Malcolm Turnbull's national energy guarantee plan masks a carbon price

The Turnbull government's new national energy guarantee could introduce a de facto carbon price, measuring the cost of emissions for the first time since the Abbott government scrapped the carbon tax in 2014.

Placing a price on carbon: One default outcome of a National Energy Guarantee.

The long-awaited energy plan, released by the government on Tuesday, requires electricity retailers to ensure improved reliability levels while also reducing carbon emissions in line with Australia's Paris Agreement commitments.

Buried in the detail of advice presented by the new Energy Security Board to state and federal governments is a mechanism to be added to the National Electricity Market in two stages in 2019 and 2020 that could produce a default carbon price.

"Some electricity retailers will not be able to meet the required emissions profile, while others will overachieve," it reads. "Therefore a secondary exchange will occur between retailers to balance their portfolios."

Read Peter Hannam’s story in the Melbourne Age - “Malcolm Turnbull's national energy guarantee plan masks a carbon price.”

Australia stock market resembles a carbon bomb waiting to explode

The Australian stock market resembles a carbon bomb waiting to go off, according to the findings of a new report measuring and comparing the level of embedded emissions and revenues derived from fossil fuels in the world’s top financial market indices.

According to the Carbon Scorecard report, published by the S&P Dow Jones Indices this week, the S&P/ASX All Australian 50 has the highest level of embedded emissions in proven and probable fossil fuel reserves and the greatest percentage of revenues derived from coal-based activities.

The findings make the Australian market – one of seven headline global indices in the S&P Global 1200, which captures approximately 70 per cent of global equity market capitalisation – the world’s “most exposed” to potential stranded assets, at a time when the rest of the world is rapidly shifting to a low-carbon economy.

As you can see in the chart below, the report analyses five measures of carbon: carbon footprint, fossil fuel reserve emissions (future emissions), coal revenue exposure (revenue from coal extraction or coal power generation), energy transition (transition to clean energy to gauge the International Energy Agency’s 2°C scenarios) and green-brown revenue share (clean energy activity versus carbon intensive activity).

Read the RenewEconomy story by Sophie Vorrath - “Australia stock market resembles a carbon bomb waiting to explode.”

A life loaded with contradictions

Life of the climate activist is loaded with contradictions.

Much of what they do is about helping people better understand the dynamics of our climate’s disruption and within that explain that effective mitigation of atmosphere damaging emissions arises from human behaviour.

That behaviour of the activist is strangely contradictory. Simply doing what they do is the behaviour of which they are critical.

Living and working within the modern living is energy intensive and to reach a point where a person’s life is effectively carbon-neutral, they are forced to become remote to the lifestyle they really want to change.

That person may live a wonderfully environmentally benign life, but buried in their bolthole, they have little influence on the wider society, except for a small circle of friends and acquaintances.

The idea that we should live the life we want to see others pursue is a wonderful ideal, but to live an absolutely carbon-neutral life could only be achieved by abandoning modern life completely.

Most climate scientists and other eager to broadcast their message far and wide employ the carbon-costly benefits of modern life to engage with others in the hope that humanity, generally, can reach some sort of conclusion about how the world can, and should approach this rapidly unfolding difficulty.

An ABC story headed: “Rocket blasts off with NASA satellite to help track climate change” tells of how NASA has launched a satellite to help with weather forecasting and tracking global climate change by measuring how much water is in the Earth's soil.

That in itself is a weird contradiction – everything about a rocket is energy-intensive from the embedded energy to the massive amounts of fossil fuels it takes to get the satellite into orbit.

So the contradiction dilemma continues – we know climate change is real,, we know is happening and we know it has the potential threaten life on earth, but yet a little like the Easter Islanders who built and worshipped the very idols whose creation threatened them, we continue to build and employ the technology and ideas that has taken us to where we are now.

It was Einstein who said something about insanity being found among those who used the same ideas repeatedly while expecting a different result. The technology that gave us rockets is what disrupted earth’s climate system and yet will still employ it as we search for answers.