People are taking the power back from big business

(This is the transcript of a speech delivered by Senator Christine Milne to the National Press Club in Canberra on Thursday.)

I wanted to come here today, straight from a fantastic community forum to save the Renewable Energy Target in the electorate of Barton in South Western Sydney last night, and in the lead up to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Summit to be held in New York next week to say, the move is on. Vigorous, innovative, climate action. People taking back power is happening.

The event last night was full of families, mums and dads, plumbers, electricians who have seen the dollars and sense in renewable energy, a people’s power station in an electorate held by the Liberals with a margin of 0.3% or just 296 votes. Are you listening PM Abbott? The event in NY, the UN Summit is the global people’s power station, and all eyes will be on whether governments are up to delivering for the people and the Global Commons.

What is now blatantly obvious to everyone, except Prime Minister Abbott, is that climate change is not only real, it is accelerating. If there were an alert system for the threat global warming poses to our way of life, the alert meter would read ‘extreme’. Just because Tony Abbott and Clive Palmer have voted together to transfer the cost of pollution from the big polluters to the community, it hasn’t made the problem, global warming, go away.

If serious and rapid action is not taken, the world is on track for a temperature rise of more than 4 degrees, leaving us with an unliveable planet. The Chair of the IPCC Dr. Rajendra Pachauri has warned “We have assessed the impacts of climate change and not a single person on this planet will be untouched”.

The science has been laid down clearly for us. We have no excuses to offer future generations.

In Australia, we will be among the first and hardest hit. The intensity of extreme weather events is increasing. The frequency of record high temperatures since the 1950s has increased, while record lows have been decreasing. Last year was the hottest year ever with the hottest ever day averaged from the hundreds of weather stations across the country, coming in at 40.3 degrees.

We are already seeing our snow season shortened while our snow dumps have become smaller. Our heatwaves have lengthened and their frequency increased since the 1970s to the point that now heatwaves kill more people each year than the road toll. In the heatwave that preceded Black Saturday in 2009, 980 people died. 374 more people than the five year average of 606. In 2050, if we do not act now, extreme bushfire days in Australia will quadruple. Every extreme bushfire day we have now, multiply that by four.

Our ocean is becoming warmer and more acidic as it absorbs more greenhouse gases, so our coral population has declined by half in the Great Barrier Reef since the 1980s. This is in addition to the invasive crown of thorns star fish and the added stress of dumping dredge spoil and coal ships using it as a super highway.

Add to that extinction of Australian animals and plants and spread of invasive species. Already the white lemuroid possum is facing extinction, with only four of them left, and the koala is being wiped out in South West Queensland.

The area for transmission for vector-borne diseases such as dengue fever will spread south-wards from Far North Queensland down to Sydney, covering around 5 million Australian homes. Speaking of which, the Climate Council report released yesterday says that $200b worth of infrastructure including 250,000 homes are at risk from flooding and massive storm surge as a result of sea level rise.

Yet, in the face of all this, Prime Minister Abbott has thumbed his nose at the science and just abolished our price on pollution knowing full well it will increase greenhouse gas emissions. And it has. In the two months since the abolition of the carbon price, greenhouse gases in the electricity sector have increased by a million tonnes annualised. It is a climate crime.

Nowhere has the Abbott Government’s ideological attack on Australia’s clean energy future and global comparative advantage been more pointed than their attack on the carbon price, the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, energy efficiency opportunities and the Climate Change Authority. One after the other they have all been caught up in the Government’s ideological zeal to leg rope Australia to a fossil fuel intensive, dig it up, cut it down past, and catapult us into an uncertain future subject to more extreme weather events and increasing risk associated with a rust bucket economy, stranded assets and unattractive investment environment.

Well the Greens will stand up to this climate denialism and irresponsibility.

We stand with Ban Ki-moon and the hundreds of thousands of people mobilising on the streets of New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rio, Delhi and here in Melbourne this Sunday for a safe climate. People are mobilising to demonstrate to world leaders that they want action and won’t stand for more equivocation and lip service.

Their message is simple – “Action, Not Words – it’s time for Australia to put up, shut up or get out of the way of real climate action, to say no to new fossil fuel expansion and to protect and grow our renewable energy sector.”

Momentum is in the air.

Not only have we got the summit next week, but we have the G20 in Australia in November, then we have the UNFCCC meeting in Peru leading into the global negotiations in 2015 with a requirement for countries to put their pledges on the table by April next year. Let me tell you: the world is serious about getting to a global agreement and the ball is in Australia’s court as to whether we help or hinder that global effort.

People want their country leaders, to lead. People want innovation. People want a clean energy future. They want clean, cheap energy and clear air to breathe. People are waking up to the ideological scare campaign run by this government and their big business mates. The Budget has helped with that so that people now see that the Abbott Government is not governing for the common good or the Global Commons.

Our PM sees global security only in terms of military alliances and defence hardware while ignoring the alliances we will need in addressing the ongoing, direct and real threats of climate change. Isolation on this strategic front is a high risk, and

his credibility in global for a will be diminished as other world leaders, like President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron, take action.

In the Abbott Government’s first appearance in global climate negotiations in Warsaw late last year, it quickly became clear that Australia was now doing the bidding of its own coal export industry by obstructing progress and dissuading its trading partners to take tough action on climate.

If these are the marching orders PM Abbott is going to issue to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop for Ban Ki-moon’s Summit, or the climate talks in Lima, then it would be better for the planet and the negotiators if Australia stays home. I will be going to Lima and I will tell them that 71% of Australians think addressing climate change is important and that PM Abbott does not speak for us. I will tell our neighbours in the Pacific and the small island states that we will fight for them and not let them drown in rising sea waters.

The climate emergency is dire. The problem is immense. The world is acting and Australia is being driven backwards by our backward looking Prime Minister and by a political class that is content with 5% tokenism.

The Climate Change Authority has said that for Australia to carry its own global share, we should be responsible for only 1% of the world’s total greenhouse budget by 2050. This is the real budget emergency. That means we have 10 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent to emit until 2050. With business as usual, we will use up our national budget in 16 years.

The Climate Change Authority has plotted this trajectory required and said that our 2025 target, just 11 years away, has to be 30-40% below 2000 levels. This is so far away from the Liberals, Labor and Palmer 5% level of ambition that it is laughable. And the CCA is being conservative with that estimate. I believe that Australia should put on the table for the 2015 negotiations a trajectory of 40 to 60 per cent below 2000 levels by 2030 and net carbon zero by 2050. This is the reality of the task ahead. This is our climate reality. Doing what is necessary is not radical, it is prudent.

Australia has all the resources and talents necessary to transform our society to an innovative, jobs rich, clean energy future.

“We have never specified long range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to ensure their fulfilment” said JFK , we could do it with a clean energy future.

And if we did, it would be our entire nation that would benefit from the best possible positioning environmentally, socially, economically and diplomatically in a world rapidly shifting to a carbon constrained future.

Why wouldn’t we give it a go? As Ban Ki-moon has said “Instead of asking if we can afford to act, we should be asking what is stopping us, who is stopping us, and why?”

Who is stopping it and why? I’ll tell you. This Government is stopping us because it is governing for the big end of town.

I’m tired of hearing business leaders complaining that no one in politics has a vision for the country and that they are waiting.

In an oped for The Australian, Business Council of Australia head, Jennifer Westacott wrote

We need major political reform to break the stranglehold that the vested interests of the fossil fuel era have over the Government and the Labor Opposition. We have reached such an extreme position that a coal magnate has his own political party to vote down the carbon price and the mining tax.

How is it possible that mining and CSG companies which were corruptly granted approvals can still proceed with their mines and drill holes after the truth is revealed? How is it possible that a mining company like Whitehaven proposed a coal mine in an area of critically endangered vegetation and secured Federal approval with an offsets proposal that was not an offset and then escaped prosecution for providing misleading information? Meanwhile Jonathon Moylan faced the full force of the law.

The public won’t have any confidence in our federal parliament until there is reform of political donations and we put in place a national independent commission against corruption. We have to end the corrupting influence of the big end of town.

This is part of a multi-pronged attack coming on old king coal – the corrupting influence it has on politics is on the nose after being exposed in NSW ICAC, ordinary citizens are putting their money where their mouth is, divesting from old polluting fossil fuel industries, and the world is moving away from wanting to buy our coal.

Right around the country we are seeing examples of people standing up against big business, and taking the power back. The Uniting Church has voted to sell its investments in fossil fuels, following on from Sydney University, who last month issued an instruction to its Australian equities managers to make no further investments in the coal and consumable fuels subsector of the ASX.

The market challenge facing coal is that it is in structural decline from which it will never return to its previous highs. The sooner the Abbott Government realise this, the better we can plan for the future. But the Prime minister has said,

It’s particularly important that we do not demonise the coal industry and if there was one fundamental problem, above all else, with the carbon tax was that it said to our people, it said to the wider world, that a commodity which in many years is our biggest single export, somehow should be left in the ground and not sold. Well really and truly, I can think of few things more damaging to our future.

I can’t think of few things more damaging to our future than PM Abbott. The atmospheric reality is that two-thirds of the coal reserves currently held and on the books of mining companies cannot be sold in order to keep global warming at the internationally agreed level of two degrees. Yet these coal holdings are built into the value of each coal company. If we know that this value can never be realised, the true worth of coal companies looks greatly inflated.

Last month, in a review for their clients, investment giant Citi gave a time frame of around four years for the thermal coal price to rise up to that magic number of $100 per tonne that would make expansion of coal mining viable in Australia.

China drove last decade’s thermal coal investment boom but are making their new intentions clear with bans and caps on coal regularly popping up across major cities and regions. Japan, our biggest coal customer, is currently building 65 terawatts of solar power over the next two years – for perspective that is bigger than Australia’s entire grid.

The last remaining hope for coal’s growth is in India, where around 300 million people live without electricity. However, they just elected a pro-renewable Prime Minister and massively increased the tax on imported coal. The Renewable Energy Target is providing the coal industry with some stiff competition. The RET has been so successful at generating jobs, investment and feeding Australian’s enthusiasm for solar power and taking control of their energy bills that it is destroying the traditional business models of incumbent players in the electricity market. It is now on track to overshoot 20% and reach 26-28% of our electricity supply by 2020.

The hundreds of people who have turned out to community forums in Petrie, Eden Monaro and Barton have heard electricians, plumbers, installers, small business suppliers, and companies tell them about the 21,000 jobs and $20 billion of dollars in investment that has been the result of the renewable energy target and the Australian renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. There will be 18,400 more jobs created and $15bn more of investment if we keep the RET as it is.

We need to drive the Government harder on the suite of measures necessary to operationalise a 40-60% greenhouse gas emission reduction target by 2030.

While the price on carbon was critical in the Clean Energy Future package to bring down emissions in the electricity sector, it did not act alone. It was supported by other grants, legislation, regulation, and mechanisms like the RET, by ARENA and the CEFC and by the Energy Efficiency Opportunities. It was and remains critical as the market based mechanism to deliver an increasing emissions reduction target. But it would be a dreadful mistake to focus on it alone. It is a case of an ETS plus.

Talking about returning to an Emissions Trading Scheme as if it is the only thing we need to do and when we have it, the climate task will be done is wrong on two levels. First it assumes that an ETS by itself is all that is needed in responding to the climate emergency and secondly it has become so misunderstood that people think ETS is code for climate action, it is not.

The flashing lights issue is how much greenhouse gas do we have to remove, and what do we have to do, including an Emissions Trading Scheme to achieve it. Continuing to talk about “the price” as opposed to the level of Australia’s ambition is wrong. It is silly to hear Labor commit to an ETS and Clive Palmer to commit to an ETS without either of them saying what the emissions cap will be.

That we have got to this situation is a mistake that all of us in the climate and environment movement made. We focused all of our campaigning energies and all of the community’s engagement on having the price on pollution rather than on selling the vision for the future of the country that the suite of measures, including the price were delivering: R&D, new technologies, jobs, investment, clean energy, clean air, and an exciting future. It enabled the debate to be about a so called “tax” rather than the win-win of addressing climate change and a prosperous Australia post the boom.

But now, as our emissions continue to rise and the need to act grows more urgent by the minute, we must lead a multi-pronged response which not only brings down emissions but stops them being emitted in the first place. I mean coal.

Minister Macfarlane admitted recently that there is a surplus of 9000 megawatts of energy in the system. This is the equivalent of 9 coal fired power stations too many. If we were to regulate the emissions from coal fired power stations we could remove this excess capacity from the electricity market and make it more efficient. This should be a regulated phase out based on emissions intensity.

Now is the best opportunity we have to phase down coal fired power, without running any risk to energy security. It would be good for the climate, for people’s health, and for jobs, as a proposed plan to rehabilitate coal mines at Hazelwood in Victoria demonstrates.

All this brings me to Direct Action, the Government’s pathetic ill- defined excuse for climate action. Under the Carbon Farming Initiative Labor and the Greens created jobs for farmers, Aboriginal communities and landfill operators with more than 150 projects around Australia. The Abbott Government and Clive Palmer destroyed those jobs and investment by axing the carbon price.

The only way those jobs and ongoing climate emissions reductions can be rescued is for the Government to negotiate on putting some spine or rigour into Direct Action. Consistent with our view that all tools in the toolbox must be used to genuinely reduce emissions, the Greens are prepared to negotiate with the Government to knock Direct Action into shape, but only if it is not separated from the RET.

Destroying the RET and pretending Direct Action alone can work to bring down emissions will not cut it. Prime Minister Abbott must abandon his attack on the RET, if he wants the Australian Greens to consider Direct Action. Over to you PM. The RET is popular, it is bringing down emissions; creating jobs; attracting investment. It must not only be saved by the Senate it must be given certainty.

In conclusion, time and tide wait for no man. Time is running out and the rising seas are coming in. The tide of public opinion is behind strong action. The shift to renewables and away from fossil fuels is on. No new coal mines, no extensions of existing mines and no new coal export terminals.

It means no more CSG and no more pretence that gas is a transitional fuel. Australia must hit 100% renewables as soon as possible.

It means a federal independent commission against corruption so the revolving door of politics and business is jammed. The relationship between mining approvals and brown paper bags must be shattered. Winning on the climate depends on it.

It’s no longer a question of ‘if’ and ‘when’, it’s now a question of now or never. As Anne Frank said, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

The Australian Greens know what is at stake in facing global warming. We have the courage to say what needs to be said, and provide hope for our future, and the Government and those who support it, focus on the past and give people nothing but despair.

This weekend when citizens around the world take to the streets, the greens will be with them. The Abbott Government in Australian is the last stand of the vanquished. The temperature is rising.