Australian Greens

Online Opinion report:: This week the Australian Parliament passed the Clean Energy Bill. Despite my reservations about the bill, I am pleased to see it finally made law. However, the work of the climate movement has only just begun.

The bill establishes a carbon price which will later become an emissions trading scheme. The policy is admittedly pretty awful and riddled with flaws, but unlike the old Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme at least it is better than nothing. As before, Labor intends to "reduce" Australia's emissions mainly by switching power generation to natural gas and buying carbon offsets from overseas, both of which I consider extremely dubious. However, the Greens, Tony Windsor, and Rob Oakeshott have worked hard to tangibly improve the policy, to the point where it can be considered a first step towards a renewable energy future. These farsighted crossbenchers have won unprecedented, independently-managed renewable energy funding; and built in regular independent reviews which provide opportunities to lift Australia's ambition later on.

Now climate activists need to work on building support for that greater ambition. Although the first independent review of the carbon price is not until February 2014, there is plenty more that can be achieved in the current Parliament. Here's what you should do if you care about climate action.

SUNSHINE COAST DAILY reports: THE Caloundra Greens are calling for Sunshine Coast residents to get behind a project to switch Australia to 100% renewable energy sources over the next 10 years.

But secretary Allan McKay has ruled out the placement of wind or solar thermal power farms on the Coast under the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan.

The proposal, put together by volunteer group Beyond Zero Emissions, was discussed yesterday at a Greens-sponsored public meeting at Lake Kawana Community Centre.

It detailed a rollout of large solar thermal plants at 12 proposed sites across the country to supply 60% of Australia's power, with the other 40% being supplied by wind.

Atherton, Georgetown, Collinsville and Stanthorpe in Queensland and Walcha, Orange, Cooma and Crookwell in New South Wales have been earmarked for wind plants.

Solar thermal energy is the focus for areas of Prairie, Roma, Charleville and Longreach in Queensland and Bourke and Dubbo in NSW.

By Matthew Wright

CLIMATE SPECTATOR reports: Feed-in tariffs were always set to be controversial – they turn the electricity market on its head by opening it for true competition. But they got more controversy than they deserved thanks to the mistake of green groups who only lobbied for feed-in tariffs for small-scale generators, and the incompetence of state government energy departments for managing to draft legislation that didn’t learn from the spectacular success of the German feed-in tariff legislation, the Renewable Energy Sources Act – legislation that has undergone 10 years of tweaking, overhaul and improvement.

There are two ways that a feed-in tariff will turn the market on its head. The first is through guaranteeing to any private investor/generator (be it big or small, private, bank or equity backed) that they can have a connection to the electricity grid and  a guaranteed buyer of their electricity.

Independent power producers are already allowed, in theory, to participate in the “deregulated” Australian Energy market. Some commentators even claim that our market is one of the most liberal markets in the world, but is that really the case?

This week, the Labor government’s Multi-Party Climate Change Committee (MPCCC) agreed to a set of principles to guide the development of a national carbon-pricing model. While a carbon pricing legislation is a worthy pursuit that will make fossil fuels more expensive, we must not forget that a carbon price alone is not enough to deal with the climate crisis. The mechanism has several limitations that inhibit the deployment of clean energy infrastructure.

THE Greens have called on the government to back a $20 billion interim carbon tax proposal to start cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Greens leader Bob Brown and climate change spokeswoman Christine Milne unveiled the plan today, which would impose a carbon price on polluters of $20 a tonne from the first of July this year.