Green Capital Newsletter - June 2010

Green Capital Survey

Politics of Sustainability

Henry Tax Review

Carbon Capture and Storage

Subscriber Forums

Update on the National Electricity Market Campaign

Sustainable Staff Workshops

Whitelist

Welcome to the Green Capital Newsletter for June 2010. The past few months have been interesting times for sustainability and the environment, and Green Capital has remained at the forefront of what business needs to know. In this issue, we look at the looming federal election and what it brings for sustainability and tell you our thoughts on the Henry Tax Review. We also let you know about our upcoming Subscriber Workshops, tell you more about the Sustainable Staff workshops we offer, and how changes to the National Energy Market are going to affect business and the community. And you have the chance to win a ticket to our next event by responding to a survey on the Green Capital Program. Finally, important information on how to make sure you receive our email invitations to upcoming events.

What do you think about Green Capital? Complete our survey and go in the draw to win a free ticket to our next event!

Green Capital wants to know what you think about our program, so we’re conducting a quick online survey to get your feedback on our events, and subscriber program. The survey only takes around 4 minutes to complete, and to show our appreciation for your participation, you’ll go in the draw to win a free ticket to our next event.

To start the survey click here. Thank you in advance for helping us get a better understanding of your interests and needs, and enabling us to better meet these.

The winner will be drawn on Friday, 9 July and announced on the Green Capital website and contacted directly.

Green Capital’s Next Event: Politics of Sustainability

Melbourne July 13, Sydney July 22 (click here for more event information)

With another election cycle looming both at the national level and in Victoria and NSW, the Green Capital team and other observers are asking: What is the state of readiness of potential governments to deliver more sustainability and real progress towards a greener, low-carbon economy?

In July Green Capital’s next major event - Politics of Sustainability - will put the political parties and their environmental performance, current policies, key advocate platforms and prospects under the microscope. Those hoping that 2010 could be a breakthrough year, when sustainability moves to the political centre stage were disappointed with the still shaky aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and the polarising of domestic politics on climate change does not bode well – or does it?

Over the past 18 months Green Capital has run a series of events to probe the political and business policy dimensions of transforming the Australian economy through incentives, innovation and investment. The events have included:

• Carbon Ethics on the moral dimensions of the climate challenge;
• Funding the Future on the tax reform opportunity via the Henry Review;
• The Emerging Green Economy looking at the transition opportunities; and
• Doing Nothing is NOT an Option! which explored the post-Copenhagen failure & post-CPRS collapse options for carbon and energy action

Next we will be debating the Politics of Sustainability for a greener, more sustainable mainstream economy delivering:

• More and better jobs;
• Smarter and leaner infrastructure;
• Cleaner production with more reuse and recycling; and
• Higher quality long-term profitability for business with less waste, less pollution, and less overall negative environmental and social footprint.

The big question is: Are today’s and tomorrow’s would-be governments ready to begin the sustainability transition in earnest and are they making it part of mainstream economic as well as environment policy? Unfortunately, the answer so far is ‘no’. One area that illustrates this very clearly is the tax debate. Now focused on a bitter argument over what it costs to exploit the nation’s non-renewable resources, the compelling 21^st Century ideas of protecting our far-more important living environment and building a new clean economy based on renewable resources are being lost in the noise.

It’s worth looking at the Henry Tax Review.

Green Capital’s Tax Review Response

Much attention has been focused on the collapse of bipartisan political support for a national emission trading scheme (NETS), and the subsequent shelving of the Rudd Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). More recently attention has shifted to the contentious Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT).

One was slammed by the Abbott Opposition as a Great Big New Tax (GBNT) on everything. The other is just being attacked as a GBNT on miners that will affect everyone. What is it about these four-letter acronyms?

The bogey of TAX seems to be at the core of everything. So it’s hardly surprising that the Rudd Government’s response to the Henry Tax Review also is instructive for sustainability-hopeful policy advocates. Instructive, even if the outcome in terms of the Government’s response and the shallow public debate that has followed is depressing.

First, let’s look briefly at what the Henry review actually said. For the first time a major national economic review looking out over three decades has overtly acknowledged the environmental sustainability challenges are a key issue, predicting ‘deepening stresses between human activities and wider ecosystems, globally and locally’.

It goes on to say: ‘Our anticipated high population growth and continuing economic growth will also put pressure on our increasingly fragile ecosystems. To ameliorate this pressure a suite of policy interventions will need to be considered, including environmental taxes where appropriate, along with targeted stewardship and statutory duty of care programs.’

The Henry review also specifically acknowledged the need to maintain some taxes outside its core favoured territory ‘only if they efficiently address social or economic costs — such as taxes on tobacco, alcohol, gambling and environmental costs, and efficient road user taxes or charges’.

That all seemed to be on the right track, and there’s a lot more in a very large and comprehensive report. Its not all good for environmentalists, but better than any other mainstream official tax review in the history of Australia.

So it’s a shame that the Government’s response has ignored sustainability almost totally, and the Opposition doesn’t care about that one little bit. However, Henry does set the benchmark for future environmental tax debate and its import won’t be lost. Watch this space!

Solution or Sidetrack? Carbon Capture and Storage under the spotlight

Is carbon capture and storage (CCS) a key technology in Australia’s transition to a low-carbon economy or a doomed bid by vested interests to preserve pollution intensive industries? Green Capital put carbon capture and storage under the spotlight when it hosted a CCS debate in conjunction with the Global CCS Institute and Canadian Consulate in Melbourne on March 15, 2010.

Set to the backdrop of Victoria’s plentiful brown coalfields, the long term value of which is thought to hinge on the success of CCS, experts on CCS and environmental advocates examined the key issues surrounding this debate.

While there was a consensus of hope for CCS to play a significant role in Australia’s transition to a low carbon economy, among speakers and panellists at the event, there were a number of concerns raised as to whether carbon capture and storage could play a serious part in helping Australia to tackle climate change within the required timelines.

A big stumbling block to CCS playing a major role in Australia’s climate action toolkit lies in the view that in Australia “we need carbon capture and storage to work for electricity…there’s a difference between extracting carbon dioxide from a mining process and pumping it back underground, from extracting carbon from a power station and pumping it back under the ground”, argued keynote speaker Richard Denniss, Executive Director of The Australia Institute.

While there have been successful commercial demonstrations of CCS at the extraction point of natural gas and oil, and also in the process of coal gasification (for example in the Weyburn Project in Canada and the Sleipner Project in Norway), the application of CCS to coal fired power generation is currently “very costly. Arguably the technology is there, but hasn’t been demonstrated at a commercial scale”, according to keynote speaker and panellist Gerry Protti, Executive Advisor to EnCana Corporation, and founding President of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

Considering CCS for coal power generation has some way to go in terms of R&D and commercial demonstrations, when can we expect CCS to play an active role in Australia’s carbon reduction strategy?

Treasury assumptions have CCS coming into play in 2033 and miraculously “solving” Australia’s climate change problems by 2043, discussed Denniss.  He was less than confident in CCS’s unproven ability to drive carbon reductions through CCS enabled coal fired power stations in the required timeframe. Nick Otter, CEO of the Global CCS Institute urged for “a degree of pragmatism” in the debate, as “fossil fuels are not going to go away…If we’re going to meet the CO₂ reduction targets out now…we’re going to need all the technologies…and CCS is in that mix…because it meets the issue of how to use fossil fuels cleanly”, explained Otter. However, Denniss echoed the sentiment held by many environmentalists in Australia, asserting that “relying on carbon capture and storage looks like an incredible excuse for business as usual, an incredible excuse…to continue to burn enormous amounts of coal in Australia…and continue to export enormous volumes of black coal.”

“The Australian Government is literally betting the house on this technology”, according to Denniss, but what about the investment perspective? Francis Grey, Research Director at Sustainable Asset Management Australia said, “if we were venture capitalists, would we put our money on carbon capture and storage as opposed to battery technology, solar technology and the other technologies that are out there? The answer would probably be no, because you’d look around at the big names in this business, and they’re not present.”

So where does this leave the future of carbon capture and storage in Australia’s climate change strategy? In summary there are a lot of doubts as to its potential to play a big role anytime soon, but with government backing and the power and influence of the coal, mining and energy industries in the background, we’ll just have to wait and see.

The latest on Green Capital’s subscriber forums

To complement Green Capital’s quarterly major events, the subscriber forums are an opportunity to bring topics from our panels to a more intimate setting for debate, networking, knowledge sharing and engagement with our subscribers.

Our next two subscriber forums will delve further into the areas covered by the Carb-En: Carbon and Energy Action Quick Check for Business, launched at our last event. With case studies from Sydney Water and the Republic of Everyone, among others, subscribers are invited to share knowledge and experience with leaders in these areas, then join roundtables to explore easy wins, key challenges and ways to advance carbon and environmental action. To join these forums, become a subscriber.

The Quick Check is designed to assist businesses to quickly evaluate and rank their performance across five key areas for carbon and energy action: Internal Business Energy & Emissions; Supply Chain & Procurement; Customer & Consumer Issues; Staff Engagement & Mobilisation; and Policy & Advocacy. Download a copy here.

Subscribers in Sydney have been invited to forums on 10 and 25 June. Melbourne dates to be announced.

To get involved or hear more about Green Capital’s subscriber program, visit our website or contact Sarah van Erp, Sustainable Business Engagement Manager on 02 9261 3566 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

We have no emissions trading scheme – so why are power bills still spiraling?

An update from TEC’s National Electricity Market Campaign

Despite Kevin Rudd’s delay in implementing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), business and the broader community are still set to pay a lot more for electricity. The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal in New South Wales has released revised figures estimating price rises of up to 42% by 2013 in NSW, with other states also expecting substantial rises.

Much of the blame has been placed on the CPRS, yet the real story behind the power price increases remains largely untold.

Electricity networks are planning to spend over $42 billion over the next five years on expanding and reinforcing their networks – the ‘poles and wires’ that distribute the electricity generated mainly by Australia’s coal-fired power stations. Regulators are allowing them to recoup this $42 billion from consumers. This is unprecedented expenditure, on the scale of the national broadband rollout. Much of it is only expanding and entrenching an inefficient and polluting power system, and simply catering for rising demand instead of reducing it.

Energy savings and demand management could help avoid around a third of this spending. Yet the networks  are ignoring most energy savings measures, despite them being proven to be nearly four times more cost-effective than building more poles and wires. For example, Energy Australia is proposing to spend less than 0.5% of its allocated capital expenditure on energy efficiency and demand management. In contrast, an average network provider in the U.S. spends proportionately about five times more.

This lock-out of demand management is a lost opportunity for both reduced electricity bills and the least expensive greenhouse emissions reductions, and places the inappropriate burden of climate change and increased carbon costs on present and future generations.

Given the policy vacuum left by the CPRS deadlock and a hollow Coalition climate change policy, the Prime Minister’s Task Group on Energy Efficiency is well placed to make an effective contribution. TEC recommends a National Energy Efficiency Target and a National White Certificate Trading Scheme, based on the NSW Energy Savings Scheme, with one key change: peak demand management targets for the intransigent networks.

The challenge for Greg Combet and Penny Wong is to stave off cynical attacks from the likes of International Power, whose leaked submission to the Task Group stated ‘IPRA rejects any proposal to introduce climate change policy, under the guise of energy efficiency measures, which has the potential to destroy the value of existing investments in the generator sector.’ We await the Task Group’s report in mid-2010.

News from Green Capital’s Sustainable Staff workshops

The Sustainable Staff team has developed several new workshops to engage staff on sustainability. Corporate Sustainability is much more than just an exercise in ticking boxes, and smart organisations are getting their staff onboard and involved in generating ideas and setting the direction for sustainability. So how do you engage your staff to embed sustainability initiatives in your organisation?

Green marketing often pays out in product sales, but how do you ensure you are not accused of greenwash? Many businesses are also looking outside their direct impacts to see how they can influence their broader supply chain on sustainability. What are the strategies you can use to green your supply chain? These questions are looked at in Sustainable Staff’s new workshops. In addition to “Picking the fruits of Energy Efficiency” we now offer workshops on topics including:

• Organisational Change for Sustainability
• Lessons in Green Marketing
• Green Procurement & Supply Chains
• Green your office – Energy, Water & Waste
• Sustainability Considerations for Buildings
• Green Events

For a brief overview of workshops on offer click here.

If you’d like to more information or to discuss a Sustainable Staff engagement program for your organisation, please contact Irmine van der Geest or Sarah van Erp on 02 9261 3566, or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Haven’t received your Green Capital invitations lately? It could be an IT issue. You’ve got to read this!

If you haven’t received an email invitation to Green Capital’s next event – Politics of Sustainability – then our emails could be getting blocked by your spam filter. Please forward this document on to your IT department so they can white-list invitations from us.

Green Capital recently started using an online event registration website, Cvent, through which we now send you event invitations. It’s come to our attention that some of our event invitations may have not reached you. To make sure you receive the latest invitations to Green Capitals events, please get us white-listed now. In case you did miss the last invitation, click here to find out more about Politics of Sustainability.

Emissions trading or the placing of a price on carbon to encourage the market to develop lower or zero emission energy sources has been on the agenda for the last several years in Australia.  Energy intensive businesses, environment groups, sustainable energy groups and state and federal governments have a range of opinions about whether we should adopt emissions trading and if so, what model. 

The drive to reduce greenhouse emissions and increase the rate of take up of renewable energy was addressed in our first Green Capital event, 'Green or Black?' A range of federal and state policies and laws affect the decisions made by business and other consumers about energy supply.  We have also examined the future of the Mandatory Renewable Energy Scheme and overcoming the barriers to mainstream green power.