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.
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| 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’.
