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Friday 4 July 2008 (Updated at 6.30pm AEST)

RAPID ROUNDUP: Garnaut Climate Change Review Draft Report: Experts respond

The Garnaut Climate Change Review draft report was released today. Below, experts respond to the report.

To read the draft report, click here. (note heavy web traffic may cause delays)

If you are having problems accessing the report, let us know as we have copies here.

Feel free to use these quotes in your stories. Further comments will be posted here as they are received. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 8207 7415 or by email.

Professor Kurt Lambeck is President of the Australian Academy of Science.

“This draft does not appear to go a long way beyond the interim report released earlier this year so we are really going to have to wait till we have the supplementary draft in August as there looks to be a lot of economically modelling which has yet to emerge.

The report accepts the realities of climate change and recognises there are some scientific uncertainties but it also notes that the cost of inaction now is to increase risk in the future. It is important to emphasise that an effort must be made to reduce these uncertainties and improve our understanding of climate change. Our mitigation and adaptation methodology will have to evolve in accordance with the new science.

The key point is the recognition that the massive global effort in research, development and commercialisation of low emissions technologies is definitely important. Professor Garnaut suggests this could be up to $100 billion a year in global activity and that Australian should be able to contribute $3 billion per year to this. I think that is a realistic assessment. The government’s recent budget commitment was a long way of the mark. The suggestion of $3 billion is far more realistic and one that we strongly endorse.”

Snow Barlow is Professor of Horticulture and Viticulture at The University of Melbourne

"'No pain, no rain'... Professor Garnaut had it right in his analysis of the potential impacts of inaction in climate change. This interim report is an excellent basis to develop policy action that may put the nation on the ‘high’ road to a low emissions economy.

While the report advocates comprehensive coverage it reserves it decision on agriculture on the grounds of measurement and transaction costs and appears to have dodged the methane 'problem'. This is the problem Australian agriculture must address regardless of how agriculture is eventually included in a trading scheme, either directly or in an 'upstream' manner. Methane from ruminant animals is second to power generation in terms of our national emissions and must be addressed by the research and development mechanisms proposed on a scale approaching 'clean coal'. In an increasingly hungry and affluent world, seeking animal protein methane from animals is worthy of global, extensive research and one which may help us in our competitive position. The global food equation is going to get much tighter as we value carbon in this way because of increasing competition for land."

Dr Mark Diesendorf is from the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales

"Professor Garnaut's draft report sets out some of the key requirements for an effective emissions trading scheme, in particular, wide coverage, including transport fuels, and 100% auctioning of emissions permits. Coverage should be further extended by including forestry.

The draft report contains a basic inconsistency. On one hand it acknowledges the seriousness of global climate change and the need for urgency, but on the other hand it envisages a slow tightening of the cap on emissions and hence a slow transition to a high carbon price. In reality, a price of at least $20 per tonne of CO2 is needed to allow combined-cycle gas-fired power stations to compete with conventional coal power and at least $40 per tonne of CO2 to allow wind to compete. An initially low carbon price is a recipe for a scheme that will fail to change rapidly the structure of electricity generation in Australia. It is essential for both gas and renewables to be brought into the mix from 2010.

Other issues that need more attention are:
- The fundamental weakness of Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models in handling efficient energy use.
- The failure to list explicitly funding for urban public transport and intercity rail among the uses of revenue raised by auctioning emission permits.
- Also among uses of the revenue from emission permits, it would be more effective to replace 'payments to households' by 'programs to assist households to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions'."

Professor Rod Keenan is Head of the School of Forest and Ecosystem Science at The University of Melbourne

"I welcome recognition in the report of the capacity to increase the level of absorption of carbon dioxide through afforestation activities.

I also support the recommendation that the emissions trading system has broad coverage with unlimited forest offset credits and that carbon stored in wood products be reflected in carbon accounting under the scheme. Further analysis is required to assess the implications of this for the forest industry. The report suggests there may be complications in including forest-related offsets in linking with the EU emissions trading market because of their reluctance to recognise land-use-related emissions units in trading.

I agree that full inclusion of agriculture and forestry in an emissions trading scheme will require issues of measurement and monitoring of greenhouse gases to be addressed. Further research is required to support effective inclusion of forestry in an emissions trading scheme.

I would question the apparent conclusion that economic impacts of climate change on the forest industry are likely to be low and that these can be mitigated simply through changing species.

The shorthand of using ‘forestry-related’ emissions and repeated reference to timber harvesting as a major driver of deforestation perpetuates the misconception that such emissions result from forest management when they are actually due to land clearing for large-scale or shifting agriculture.

There appear to be inconsistencies in the report. One section recommends not using an emissions trading scheme to reduce forest loss due to agriculture or unsustainable logging in developing countries and instead using a mix of regulatory and fiscal arrangements. In a later section there is a suggestion to integrate Indonesia and PNG into a regional emissions trading arrangement with a focus on reducing forest-related emissions. The potential for large-scale emissions reduction from forests in PNG are overstated. Given current institutional and indigenous land ownership arrangements, developing a broad-scale forest conservation system in PNG would be challenging. Sustainably-managed timber production with appropriate conservation areas represents the best land use mix for the future economic development of PNG."

Professor John Quiggin is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow in the school of economics at the University of Queensland.

“There is no doubt that the review has shifted the terms of the debate substantially. The issue now is not whether to set an emissions target or not but whether we have time to make the drastic cuts in emissions necessary to avoid severe climate damage”

Professor Barry Brook is the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and Director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide.

“The Garnaut Draft Review is an extensive document and very much a work in progress. But the key fundamentals are already there. It rightly points out that the scientific evidence for climate change, on which hard economic decisions must ultimately hinge, is already flashing some extremely worrying warning signals: carbon emissions and the impacts of climate change are tracking at or above the top end of predictions made a decade ago, tipping elements such as the Arctic sea ice and polewards expansion of the tropical weather systems are being crossed decades ahead of schedule, and because of amplifying carbon-cycle feedbacks, were are now close to the time at which this ‘diabolical problem’ runs away from us, and which point neither mitigation nor adaptation will be sufficient for us to cope. Our great natural assets – the Great Barrier Reef, the wetlands of Kakadu, the enormously productive agricultural basin of the Murray-Darling system – will be severely degraded or all but eliminated within the lifetimes of current generations. As Garnaut said, we should have moved on this issue years or decades earlier, when potential impacts were already reasonable well understood and yet greater uncertainty about the extent of the problem existed, compared to today.

By explicitly recognising these harsh realities, the Garnaut Report positions the economic and social arguments within the right frame of reference – one in which urgent action is required, and where forward-looking domestic action from the developed world, especially nations that are exquisitely sensitive to climate change impacts, must be the trigger for international multilateral agreements – which are ultimately the only way to solve the problem, and at the same time spawn the energy revolution of the new century – renewables, not fossil carbon.

Unlike the most up-to-date climate modelling, which has recently been detailed by the IPCC, the full economic modelling of impacts will await a supplementary draft report in August. However, some clear points have already been made in this report:
• Scenarios that project a business-as-usual pathway towards a 700% increase in the size of the Australian economy, and a greater per capita wealth of the average Indian compared to Australians by 2100, are pure fantasy – there are not only insufficient fossil fuels available to meet the needs of this model scenario, but the multitude of damaging impacts that would be caused by the resulting catastrophic climate changes mean that societal collapse, rather than unconstrained growth, would be the order of the century, for the world economy in general and for Australia specifically.
• Scenarios which explicitly attempt to build in the costs of climate change impacts show major disruptions to our economic, environmental and social well being, amounting to, conservatively, hundreds of billions of dollars of additional economic burden each and every year. And these stated costs are an absolute minimum: rather than try to put a dollar value on the lives of future generations, or the irreplaceable loss of millions of species and natural treasures, or on the staggering potential costs of crossing run-away tipping points such as the collapse of the polar ice sheets, these are quite deliberately left out the Garnaut Report economic modelling. After all there is a price that goes well beyond what humanity is willing to pay, or indeed able to pay, to impacts that are impossible to pay for, or to build into economically rationalist thinking.”

Joel Fleming is an environmental scientist and Founding Chairman of Climate Friendly Pty Ltd

Permit Auctions Will Raise Enough Money to Replace all Coal Power Stations.
“Full auctioning of emission permits under the ETS will raise huge amounts of revenue. This revenue is by far the biggest opportunity to transform our economy if the funds are used directly to cut emissions. Over ten years this could add up to $100 billion. It’s enough money to replace all coal power stations with clean energy within ten years. The total capital value of coal power stations in Australia is not more than $50 billion.

Global warming is a massive and urgent problem. We can use this revenue to achieve a rapid switch to a low carbon economy and become a global leader in clean energy solutions.

Use Permit Revenue to Fund Measured Carbon Abatement Projects not Handouts
Assistance to affected sectors, like low income households and trade exposed sectors, should not be via handouts but instead focus on measured energy efficiency programs that save greenhouse emissions and money. It would be a great shame if the ETS permit revenue was used for financial handouts rather than actually cutting emissions. Used to fund measured abatement projects the permit revenue can help achieve the rapid emission cuts necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

"The draft Garnaut report is a cautious but important step toward a response to climate change. Garnaut correctly observes that the rate of climate change is accelerating and we now risk catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef, other outstanding natural areas and our food-producing capacity. The science was already clear twenty years ago. Further delay would be unconscionable.

As Garnaut says, our effort will help to keep alive "the possibility of an effective global agreement". The likely costs of emissions trading or moving to a basket of renewable energy supply technologies are far less than the certain costs of inaction. A range of conservation measures could reduce emissions by 35 per cent or more at no cost, in many cases with financial benefits.

While the targets and details of the trading scheme await modelling still under way, we know that electricity typically represents only about 2 per cent of household expenditure and transport about 5 per cent. Including the costs of releasing carbon dioxide might impose about $20 a week on an average household if there are no efficiency improvements. I can't imagine many people being prepared to look their grandchildren in the eye and say we allowed the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu, the wet tropics and the Murray-Darling Basin to be destroyed, just to save $20 a week or less. The Rudd government should move swiftly to implement the Garnaut report, to strengthen the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, to give us world's best practice efficiency standards for appliances and to invest massively in public transport through Infrastructure Australia."

Barney Foran led the CSIRO Resource Futures Group and now works on energy security and greenhouse futures at The Institute of Land Water and Society at Charles Sturt University.

"Comprehensive and for the most part fair as we've come to expect from Garnaut and his team. At times there were hints that the Garnaut team really understands it. The economic thought process seemed to be on the edge of a breakthrough. But Canberra orthodoxy is a strong habit to break. A good report is marred by five assumptions that together crystallise Australia's greenhouse quandary.

The first is that we must double population, just to dilute our emissions budget it seems. The second is that we remain addicted to coal even though its 'end of pipe' solution is an engineering and thermodynamic nightmare. The third, from a man who helped deregulate tariffs, is that we compensate dirty industries just because we now have them. The fourth is that the ETS is the central instrument, instead of a guiding framework. Reducing emissions requires engineers with spanners building low carbon infrastructure. We the consumer must tighten our belts and reduce our physical affluence. The ETS might just push us in the right direction. The fifth is that the report proposes 'we can have our cake and eat it too'. It seems everything can double, quadruple or even multiply sevenfold as the parallel physical inputs to a growing economy, water, good land, oil and gas somehow rearrange and correct themselves."