AUSTRALIA AND THE RENEWABLES DEBATE
The Australian Green Party expert on nuclear and climate change issues, Senator Christine Milne, speaks with the Abolitionist.
Interview by C.Vaughan

Bob Brown said just before John Howard left office that he didn’t understand climate change. He said Howard’s speech at the Liberal Party’s Federal Council in June was, “stunningly devoid of any description of the impact of climate change”. Why do you think Bush and Howard were seemingly ignorant on the topic of climate change? Is it not because they want to fast track nuclear energy and want no dissent on the matter?

I don’t think John Howard was ever interested in the environment. He took the view that if you run a successful economy that making lots of money it will take care of everything else and that you can pay for any environmental damage after the event. The only reason why he has become interested in climate change is because the communities very interested in climate change and so he’s felt the need to respond to public concern and also it’s opportunistic because he wants to support expanded uranium mining and he wants to be involved in George Bush’s Global Nuclear Energy partnership. It is a convenient excuse to for his support to nuclear to try and claim that it is some kind of solution to climate change. He gets himself into trouble the whole time because he’s not an expert on the details. To demonstrate how little the ex-Prime Minister knew about climate change - only 12 months ago he was saying he was a climate skeptic and he didn’t believe the more extreme predictions of climate change but he went on to say when asked what would a 4 degree rise in temperature mean for the Earth, he said quote, “It will be less comfortable for some”. Now a 4-6 degree rise changes life on planet earth as we know it! For him not to understand, talking about a human and environmental catastrophe at a 4-6 degree change, demonstrates how little interest he took in the subject.

Ecofriendly designs and non toxic materials exist already. Long lasting lightbulbs and as we saw the other night on George Negus’s Dateline, every household in Cuba has these things as well as giving away free fridges to households that are guzzling electricity from their old fridges. The Australian Greens is a big part of the Renewables solution in Australia. Portugal has a wide variety of renewables that are being tested with success. Encouraging walking and promoting public transport as well as building houses closer together is a more efficient use of space and infrastructure. Australia is an affluent and progressive society that could live well on an efficient, non-toxic, recyclable technology yet no money is being poured into Renewables. This country could be world leaders economically and every other way yet this is not even a distant speck on the political horizon. Why?

Australia could be a world leader in both energy efficiency and renewable energy. Let me just deal with energy efficiency first. We have a huge opportunity to reduce the energy we use in Australia building new energy efficient buildings and by retrofitting existing buildings – commercial or residential and therefore have more comfortable houses to live in and work places and doing the right thing by climate change, but the Government has not been interested at a number of levels. We don’t have, for example, mandatory standards for insulation – something as basic as that. We still don’t have across the country insulation in every home. We still don’t have appliance standards that are high enough so that the chief imported white goods, coming into the country, are still flooding the market and we ought to be able to set much higher performance standards for whitegoods. Also in terms of design we need to be promoting much more energy efficient design.

The Australian Greens have come up with a policy called EASI and what we are saying is the Government should use some of the surplus to invest in retrofitting all of Australia’s existing residential building stock – that would cost about $22 billion – from a major environmental outcome because it would reduce Australia’s greenhouse gases by at least 10% getting us somewhere towards our target by 2020, and it would mean that every house in the country would get a free energy audit then whatever could be paid back within 10 years would be invested in that house and paid for by the Government so that would be solar hot water and insulation at the very least and then over time people would pay that investment back on the basis of the energy savings on their bills so that way within 10 years you’d see a massive retrofit across Australia, it would produce thousands of new jobs both for the energy auditors and in terms of insulation of these kinds of technologies. It’s a win-win all around and it’s better than just ad-hoc rebates. While rebates are welcome they are still only a few thousand or a couple of hundred thousand homes but we’ve got several million dwellings in Australia and we need to have a Government program that actually backs energy efficiency.

In terms of renewables the reason Germany is streaming ahead on renewables is because they have got laws where energy utilities are required to buy energy from anyone who produces it from a renewable source and they have to buy it at a fixed price for a fixed period of time so you can go to a bank and borrow to put solar photovoltaics all over your roof because you can guarantee to the bank have a guaranteed market at a guaranteed price for a fixed period of time then once you have paid off your loan then any income from that becomes profit. That’s why solar energy in Germany has taken off in the way it has plus in places like China they’ve got mandatory renewable energy. China has got a 15% target. People are able to make money out of solar and wind. California’s the same. Australia is way behind in the policy mix because to roll out really effective investment in renewable energy, you need not only a price on carbon and a emissions trading scheme, you also need a high mandatory renewable energy target. The Greens have set a target of 25% by 20/20.

There’s a growing number of renewable alternatives that promise clean, inexhaustible power: wind turbines which is being quashed in this country, solar arrays, wave power flotillas, small hydroelectric generators, geothermal systems even bioengineering of algae that turns waste into hydrogen, these are the kinds of challenges that brilliant innovative business people thrive on yet Dave Sweeney from the Australian Conservation Foundation has said in our interview with him that he is sick and tired of the Government, Industry ably assisted and abetted by the media are marketing these new operations as some kind of hippy joke. Certainly the debate is being framed that way. What are your views?

Dave Sweeney is right. They do try and frame renewables as being some sort of pleasant but entirely peripheral, almost irrelevant source of power and they keep on saying, both John Howard and Kevin Rudd, the base load power has to come from coal-fired power stations and in the case of John Howard he adds to that nuclear power so they say it would be nice to have all these renewables but they are really only peripheral and the main game is coal and nuclear. That is where John Howard is completely wrong.

Solar and thermal power has been producing base load in California for 25 years. Solar heat and power have got a solar thermal station that they could put at Moree tomorrow for 300 megawatts but there is no incentive to do so. All the renewable technologies are there, they are ready to go but in the absence of a decent price on carbon and with the absence of renewable energy targets there is no financial framework for these to be rolled out across the country. Instead of that we have both the Liberals and Kevin Rudd talking about ‘clean coal’ which is unproven technology, and they are directing by far and away more Government funding into so-called ‘clean coal’ to the very Industry that created the problem in the first place, to the industry that has made mega-profits out of putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, now they want to give affectively corporate welfare to the coal industry. My view is the coal industry should pay for it’s own research, it’s made enough profits over the years to invests in it’s own research. In the meantime, if we are serious about climate change we need to put in place incentives, regulations and some legislation to give the Renewables a change because they quite capable. Solar, Thermal, Wind and Wave power are quite capable of producing enough power by Australians and when you add to that the savings that could be made on energy efficiency as well.

Ever compliant, the media are now saying that big business, the corporate polluters themselves, are the ones best suited to cleaning up their own mess. So they fowl their own nest and now they are more than happy to clean it up. Do you believe this?

It’s very obvious that in Australia for a long time the Coal Industry has placed it’s own people. First of all the university sector has become so strapped for cash that the Coal and Oil Industries are able to get all sorts of research work done through the university institutions and other places of research. You have those people then being placed in Government Departments and in Ministerial offices so you get a revolving door of advise coming from Coal and Oil Industries in particular at the expense of the environment. As Sir Nicholas Stern has said, “Climate change represents the greatest market failure of all time” because the free market does not take into account the environment and the ecological cost and it assumes that the economy operates separate from the environment. If we have learnt anything from the collapse of the Murray Darling system it is that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. That without the environment you have no economy and that is something that we are now understanding in Australia as people are being driven off the land through to lack of water in the river systems.

Bob Brown is the only one I’ve heard that’s addressing this conveniently forgotten aspect of climate change and that’s be prepared for mass migration. When the waters rise there will be a Bangladeshi mass migrant move. So does that mean that these good people lose their land, their livelihoods and perhaps loved ones, and then they get the added indignity of spending time in one of Australia’s gulag concentration camps for refugees over here?

The issue of environmental refugees is a really important issue. Something that the Greens have been trying to get the Government to address for some time. It’s recognized in the United Nations that with sea level rise and storm surge and with salt water incursion into fresh water, there are going to be increasing numbers of people particularly in developing countries that will no longer be able to live on the land that they currently occupy. We’ve got 2 choices: We can either ignore that and just expect them to start with internal migration and when they can’t do that any more there will be Boarder squirmishes, people will be forced to leave and where do they go? That will cause huge instability. The Greens have been arguing we need to incorporate a definition of environmental refugee into the United Nations Refugee Convention and we need to be engaging, particularly with our Pacific Island neighbours and saying to them, “How can we assist you to stay where you are longer and build resilience in your eco-system so that you can stay there and your culture can remain intact and your association with land? Then ultimately if you have to leave how can we manage that?

New Zealand is already reaching out to the Pacific and has made arrangements with Tuvalu for example and New Zealand already takes a large number of people from the Pacific Islands. Australia has put up the barriers and refuses to recognise the notion of environmental refugees but it is very clear to me that climate change is not only a ecological disaster but it is a disaster in terms of human well-being and a loss of culture. We are going to see people from Bangladesh having nowhere to go and being forced across the Border into India where there will be conflict on those Borders and that is going to repeat itself in very many places across the planet but it’s why Australia and the US doesn’t want to know about environmental refugees because they don’t want to take them.

This is clearly a point of frustration for people in these places and last year in Nairobi I was at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the spokesperson for the small island developing states happened to be from Tuvalu. He stood up and said if the world knew that 47 countries were going to disappear in the next 50 years but they didn’t know which ones, then there would be a vastly different attitude to climate change than there is now.

47 small island developing states are the ones most likely to suffer loss of culture, loss of livelihood and threatened survival.

It worries a lot of people that this nuclear rush to get it accepted is going the way the invasion of Iraq did - preemptively. They are putting their own pro-nuclear people into the environment movement and calling them “environmentalists”. David Bradbury in “A Hard Rain” has said that they have to move now because the reactors are 40 years old and need replacing. Recently there was a nuclear scare in Japan at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant and the other thing is these nuclear reactors are being built on earthquake fault lines such as in Japan and in Malaysia. They are also being built close to cities and high-density populations. What’s going on?

I think it’s absolutely frightening the prospect of building nuclear reactors on fault lines with known volcanic activity. The Indonesians have got them planned. We already know there’s significant volcanic activity there and if they build a reactor there the fall-out would impact on Northern Australia and hundreds of thousands of Indonesians. The issue with nuclear is that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Foreign Affairs are basically driving an agenda for the Mining Industry. It is purely a case of greed. They are facilitating global markets for BHP Billiton, for Rio Tinto and for any of the companies involved in uranium mining. Frankly they have not been prepared to look at the adverse security and environmental consequences of doing so. They are currently talking about signing with President Putin while he’s in Australia for APEC this week an agreement to sell uranium to Russia. This is into a regime an anti-nuclear protestor was beaten to death outside the Angarsk Enrichment Uranium Enrichment Plant that President Putin has announced in his global power infrastructure – that plant he wants under the supervision of IREA. It’s meant to be for enriching uranium for civilian uses and they will pass that enriched uranium onto other countries.

Already the Russians have built a reactor in Iran. They have signed a memorandum of understanding on nuclear with the Burmese regime and I cannot believe that Australia is being so naive in over-looking human rights abuses. Fourteen journalists have been murdered in Russia since Putin has come to power. We now have scientists and campaigners for the democracy movement being put in asylums. They have gone back to punditry of psychiatry as in the old days of the KJB and we’ve got abuse of the rule of law as well where even new political parties can’t operate in Russia because the rules get changed or the time to prevent them from contesting elections and banned the non-government sector. It’s just extraordinary this retreat from democracy and yet our Prime Minister says he trusts the Russians. I would suggest that either he is completely misrepresenting the situation or that the Department of Foreign Affairs isn’t doing the job it was meant to do or it’s being so dumped down after 11 years under John Howard that they simply don’t know what’s going on around the world and that’s on top of Australia agreeing that it would sell uranium to India outside the non proliferation treaty and that is also after Australia being prepared to support the United States in sending nuclear technology to India outside the NPT and of course sending uranium to China where the Ambassador to Australia told us that China does not have enough uranium for both nuclear weapons program and it’s civilian nuclear power program. It’s a clear statement that Australian uranium will allow the Chinese to displace their own uranium into their weapons program.

We have got a reckless Prime Minister who is escalating global instability and environmental catastrophe. The Labor Party is going along with it to the extent of saying that nuclear reactors are too dangerous for Australia and we don’t want a nuclear waste dump in Australia but they are more than happy to support the export of uranium into China and Russia where it will have adverse environmental consequences and human rights consequences when there will be nuclear waste dumps but apparently the worries we have in Australia apparently don’t apply to ordinary Russians or ordinary Chinese people and I find that really offensive.

What about Peter Garrett? In the ABC Program’s transcript of his interview he said, “I’ve carried my convictions and my positive feelings about the issues I want to work on through all my working life. Now, I am convinced and in the maturing of time can see that the international situation has changed; it’s terrorism now, it’s not nuclear disarmament.” Nuclear disarmament is not a threat? Are we to assume he is either naive or is he lying? What are your thoughts?

The terrorist threat of course is extremely real. We just heard from the Russian there were more than 130 suitcase bombs made and only 48 or so of them have been recovered so we know that they are out there and we know that there’s been various trafficking of fuels and stuff across the Border in various former Soviet territories. The threat of nuclear terrorism is real and that’s why we ought not to be feeding it but as to Peter Garrett. Well, it doesn’t matter whether it’s American bases, whether it’s the export of uranium, the lobbying of Tasmania’s forests, he’s made the decision and abandoned a strong stand on the issues everyone thought that he cared about in order in try and become a Minister in a Labor Government. At best you could say it’s allow that to happen and that he will be eaten up and spat out in exactly the same way as Cheryl Kernot was by the Labor Party. He had wealth. He had fame but he didn’t have power before while he was a rock star. Now he has compromised everything he stands for in order to become spokesman for the Labor position in Australia. He is only John Howard light on the environment. It’s a naïve view if he imagines that once he becomes a Minister in a Labor Government he can change things from within. He needs to look at what happened to Cheryl Kernot.

I think it’s a deliberate 2-step process where they first had to move him away from his sphere of considerable influence in the Greens, with young people, and then the next step will be to move him right out of politics altogether, not for his politics but for his previous credible anti-nuclear campaigner stance.

Peter Garrett has toned down and compromised everything and he’s being used by the Labor Party to try and take votes from the Greens in inner city seats where the Greens have strong support. Meanwhile out there among the traps are the members of the Labor Party campaigning for additional coal exports. Senator Chris Evans and where Senator Kerry O’Brien is campaigning to support the Gunns Ltd pulp mill and all the logging that what goes with it. Once Peter Garrett has lost his environmental credibility he will have no use to the Labor Party anymore and that’s the point where they will spit him out but between entering politics and losing credibility there’s a gap that’s being exploited by the Labor Party at the moment. It will not last. The lag time will catch up. If Labor wins Government and there are no changes then the residual respect that people would have had for him will disappear and that is where he will lose his usefulness to the Labor Party.

Is there a vigilant citizenry out there that gives a damn about nuclear and uranium mining?

I think there is a degree of apathy in the community. There’s a bit of not-in-my-backyard as long as there is not nuclear reactors and waste dumps in Australia people aren’t taking too much notice but on the other hand part of that is the media doesn’t report the state of play like human rights, environment and lack of democracy in places like Russia and China. I’m really frustrated at the moment that all the hype about the Olympic Games in Beijing is failing to point out that the world is turning a build eye to what the Chinese regime is doing to dissidents. It should have been part of the bargain with the Olympic Games that pressure was put on China to lift the bar on those things.