GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS — BROWSE TO NORTH WEST SHELF PROJECT

HON ALISON XAMON (North Metropolitan) [1.11 pm]: I move —

That this house —

(a)  notes that the greenhouse gas emissions of the proposed Browse Basin and Burrup Hub LNG development will be several times the amount produced by the proposed Adani mine and will become Australia’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions;

(b)  notes that this development, should it go ahead, will actively undermine Australia’s ability to meet its global commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the effects of climate change; and

(c)  recognises that on balance the cumulative impact on the environment is simply too great to justify proceeding and calls on the government to instead prioritise the creation and retention of ongoing jobs in clean and renewable energy industries.

By way of introduction, I want to state from the outset that I recognise that this is not a motion that will be considered valuable by anyone in this chamber who is a climate change denier—I think that they are a real minority—or thinks that climate change is not caused by human activity. I believe that the vast majority of people within this chamber are concerned about climate change and want to come up with solutions to address climate change, but the reality is that the challenge is enormous, wicked and extraordinarily difficult to tackle. It is difficult for us to tackle it at a state, national and indeed international level, but I believe the issue is so serious that we have an obligation to try to be on the right side of history on this one and to do all that we can in our part of the world to try to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The last time the Earth was two degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels was several hundred thousand years ago. We are on track to get substantially warmer than that and, unfortunately, within the next couple of decades. That means there is the risk of setting off feedback loops that will accelerate and enhance the warming. I will not talk about all the impacts that climate change will bring, because members have heard that ad infinitum and should be across the general risks.

The last time I spoke about climate in this place, I referred to the global carbon budget. I gave the figures that we need to achieve globally in order to have a chance of at least keeping it at, or even under, our warming targets.

Under the Paris Agreement target, we will increase our carbon output and put the world on track for more than two degrees of warming. Unfortunately, Australia is tracking terribly against what was already a very generous carbon budget for Paris. Claims that we are doing well are relying, unfortunately, on quite dodgy accounting and transferring of land use, land use change and forestry credits from Kyoto 1 to meet the Paris target. Once we take that out, we are way over our carbon budget, and we will continue to be way over our carbon budget for the foreseeable future.

In terms of dealing with LNG within Western Australia, which is the basis for this particular motion today, for the last three years Australia’s actual emissions have been going up. Very simply, the LNG industry has been the cause of that increase. The LNG industry in Western Australia is responsible for 36 per cent of our state’s emissions. If the full Burrup hub expansion goes ahead, including Scarborough and Browse, we are looking at just this area within Western Australia producing 47 per cent of WA’s greenhouse gas emissions. To put that in some sort of perspective nationally, that is eight per cent of Australia’s total emissions. The Adani Carmichael mine does not even come close to that—the expected annual combined scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions are less than half that of the Burrup hub. Therefore, although AGL Energy’s combined energy production portfolio currently tops the list of scope 1 emissions, it does have concrete plans to reduce its emissions by almost one quarter over the next four years. That will leave the Burrup hub as the undisputed heavyweight emitter within Australia. Members, I do not think this is something that we want to be a part of or should be looking to be a part of.

Both Woodside and Chevron talk about how these projects will continue to export LNG beyond 2070. I note that that is well beyond the stated 2050 target for carbon neutrality. I remind people that 2050 for carbon neutrality is an extremely soft target, particularly when we look at the rate at which climate change is expanding and the degree of the crisis that we are facing. Frankly, even a date of 2050 for carbon neutrality means that we will not meet the need to stay below that critical two degrees of warming.

The concern that the Greens have, the concern that I have and the concern that increasingly the environment movement has is that we cannot afford to allow these projects to expand, and we cannot continue to approve these new projects. We just cannot afford it. The carbon budget simply does not allow it. We are able to look at saying no to these expansions. In February 2018, the New South Wales Land and Environment Court refused the proposed Rocky Hill coal mine. The Chief Judge of the court, Brian Preston, explicitly referred to climate change and the scope 3 emissions of the coal extracted by the mine as the reasons for refusing that application. We do not have to accept the expansion of what is a greenhouse gas–polluting industry.

It is really important that in this place we are mindful of who bears the cost of the expansion of the LNG industry. If Western Australia were to reduce emissions by only 26 per cent from 2005 levels, which is the Paris Agreement target for Australia for 2030, the full Burrup hub project then would account for over 90 per cent of Western Australia’s emissions allowance. This means that every single other sector of the economy would need to cut its emissions by 90 per cent. That does not strike me as a fair arrangement. As it stands, Australia is committed to a five per cent reduction on 2005 levels by 2020. These current projects, with their current emissions, have on their own led to a nearly five per cent increase in Australia’s 2005 emissions levels. The proposed expansion would take that to an eight per cent increase over 2005 levels.

I do not need to point out that this is entirely the wrong direction we need to be taking. It is utterly unreasonable to expect Western Australians to effectively be responsible for subsidising the carbon emissions for these projects at all, let alone to the extent that I have just described would be necessary to meet our Paris targets, while at the same time bearing the impacts of climate change in our agricultural lands, forests, water supplies and health system. I note that the Department of Health is undertaking its first public health inquiry into the impacts that climate change will have on mental health and health, precisely because it is recognised that there will be impacts, even as it stands. All the while, as if to rub salt into the wound, we will be receiving no royalties to assist those people who will be most impacted by climate change. The Western Australian Council of Social Service—in fact, all the councils of social service around Australia—have produced some very important data pointing out that people from low socioeconomic areas will be most adversely impacted by the effects of climate change.

I note that this government is very committed to expanding the LNG industry. It has been out on the world stage actively pursuing an LNG future for Western Australia. We have seen the government budget $10 million over 10 years to assist in the creation of that LNG futures facility. I am concerned that policy settings are locking us into a warmer climate—that is what they are doing—and offering very little money back to government in the process, and are actually directly and indirectly employing relatively few people. I will refer more to that in a moment. This is terrible decision-making and public policy. It is important to look at the issue of jobs, because much is made of how many jobs will be created as a result of the expansion of the LNG industry. However, it affects only a relatively small number of people, particularly when we look at lost opportunities for other areas of job creation, which I will speak about in a moment. At the moment, Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that 14 700 people are employed in the oil and gas industry in Western Australia. To put that into some sort of perspective, McDonald’s employs 8 405 people. Even the Department of Health employs 35 000 people, and the Department of Education employs over 39 000 people. Those are the sorts of employment figures we are talking about. I recognise that they are real people with real jobs, but I am suggesting that people with the same skill set should be able to look at other employment opportunities that will have a far greater benefit for the state from both a financial perspective and, most importantly, a mitigation of climate change perspective.

Ultimately, there are no redeeming features of putting all our energy into trying to expand the LNG industry, particularly to the extent that is being proposed. Even if we accept—and I do not—the argument that WA LNG is replacing coal burnt overseas, this has been demonstrated time and again to not be the case. The concern is that by continuing to pump out LNG, it is being burnt in addition to coal, and to the exclusion of pursuing renewable energy opportunities, so that argument does not stack up. We need to remember that LNG produced here and burnt overseas will still have an impact on us as a planet. What happens in other countries will impact just as much here. I recognise, of course, that there are construction jobs initially in establishing LNG, but that is a relatively short time frame in the overall lifespan of LNG production. There are also construction jobs in transforming our energy infrastructure to 100 per cent renewables. It does not have to be an either/or scenario. We do not have to look at LNG as though it is the only way we can produce jobs, because there are also jobs in renewables. We already know that 100 per cent renewables is completely possible—it is.

The Premier has spoken about the possible creation of 1 400 jobs, but we know that simply requiring offsets for these existing last projects will open the door to around 4 000 jobs. That is where the jobs lie. That is where the opportunity lies, and without the overall cost to the planet and the community. The sorts of numbers we are talking about are roughly the current employment numbers for the whole of Woodside just in offsets. Other modelling predicts that there will be more than 10 000 jobs for renewables in WA, if we ever decide to get very serious about transitioning. The Premier’s best case scenario for the Scarborough field is almost 600 ongoing operational jobs and 3 200 in the construction phase. I certainly recognise that for the next five years or so, we are talking about a huge number of jobs, but I am also saying that after that, the number of jobs will decrease quite significantly and those jobs could be found elsewhere in other industries.

I am also really concerned that there is effectively no financial benefit to Western Australia. There is no financial argument to be made in favour of pushing this industry, particularly if we are looking at doing it at the expense of others, with no requirement for proper offsets. We are talking about years of corporate tax dodgers and some pretty sweet deals that let them get away with not paying royalties and having no real requirement to offset their pollution. It is, therefore, really hard to see where the benefit will be for WA as a state. There is certainly not enough to justify selling out the rest of the state and the rest of the world when it comes to climate impacts. It just does not justify it. If it were not such a serious issue for Western Australia and the world, I think it would be almost comical.

Renewables are here. We have already seen the crossover in which a number of different renewable electricity generation options are as cheap as, or cheaper than, building new gas operations. I refer to the really good work being done by Sustainable Energy Now WA, which is made up of experts in this area. It has demonstrated how we in WA can switch to 100 per cent renewables. It has mapped out what that looks like. We are seeing Australia’s biggest energy supplier planning to significantly reduce its carbon emissions by transitioning to a mix that includes a lot of renewables.

One of the other issues I want to raise is the increasing concern—we are starting to see the basis for concerns around this globally also—about what may be effectively the creation of stranded assets. It takes decades for these large installations to pay back their investment costs. For the reasons I have already given, we do not have those decades available to enable us to recoup those costs, especially if we are serious about dealing with climate change, particularly the Paris targets. The Global Energy Monitor has estimated that up to $US1.3 trillion in proposed LNG import–export facilities are at risk of becoming stranded around the world. As a state, we do not need to be cleaning up billions of dollars’ worth of stranded LNG assets on the Burrup Peninsula and off the North West Shelf in 20 years. That is before I even start talking about the intrinsic value of the Burrup itself. I will leave that to my colleague Hon Robin Chapple, who has been talking about this for a very long time.

The long-term contracts with gas companies will commit both them and their clients to not transition for decades. As I said, they are decades which we not only do not have, but also in which it is reasonable to expect that national regulation will start catching up with the science. It may not be there now, but it will be, and their clients will be forced to move away from fossil fuels.

The reality is that the policy framework in the future is not going to look like it does now. We have already seen it rapidly evolve in the last decade alone. We know that once these facilities are built and those billions of dollars of capital investment are made, those companies will seek to extract the resource and sell it as fast as they can. I think it is absolutely bewildering that the government would go to such lengths to encourage further significant expansion of an industry that we know locks us into a future that I think the majority of us here are united in wanting to avoid. I believe that the majority of people in this chamber ultimately want to do their part to offset a climate change disaster. At best, it is a dangerously cavalier disregard for the future and a complete lack of imagination and ambition for Western Australia; at worst, it is a series of deliberate choices being made for deliberately opaque reasons. I recognise that much money can be made in the short term, I recognise that jobs are easily able to be generated in the short term, but we have to take a long-term view to the expansion of this industry. For all the reasons that I have already articulated, I do not think that it is the horse that this government should back. We will find ourselves on the wrong side of history. Western Australia has the incredible luck of being gifted with everything in abundance that we need for clean energy. If we applied the same level of investment into clean energy offsets and decarbonising our economy as we are applying to LNG investments, not only would we be looking at a far better and cleaner future, but also it would make better economic sense in the long term.

The problem with locking us into these large polluting industries that have such a long lifespan is that it does not recognise that technology is changing rapidly. It is changing every single day. Even today I found a business article that outlines an energy start-up company that is backed by Bill Gates, and it is described as a “solar breakthrough”. It describes the capacity of one of our most polluting industries—for example, concrete—to potentially be put onto 100 per cent renewables. This sort of thing excites me. This sort of thing gives me hope and makes me think that although climate change is formidable, we do not have to feel as though all is lost, because I do not believe it. I believe there is a future there that we need to explore.

Comments and speeches from various members

The PRESIDENT: Order! I am going to interrupt that part of the debate and offer Hon Alison Xamon, as the mover of the motion, an opportunity to provide a reply for the last five minutes.

HON ALISON XAMON (North Metropolitan) [3.07 pm] — in reply: Thank you, Madam President. I thank members for their contributions, some of which were, of course, a bit more thoughtful than others. I want to respond to a few things that came up in the course of the debate. The Minister for Environment responded by rattling off a range of worthy initiatives that are currently being undertaken by government. The Greens of course take no issue with the list of initiatives that are occurring. They are positive. The problem is that they will not be enough to offset the sheer amount of carbon that will be produced by the expansion of the LNG industry. That, members, is the key here.

When I first started to look at the research, before I put forward this motion, I had hoped that I would be able to put forward a motion that would talk about all the opportunities around offsets, job creation and the sorts of things that I was going to suggest the government needed to initiate in order to fully offset the sort of expansion that we are looking at. But, unfortunately, the more I looked into it, the more apparent it became that over a 50-year life span, even if we go to the full extent of the offsets that are possible within this state—a huge number of offsets are available, and a huge number of jobs, as I said, can be produced by that—that still will not be sufficient to fully offset the amount of carbon that will be produced by the expansion of the LNG industry as it has now been proposed. Renewables have a huge role to play in the future, and there are job opportunities there. It is a desperate shame that they are not being grasped with the same fervour as the expansion of the LNG industry by this government. It is a mistake; it is short-sighted, and for a government that talks about jobs, there are jobs there, and that is where we need to be going.

I will just quickly address the old chestnut of nuclear power. I look forward to the ideologues who love nuclear power to bring that to the election, and for the Australian public to smack it away, as it will. There is no social licence for a filthy industry. There is still no actual strategy to deal with nuclear waste. We still do not have any scientific solution for that. Come back with a solution to the nuclear waste problem that is not just about burying it in traditional lands. Come up with a proper solution, and then let us have a bit of a discussion. Until then—no. Then there is the issue of population. The Greens have been talking about the footprint of individuals in the Western context around population for a long time.

A lot of stock was put on the Woodside report, initiated by Woodside, that was trying to make the case for why LNG is an important part of the future. I was also going to flag that there have been a lot of criticisms about that report, and I also note the work of the CSIRO, which is starting to talk about the gymnastics needed to justify LNG emissions. I encourage members to go away and do some research around that. The key thing here is that we need to stop talking about LNG as a transition fuel. We were talking about LNG as a transition fuel 15 years ago, and there was a sound argument to be made for that. However, it is not a transition fuel for the next 50 years. It is not a sound substitute for coal in the long term.

The minister talked about the Greens pouncing on one industry. I remind the minister that if the full Burrup hub expansion goes ahead, we are looking at just this area producing 47 per cent of Western Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, and eight per cent of Australia’s total emissions. That is why I am specifically talking about the LNG industry. The concern here is that we are not talking about a gradual process of transition away from LNG. We are not talking about using existing technologies to transition, although I do agree with that sentiment. We are talking about locking ourselves in, until 2070, to a very carbon-intensive industry. Western Australia has a responsibility in the global scheme of things, as does Australia, and it is important therefore that we address this.

I understand the attraction for government in the short term. There are jobs in construction, and potential ongoing jobs, but there is also a potential for jobs elsewhere. I am concerned with the petroleum resource rent tax, which is a pretty garbage tax. We do not even see the sort of money we should be getting for such a polluting industry. It is important that we revisit this.

Division

Question put and a division taken with the following result —

Ayes (4)

Hon Robin Chapple             Hon Tim Clifford             Hon Diane Evers             Hon Alison Xamon (Teller)

 

Noes (31)

Question thus negatived.

 

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