“We haven’t been very good at doing it.” Garnaut says oligopolies in way of green superpower dreams

There’s no shortage of enthusiasm for Australia’s potential as a zero-carbon export superpower, but leading economist Ross Garnaut worries industry transformation is not happening fast enough.

“Knowledge of the opportunity has been expanding,” Professor Garnaut told the audience at Climate Action Week Sydney’s opening-day event.

“So far, we haven’t been very good at doing it.”

For a decade, the veteran climate and energy expert has been communicating his superpower vision involving leveraging Australia’s ample wind and solar resources to produce green metals, fertiliser and transport fuels for the world.

Interested parties include densely-populated, high-income Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea valuing the zero-carbon goods Australia could produce at low cost.

Even with broadening support for renewable energy-powered manufacturing and exports – including at the federal government level – progress had been slow, leading to “some disillusionment”.

Australia’s highly-concentrated economy and bureaucratic tendances were largely to blame, Prof Garnaut told the event, which organisers hope helps accelerate the transition to a net-zero future.

“The Australian economy is characterised by oligopolistic organisation, which makes it particularly resistant to innovation,” he said. 

“We’ve got to break through that and it will probably be new companies, companies that are currently unknown or small that do the innovating.”

“Very complicated and heavy-handed” bureaucratic processes to qualify for government support were another handbrake.

Ideally, there would be general incentives rewarding companies producing goods without emissions, he said.

“As soon as we’ve got one competitive, low-cost green iron example – and we can have them right now – then that busts the narrative that all this is for the distant future.”

Mission Possible Partnership director of industrial decarbonisation Rachel Howard said Australia was “punching above its weight” on proposed net-zero industrial plants, second only to the United States.

“Over 40 plants have been announced in Australia across materials and fuels,” she said. 

But numbers shrank significantly for projects marked with final investment decision. 

“We now need to look at how to get these projects from announced to bankable,” Ms Howard said.

Monday’s introductory session at the University of Technology Sydney will set the tone for 250-plus events scheduled across the city for its second Climate Action Week.

Speakers remarked on the urgency of the climate task following ex-tropical cyclone Alfred’s damaging rain and flooding, as well as the challenges of a shifting political climate in the US.

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation program director Jonathan Pershing, a former Special Envoy of Climate Change at the US Department of State, stressed his nation was not monolithic and many Americans supported climate action.

“This is a chapter, a rather difficult chapter, in an ongoing conversation,” he told the audience.

Mr Pershing said the pace of change enacted by the Trump administration was unprecedented but hoped for “a little bit more rationality” once additional layers of department and agency appointments had been made. 

“What (President Donald Trump has) got is a very thin layer across the top,” he said.

“And many of the decisions are actually being made in the White House and not with the benefit of the various departments and agencies that might take a look at the policy.”

Congress was another potential speed bump to the agenda, as were communities already objecting to diminished government services in national parks and elsewhere.

“These are the kinds of things that people are just now beginning to hear about, to understand how they affect them individually, and to react to.”

AAP