The budget should have been a road to Australia’s low-emissions future. Instead, it’s a flight of fancy

Shutterstock

John Quiggin, The University of QueenslandLooking at other nations around the world, the path to cutting greenhouse gas emissions seems clear.

First, develop wind and solar energy and battery storage to replace coal- and gas-fired electricity. Then, replace petrol and diesel cars with electric vehicles running off carbon-free sources. Finally, replace traditionally made steel, cement and other industries with low-carbon alternatives.

In this global context, the climate policies announced in Tuesday’s federal budget are a long-odds bet on a radically different approach. In place of the approaches adopted elsewhere, the Morrison government is betting heavily on alternatives that have failed previous tests, such as carbon capture and storage. And it’s blatantly ignoring internationally proven technology, such as electric vehicles.

The government could have followed the lead of our international peers and backed Australia’s clean energy sector to create jobs and stimulate the post-pandemic economy. Instead, it’s sending the nation on a fool’s errand.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, left, and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg should have used the budget to create jobs in the clean economy.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

Carbon-capture folly

The Morrison government is taking a “technology, not taxes” approach to emissions reduction. Rather than adopt a policy such as a carbon price – broadly considered the most effective and efficient way to cut emissions – the government has instead pinned its hopes on a low-emissions technology plan.

That means increased public spending on research and development, to accelerate the commercialisation of low emissions technologies. The problems with this approach are most obvious in relation to carbon capture and storage (CCS).

The budget contains A$263.7 million to fund new carbon capture and storage projects. This technology promises to capture some – but to date, not all – carbon dioxide at the point of emission, and then inject it underground. It would allow continued fossil fuel use with fewer emissions, but the process is complex and expensive.

In fact, recent research found of 39 carbon-capture projects examined in the United States, more than 80% ended in failure.

---

Read more:
The 1.5℃ global warming limit is not impossible – but without political action it soon will be

---

The government’s CCS funding is focused on capturing CO₂ from gas projects. This is despite the disappointing experience of Australia’s only CCS project so far, Chevron’s Gorgon gas field off Western Australia.

Some 80% of emissions from the operation were meant to be captured from 2016. But the process was delayed for three years, allowing millions of tonnes of CO₂ to enter the atmosphere. As of January this year, the project was still facing technical issues.

CCS from gas will be expensive even if it can be made to work. Santos, which has proposed a CCS project at its Moomba gas plant in South Australia, suggests a cost of $A30 per tonne of CO₂ captured.

This money would need to come from the government’s Climate Solutions Fund, currently allocated about A$2 billion over four years. If Moomba’s projected emissions reduction of 20 million tonnes a year were realised, this project alone would exhaust the fund.

Plans to capture carbon from Chevron’s Gorgon gas project have not gone to plan.
Chevron Australia

What about electric vehicles?

There is a striking contrast between the Morrison government’s enthusiasm for carbon capture, and its neglect of electric vehicles.

It ought to be obvious that if Australia is to achieve a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 – which Treasurer Josh Frydenberg this week reiterated was his government’s preference – the road transport sector must be decarbonised by then.

The average age of Australian cars is about 10 years. This implies, given fairly steady sales, an average lifespan of 20 years. This in turn implies most petrol or diesel vehicles sold after 2030 will have to be taken off the road before the end of their useful life.

In any case, such vehicles will probably be very difficult to buy within 15 years. Manufacturers including General Motors and Volvo have announced plans to stop selling petrol and diesel vehicles by 2035 or earlier.

But the Morrison government has ruled out consumer incentives to encourage electric vehicle uptake – a policy at odds with many other nations, including the US.

---

Read more:
The US jumps on board the electric vehicle revolution, leaving Australia in the dust

---

Despite the “technology, not taxes” mantra, this week’s federal budget ignored electric vehicles. This includes a A$10 billion infrastructure spend which did not include charging stations as part of highway upgrades.

Unless the government takes action soon, Australian motorists will be faced with the choice between a limited range of second-rate petrol and diesel vehicles, or electric vehicles for which key infrastructure is missing.

It’s hard to work out why the government is so resistant to doing anything to help electric vehicles. Public support appears strong. There are no domestic carmakers left to protect.

The car retail industry is generally unenthusiastic about electric vehicles. Its business model is built on combining competitive sticker prices with a high-margin service and repair business, and electric vehicles don’t fit this model.

At the moment (although not for much longer), electric vehicles are more expensive than traditional cars to buy upfront. But they are cheaper to run and service.

There are fears of job losses in car maintenance as electric vehicle uptake increases. However, car dealers have adjusted to change in the past, and can do so in future.

The budget ignored electric vehicles.
Shutterstock

Wishful thinking

The Morrison government is still edging towards announcing a 2050 net-zero target in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow this November. But as Prime Minister Scott Morrison himself has emphasised, there’s no point having a target without a strategy to get there.

Yet at this stage, the government’ emissions reduction strategy looks more like wishful thinking than a road map.

---

Read more:
Australia’s states are forging ahead with ambitious emissions reductions. Imagine if they worked together

---

John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Advertisement

Despite major conservation efforts, populations of New Zealand’s iconic kiwi are more vulnerable than people realise

Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, CC BY-ND

Isabel Castro, Massey University

Kiwi are moved between populations to lower the risk of inbreeding.
Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust, CC BY-SA

Like many endangered species, Aotearoa’s flightless and nocturnal kiwi survive only in small, fragmented and isolated populations. This leads to inbreeding and, eventually, inbreeding depression — reduced survival and fertility of offspring.

Mixing kiwi from different populations seems a good idea to prevent such a fate. But translocating kiwi in an effort to mate birds that are not closely related can come with the opposite risk of outbreeding. This happens when genetically distant birds breed but produce chicks with lower fitness than either parent.

Translocations have been part of the kiwi conservation effort for decades. We also have many genetic studies of the five species of kiwi in New Zealand.

But our research, which synthesised available genetic studies, shows we don’t yet have enough genetic information to predict translocation outcomes and manage genetic diversity to achieve safe and sustainable conservation practices.

Kiwi are cherished by all cultures in New Zealand as a symbol of a unique natural heritage. For Māori, kiwi are a taonga (treasure) and of vital importance to hapū (sub-tribal groups) and iwi (tribes) across Aotearoa.

Our research is the culmination of more than two decades of close collaboration and inclusion of mātauranga Māori (traditional knowledge) to improve conservation outcomes — for mana tangata (people with authority over land), for kiwi and for other species across the globe.

---

Read more:
‘Revolutionary change’ needed to stop unprecedented global extinction crisis

---

Kiwi whakapapa under threat

Before humans arrived in Aotearoa, kiwi populations numbered around 12 million. They were dispersed across most of the country.

In the early 20th century, there were still millions of kiwi roaming the bush. But Pākehā settlers accelerated the destruction of New Zealand’s forests and introduced invasive predators, including stoats and ship rats, which are now a major threat, particularly to kiwi chicks.

Introduced predators, including stoats and rats, are a major threat to kiwi.
Shutterstock/Lakeview Images

Today there are fewer than 70,000 kiwi in the wild, and populations are declining in areas without predator control. The forests, wetlands and pastures where kiwi once lived have been milled, drained and ravaged by introduced browsers such as goats and deer.

Kiwi are also not immune to climate change, with worrying mortality events during recent severe droughts. In these new and changing conditions, kiwi face many challenges: new predators, new diseases, new seasonal events, new foods.

---

Read more:
Forensics and ship logs solve a 200-year mystery about where the first kiwi specimen was collected

---

Genetic diversity provides a buffer against such challenges and better chances of survival for a species. One way to maintain genetic diversity is through mating between individuals that are not closely related.

But most kiwi live in groups of fewer than 100 birds. We have confined them to pockets of favourable habitat. As a result of well-meant conservation management to protect the birds from mammalian predators, we have moved them to safe havens on offshore islands or patches of remnant forests that effectively function as “mainland islands”, cut off from other habitat.

Kiwi being released on an offshore island sanctuary.
Shutterstock/Naska Raspopina

Call for more genetic research

One way to avoid inbreeding depression is to mix individuals from distant populations that have different genes and could provide the basis for genetic rescue. But some are opposed to such mixing because it raises the risk of outbreeding depression, which is particularly high if the parental populations differ in their adaptations to their respective environments.

Kiwi populations have evolved to adapt to local conditions on timescales of tens of thousands of years. This means one population of the same species may have adapted in different ways to another. For example, populations of North Island brown kiwi (Apteryx mantelli) are found from the warm lowlands of Te Tai Tokerau/Northland to the sub-apline volcanic plateau near Mount Ruapehu.

kiwi Shaun lee.
Flickr/Shaun Lee, CC BY-SA

For decades the Department of Conservation (DOC) and community groups have been translocating kiwi all over Aotearoa. We need more gene sequencing research of such populations to investigate the effects of inbreeding and outbreeding.

Decision making in the absence of sufficient genetic information risks leading to management strategies that are inadequate or even harmful for future population sustainability.

Working with Māori

Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa, are kaitiaki (guardians) of the kiwi. Whakapapa, a key concept of relatedness in te ao Māori (Māori world view), means Māori culture has a deep understanding of ideas described in western science as genetic diversity, inbreeding and hybridisation.

But hapū and iwi are not always consulted about conservation interventions, even though their role as co-managers of taonga species is well established in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

In 2013, my research group teamed up with two hapū (Te Patukeha and Ngāti Kuta) to develop a management plan for the North Island brown kiwi in their area. A century of well-intentioned but somewhat random mixing of different North Island brown kiwi populations during translocations has effectively produced both “randomised experimental” and “control” groups.

Our team is now comparing the precise genetics of mixed-background birds currently thriving on Ponui Island in the Hauraki Gulf with the control populations in Te Tai Tokerau and Taranaki, from which the Ponui Island kiwi have been drawn.

We have also recruited support from other hapū and iwi in Tai Tokerau and have now started to analyse genetic information from several sites, using the latest techniques to investigate the genetic make-up of the birds. This research will shed new light on the effects of years of breeding in populations that started with kiwi from a single source versus those that started with mix-provenance birds.

We need to save North Island brown kiwi, but we need to do it properly. And when conservation efforts succeed, it would be far better if we knew why they worked. If we do this research right, the conservation management of other species will benefit, across Aotearoa and the world, at a time of an accelerating extinction crisis.

Isabel Castro, Associate Professor in Ecology and Zoology, Massey University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.