My Copenhagen Letter to Dirty Kev

I used to battle depression over the climate crisis. These days I'm having more trouble with anger towards "the establishment". Obama makes me want to hope, but I'm terrified that he'll do a Kevin on the climate too.

There's just over a month to go before Copenhagen and activism is in top gear. I went to a local 350.org gathering last weekend and just now I took advantage of Greenpeace's Dirty Kev campaign to send a letter to the federal government. The form letter is nice, but I had more to say:

Above is a form letter which I support 100%. Personally I wish to also express my anger and disgust at the way your government has handled the greenhouse gas issue over the past two years. Your action has fallen appallingly short of the inspiring promises and uplifting rhetoric we heard in the months either side of the election.

Professor Garnaut gave you sound, realistic advice which you arrogantly (or is it fearfully?) discarded. Your proposed CPRS does almost exactly the opposite of what is required to make a meaningful, morally-justifiable contribution to protecting the climate for my children. Your renewable energy legislation actually undermines efforts to reduce our nation's use of fossil fuels.

My family, along with thousands of others around this country, is prepared to pay actual costs, suffer actual hardship and make actual sacrifices to help realise an actually sustainable future for humanity. And what a wonderful future it could be!

Please: have the guts to face up to the reality of this climate crisis. We need genuine leadership to inspire this country to make strong decisions as individuals and communities. We need:
- radical improvements in energy efficiency
- deep cuts to energy consumption
- rapid phase-out of coal power
- to stop wasting money on CCS
- real investment in appropriate cost-effective renewable energy
- an actual debate on nuclear options (Gen4 designs, especially thorium-powered ones, and yes I'd have one in my back yard in preference to coal)
- a national decision to get off our arses and do something worthwhile

In closing, it's only fair to also thank you for your investment in education and internet infrastructure. I am in absolute agreement that building a sustainable, prosperous future requires the best possible education culture and world-class information technology infrastructure. But it will all be futile if we fail to turn around the global GHG emissions trend and get back into safe territory (currently estimated to be sub-350ppm) in the next several decades.

If you have even a mild concern about the climate and global warming etc, please make yourself heard now. There are lots of ways you can express yourself - sending Dirty Kev a letter is quick and easy.

About that PV rebate means test

Hi again.

By now I expect you've all heard that in last week's federal budget, the first under this new management, it was announced that the Photovoltaic Rebate Program (PVRP) would immediately be subjected to means testing. Specifically, the $8,000 rebate would not be available to households whose combined income exceeds $100,000 per annum.

Predictably, there's been an enraged outcry from the renewable energy industry and green groups, and of course the opposition parties have seized the opportunity to attack the government's credibility on climate change policy. ("Hi Kettle, I'm Pot! My, you're a lovely black colour aren't you?")

Like many commentators I have great sympathy for the small business owners and employees who've been enjoying a surge in PV installation activity as a direct consequence of the PVRP and who are now dealing with a sudden drop in orders. Yet I do not necessarily agree that the PVRP should have been left as it was. Let me explain.

In the back of your mind you must always remember this: photovoltaic technology is really neat, but it's a long way from ideal. For starters, today's PV is generally more expensive than other renewables. And it only generates power while the Sun is shining brightly. No matter how many solar panels we install in this country we'll always have need for other energy systems which generate significant power for the other 16 hours per day.

As a rule, I was no fan of the former government. So hopefully it should get your attention when I say that the basic premise behind the PVRP was pretty sound. $150M was allocated over five years to encourage industry development and hence further R&D in PV technology - not to generate as much electricity as possible! Maybe they were forced into it, I don't know, but it was a sensible notion to invest public funds in a promising sector of the renewable energy industry. Unfortunately... they didn't follow through with a sensible rebate scheme for the distribution of those funds.

The PVRP previously offered a flat $4,000. Better than a kick in the teeth, but with PV systems starting at around $12K for an average output of 4kWh per day even that wasn't enough to spur a lot of interest. The "battlers" still couldn't afford it and the more well-off could get better rates of financial return from other forms of "investment". So last year, possibly reading the pre-election mood re climate change, they doubled the rebate to $8,000.

Well didn't that just open the floodgates. They halved the effective cost of an entry-level PV system, bringing it within the reach of middle Australia and making the financial payback time far more acceptable. The take-up rate exploded, "with 35% of all solar installed in eight years of the program occurring in the last six months." (Quote from ATA e-bulletin 19 May 2008).

Poor Mr Swan. Elected to government on the promise of leadership on climate change, faced with the economic necessity of slashing government spending, he had to deal with a PVRP that had gotten out of control and was burning through its multi-year budgetary allocation at an alarming rate. There were only two options: put the brakes on the rate at which money was being paid out (by lowering the amount per payment or limiting its availability) or let it continue to accelerate before slamming into a brick wall a little way down the track when the money runs out. Clearly the brick wall option would be catastrophic for the very PV industry which the program was intended to foster.

So the new management decided to slow the rate of payments by introducing a means test, in line with the general policy of targeting financial assistance to those who need it most. In my personal opinion, that was a reasonable thing to do. The biggest thing to criticise is that it's an all-or-nothing measure tacked on to what was a poorly-designed rebate scheme in the first place.

Just for the fun of it I'm going to do a separate post discussing the actual impact of the means test, how it might relate to the also-announced green loans scheme, and explore an alternate design for a PVRP means test.

To wrap up this one, though, I would ask you to keep looking at the bigger picture and reserve your final judgement on this government's climate change credibility until we see their response to the Garnaut review. The PVRP is something that was inherited and that, politically, had to be carefully managed. Failure to slow the rate of payout would have harmed the PV industry and been attacked by the opposition as financially irresponsible. Axing the scheme (presumably in favour of something better down the track) or reducing the rebate would have sparked a political feeding frenzy. It had to be maintained, but carefully.

The Minister for the Environment put it this way on ABC TV: "We've got programs out there... which will ensure there is enough demand in the Australian community in the long term to get solar panels on roofs... and to make sure that we continue to build a sustainable solar industry into the long term."

Mind you, the other climate change measures announced in the budget weren't terribly inspiring... my guess is it'll be another year, the post-Garnaut budget, before we know whether the promised leadership will be delivered. Let's keep up the pressure.

"Obscene" profiteering causing global starvation

Please take a few minutes - right now - to read Greenpa's post about the murderous impact of food market speculation on the world's poor and needy, and follow it up with an action.

I'm going to write to my member of parliament.

Target, my arse!

I hope that subject line got your attention. Because that's exactly the strategy employed by our Prime Minister with his weekend announcement of a "National Clean Energy Target". Hopefully I've got something more useful to say than he does.

The more astute reader may have already picked up on my subtle hints and started to suspect that I'm not particularly impressed with Mr Howard's efforts in the area of clean energy. But for the sake of not being an arse myself I'll make the majority of this post as objective and even-handed as I can, starting... now.

There are three major aspects to the announcement: the what, the how and the when.

What: 30,000 gigawatt hours of energy per year. It sure sounds like a lot (it's meant to) but it's a funny way of putting things. Since one year has around 8,760 hours in it we can convert it to a measure representing the average instantaneous rate of power generation. Dividing 30,000 by 8,760 gives a smidge over 3.4. That's 3.4 gigawatts. To put that into perspective, Tarong power station in South-East Queensland has a generating capacity of 1.4 gigawatts, so we're talking about just under two and a half Tarongs worth of energy. I've loaned my copy of Mark Diesendorf's book to a friend so I can't look up what fraction of Australia's total present energy generation that is but my initial estimate would be "not much". To be fair, increasing our total renewable energy capacity to this level would be a significant step forward, but see the next paragraph.

How: This is not a "renewable" energy target or even a "sustainable" energy target. This is an allegedly "clean" energy target which refers to "technologies that emit less than 200 kilograms of greenhouse gases per megawatt of electricity generated", explicitly including coal-fired systems with carbon capture and presumably including uranium-based nuclear plants. There's a serious omission in that definition, which is the amount of time over which those emissions will be measured. Multiplying 200kg/MW by 3.4GW gives 680 tonnes. But is that 680 tonnes per year? That would be quite impressive actually, but it could well mean 680 tonnes per HOUR. Regardless, it appears to be a business-as-usual approach from a government which has pledged its support for the coal and nuclear industries, declared its faith in the gospel of carbon capture and storage and demonstrated its disinterest truly clean, renewable, sustainable energy sources.

It must also be pointed out that this scheme is intended to replace all the existing state-based schemes and coalesce them into a national one. There could be some real advantages from an administrative and economic perspective in doing this. But whereas the existing schemes are largely being implemented using true renewables this new arrangement seeks to bring coal and possibly uranium-based nuclear energy under the same umbrella.

When: Mr Howard's announcement sets the year 2020 as the goal for implementing this scheme. That much at least is clear and unambiguous. But if 3.4GW is only a small fraction of today's consumption, it'll likely be a much smaller fraction in twelve years time unless dramatic action on energy-efficiency is taken between now and then.

In the end this policy has the appearance of a misleading pre-election publicity grab designed to give the marginally-concerned majority the impression that the Liberals are being proactive about addressing climate change and sustainability, when all they actually intend to do is sweep the carbon under the rug and rush to build uranium-based nuclear plants as soon as they possibly can.