Matthew Wright from Beyond Zero Emissions was interviewed on 24 April 2007 by Elanor McInerney on Melbourne's 3CR Tuesday Breakfast show.

E: Yesterday John Howard said Australia was a minor emitter of greenhouse gases and could not influence the global climate by acting alone, in a speech in which he also rejected what he called Kevin Rudd's zealotry about the issue. Kevin Rudd has nominated signing the Kyoto Protocol as one of his priorities for the first 3 months of a federal labour government, should there be one, but he was criticised by Howard for calling climate change the overwhelming moral challenge for this generation.
Also yesterday, a report was released by the Australian Conservation Foundation and others, making the case for sourcing one quarter of our energy from renewable resources like wind and solar power by the year 2020. Malcolm Turnbull was quick to deride that plan as optimistic.
So is community concern about climate change being converted into effective action or just political hot air? This morning we are joined by Matthew Wright from Beyond Zero Emissions. Good morning Matthew.

M: Good morning Elanor.

E: Firstly, climate change has definitely staked a claim on the national agenda, but what's your evaluation of what each leader has been making of it?

M: Yes, look I think Kevin Rudd's been taking a clear, climate change is real position, however, his responses are seriously lacking, while Howard is taking a begrudgingly "climate change is real" perspective and of course Howard has been influenced by Hugh Morgan. If you heard Radio National on Saturday morning, Clive Hamilton named Hugh Morgan, Ray Evans and Howard - and Ray Evans was Hugh Morgan's political adviser when he was at Western Mining - as deliberately undermining Kyoto not only domestically but abroad. That was what Clive Hamilton was saying.

E: Well, the federal government's position on climate change seems to involve minimising people's expectation of what is possible. Malcolm Turnbull consistently makes statements dismissing solar and wind energy as viable solutions while at the same time making the case for nuclear power. Does an attitude like this translate into making it difficult for these renewable options to even be considered as part of a larger energy mix?

M: Yes, absolutely. And the kinds of statement they are making, which are blatantly false, contradict the facts from around the world, like Spain recently hitting 27% of their power from wind energy. Also they talk about clean coal costing twice as much as power now and then they want to pour huge amounts of research dollars into that, while they argue that renewables can't make it because renewables cost twice as much as power now. The only difference being that renewables are actually available now; you can purchase them off the shelf, you can tool up factories and you can start installing and make serious in-roads.

E: And the report I mentioned from ACF and other green groups made the case for one quarter of our energy to be sourced from renewables by 2020. Is this different from Beyond Zero Emissions' target for zero net emissions by 2020?

M: Yes. Beyond Zero Emissions have produced our own report on going 90% emission reductions by 2020 for the stationary energy sector. The report from ACF and Greenpeace is relatively conservative, if you think that the UK has already chosen to go 30% by 2020 and the EU is going 20%, and if the US joins in they'll go 30% as well. California has opted to go 25% by 2020. So I'm not sure why they're pouring so many resources into producing a report that's stating what's the easy option in terms of energy efficiency and integrating, say, wind onto the electricity grid without any mitigation measures required, because 20% is the accepted amount that you can put on the grid without considering planning of where your grid is and what its capacity is.

E: But even that conservative report was criticised by the government as not economically viable. Is there a way to produce zero net emissions or a way to put it out there to the public as necessary in a way that it has the economic-speak that seems to be necessary to have public support, or at least government policy support?

M: Yes, well it's just a messaging method from the government. They're trying to confuse and dictate to the public what's what, but when you've got Sir Nicholas Stern - former chief economist to the World Bank, and he's a respected person by anyone who wants to look at the economic model - saying that if we spend 1.8% of our GDP per year we'll basically stave off having 20-fold increase in costs down the track. So, in other words, the small tax on our productivity now will lead to a viable future, whereas you've got Howard and Macfarlane and Malcolm Turnbull all thinking about 3-year election cycles and not thinking about what's going to happen in 2020, 2030, 2040. The latest data from Jim Hansen, who's the respected head climatologist at NASA, is that from 2040 we could be looking at a one metre per 20 year sea level rise. Now that's going to be the biggest social and economic disaster of all times.

E: You mention that percentage of GDP being spent on climate change reduction. What is the government's spending on R & D at the moment, and it seems to be directed in the wrong direction in terms of the nuclear power option being quite a long time in the making and not necessarily getting the reductions that we need, as well as the clean coal option. What are we spending and where could it better be spent, do you think?

M: Yes, we're spending a fraction of a percent on R & D and that does include clean coal which is itself a euphemism for less-dirty coal. What should actually be occurring is that we should have all these R & D dollars going into existing commercially viable technologies. I mean, we don't actually have the population size to carry an industry like this. We haven't in the past developed the plethora of technologies we use in our life, we have usually just imported technology and developed them, and where there's been a niche we've developed that. But trying to tackle clean coal and create clean coal is just a ridiculous thing to do because we're starting from a really bad base, a really shaky foundation. Why not use technology that's already out there? Concentrating solar thermal plants: a 1000 MW plant going up in California should be commercial within a year. That will provide the commercial reference so that we can then start building them in Australia and meet the same economics.
And wind turbines in Denmark: they're employing 15,000 people in just one wind company, so they've got 5 million population, so if that was in Australia and we take that opportunity we'd be employing 60,000 in that area and that would mean far more jobs than what coal's giving us.
If we go to hybrid electric vehicles, we could reduce our fuel consumption by 85%, we would eliminate $10 billion of liquid fuel imports and that would offset the $25 billion of coal exports we do each year. On top of that we are potentially going to risk $10 billion of economic activity in the Murray-Darling basin and that's a consequence of the Australian government's negligence in regards to reading the signs coming from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology in regards to climate change - that's another $10 billion, and now we're up to $20 billion. And finally $5 billion is the amount at risk in the Great Barrier Reef area from tourism, so we're talking $25 billion. I've just matched the amount of economic activity that coal is generating in exports, and I've done it in the consequences of not doing something about climate change and doing something positive about the transportation sector in relation to climate change.

E: So, just in general, for people who are receiving messages from the political leadership about how renewables and cleaner climate energy options are just not viable and not really possible, what would be the refutation that you would want people to have in mind when they are hearing those kinds of claims made over and over again?

M: Yes, just say "Look, there's markets that are far bigger than Australia, they are California and the European Union, in particular Germany, Spain and Denmark, and these markets are using serious amounts of renewables". You could mention that the amount of solar panels installed on roofs in Germany last year - 960 MW - would equate to 230,000 houses here if we'd installed that many solar panels on our roofs. And that's solar photovoltaics. On top of that you've got concentrating solar thermal plants which are actually cheaper than solar photovoltaics. In terms of wind power, Victoria already has around 55,000 houses worth of power coming from wind power, and one wind farm coming on line is going to increase that to around 200,000, so there's a lot of serious amounts of reference material out there.
In terms of running purely on renewables, King Island are running 60% wind power in conjunction with their diesel generators, and in just the same way that you can do it on a micro-scale, because we always set up micro-sized tests, you can do that on a large grid.
Mawson Base on Antarctica runs 90% wind power and combines that with their diesel generators, so it's no different than operating a grid with these things.
And secondly if you're going to install renewables, all you need is security of supply - security of supply means having adequate backup to meet any troughs in output and any peaks in demand. And existing gas and hydro provide that - and maybe a little bit more of new gas - but there are certainly no issues with security of supply and the biggest furphy out there is this whole notion of base load. It's all about providing security of supply and that's a planning decision, and all the costs need to be included if you're planning on rolling out renewables.

E: Alright, we're out of time, but thank you very much Matthew Wright for being with us this morning on the breakfast show.

M: Thanks Elanor.