You can't stop climate change by opening new gas fields any more than you quit smoking by going from one to two packs of cigarettes a day, but that's the plan the federal government unveiled with its new 'Future Gas Strategy' this week.
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It is nothing short of a climate disaster.
It's a sweet deal for gas companies and a bum deal for Australians. The strategy is full of greenwashing. It's not only environmentally and economically reckless, it also misrepresents Indigenous voices.
Almost two decades after Kevin Rudd described climate change as the "great moral challenge of our generation", ACT senator David Pocock described Labor's gas strategy as "morally bankrupt". The Greens 'environment spokesperson, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, said it showed the government had "utterly caved to the fossil fuel lobby" and, judging by the praise it received from the gas industry, she's not wrong.
The Future Gas Strategy delivered by Resources Minister Madeleine King is a plan for failure.
While we are already halfway through what the UN calls the critical decade for climate action, the government is suggesting Australia can still meet its climate targets and open up enormous new sources of fossil gas. It will be about as effective as trying to prevent mesothelioma by opening new asbestos mines. The strategy also aims to "prevent gas shortfalls" and "[empower] First Nations peoples by clarifying consultation requirements for offshore resources activities and pursue benefit-sharing to ensure First Nations people are partners in the transition to net zero". I'll come back to that last point.
Firstly, let's start with the big lie at the heart of the Future Gas Strategy: that we don't have enough gas in Australia. That we need to fast-track exploration and production to prevent looming shortfalls and ensure Australia's manufacturing industry can continue to make stuff. Let's be clear: Australia has a ridiculous abundance of gas. Fact: 82 per cent of Australia's gas is used for exports. Australia has so much the gas industry uses more gas just to process the fuel for export (7.3 per cent) than Australia's entire manufacturing sector (6.4 per cent). Fact: residential use accounts for just 2.6 per cent of Australia's gas.
To put that in perspective, if Australia's entire gas usage were represented by $100, only $2.60 is for residential gas use. So, any time you hear talk about a gas shortfall or shortage, just know it's pure BS.
Even if there was a gas shortfall, the focus of the Future Gas strategy is on increasing supply, with nothing to reduce demand.
Think about it; if we were suddenly facing an imminent water shortage, our first move would be to rapidly find ways to reduce our water use and demand.
The strategy also relies heavily on carbon capture and storage (this is how governments can say Australia will be net zero while also increasing its emissions from gas production - by shoving some of the pollution in a hole).
It's tiresome to keep having this conversation, but carbon capture and storage is a massive failure. While renewable energy technologies like wind and solar have been getting both more efficient and dramatically cheaper, carbon capture and storage is an expensive and repeated failure that only works in glossy brochures.
To give you a specific example of failure, Chevron's recently approved Gorgon LNG stage 2 expansion will release 3 billion tonnes of emissions; Chevron's CCS program has, by contrast, sequestered just over 9 million tonnes to date, far less than was promised, and just a drop in the ocean of Chevron's emissions.
CCS projects have been promised and failed, propped up time and again over decades and with billions of taxpayer dollars with basically nothing to show for it. In terms of value for money, it would probably be less wasteful and environmentally harmful to just set fire to any public cash the government intends to invest in CCS.
I would personally love it if jetpacks got me to work everyday, but it would be silly to design a national transport strategy based on the hope they'll become commercially available. That, however, is effectively the hope that sits at the heart of the government's gas strategy. As it stands, commercially viable carbon capture and storage to permanently and safely store emissions is currently as mythical as leprechauns and as commercially viable as small modular nuclear reactors.
Not only is expanding the gas industry poor economics and a disastrous climate decision, but the government's Future Gas Strategy has undermined First Nations communities as well. "Empowering First Nations peoples" is an important goal for any government policy to set, but especially a resources policy. New gas fields and coal mines are often on Aboriginal land. Whether it's the Wangan and Jagalingou's fight to protect their country from Adani's (rebranded as Bravus) devastating coal mine, or the Gomeroi Peoples' fight to protect their land from Santos' Narrabri gas project, First Nations communities have been leading David and Goliath fights to protect country, including clean water.
Sadly, just a few months after championing the Voice to Parliament, Traditional Owners were this week asking the Labor government to remove their quotes from the Future Gas Strategy because they felt the document "twisted the things we've said, misrepresenting our view". The strategy made it seem like Aboriginal communities supported new gas projects to help solve energy poverty. Yet, speaking to The Guardian, Samuel Sandy, chair of Nurrdalinji Aboriginal Corporation and a Djingili Elder, said the government's treatment of its submission was "wrong and upsetting".
In its submission, Nurrdalinji NTAC said: "The answer for the problems of energy security in our communities is not gas but solar energy which is free, plentiful and does not cause further damage to the climate."
Australia needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stop building new gas and coal projects. Instead, Labor's gas strategy is to make climate change worse. Opening up new gas fields will not solve energy poverty in Indigenous communities who want clean, cheaper solar power. But it will deliver more expensive energy costs and insurance premiums to Australians because of more frequent and intense bushfires, floods and cyclones.
Finally, for a country blessed with such abundant gas resources, Australia is getting a bum deal. After all, the federal government collects more revenue from HECS than it does from the petroleum resource rent tax - another thing the Future Gas Strategy will not fix.
- Ebony Bennett is the deputy director of the Australia Institute.