dioxide bubbling to the surface and leaking out wherever, the community is going to have to make good elsewhere and pay the cost.

Why should these companies be able to privatise profit and socialise cost over time? We have had enough experience of mining companies doing this. I need only refer to the Fly River in Papua New Guinea. BHP polluted it, made maximum profits over a long period and left the community with a destroyed ecosystem and long-term health and environmental costs. BHP has never had to pay the full cost of the damage, let alone rehabilitate the area. That is an example of what is occurring right around the world. The legacy issues from the mining industry go on for years. Legacy issues from the mining industry are sometimes localised and sometimes they are regional. In my own state of Tasmania, there is the King River and the effect that the operations at Mount Lyell have had on it over time. The point is that companies have walked away and have not had to bear the cost of rehabilitation. Even where bonds have been paid up front, they have never been indexed in such a way that there is a reasonable amount of money to deal with the issues at the point where they need to be dealt with as community attitudes change. Rest assured, community attitudes have changed in terms of using the environment as a sewer. We cannot use the atmosphere and the ocean as a sewer anymore. The issue of liability needs to be resolved.

I rise to continue the debate on the amendment that the Australian Greens moved in this house in relation to ensuring that the full liability into the future for any adverse impact, including any leakage from carbon storage projects, is borne by the entities undertaking those projects. This is a critical principle for this bill. I say it is a critical principle because, right around the world at this particular time, governments everywhere are grappling with this issue. There is not, at the moment, a regulatory framework in any government anywhere, so Australia is trying to be the first country in the world to put together a framework for carbon capture and storage. Therefore, the principles on which this bill is based are more important, I would argue, than a lot of legislation we deal with where there is already considerable experience in other parts of the world in comparative analysis and historical data. This is cutting new territory, and everyone around the world will be looking at what Australia has done, so the principles underlying it are critically important.

I would argue that the principle that needs to be absolutely entrenched upfront is the polluter pays principle—that is, the idea that the full liability for any adverse impact is borne by the polluter, borne by the entity that is trying to store liquefied carbon dioxide in the cavities, wherever they may be in the ground. So this amendment is a critical amendment of principle because it underpins everything else I am trying to do in my amendments and that I understand the coalition are trying to do in their amendments, because we recognise that the issue into the future is that companies come and go. That is the problem. The problem is that companies have a shelf life of one, two, five, 10, 15 years or so. It is a record if they get to 50 years as the same entity as they started. But the problem is that, once carbon dioxide is pumped underground, we have to keep it there permanently—not for five, 10, 15 or 50 years, but in perpetuity.

How do you develop a framework where the liability is very clearly demonstrated so that courts in the future can make a determination about who should pay? The amendments that are going to come after this and the Greens amendments are basically about having the closure certificate at 20 years and then going to common law. This means that, if these storage cavities leak at some time in the future, that matter will end up in the courts. It is my contention, as a member of the Greens, that that will inevitably happen because, whilst you might initially get very good geological structures, the volumes we are talking about of liquefied carbon dioxide over time are such that there will be enormous pressure going into fewer suitable geological formations. We simply will not have them, and then you will have greater risks associated with leakage.

The second question is: how are we going to plug these storages? We do not know that. The technology for plugging cavities of liquefied carbon dioxide over time is unproven, and those plugs might well not last the distance. So, underpinning this legislation has to be a clear directive to courts in the future—20 or 50 years hence—covering when this carbon dioxide was pumped into these holes in the ground by companies that were profiting by pollution and then dealing with the pollution by carbon capture and storage, so the liability rests with them. That is why having this principle upfront is so important.

At the recent International Union for Conservation and Nature World Conservation Congress that I attended in Barcelona, I sat talking to people from the Environmental Law Centre in Bonn, Germany. They talked about how European governments were trying to grapple with this issue of liability. I come from a community perspective but I suspect there are other people in the parliament who may well come from a business perspective. But it is the same for both: there will be no investment in this technology unless there is certainty about how liability is going to be assessed in the future, because if you try to ignore it and not state it explicitly, then companies will not invest because they will run the risk that, in the future, courts may interpret it one way or another. So it is important that you be explicit and upfront about who should bear liability for any leakage and adverse environmental impact that may occur in the future. It is the Greens’ view, which is why we have an amendment to this effect, that a bond should be set aside—as we require now for mining companies and so on—and it should be indexed and looked at in terms of a reasonable projection over time so that you have a reasonable amount of money to address any leakage in the time frames that we are talking about. We do not want to have what we have now: the 100-year legacy of disastrous mining impacts around the world which, even though they are disastrous, are localised. As I said before dinner, if carbon capture and storage is rolled out on a grand scale around the planet, the potential adverse impacts as to global warming and carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere are incredibly dire.

The International Energy Agency, in its recent report on carbon capture and storage, which I have downloaded, says:

The regulatory framework necessary to support CCS projects also needs to be further developed. Despite important progress, especially in relation to international marine protection treaties, no country has yet developed the comprehensive, detailed legal and regulatory framework that is necessary effectively to govern the use of CCS.

This is where, essentially, the eyes of the world are turned on Australia in terms of this technology. It is no secret to anybody here that the Greens believe this technology is too slow, too far away, too expensive and too last century to be effective in dealing with greenhouse gas emissions. That is why we have argued constantly that, if the companies involved want to spend the money on it, well and good, let them do so, but public money ought not to be spent on unproven technologies when there are proven technologies that can produce zero emissions. Carbon capture and storage can never be zero emissions. It could be, if successful in terms of capturing the carbon dioxide, a low-emissions technology but it could never be zero emissions technology. And we ought to be leap-frogging the whole coal industry in favour of renewables and efficiency.

As I have said many times in this chamber, the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; the Stone Age ended because we learnt to do things better. In my view, the coal age will end not because we run out of coal but because we recognise that we cannot afford to keep using it in a planetary sense because of our climate. So I would strongly put to the chamber that it is critically important in a global context that we make very clear at the beginning in the objects of this act, for the whole world to see, that Australia endorses the polluter pays principle, that an object of this act is to make sure that the entity that is responsible for undertaking these projects bears the full liability into the future for any adverse impact, including leakage.

That is why, in another amendment I will be moving later tonight, I want to make sure that one of the expert committees that the minister must appoint in relation to this must be a committee that actually monitors these underground storages for leakage. It is no use just saying that we want to look at the rights of petroleum producers, vis-a-vis carbon capture and storage proponents; we have to also be making sure that these repositories are monitored year in and year out, so that when we see any problems occurring they can be rectified—they can be examined in terms of what is happening and can be dealt with. It is such a critical matter of principle upfront in the bill. It underpins all the other amendments that the Australian Greens have. And I think, globally, it is the only responsible thing to do.

There are only two choices here: either you accept that the polluter pays and the liability rests with the polluter, or you believe that private companies ought to be able to maximise profits and that the ecological and social costs be socialised to the community in the longer term. They are the choices here in terms of principles that should underpin this legislation. I would argue that, after more than a hundred years of polluting the atmosphere for free—as these companies have done and maximised their profits in a way that the community is now suffering with global warming—there could be no moral argument whatsoever for suggesting that the community should not only pay the costs of climate change in terms of the environmental impacts but also pay the costs in terms of rectifying things after these companies have made mistakes.