The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act (EPBC) requires the Federal Government to assess and determine whether to approve new projects that have impacts on nine “matters of national environmental significance (‘MNES’)”. Commonly referred to as Triggers, these are:
New projects likely to have a significant impact on any of the above must be sent to the Federal Environment Minister to evaluate and determine whether it can progress. As climate change is not listed as a MNES, projects with large emissions but do not breach any of the nine MNES, are not referred to the Federal Environment Minister for assessment.
Further information by the Australian Energy Council, the electricity and gas industry body. You are going to be hearing a lot about this in the coming months.
Why the Samuel’s Report did not recommend a Climate Trigger
The Second Independent Review of the EPBC Act was conducted by Professor Graeme Samual AC in 2019-2020 during a Liberal National Party government.
From page 51.
“Contributions to the Review have suggested that the EPBC Act should be expanded to include a climate trigger, which would seek to solve 2 apparent problems.”
“The first view presented is that Australia’s current emissions reduction policy settings are insufficient to meet our international commitments and more needs to be done. Advocates for a climate trigger suggest it would contribute to reducing Australia’s emissions profile by regulating significant land clearing and those projects with large emission profiles.”
“Successive Australian Governments have elected to adopt specific policy mechanisms to implement their commitments to reduce emissions. The Review agrees that these specific mechanisms, not the EPBC Act, are the appropriate way to place limits on greenhouse gas emissions.”
Does the Safeguard Mechanism work?
The Safeguard Mechanism only covers facilities with direct emissions (Scope 1) over 100,000 tonnes of CO2e- per year.
- All facilities must reduce net emissions by 4.9% per year to 2030, and to be at net zero emissions by 2050.
- A “hard cap” has been set on gross emissions.
- New offshore gas fields are required to either fully offset, or capture and permanently store, all reservoir carbon emissions.
The Australia Institute says –
“Depending on offsets to meet emission reduction goals is mathematically impossible and a recipe for climate disaster”.
- Carbon capture and storage (otherwise known as CCS) is a licence to ramp up emissions.
- CCS will never be a ‘zero-emissions’ solution.
- CCS is eye-wateringly expensive.
- Chevron’s Gorgon Gas Plant in WA, which is the biggest attempt at a CCS project in the world, is a big, expensive failure.
Other excuses for not introducing a Climate Trigger
The Water Trigger is only implemented for coal and unconventional gas projects and the Climate Trigger can be too. This allows an alternative assessment for the mining of rare earth minerals for renewable energy projects.
The government says that more gas is needed to keep peaking plants going so we can move to renewable energy. Peaking plants use small amounts of gas. 82% of our gas is exported.
The government says that we must sell our gas to Japan, Singapore and Korea for the regions security and so that they will buy hydrogen from us when it reaches export scale. It is not up to us to reduce other countries emissions, it’s up to them.
The coal and gas industry are strenuously lobbying the government to not include a Climate Trigger. Nannas believe successive governments have complied with them due to the donations they receive.