The Coalition has been in power for way too long for the health Australian energy security and the planet.
Since Tony Abbott was elected PM in 2013, successive Colation governments have launched a war on energy policy so extreme that it is a wonder that Australia can keep the lights on at all.
It began with the Abottalypse who dismantled Australia’s elegant, world-beating carbon price. The Gillard Government policy was a relative pricing mechanism that charged polluters for polluting and cost households and businesses nothing via revenue that was recycled as tax cuts.
All it did was make dirty power more expensive and clean power less so via a market mechanism. By doing so it picked no winners or losers, it just charged the polluters for what they were already doing, polluting, and it unleashed massive innovation in post-carbon technologies.
The supposedly market-friendly Coalition trashed this in favour of Tony Abbot’s “direct action” policy. Instead of polluters being charged for polluting, it taxed everybody else and paid the dividends to polluters to stop polluting.
It was half-arsed, picked winners and was much more expensive to everybody except the polluters but at least it diminished greenhouse gas output if applied vigilantly.
After Abbott, came the Turnbull Government. Our much-vaunted Malcolm presided over nothing. In the end, he proposed the perverse and tortuous NEG to get around the carbon pumpers in his own party but it was always doomed, and thank god for it, given it handed the power of carbon targets to the likes of climate skeptics One Nation.
Yet, all of this pales next to what has arrived this week with Scott Morrison:
Australian taxpayers will soon be helping to foot the bill for the emissions reduction efforts of one of the nation’s largest fossil fuel companies.
Santos Ltd. on Monday sanctioned the first carbon capture and storage project eligible for funding under a controversial change to a government program that pays companies to lower emissions. The move is another sign of the continued support for fossil fuels by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who later spoke at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, and whose proposals to reach net zero by 2050 have been widely criticized.
Accompanying ScoMo’s pork-barreled pledge for 2050 net-zero, he has launched the Coalition’s Carbon Corruption Tax. Taxpayers will now be directly taxed to pay for new and unproven carbon capture and storage experiments via gas robber baron Santos.
At this stage, the technology doesn’t work. Gorgon has spent $3bn proving that:
The operator of Australia’s only commercial-scale carbon capture and storage project has conceded the project has failed to meet its targets, and is now seeking a deal with Western Australian regulators on how to make up for millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide it failed to store.
On Monday, Chevron announced that it had finally succeeded in sequestering five million tonnes of carbon dioxide at its carbon capture and storage facility at the company’s Gorgon LNG plant.
While Chevron celebrated this as a “significant milestone” for the project, it falls well short of what was promised to regulators when the massive $70 billion LNG project was first announced in 2009.
The storage project is supposed to be capable of storing at least 80 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced by the Gorgon LNG facility, or around 4 million tonnes a year. The storage was one of the key conditions for state government approval.
Chevron is understood to have spent more than $3 billion building the carbon capture facility, but it took several years after the start of gas production for the Gorgon CCS project even to begin operation due to delays and technical difficulties. The first CO2 was injected into an undersea deposit in 2019.
The project encountered further difficulties after its commissioning, with sand clogging parts of the storage system and dramatically reducing the amount of carbon dioxide it was able to inject underground.
It is understood regulators may ask Chevron to offset the emissions it failed to store by purchasing offsets from either local or international carbon markets. If Chevron is made to buy Australian Carbon Credit Units, which currently trade at above $20 per tonne, the cost to the company could easily exceed $200 million.
But that is no barrier to ScoMo, the gaslighter-in-chief. He’s launched a Corruption Carbon Tax to give the money to the polluters so that they can game CCS failure at a profit.
Consider the policy progression over a decade then:
- Gillard: Free carbon price for everyone except polluters promotes all low-carbon technologies, including CCS, via competitive and objective market mechanisms.
- Abbott: Carbon tax charges households to shut down pollution.
- Turnbull: Nothing.
- Morrison: Carbon tax pays polluters to game pretense of decarbonisation.
Each stage is a reflection of the respective character of the PM and government of the time. Morrison is by far the worst: corruption masquerading as policy delivering worst-case outcomes for Australians.
It’s enough to shake your faith in your fellow man.
