Greg Hunt grapples with tricky balancing act

 

 

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 few weeks into Malcolm Turnbull’s ascension to Prime Minister and it is apparent that Environment Minister Greg Hunt is grappling with a tricky balancing act between his desire to leave a positive mark on climate change policy with a supportive Prime Minister, and not getting the conservatives within his own party and on the Senate cross-bench off side.
 

In an interview on ABC Radio National’s Breakfast program this morning, when asked yet again whether the government had dropped its plans to abolish the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Hunt’s response was that its “long-term position” was the same.
 

Greg Hunt.

Now, in a literal sense, that sounds like ‘yes we still intend to abolish them’, but what’s meant by tacking on the phrase, ‘long-term’?
 

Well I’d suggest it’s probably similar to the sentiment of economist John Maynard Keynes when he wryly noted in the long run we are all dead.
 

Hunt’s line is that given the Senate won’t let the government abolish ARENA or the CEFC, he will instead “work with them” up until the election to make sure they are spending taxpayers money wisely and in co-ordination with the government’s Emission Reduction Fund and Renewable Energy Target. 


As part of this these bodies will be wrapped under an apparently new division Hunt has titled the ‘Office of Climate Change and Renewables Innovation’.  The message to his conservative colleagues is this is all about Hunt keeping a close eye on these institutions to get value for taxpayers’ money. He’s not absolutely celebrating that he can finally dump the ideological and deeply unpopular Tony Abbott-led jihad against renewable energy.
 

But there’s nothing changing here except some shuffling of the deck chairs. ARENA and the CEFC already work closely together and in many respects their work is heavily dependent on linking in to the Renewable Energy Target and to a lesser extent the Emission Reduction Fund.  Climate Spectator regularly speaks with organisations engaged across all of these funding mechanisms and never once have they complained about a lack of co-ordination.
 

It’s very obvious Hunt is keen to bask in the reflected glow of the projects that both ARENA and the CEFC will fund.  With these institutions he finally has a means to provide concrete demonstration to the average punter that he’s doing something to clean up the environment that they can immediately grasp. In the interview with ABC’s Fran Kelly, his dismissive talk of ARENA being responsible for a failed Solar Flagship program was gone (which they weren’t actually responsible for). In its place he told Kelly of how they were doing wonderful things such as the Weipa Rio Tinto solar farm that commenced operation today, and would also be supporting battery storage which, according to Hunt, will achieve amazing things.
 

It looks an awful lot more impressive to punters than what he’s managed with the Emission Reduction Fund. A huge gleaming field of solar panels displacing diesel fuel is rather more impressive than handing money over for a ten-year-old internal combustion engine with a smokestack to keep on burning gas from a rubbish dump, or handing cash to a farmer just for him promising not to cut down dry scrub in western NSW, which isn’t of much value for farming anyway.
 

So what of the Government’s ban on the CEFC lending money to wind farms and rooftop solar?
 

Again Hunt was treading carefully so as not to upset the cross bench senators who contend wind turbines emit a mysterious sound you can’t hear that elicits an array of medical illnesses that medical authorities are too dumb or corrupt to identify.
 

According to Hunt there is not a “blanket ban” on the CEFC financing any technology such as wind farms.  Rather that they should try to focus on emerging technologies, including solar (no talk of avoiding rooftop solar, I might add) and in the case of wind perhaps this might mean new turbines or offshore wind.  Now, as pointed out in the article, Board of Clean Energy bank being told to break the law,  the CEFC would be unable to fulfil its obligations to make a sustainable financial return if it pulled out of rooftop solar and land-based conventional wind power.  Meanwhile, lending money to offshore wind – that’s pretty much a licence to lose money, as is geothermal, which Hunt also mentioned in his interview.
 

The CEFC, it appears, will need to play along with Hunt’s grand charade. It will of course want to be seen to be making an effort to support the technologies the conservatives like (the ones that aren’t doing much to displace fossil fuels or that their mates are involved in), such as large-scale solar and geothermal. Meanwhile, it will need to keep under the radar as it tries to finance renewable energy projects and technologies that have some reasonable hope of significantly scaling, while paying back their loans. Alternatively, it might seek to tack on token sub-components to wind and rooftop solar projects to give them the appearance of involving ‘emerging technologies’.

 

Read the Tristan Edis story on the ClimateSpectator - “ARENA and CEFC are now part of Hunt's delicate dance with conservatives.”