It’s a rare reversal of fortune in Australia’s mediocre (on a good day) political journalism environment: Labor is being given preferential treatment by the media compared to Peter Dutton’s opposition, at least on one key issue.
The media are all over the Coalition’s increasingly shambolic “signature” nuclear policy, the release of which has now apparently been dragged forward after being pushed back, with one MP telling Nine’s journalists that “we will have to educate 26 million people”. Presumably because scores of economists, energy experts, investors, scientists and the CSIRO, not to mention the International Energy Agency, are all uneducated.
That media scrutiny is entirely appropriate — the Coalition is clumsily pushing rotten policy. Even The Australian, which has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for Dutton’s thought bubbles, had to describe yesterday’s CSIRO report as a “grim picture” for Dutton.
But how much scrutiny has Labor — which is actually in government, and in charge of doling out taxpayer money — attracted from the media with its equally irrational commitment to expanding the role of gas in Australia’s energy economy and funding carbon capture and storage (CCS)?
Not merely has Labor committed in its gas strategy to fund carbon capture as a purported means of reducing CO2 emissions from gas, it proposes Australia take CO2 from other countries and store it underground as well. While there’s some justice in other countries dumping their CO2 back on us given we’ve exported so much of it to the world, it effectively means that we’re not merely pretending that carbon capture is a solution to our own reliance on fossil fuels, we’ll be peddling it to other countries.
Unlike Dutton’s nuclear power technology, carbon capture doesn’t work. Beyond the ongoing embarrassment of Chevron’s Gorgon project in Western Australia, in early May, a major Canadian CCS project was abandoned as not economically feasible — primarily because the Canadian government refused to give even more handouts to the project (there’s a list of abandoned CCS projects here).
Meanwhile another CCS project in Canada was revealed to be capturing far less than its promised 90% of coal-fired power emissions. In April an Illinois CCS project was shown to be capturing just a small fraction of emissions. The growing use of pipelines to move CO2 for CCS in the United States is also — inevitably — leading to potentially fatal CO2 leaks in communities.
But Labor is throwing money at CCS — not just the “$15 million Carbon Capture Technologies Program” spruiked in the gas strategy, but its half-billion funding to Geoscience Australia to map fossil fuel deposits and potential CO2 storage sites for industry — for free. Bizarrely, only Crikey has pointed out that this is a staggering handover of taxpayer-funded intellectual property to the fossil fuel industry for nothing in return — the sort of largesse that usually invites scrutiny from economists and commentators in journals like the Financial Review.
That’s of a piece with the broader media coverage of Labor’s commitment to carbon capture as a core part of its fossil fuel revival strategy. Only Guardian Australia has called bullshit on CCS and the nonsense used to justify it. While the Coalition’s nuclear policy has been pulled apart from all directions, Labor has sailed through without scrutiny.
That could have changed yesterday with the CSIRO Gencost report that received extensive coverage right across the corporate media. While all outlets covered what bad news it was for Dutton, in a key graph in the executive summary (so journalists didn’t have to go far to find it) the CSIRO showed what bad news Labor’s gas and carbon capture strategy is for consumers.
It concludes that while small modular reactors — which don’t actually exist yet — are by far the most expensive form of energy for consumers, second most expensive is black coal with CCS and third is gas with CCS. All journalists had to do was look a little to the left to see how expensive Labor’s strategy is going to be.
Why? It’s possible journalists are on a slow learning curve about energy costs. At Crikey we’ve been pointing out how absurdly expensive and delay-prone nuclear power is for 15 years, while that penny has only dropped for many in the corporate media in the past six months. Perhaps, just as the repeated abandonment and endless delays of many nuclear power projects eventually piled high enough for journalists to notice, the ever-lengthening list of failed CCS projects will one day catch their attention.
Or perhaps it’s simply that Labor gets a pass on climate policy, whereas everyone knows the Coalition is surgically attached to fossil fuels. It turns out there’s no difference between them except in their choice of unviable technologies.
Are you happy with Labor’s climate policies? Should the media be giving the government’s plans more scrutiny? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
