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

I am sorry, Senator McLucas, but carbon capture and storage, geosequestration, is landfill. There is no other way you can describe injecting a waste product under the ground than landfill. That is what it does. Of course the coal industry hates that terminology, just like the tobacco industry did not like being called on the consequences of its actions, and hence we got low-tar cigarettes. This is the equivalent of low-tar cigarettes. This is the coal industry’s low-tar cigarettes. For years the tobacco industry pretended there was no connection to lung cancer but, when the connection was finally proved, they came out with low-tar cigarettes to legitimise their ongoing sales of cigarettes for another 20 years. Finally they have been called on that, too. This is a holding strategy only. This is being seen as the strategy that will somehow transition us from coal fired power plants to this new energy revolution, except that the energy revolution is going to leapfrog clean coal before there is ever a commercialised plant and, frankly, by the time you get a single commercialised carbon capture and storage plant—if you ever do—we are likely to be beyond the thresholds in terms of climate change. That is the reality. We have so much warmth locked into the ocean right now that the Great Barrier Reef cannot wait for carbon capture and storage. The International Energy Agency says as much. They have said that, if this was going to be commercialised in the time frame, there needed to be many more billions spent on it in the 20 years before now. Nobody is arguing that you are going to have this at a commercial scale with any kind of real impact on greenhouse gases before 2025, and the industry is pushing it out further. Even the US government, which had all the faith in it, has pushed out the time frames, and a number of the projects have fallen over in recent years because they are just not making it on economic terms.

To give you an example, we are talking about the storage aspect of it but, in terms of the capture aspect, we are not even there yet. There is not a commercial scale coal fired power station which is capable of bolting on a post combustion capture technology. If you want to have post combustion capture, then you reduce the efficiency of your power station by at least 30 or 40 per cent, which means you burn that much more coal at the front end in order to get the same amount of electricity out the other end, and you have to have the carbon capture and storage. It does not exist yet. If you want pre combustion capture, you have to build a new power station. Talking about building new coal fired power stations to go with this technology is crazy. If you have to build a new power station, why not build renewables? Why build something that is unproven, expensive and not economically viable? However, the whole world is waiting for this technology, meanwhile burning coal as usual. But I think there is about to be a big shift in gears on this because people are going to realise that we are closer to greenhouse gas thresholds than we thought. The coral reef scientists are already saying that it is too late for the world’s coral reefs and that we are now managing them for decline. Nobody wants to hear these messages because everybody wants to think there is enough time to turn it all around, have everything the way it is at the moment, continue as we are and somehow technology will get us through it. Well, it will not.

The reality is that two weeks ago a Russian Arctic exploration ship and a British ship at two separate locations discovered methane chimneys bubbling up through the Arctic, caused by the melting of the permafrost on the ocean floor. Once you start getting methane chimneys, you are into an almost feedback loop that you cannot stop. There are indications that the thermohaline is starting to slow, the thinnest Antarctic ice is melting from underneath, and the Arctic has had its lowest level of ice ever in the summer this year. This is the reality. We do not have the time to wait for this.

I do not go out and talk about doomsday scenarios, but I can tell you that I lose a lot of sleep worrying about just how accelerating the greenhouse impact is, how little time we have got to turn it around and the lack of political will to do so in terms of rigorous targets. That is why I take some hope from the fact that Obama has come out and said that a new target for America will be 80 per cent by 2050 and that the UK government has transformed its target to 80 per cent by 2050. It will leave this government with no other choice but to do the same or be seen as a global recalcitrant. That debate is going to be had in Poznan and Copenhagen next year.

That is why I think you have to call this for what it is. Anything that is trying to deal with a waste that you have generated is a last century idea. A 21st century idea is preventing the waste in the first place, doing the full cycle analysis of whatever the product is, learning to reuse and learning to have synergies in uses of waste products so that you do not end up with dumping to atmosphere, dumping to ocean and dumping to rivers. We have to end that mentality—and we are nowhere near ending that mentality right now.

Question agreed to.

by leave—I move Australian Greens amendments (2) and (3) on sheet 5603:

(2)    Schedule 1, item 169, page 218 (line 6), omit “may”, substitute “must”.

(3)    Schedule 1, item 169, page 218 (line 7), omit “may”, substitute “must”.

These amendments regard mandatory refusal of pre-certificate notices. A concern was raised in the Senate inquiry that the minister does not have to refuse to give a pre-certificate notice relating to an application for a site even if the minister is satisfied that there is a significant risk that the greenhouse gas injected into that site will have an adverse impact.

Given that the minister, even if satisfied that there is a significant risk, does not have to refuse to give such a pre-certificate notice, these amendments change the word ‘may’ to ‘must’, so that the minister must refuse it as a site if he or she is persuaded at that point that there is a significant risk of an adverse impact. Otherwise, you can have a minister who knows that there is a significant risk that greenhouse gases injected into that site will have an adverse impact but they can still grant the particular certificate. These amendments provide the minister with some certainty when being leant on by either the politics of the day or the imperative to approve sites and so on. If he or she knows that there is a high risk of an adverse impact, then they must refuse that site.