A comprehensive new report by The Aotearoa Circle’ s Sustainable Finance Forum looks at how New Zealand can reform its financial system to help deal with the climate crisis.

Auckland University of Technology academics Dr David Hall and Alec Tang have been on the technical working group for the past two years that has helped to shape the Sustainable Finance: Roadmap for Action 2020 and its recommendations.

“Climate finance is one of the most neglected, yet most important, drivers of the transition to a low-emissions economy,” said Dr Hall.

• READ MORE: Sustainable Finance: Roadmap for Action 2020

The roadmap is an initiative involving major banks, insurers and other financial sector players. It builds on an earlier report co-authored by Dr Hall, Climate Finance Landscape for Aotearoa New Zealand, which was launched at AUT in April 2017 by the Minister for Climate Change James Shaw.

That was New Zealand’s first report on domestic climate finance, and several recommendations have since been implemented, including the establishment of the $100 million Green Investment Finance Ltd, a publicly-backed green investment fund, and the adoption of the mandatory climate risk reporting and disclosure requirements for all major New Zealand businesses.

The new Roadmap for Action 2020 takes this to the next level, publishing a series of commitments by financial sector actors to achieve more sustainable outcomes through their activities.

“Collectively, we need to change the way investment and lending decisions are made, so that environmental, social and economic factors are integral and negative impacts, both immediately and over the long term, are avoided,” the report says.

Dr Hall said the Sustainable Finance Forum sought to achieve this through changing mindsets, transforming the financial system, and financing the transformation.

Republished from AUT News.

The Green Party say voters have given a strong signal they are valued in the New Zealand government, and they have ambitions for executive roles in the next one.

With special votes still to be counted in yesterday’s general election, the party has 180,224 votes or 7.6 percent of votes nationally, which wins them nine list MPs as well as the hotly contested third place for party vote share.

It is a spot that is typically a scramble between the smaller parties, and can bestow the possibility of negotiating a key place in a coalition government.

• READ MORE: ‘ We will … govern for every New Zealander’, says Ardern after Labour victory
• Jacinda Ardern promised ‘transformation’
• More NZ election stories
• Preliminary election results

However Labour’s sweeping victory with 64 seats gives the party enough seats to govern alone.

Green co-leader Marama Davidson told RNZ’s Guyon Espiner she is very happy with the outcome, which should give them 10 MPs.

In 2017 the party got 6.2 percent of the party vote.

Electorate win in Auckland Central
This year’s one electorate win was for Chlöe Swarbrick, number three on the party’s list, who polled better on election day than polls had showed in the lead-up, and won the Auckland Central seat off the opposition National Party.

She beat Labour’s Helen White by 492 votes, however Labour won that electorate’s party vote. The only other Green Party member to have ever held an electorate seat was Jeanette Fitzsimons, for Coromandel in 1999.

Swarbrick’s win means another Green candidate from further down the list is headed for Parliament.

“I’m really ecstatic, completely stoked. We were hoping to stay above five percent, because historically smaller first term government parties do not achieve that,” Davidson says.

“Not only have we defied the results… but we’ve increased our support to 10 MPs. [We have] three new incredible MPs, I’m completely ecstatic.”

The party’s list number eight is Teanau Tuiono (Palmerston North), who Davidson says will be their first Pasifika MP.

Number nine is LGBTQI and Māori activist Elizabeth Kerekere (Ikaroa-Rāwhiti); and anti-poverty campaigner Ricardo Menéndez March (Maungakiekie) is the number 10.

Special votes crucial
Davidson said special votes would show whether they could boost their number to 11, as well.

She said the party would meet together today to discuss what they wanted next; whether they wanted to negotiate with Labour to try to form a coalition government again, what the crucial factors are that they wanted on the table, and what would be the deal-breakers for them.

Davidson said that despite the strength of Labour’s position, she believed New Zealanders would still prefer a coalition.

“People do not want to see just one political party in full power,” she said.

“They totally gave huge [numbers] to Labour, that’s clear, but I think it’s been clear in the polls and the surveys done right up to the election, and the fact Greens swung an extra 2 percent on top of what we were polling – it’s again a clear mandate for not just one party to hold all the reigns of power.”

Davidson said they did not yet have any appointment set up to meet with Labour, and today the Greens would hold internal discussions about what their next steps might be.

“I am being upfront with our strategy here: [talk of a coalition] will absolutely come back to the members, on how well we can see our long term future going into the next term; whether or not we are able to achieve our work programme, our priorities in climate, inequality and environment.

Roles to progress Greens programme
“Whether or not we achieve roles that can progress that work programme. That is what… agreement will come down to for our members. And we won’t be able to pre-empt that for our members.”

In the outgoing government New Zealand First won 7.2 percent of the party vote, but crucially that gave them the ability to swing the balance of power between a right or left -leaning government. They played that position into gaining the deputy Prime Minister role for party leader Winston Peters, three positions in cabinet, an outside cabinet a ministerial and an under-secretary role.

By contrast, the Greens came away poorer: three ministerial positions (including Minister for Climate Change, Minister for Women and Minister of Conservation), and an under-secretary role, but all outside of cabinet.

“Outside of the executive in the last term, the Greens in Government achieved more action for climate change than 30 years,” Davidson said.

But this time around, can they hope for Labour to consider their MPs for ministerial roles or cabinet positions?

“We would want to see roles that would progress [our work] programme, and yes, it would involve some ministerial responsibility at that level,” she said.

“Across all of our MPs, we will be looking at aligning potential roles with the work programme, as a whole not just down to one person.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

When New Zealand Health Minister Chris Hipkins recently quipped that the Green Party is “to some extent the conscience of the Labour Party” he was not simply referring to polls suggesting Labour may need the Greens’ support to form a government.

Hipkins was also suggesting Green policies help keep Labour honest on environmental and social issues. So, what difference has the Green Party really made to New Zealand’s political debate?

Drawing on a study of 57 million words spoken in Parliament between 2003 and 2016, our analysis shows the presence of a Green party has changed the political conversation on economics and environment.

• READ MORE: Ardern’s government and climate policy: despite a zero-carbon law, is New Zealand merely a follower rather than a leader?

In the recent Newshub leaders’ debate, both Jacinda Ardern and Judith Collins agreed that “growing the economy” was the best way to respond to the economic crisis driven by covid-19.

Their responses varied only on traditional left-right lines. Ardern argued that raising incomes and investing in training would grow the economy. Collins suggested economic growth should be advanced by increasing consumer spending through temporary tax cuts.

By contrast, Green parties in New Zealand and elsewhere have long questioned the impact of relentless growth on the natural resources of a finite planet.

Green thinking is informed by ecological economics, which aims to achieve more sustainable forms of collective prosperity that meet social needs within the planet’s limits.

The language of economic growth
The impact of this radically different view can be observed in New Zealand parliamentary debates. When MPs from National and Labour used the word “economy” they commonly talked about it in the context of “growth” (“grow”/“growing”/“growth”).

On average, National MPs said “growth” once every four mentions of “economy”. Labour MPs said “growth” once every six mentions.

Green MPs used “growth” once every 20 mentions of “economy”. When they did mention growth it was primarily to question the idea and to present alternative ideas about a sustainable economy.

Our analysis of the most recent parliamentary term (2017-2020) is ongoing.
However, while Labour has recently introduced “well-being” into discussions of the economy, it is striking how the covid crisis has reinvigorated the party’s traditional focus on growth economics.

The research also shows Green MPs mention “economy” primarily in relation to the environment, climate change, sustainability and people, rather than in relation to growth. Their distinct focus is on the connections between the economic system and the environment.

From Labour to the Greens
Despite criticism that the Greens have not focused enough on “environmental” concerns, Green MPs used words related to environment, climate and conservation more frequently than Labour or National MPs over the 13-year study period.

For example, after controlling for the number of words spoken by each party’s MPs in parliament, Green MPs mentioned “climate change” four times more than National or Labour MPs.

This represents something of an historical shift. Atmospheric warming and CO₂ were first talked about in parliament by Labour MP Fraser Coleman in 1979. And Labour’s Geoffrey Palmer was the first prime minister to place climate change on parliament’s agenda.

But it has been the Greens who have maintained the momentum, using their speaking opportunities in the House to hold governments to account, including progressing legislation on the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019.

Making women’s voices heard
The Green Party has also made a difference to who speaks. By institutionalising gender balance in their leadership and party organisation, and in the way they select their party list for each election, the Greens have consistently elected a higher proportion of female MPs than the other parties.

Historically, female Green MPs have contributed significantly to debates and policy action on inequality, child poverty, Treaty of Waitangi issues, gender equality and action on domestic violence.

This is significant. Analysis of political language globally, particularly on social media, has shown that politicians who identify as women and people of colour are subject to far higher rates of verbal abuse than their male counterparts. This is also the experience of female MPs in New Zealand, including women representing the Greens.

‘Quantity of life or quality of life?’ A 1972 election ad from the Values Party, political ancestor of the Greens.

A history of disruption
Minority parties often struggle to maintain their identity in coalition arrangements with larger parties, but the Greens have retained a unique position in New Zealand.

In 1972, the Values Party became the first “green” party to contest a national election anywhere in the world. Former Values activists, including the first Green Party co-leaders Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, were later successful in taking the Greens into Parliament.

The language of green politics in New Zealand and the questioning of growth can be traced back to these origins. Language and words are significant as vehicles for articulating new ideas and provoking transformative action.

Linguistic analysis therefore shows how influential the Green Party has been in presenting alternatives to the idea that economic growth based on unlimited use of New Zealand’s natural resources is a sustainable option.

If Chris Hipkins is correct and the Greens are Labour’s conscience, it is because
they have effectively disrupted a historical near-consensus among the major parties that economic growth is the only driver of prosperity.

Dr Geoffrey Ford is lecturer in digital humanities and a postdoctoral fellow in political science and international relations, University of Canterbury; Dr Bronwyn Hayward, is professor of politics, University of Canterbury, and Dr Kevin Watson, is dean of arts and associate professor of linguistics, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Former Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons has died.

Her husband, Harry Parke, said the death was totally unexpected.

“Yesterday morning she was out on the farm doing stuff, she had a bit of a fall and finally ended up in Thames Hospital where she had a massive stroke and died at 9.45pm last night – very peacefully I might add,” he said.

READ MORE: What the Green Party has achieved in 18 years
LISTEN TO MORNING REPORT: Interview with Harry Parke

“The day before, she was using a chainsaw – that’s the sort of person she is. She worked a lot harder than I ever did. I was totally in awe of her.

“Fortunately we both had very much the same convictions about what needed changing in the planet and we had a very close relationship.”

Fitzsimons became the co-leader of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand in 1995, and when the party joined the Alliance led by Jim Anderton’s New Labour Party, she took on the deputy leadership role.

After the first MMP election in 1996, she entered Parliament as a list MP for the Alliance but it was not long before strains appeared in the grouping.

Left the Alliance
She felt herself left out of its decision-making and the Green Party itself was increasingly unhappy with the Alliance’s direction.

The agreement to send New Zealand troops to Afghanistan in the United States’-led so-called war on terror was a step too far for the Greens and they left the Alliance.

Fitzsimons won the Coromandel seat for the Greens in 1999, the country’s first elected Green MP and was disappointed when she lost it in the following election, although the party remained in Parliament due to its party vote.

She and her co-leader Rod Donald were strong influences in the change in public perception of the party as a group of sandal-wearing tree-huggers.

Parke said Fitzsimmons was “instrumental” in getting the Green Party up and running in the 1990s. More recently, her focus had been on climate change.

“She fought really hard to get people to accept you can’t keep growing the economy and stop climate change. It just seems people don’t want to hear that.”

Never raising her voice
Fitzsimons was known for never raising her voice in the House and never responding to barbs thrown around in Parliament.

“She strongly believed that never got you anywhere, that all it did was take the focus off the subject you were talking about and your energy needed to be totally on what you were trying to achieve. I think she held that up admirably,” Parke said.

“She never let her emotions get in the way of what needed to be said and what needed to be done.”

“She totally lived her convictions and there was no way that anyone could say she didn’t live up to what she was saying.”

Fitzsimons was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2010.

This article is republished under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.

Celebrating 100 years of oil shale mining may represent a proud moment for Estonia, but this doesn’t compare to what the country has lost, many environmentalists say.

The backbone of Estonia’s electricity production may have allowed the Baltic nation to escape from beneath the Soviet yoke and become energy self-sufficient post-independence in 1991, but most observers remember that this has come at a cost: the environment.

“In terms of ecology it’s a total disaster. From the point of view of state economy this is something to be proud of,” says Professor Mait Sepp, research fellow in physical geography at the University of Tartu.

“We have lost our wetlands, we have lost our streams.”

Many of Estonia’s environmental organisations agree, with more than 15 percent (504.6 km²) of the country’s Ida-Virumaa region severely damaged by the oil shale industry.

Mihkel Annus of the Estonian Green Movement says the sector still stamps the largest ecological footprint on the nation, despite European Union (EU) regulations.

’40 years like a volcano’
Perhaps the greatest reminder of this footprint will be the country’s ash mountains, huge piles of solid hazardous waste that mar Estonia’s relatively flat landscape.

“These will probably stay as the remnants of our fossil-fuel dependent past for centuries from now, as well as the land that has been excavated and already been exhausted,” says Annus.

Harmful to the environment due to the poisonous gases and various contaminants they emit into surface and groundwater, these mountains are not only viewed as an ecological disaster.

They have also dealt a blow to the country’s pockets.

It cost the government more than 36 million euros (about NZ$44.4 million) to close the infamous ash mountain in Kohtla-Järve, which stood approximately 170m above sea level before it was closed and made environmentally safe in 2015.

Estonia’s current environmental headache is the Kukruse ash mountain, which one official from the Ida-Viru County government describes as a 40-year-old “volcano”.

Hardi Murula, head of development and planning for the county government, says they have been engaged in ongoing talks for the past three to four years on how best to “neutralise” the mountain, but that no consensus has been reached.

“No one can guarantee during the restoration process that the pollution can be stopped.”

The closure of ash mountains throughout Ida-Virumaa is largely seen as positive despite the challenges, with one of the mountains in the former oil shale town of Kiviõli converted into an adventure centre in a joint industry-government project.

Piret Väinsalu of the Estonian Fund for Nature says the restoration of land is rather impossible, however.

“You can try to restore it into something, but it will always be there as a ‘heritage of oil shale age’.”

Legacy pollution
But government, industry and environmentalists do not see eye-to-eye on the source of this environmental damage.

Minister of Environment Marko Pomerants says much of the environmental impact is related to “legacy pollution” of the Soviet-era.

“Fortunately, most of the major negative effects are a thing of the past and the current oil shale sector has remarkably reduced its harmful practices for the environment.”

He says environmental concerns today largely involve emissions, although these have decreased since 2002.

Timo Tatar, head of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication’s energy department, agrees.

“Talking about environmental damage, one can say, that oil shale environmental impact has significantly decreased due to heavy investments into new combustion technologies as well as emission control.”

Official 2014 data by the European Commission shows Estonia currently stands as the second highest emitter, per capita, of greenhouse gases in Europe, however, and its far from carbon-free history occupies a blight on their climate change record.

Although the EU’s Emissions Trading System allows the country to sell-off its emissions because they are lower than the country’s massive levels at 1990, things are far from rosy, especially in the wake of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement.

In light of this, environmentalists Annus, Väinsalu, and their colleague Aleksei Lotman, a marine conservation expert with the Estonian Fund for Nature, do not share officials’ view.

Although they agree the oil shale industry is “very much less polluting” than it was 30 years ago, they say making oil shale “environmentally friendly” is not enough.

To call current improvements by the oil shale industry so is “over-optimistic to say the least”, Lotman says.

A question of commitment
They are therefore critical of industry and government and feel both have failed to act effectively.

Väinsalu, who serves as the Estonian coordinator for the international non-profit network EKOenergia in her role with the Estonian Fund for Nature, says the government does “just enough” to be on a good list for Estonia’s European partners, while it simultaneously supports oil shale interests by lobbying for greater industry exemptions.

“Instead of understanding the need to find an alternative route and exit the oil shale era our government just supports the industry in every way possible.”

Eesti Energia, Estonia’s state-owned energy enterprise, refutes such claims and says it has taken several steps to reduce the environmental impacts of its operations.

“Today we can produce more energy from oil shale than in the past with less environmental impact,” says Eesti Energia.

Eesti Energia says introductions in new technology have been responsible, although physical changes have also occurred.

Among these was the 2008 closure of the ash field at their Balti power plant near Narva, in Estonia’s east.

The project took three years to complete and resulted in 570ha being made safe for the environment.

In 2013, Eesti Energia’s sister company, Enefit, opened a 17-turbine wind park on the former ash field.

“Our main focus lies in replacing fossil fuels with cleaner fuels,” Eesti Energia says.

The company adds it already does so through its use of water, wind, and biomass.

Annus, however, as a member of one of Estonia’s most influential environmental organisations, feels industry may not have been as cooperative as it makes out.

“Whether they would make their processes more environment-friendly voluntarily, is questionable.”

He says this is because the oil shale industry has been put under increasing pressure by tightening EU regulations.

“They have been forced to take action to meet the set concentration values of emissions, changing the technology of landfilling of solid and hazardous waste, limiting water pollution, and so on.”

Annus adds much of Estonia’s oil shale industry happens behind closed doors, which further calls into question their transparency.

“A lot of the region has also been blocked off from the public eye.”

Kaja Peterson, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute Tallinn Centre’s (SEI Tallinn) climate and energy programme, says Eesti Energia has, in fact, been rather open.

“I think Eesti Energia has been very flexible because they reformed and created a new sister company, Enefit Renewable Energy.”

She points out, however, that Eesti Energia is gradually transitioning to renewables and oil shale, unfortunately, still forms the majority of their operations.

Fossil free future?
This seeming unwillingness on the part of officials to divest from oil shale has led to serious doubts about Estonia’s renewable future.

While the government and oil shale industry remain positive, environmentalists and researchers are sceptical.

They claim there is no direct investment or clear political will in renewables by the government, only some will to diversify.

“There have been measures to promote sustainable energy, but the indirect subsidies for fossil fuels have still been greater,” Annus emphasises.

Annus feels Estonia is lagging behind a large portion of their EU counterparts and trendsetters, while Tatar and Pomerants celebrate Estonia reaching its Renewable Energy Directive target – 25 percent of renewables in final energy consumption – well before the 2020 deadline.

“Since the political target has been achieved there is no political motivation to increase that,” Peterson says.

Peterson’s colleague, Lauri Tammiste, SEI Tallinn’s director, says the shift to a low-carbon economy remains on the official agenda.

He highlights plans by the government to reach 50 percent of renewables and lower CO₂ emissions by 2030, although there will be a challenge.

“The main issue is, how to actually deliver these goals and ensure successful transformation with biggest possible environmental, economic and social benefits.”

When asked whether Estonia would have a fossil free future, Sepp was adamant he would not see change in his lifetime.

“No. Not in the near future.

It’s very convenient to use this old system. You have one system which works and to build a new one …. takes a lot of money and a lot of effort. Some very critical changes must happen to change this system.”

It seems clear, for the time being at least, that Estonia’s energy future remains far more carbon intensive than environmentalists would like.

Feature article by Kendall Hutt; photos by Essi Lehto and Lukas Rusk. The assignment was part of the Inclusive Journalism Project collaboration between journalism schools in New Zealand and Scandinavia.

The world seems particularly chaotic this winter. The climate news is diabolical, with fears about melting of the Arctic permafrost and the ancient ice stores of the Himalayas. There is a Royal Commission into the brutal treatment of children in prison in the Northern Territory.

And that is before we get to ISIL terrorism and other mass shootings in Europe and America.

There is Britain’s brain-snap exit from Europe and the punchline that Boris Johnston and the other Tory geniuses have no clear plan for it. And there is The Donald – the Republican Party’s candidate for President of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

All these problems require sane collective action, which means democratic use of the power of the state. The good news – and don’t we need some – is that after three decades, our handcuffs are coming off.

Since the 1980s (or even the mid-1970s, according to Michael Pusey) the West has slowly strangled itself and the rest of the world with a political obsession that goes under the name of “neoliberalism” (or “the Washington Consensus”, the Australian version of which Pusey called “economic rationalism”).

During the recent Federal election, Australia took a step away from the naïve adoration of markets and lower taxes. The Coalition had to accept that generous superannuation tax breaks for the super wealthy are not good policy.

Both sides of the aisle heard the message that wealthy property investors are less deserving of tax breaks than first home buyers.

The Coalition may be set on giving a $51 billion hand out to corporate Australia but it is unpopular and may be resisted in the Senate.

It is against this background that we want to put forward a new idea, framed in response to a recently published essay titled Balancing Act, by George Megalogenis, the Australian author and economics graduate. Our idea is that renewable energy provides the perfect act of renewal for the democratic state at this time.

Balancing act
In Balancing Act, an issue of the Quarterly Essay series, Megalogenis pinpoints the driver of much of the malaise in Australian policy making; neoliberalism, or the “open model” as he calls it. He says that it is time to accept that the open model which both sides of politics have implemented over the last 30 years gives us no path to future prosperity and the voters, yearning for long-term vision, want “a return to some form of government intervention in the economy”.

In our response to his Quarterly Essay, we want to briefly explore how Megalogenis’s arguments about the need for state intervention could be used to;

• slash greenhouse gas emissions
• build a reliable consensus in climate politics
• help fix the economic model.

Our argument is that the new conversation about government intervention in the economy provides a way to solve the climate riddle, by moving beyond the “market fetish”.

Megalogenis writes:

The Coalition can’t lay claim to the future until it adjusts to the two big shocks of our age. The first shock is that the version of capitalism favoured by the conservatives is broken… The second shock is that the international community may finally be ready to tackle climate change.

Policy solutions that match the global warming threat require transformation, not tinkering. As Megalogenis rightly points out, these processes of restructuring require governments to stop simply devolving agency to the invisible hand of the market.

The return to regulation in the economy could revitalise the environmental agenda, cutting through the impasse of carbon politics with a healthy dose of nation building in the area of renewable energy. It would replace fifteen years of neoliberal environmental orthodoxy with a new agenda that is both more rigorous and more popular.

Neoliberal environmentalism
Environmentalism from the 1960s until the 1980s was a diverse movement. There were public transport and urban design activists calling for more rational, convivial cities. Conservationists campaigned to protect biodiverse forests from destruction. Greenpeace put its ships in the way of nuclear testing and toxic waste dumping. Deep greens proposed new cultural paradigms to replace consumerism and economic growth.

Then, at some point in the late 1990s, the climate threat became so great that it rightly dominated the environmental agenda in Australia and around the world. This occurred at the same time in history that free market ideology was ascendant. The timing was tragic.

Until this point, environmentalists responded to global warming with tools that had already worked in achieving environmental and other policy progress. These were forms of government regulation: bans on some chemicals and practices, standards on imported and locally manufactured products, incentives for clean production, plans for rational design of cities around mass transit.

Unfortunately, however, greens became convinced that the best and perhaps only way to save the climate was to monetise it. (Or more accurately, to monetise tradeable rights to pollute the climate.) We reduced the complexity of a global system out of control into the mere absence of a price signal.

Rather than build a social movement for transformation, we operated like technocrats. We learned to speak in what the Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss calls “econobabble”. Too tentative to pick winners – solar and wind over coal and gas – we hid behind economic talk of carbon prices and market architectures. It is no wonder the public cooled to global warming.

The emerging criticism of the open economy doctrine now allows us to return to a more rational and constructive conversation. Megalogenis says, “The debate we have to have is on the role of government in the economy”. The practical program he prescribes starts with public investment in infrastructure.

Our view is that the first candidate for this infrastructure development should be the switch to clean energy for electricity and transport. Australia’s economic opportunity here is vast as we have prodigious renewable energy resources which are tragically underdeveloped. We also have the opportunity to create goods for export.

Green industries
Recent announcements in electric vehicles indicate just how rapidly the world will move towards green industries. The Netherlands and Norway are looking to have only electric vehicles sold by 2025 and India has an astonishing goal to replace all of its petrol and diesel cars with electric vehicles by 2030.

If the Paris climate agreement COP21 succeeds, this would require wealthy countries such as ours to decarbonise our energy sector by about mid-century. For long-term assets such as energy infrastructure, achieving a complete rebuild before 2050 means starting immediately with a concerted program of investment.

This is a massive economic undertaking and requires strong government intervention. According to the International Energy Agency, rebuilding a clean energy system by 2050 would cost US$44 trillion globally. (Crucially, it would save US$115 trillion, because fuels such as the sun and the wind are free as well as renewable.)

Giles Parkinson, the editor of RenewEconomy, estimates that Australia will end up spending $130 billion on electricity networks over 20 years from 2000 to 2020. He calls this “pure folly”, propping up last century’s old, dirty, one-way electricity model, when our competitors are investing in renewable energy, battery storage and smart grids that will deliver cheaper, cleaner, more secure energy.

Our mal-investment will be of little use when energy companies like AGL eventually retire their coal-burning plants. Australia cannot afford waste on this scale. Nor can our climate bear the consequences of further delay.

What is needed to transform the energy system is for government to set a clear goal to decarbonise by mid-century and take firm hold of economic levers to make it happen. The National Energy Objective – the foundation of all energy policy in the country – needs to be modernised to include decarbonisation as a goal, alongside secure and efficient delivery of energy.

This greening of the energy and transport sectors would create real investment in long-term, productive assets. It will generate jobs and new industries. It is a perfect example of the kind of government action that Megalogenis recommends.

Upbeat about renewables
The reason that we are both so upbeat about the renewables boom is that it offers everything that carbon politics failed to deliver. Where carbon markets are abstract, renewables are tangible; solar panels and wind turbines you can touch.

Carbon markets created a small number of direct jobs within the banking sector – which is hardly the world’s most loved profession – but building renewables and a smart grid will generate millions of mostly blue collar jobs around the world, according to a recent report from the intergovernmental International Renewable Energy Agency.

Where carbon price schemes are ultimately just another globalised market – like currencies or commodity futures – renewables can be owned and operated by local communities. For example, most of the wind farms in Denmark are local co-operatives. Shareholding or direct ownership of clean energy – especially rooftop solar – gives it an unassailable social license, with electoral support across the political spectrum.

With the rise of smart grid technologies, even urban communities can own their own ‘virtual’ power stations; roof-top solar and household battery power, traded and optimised in real time, providing reliable energy to replace baseload coal.

Energy as innovation
Prime Minister Turnbull has called for innovation. Smart energy is innovation on steroids. Australia already has start-ups making hardware and software that we should export to a world hungry for clean energy. Reposit is building solar and battery storage systems that sell their aggregated energy into the grid, like a virtual power plant. Redflow is developing consumer and utility-scale batteries on the ‘flow’ design, which can provide very high durability energy storage and safety and sustainability improvements over conventional lithium-ion batteries.

A combination of ‘push’ policies that stimulate innovation and ‘pull’ policies that provide stable demand for renewables (and storage and smart grids) would liberate a wave of entrepreneurship for the Prime Minister. These products, services and new business models are more responsible exports than coal and they are becoming more competitive. Even if no top-down mandate for clean energy emerges from the Paris climate agreements, the natural growth of unsubsidised renewables will be worth US$7,800 billion by 2040 according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The most important reason to rebuild climate politics around renewables (as distinct from carbon markets) is the politics itself. Renewable energy has a super-majority of support (70 per cent plus of the electorate), in major markets all around the world. Polling commissioned by the Australia Institute found that three quarters of Australians would support a party that boosted solar and battery storage and 63 per cent are prepared to endorse a national switch from fossil fuels to renewables by 2030.

Even in Australian wind districts, where a vocal minority of opportunistic politicians have whipped up anti-wind farm panic, an amazing majority prefer wind and solar to coal or gas. Detailed polling in ten wind districts in 2011 found 83 per cent of people support wind power. Carbon markets are nowhere near as popular.

Tony Abbott’s ‘great big new tax’ scare campaign killed carbon markets in the popular imagination (assuming they were ever truly popular to start with). Similarly, toxic misinformation makes it impossible to conceive of a bipartisan national carbon market policy in the US. Strange, extreme ideas are also percolating up in the Tory party in England, including paranoid notions that wind turbines cause ‘infrasound’ sickness and death.

Prime Minister Turnbull’s post-election cabinet reshuffle has created a perfect political setup to take a renewable energy leap forwards. Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg has taken on the Environment portfolio. It is a high risk situation for Frydenberg, because the ‘jobs versus environment’ frame through which these issues are seen means he appears to have to choose either energy or the climate. Encouragingly, he recently told a clean energy conference that his job was to “move energy into the environment [portfolio]”.

Conflict or harmony?
As one of us has written in The Guardian:

It depends entirely on whether the two sides of the portfolio – energy and the environment – are set in conflict or in harmony with each other.

… If Frydenberg does not move quickly to capitalise on this innovation, then he is caught between coal and a hard place. He either fails one half of his portfolio or fails the other half.

… Unleashing the renewables revolution is the only way that the new minister can do something significant for the environment and at the same time, build Australia’s energy resources and energy security. This is an opportunity that Greg Hunt never had when he was environment minister.

Renewables are the best and perhaps the only way to save the debate about saving the climate. If Megalogenis is right, then Australia has a narrow window of opportunity to use government intervention to reinvent our economy and rebuild crumbling infrastructure.

The stakes are cultural as well as economic. Dark forces and racist politicians are on the march around the world. Restoring public faith in a collective, democratic space is a protection against the demagoguery that Trump is bringing to the gates of the White House, if not to the Oval Office itself. Clean energy infrastructure is the first and best candidate for a new approach to nation building on a planet in peril.

This article is republished with permission from New Matilda.