Shorten: Coalition rightwingers forcing Australians to 'pledge loyalty' to coal

Extract from The Guardian

Opposition leader says ‘I don’t understand what happened to the Malcolm Turnbull of 2009’ and says country missing out on renewables opportunities'

Malcolm Turnbull has rejected the unilateral banning of coal exports, saying prospective buyers would simply look overseas for their energy requirements. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

Shalailah Medhora and Daniel Hurst

Tuesday 27 October 2015 16.03 AEDT

The right wing of the Coalition is forcing Australians to “pledge loyalty” to coal and in the process missing out on investment opportunities in renewable energy, the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said.

Shorten addressed reporters on Tuesday, explaining the constraints that the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was facing from the right of his own party.

“I think the right of Australian politics is taking the debate about our energy future down fairly sort of draconian paths where we’re demanding we’ve got to pledge loyalty to one form of energy hand over heart,” he said.

“I don’t understand what happened to the Malcolm Turnbull of 2009 who was willing to stake all on the principle of lowering carbon emissions, on having policies which were sensible on climate change.”

In an open letter, 61 prominent Australians called on world leaders to discuss halting of new coalmine projects and blocking the expansion of existing ones when they meet for a United Nations climate conference in Paris later this year.

Turnbull on Tuesday morning rejected the unilateral banning of coal exports, saying that prospective buyers would simply look further afield for their energy requirements.

Shorten warned that the ideological commitment to coal was impacting on the economy.

“I’m worried, as we have these left-right arguments about are you for coal or against coal, that we’re missing the investment opportunity,” he said.

But he would not commit to Labor abandoning non-renewables altogether.

“I don’t think it’s up to government to pick the winner and say that coal is bad,” Shorten said. “Labor doesn’t think that.”

Speaking in Canberra, Turnbull said a moratorium on Australian coal exports “would make not the blindest bit of difference to global emissions” because importers would buy it from elsewhere.

Turnbull said coal remained a significant part of the global energy mix and would be “an absolutely critical ingredient” in alleviating hunger and promoting prosperity around the world. This appeared to be an extension of the “moral case” for coal exports advocated by the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, and by the coal industry in support of increasing supply to developing markets such as India.

But the prime minister undercut that argument by conceding many people in developing countries were not on an electricity grid, and renewable energy sources such as solar could become more cost-effective in those circumstances.

“I don’t agree with the idea of a moratorium on exporting coal. With great respect to the people who advocated it, it would make not the blindest bit of difference to global emissions,” Turnbull said.

“If Australia stopped exporting coal, the countries to which we export it would buy it from somewhere else. So there is absolutely quite a lot of coal around ... so if Australia were to stop all of its coal exports it would not reduce global emissions one iota. In fact, arguably it would increase them because our coal, by and large, is cleaner than the coal in many other countries.

“With great respect to the motivations and the big hearts and the idealism of the people that advocate that, that is actually not a sensible policy from an economic point of view, a jobs point of view or frankly from a global warming or global emissions point of view.”

The Australian Conservation Foundation accused Turnbull of “resorting to the drug dealer’s defence” by arguing that someone else would supply the coal.

“Australia has a moral responsibility to help our developing neighbours leapfrog over dirty coal, straight to clean renewable energy,” said the foundation’s chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy.

The Australia Institute, which helped organise Tuesday’s open letter, suggested Turnbull had ignored the substance of the proposal by focusing on Australian exports. The open letter called for world leaders to negotiate a moratorium on new coalmines and coalmine expansions, and referred to a similar call by the president of Kiribati, Anote Tong.

“Malcolm Turnbull should take the time to read the letter from President Tong – it is not a call for an export ban, but a considered call for a global moratorium on new coalmines,” said Ben Oquist, the executive director of the Australia Institute.

“This is an entirely sensible move both environmentally and economically. Now is the time to pick up the phone to President Tong to discuss how Australia can be a leader in the climate debate.”

Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters said Turnbull was “using rhetoric to juggle the wishes of the climate dinosaurs in his party against the overwhelming community support for climate action”.

“Australians deserve more than a prime minister who sidesteps questions about our future and that of our children and our Pacific neighbours,” she said. “Coal must not be treated as the elephant in the room at the climate talks.”

Turnbull was addressing the media as he confirmed the appointment of Dr Alan Finkel, the outgoing chancellor of Monash University, as Australia’s next chief scientist. Finkel, an engineer, has previously called for a debate about nuclear electricity generation in Australia as part of efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

The media conference was dominated by questions about Australia’s response to climate change as world leaders prepare to meet in Paris to discuss post-2020 emission reduction targets.

Finkel said his vision was “for a country, society, a world where we don’t use any coal, oil or natural gas because we have zero-emissions electricity in huge abundance and we use that for transport, for heating and for all the things we ordinary use electricity”.

“But you can’t get there overnight, so what we need to do is optimise the technology so that with we can cost-effectively introduce alternatives,” Finkel said.

“The best way to get rid of coal is to introduce alternatives that deliver value at a reasonable price rather than just arbitrarily turning it off.”

Turnbull said coal was likely to remain a very large part of the global energy mix “for a very long time” and he cited “energy poverty” as a major limit on achieving the development goals of alleviating hunger and promoting prosperity around the world.

“Coal is going to play a big part in that,” he said. “Having said that, the pace of technological development in the renewable space has been extraordinary.”

Turnbull singled out the improvement in battery storage for solar power as “a big game-changer” and described the energy field as “very disruptive, very disrupted”.

“Solar panels and batteries in an Australian household context at the moment are probably not in most cases competitive with the price of grid-delivered power,” he said.

“However, if you are in a remote community, or if you are in a community in a developing country where there is no electricity grid, and the alternative is generating power by burning diesel, then solar panels and some batteries, if the efficiency of the panels is improved and the price and efficiency of the batteries has come down could actually be and very often is much more cost-effective.

“So it’s horses for courses. It is important to take the ideology out of this and just approach it in a very clear-eyed, cool-headed rational way.”

Supporters of Adani’s $16bn Carmichael coalmine and rail proposal for central Queensland, which was re-approved by the federal government this month, have argued it would help lift millions of Indians out of energy poverty. But analysts have disputed the claimed benefits on the basis that many remote villages are beyond the reach of the electricity grid.

Finkel, whose appointment begins in January upon the expiry of Professor Ian Chubb’s five-year term, would not give an opinion about the adequacy of the government’s 2030 target of reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions to 26%-28% below 2005 levels. He said he would “need time to engage on that”.

But Finkel vowed to provide the government with evidence-based advice and was “absolutely confident” that he would have a receptive audience.

In broader remarks, Turnbull and the science minister, Christopher Pyne, praised Finkel for his personal experience as an entrepreneur translating research into commercial products, saying he was well-suited to improve collaboration between universities, research centres and business.

Turnbull, who lost the Liberal leadership in 2009 after an internal backlash against his support for an emissions trading scheme, has promised his colleagues that he will stick with the Coalition’s “Direct Action” climate policies, although he has left the door open to considering changes in 2017 when a review of the safeguards mechanism is due. Turnbull is planning to attend the climate talks in Paris in December.