Tim Flannery says Australia is 'backing the wrong horse' in Galilee basin
|
Version 0 of 1. Former climate commissioner Tim Flannery says governments are “backing the wrong horse” in Queensland’s Galilee basin, as new reports cast doubt on the viability of Australia’s largest proposed coal fields. A report by Flannery’s Climate Council argues that a fast-changing world energy market, increasing risk aversion in financiers and the prospect of blowing the global “carbon budget” are increasing the chances that Galilee coal will never be dug up. It says “any new coalmine” such as those in the Galilee, which would create 1.3 times Australia’s annual carbon emissions, is “fundamentally at odds with protecting Australia from the impacts of climate change”. Related: Australia: The new coal frontier A separate report by the Centre for International Environmental Law (Ciel) in the US pointed to Galilee’s planned export hub, Abbot Point port, as an example of the failure of ratings agencies to safeguard investors by factoring in climate risks. The Ciel report says ratings agencies are repeating the mistakes of the global financial crisis by miscalculating climate factors that could leave investors exposed to “significant legal risk”. On Wednesday, Guardian Australia reported that Adani had suspended engineering work by four major contractors around its Carmichael mine in what sources claimed was the first sign of a retreat from the Galilee’s largest proposed project. Adani issued a statement on Wednesday saying it remained committed to the mine but was moving to “synchronise our budget, project timelines and spending” to accommodate delays in “a range of approvals”. Flannery told Guardian Australia the Climate Council report showed “the dangers of clinging to the old” and the Galilee coal “has to stay in the ground”. Related: Adani halts engineering work on controversial Carmichael mine – sources “For 10 years or more, myself and other people have been warning the world that this energy transition is happening, that Australia needs to back winners, that we need to make sure that we’re well-positioned to take advantage of the new energy economy that’s developing,” he said. “We really need now to aggressively go after the real resources in Queensland, which are the fabulous solar sources right across central Queensland, [and] the intellectual property resources at the University of Queensland, which are known around the world for what they do in this area.” The Ciel report found that ratings agencies “may be artificially inflating the credit ratings and financial value of companies that contribute to global warming” by failing to take account of a global commitment to limit average temperature rises to 2C. Agencies that assumed a business-as-usual approach to fossil fuels leading to a 4C rise themselves faced “potentially significant legal risk” as a result. Abbot Point, which was assessed by Moody’s rating agency, was a key example of “a potentially inflated credit rating”, according to the report. Ciel climate and energy director Niranjali Amerasinghe said overstated credit ratings threatened investors, markets and the global economy by encouraging “overinvestment in activities that cause climate change”. The Climate Council report said the Chinese market for thermal coal was drying up amid renewable investments and a push to cut 160 million tonnes in burned coal by 2020. It cited the 11 international banks that now refused to invest in the Galilee. It also cited the 100-plus coal-fired power stations that shut in the US in the last decade and a five-fold increase in global renewables investment in the same period, to the point where it now outstrips fossil fuel investment. The chief executive of the Queensland resources council, Michael Roche, said the report was mistaken in that coal demand would remain strong in China and India – and it was best if lower-emission Queensland coal fulfilled it. “If you keep the Galilee basin coal in the ground and the demand in India and China does not go away, guess what happens,” he told the ABC. “You use lower-quality coal form other parts of the world, such as Indonesia [and] the global carbon emissions … are made worse.” Flannery said the argument that Queensland “burns clean” was one that “I keep hearing”. “That may or may not be true – but the energy market is a generic market and renewables are just gaining traction day by day, year by year, while carbon capture and storage seems to be going very slowly,” he said. “I just don’t think those arguments are going to be sufficient to give coal a future.” |