David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In search of a preferred euphemism for carbon capture and storage, a lie a deceit, a complete and utter falsehood. Carbon capture and storage has been hanging around since Tony Abbott was a young politician, and it's about as reliable as a Tony Abbott speech or a Tony Abbott fact. It's about as reliable as a Boris Johnson political promise. Carbon capture storage is a lie from the fossil fuel industry, designed to somehow extend the life of a dying industry. That's what carbon capture and storage is, and to think that we're passing legislation pretending that carbon capture and storage works when we know it doesn't. Every credible report knows it doesn't. Of course, the report that came out of the House of Representatives here isn't a credible report. It was owned and dominated by Labor and the coalition. They just lapped up and repeated Santos's media releases. The majority report that came out of the Senate was much the same, just Labor and the coalition literally abusing logic, abusing fact, abusing science in order to find somehow some narrow path of deceit to pretend that this bill has any merit at all.

But carbon capture and storage is a false solution to climate change. It's unproven at scale, and even at the tiny sequestration volumes claimed by the industry in past projects, they leak and they fail to deliver on the storage promises that are given. Even if the proposed storage that will be facilitated by this bill gets up, it will be a tiny proportion of the life cycle emissions of new fossil fuel projects. Carbon capture and storage has not been proven feasible or economic at any viable scale. At best it will be a tiny fraction of the emissions generated from these projects. One of the recent reports by the IEEFA about the Norwegian Sleipner and Snohvit CCS projects demonstrates that CCS has real material ongoing risks that will almost certainly negate all or any of the short-term benefits it seeks to create. That's from a project that was literally paid for by the Norwegian government—which is almost entirely funded by the fossil fuel industry—and even that report says it stinks, it doesn't work, it's dangerous and it's a problem for the future. CCS prolongs dependence on fossil fuels and it delays replacements with renewable energy alternatives. We know that it's going to create long-term environmental health and safety risks for any community in its vicinity and for any worker associated in any way with carbon capture and storage. It is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode to kill, injure and damage those in their vicinity, and to add to global boiling.

As the Environmental Defenders Office said in its submission to the Senate inquiry:

policies such as CCS and geoengineering carry the risk of justifying ongoing use and extraction of fossil fuels, and [they strongly recommend] they should not be promoted or encouraged in order to sustain the life of the fossil fuel industry. CCS in particular also carries significant risk of additional and unintentional emissions pollution in its operation, while the environmental and social risks of large scale geoengineering remain unknown.

That's the evidence. Yet the ecocide lovers in the Labor Party and the ecocide lovers in the coalition want to pass this bill to open up the Barossa fields. They want to pass this bill to justify more offshore coal and gas. They want to pass this bill to keep their mates in the fossil fuel industry happy, to keep the donations rolling in. They want to pass this bill so that when they're pensioned off out of this place, they can walk hand-in-glove with the fossil fuel industry through that nice revolving door and get their job on the board, get the job from their mates, get the executive pay and sell out our future and democracy.

Of course we're going to vote against this, but it'll be a spectacle that any person concerned about the future should look at. Watch how Labor and the coalition join together once again to mortgage our future and screw up our climate simply for the short-term money they and their mates will get. We oppose this bill, and I thank Senator Whish-Wilson for the work he's done on this.