Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson, I wonder if it would help to explain that the bill seeks to deal with two different distinct activities. One is projects associated with carbon capture and storage in undersea formations. This was the subject of a 2009 amendment to the London protocol, and the legislation seeks to create a regulatory arrangement for that when it requires the transborder movement of carbon dioxide.

The bill also seeks to deal with a different proposition. This was the subject of a 2013 amendment to the London protocol. It relates to marine geoengineering activities. This allows for the placing of waste or other matter for a marine geoengineering activity such as ocean fertilisation, for legitimate scientific research. It's a really important point, because it's for research purposes only. It's not imagined that it would be permitted at anything like commercial scale at this point in time.

One of the technologies that people are interested in investigating is ocean fertilisation. There are good reasons to regulate that, because we're not yet certain what kinds of impacts that ocean fertilisation might have in addition to its climate benefits. We should always be cautious about these technologies. It's at research scale, and the amendment before us seeks to create a regulatory framework to manage research projects of that kind.

I will indicate that the London protocol is also looking at potential other future listings, including microbubbles—injecting tiny bubbles into the ocean surface to increase sunlight reflectivity—and marine cloud brightening, or seeding, which is injecting sea salt into cloud updrafts to reflect sunlight back into space. These are all research propositions. They're not commercial. But it is important that there is a regulatory framework to manage them so that we don't have unintended consequences on ocean environments. Because the ocean is a shared resource, it makes sense that that's done through an international protocol.