Climate Change

Professor Ross Garnaut: Bouncing back from COVID – how renewables can make Australia a manufacturing superpower.

Professor Ross Garnaut is one of Australia’s most distinguished economists and a global expert on climate change, trade and energy policy. He was Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s principal economic advisor and was Australia’s Ambassador to China. He’s lead many government reviews, including the seminal though ill fated Garnaut Climate Change Review into carbon emission reduction for the then Rudd Government. 

He is the author of many studies and books too numerous to mention, but his recent book – Superpower – details how Australlia can make the most of the economic benefits of the upcoming clean energy revolution.

Misha Zelinsky caught up with Ross for a chinwag about the politics of climate change including why Kevin Rudd was unable to pass his emissions trading scheme in 2009 and who was to blame, why COVID-19 shouldn’t distract us from climate change action, why Australia should be the world’s smelter for aluminium and steel and how renewable power can make Australia a manufacturing powerhouse, what the decoupling between the US and China means for Australia’s security, and why we need coordinated global action more than ever.

Transcript of Episode:

Misha Zelinsky:

Hi everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Diplomates, I’m Misha Zelinsky. I’m joined today by Professor Ross Garnaut. Ross, have I got you there?

Ross Garnaut:

Yes. Hello, Misha, good to be with you.

Misha Zelinsky:

Thank you very much for joining us. Now, of course, you are, as I understand it, in Queensland in Barcaldine, is that right?

Ross Garnaut:

Yeah. Barcaldine. Home of the AWU amongst other things.

Misha Zelinsky:

Indeed. Indeed. The scene of the very famous 1891 Shearer Strike and where the Labor Party was formed under the Tree of Knowledge there. So it’s an auspicious place to be.

Ross Garnaut:

Yeah. That’s right, not a bad place to be during a pandemic, warm and isolated.

Misha Zelinsky:

Very good. I’m glad that you’re socially isolating. Now, you’ve touched on the COVID-19 crisis, you’ve been around and dealt with government policy for some time, dating right back to your work with the Hawke government. What are the similarities or differences to the crisis from the past that you see?

Ross Garnaut:

Well, we’ve been through a few. The deep recession of 1991, the Asian financial crisis of 98, the global financial crisis of 08/09 and this one. I must say this is bigger than any of those.

Ross Garnaut:

Almost anything that goes wrong can trigger an economic crisis. And then they take on a life of their own. And when this one’s all over, we’ll be very much aware that it was begun by a health event, the pandemic, but the economic collapse that followed took on a life of its own. And it was very damaging in ways that were not easily foreseen at the time the pandemic hit.

Ross Garnaut:

One big difference between this and those earlier crises is that we don’t have a coherent international system to deal with it now. You compare it with the GFC, which before this one was the biggest hit since the Great Depression, biggest hit to global economic stability. Back then you had an effective co-operation between the leadership of the US, China, Europe, Japan, Australia.

Ross Garnaut:

Kevin Rudd as prime minister used that episode really to create the G20 as a heads of government meeting. And a couple of meetings of heads of government, presidents and prime ministers during the GFC was very important to getting a coherent global response. A commitment not to respond in protectionist ways and beggar thy neighbor ways. A commitment to have simultaneous fiscal expansion and monetary expansion.

Ross Garnaut:

And under that rubric you did get a coordinated global effort that greatly diminished the damage that was done by the crisis. Well, that’s in contrast to the current situation where you’ve got incoherence in global leadership. Where you’ve got the world’s biggest economy run by a man who thinks that international cooperation is a bad thing. That created crises in relations not only with geo-strategic rivals, China and others, but with his allies in Europe.

Ross Garnaut:

So that incoherence in the global response to crisis is the big difference I think between this one and anything we’ve seen in our lifetime.

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s an interesting point and a useful segue into, if you want to talk about global political incoherence, you’ve done a lot of work in the recent past, and the last decade certainly and beyond, in response to climate change. Now, it’s easy to forget, it seems it was only just yesterday that we were absolutely beside ourselves in Australia about the impacts of the summer from hell, the bush fires. Certainly now we find ourselves in a completely different situation with the covid-19 pandemic. Do you worry that the covid-19 response and the overall situation is a distraction from the efforts on climate change?

Ross Garnaut:

Well, inevitably it is a distraction. Just a fact of life. But this pandemic is a pretty serious thing, both in the health effects and the huge economic damage following it. But the pandemic and the economic collapse do not change the way carbon dioxide works, the physics of carbon dioxide just keeps on doing what it does. And the process of warming continues. And we’d be foolish not to keep that in mind.

Ross Garnaut:

It’s inevitable that we deal with the health crisis and the economic crisis as it comes. But wise leadership can deal with immediate things in ways that help rather than hurt progress in dealing with longer term issues.

Ross Garnaut:

We could manage the recovery from the economic crisis we’re going to go through with a strong focus on investment in the new economy. Or we could deal with it with a lot of ad hoc measures that increase short term employment and have no regard to what’s going to be sustainable in the long term. And that’s one of the most important choices that Australia and the international community will make in the period ahead.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, just turning to the so called summer from hell relating to the bush fires. And one of the things that was talked about, directly quoted from a report that you prepared for the Rudd government then, it was that fire seasons will start earlier and slightly later and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be more directly observable by 2020. That was very popularly shared, I think in sorrow, online. I mean, firstly, are you surprised how accurate that was?

Ross Garnaut:

Yeah. My report got that exactly right. And I should explain how I got it right. My report was very well resourced. I had a very strong group of people working with me, initially from all the state governments. My report was initially commissioned by the six states and two territories with an invitation for the Commonwealth to join. And the Commonwealth joined when Kevin Rudd became prime minister late in 2007.

Ross Garnaut:

And I had the resources to commission work from the very best atmospheric physics scientists in Australia. And I got a group in CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology to do that report on bush fires. And, as you say, my report got it right. All I did was honestly and accurately, put into my report what they reported to me and said.

Ross Garnaut:

Am I surprised that it was exactly right? Well, the fact that 2020 was mentioned might be a bit of a fluke. But all of the science that I commissioned, in ways that foretold how things would evolve in the impacts of climate change, turned out to be very sound.

Ross Garnaut:

What the work I published in my report said about sea level rise, about the warming effect of climate change, what would happen in Australia in the decade ahead, the drying of southern Australia. All of these things turned out pretty much as the science said they would.

Ross Garnaut:

All of the scientific work over the past dozen years since my report came out has broadly confirmed the accuracy of the scientific evidence as it came out in the work that I commissioned and which I published in my report in 2008. Bush fires is just one part of that. And getting the year exactly right might be a bit of a fluke, but the work was very sound. And like reports on other effects of climate change, it’s turning out to be, sadly, very much as predicted.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, one of the things I’d be curious to get your take on, of course, you produced the Garnaut Report for the Rudd government. One of the things people talk about or believe when you look at the polling for support for action on climate change was that the support fell essentially after the millennium drought broke. So there was a belief at the time that the dams would be empty, that they would never fill again. There was a great degree of urgency. It then of course rained and we lost, I suppose, support for action. And then we had the climate wars under Gillard and then Abbott. Do you think the bush fires will be a turning point or is this the new millennium drought?

Ross Garnaut:

Misha, I don’t think you’ve got the history of the politics right there. A very simple reason why my recommendations weren’t implemented as the States and the Commonwealth had in mind in 2008, and that’s when the legislation to implement the central feature of my recommendations, the carbon price, went past the House of Representatives, the opposition had said it would support it in the Senate. And at the 11th hour, just days before the vote was to come in the Senate, Tony Abbott organized himself to depose Malcolm Turnbull as the leader of the Liberal Party. And the numbers were no longer in the Senate.

Ross Garnaut:

In those days, the government needed the support of the opposition to pass legislation. The Greens weren’t enough. So the reason why Rudd did that at the time was that Abbott rolled Turnbull in the Liberal Party party room.

Misha Zelinsky:

And the Greens also voted against it as I recall.

Ross Garnaut:

Yeah. But that was incidental. The Greens didn’t have the numbers to pass it.

Ross Garnaut:

Now, a couple of Liberal senators, who were supporters of Malcolm Turnbull, did support the legislation. But whether they would have actually supported it if the Greens were on the same side as them is a moot point. But certainly the Greens, with the Labor Party, didn’t have the numbers at the time.

Ross Garnaut:

Now, I don’t think that the end of the millennium drought had anything like the influence on public opinion that you’re talking about. What reduced support for action on climate change was the visceral attack waged by News Corp and Tony Abbott against action on climate change. Supported of course by elements of the business community that stood to lose. And organizations like the Business Council and Mining Industry Council tend to support the squeakiest wheels. And so they tend to support their coal miners and others opposed to anything being done about climate.

Ross Garnaut:

But it was the visceral attacks, especially by the opposition, but with support from the majority media, that led to the change of opinion. I think there’s lots of evidence in Australia when the leader of one of the major parties takes a very strong position, there’s a certain proportion of the Australian community that follows that lead. Whether it’s the Labor Party leader or Liberal Party leader taking that lead. And when Abbott started attacking any action on climate change, that moved the opinion polls a bit. But it never moved it against action on climate change. And I record this in my book, Superpower.

Ross Garnaut:

If you track the polls right through, sure, there was a dipping of support for action on climate change during the Abbott era. But there was never a majority support for Tony Abbott’s positions.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yes, that’s a really good prompt on the history, but also you mention your book, Superpower, recently released, available at all good bookshops. So I encourage people to read it, it’s a very interesting read. But you make the case for a renewable makeover of Australia. But essentially from more of an economic standpoint, clearly there’s a climate imperative to it. But you argue the case on an economic standpoint. Can you explain the benefits of how you see this renewable makeover? And should we have been aiming for these net zero emissions target? And what’s a realistic timeframe to get it done?

Ross Garnaut:

Yeah, well, in Superpower I talk about what’s changed since my two big reports. First of all for all the premiers and the prime minister back in 2008. And then the multi-party committee on climate change in the hung parliament chaired by Julia Gillard in 2011.

Ross Garnaut:

Now, the big thing that’s changed since then, there’s the cost of the alternative technologies, the zero emissions technologies, have fallen dramatically.

Ross Garnaut:

I said that I’d assumed in all my modeling that solar costs would come down by a few percent per annum. Well, they came down by 85% in the first decade. And they’re still coming down since then. So that means that in places with good solar and wind resources like Australia, the costs of renewable energy are now lower than the costs of new-build thermal energy, much lower. So if the economics run things there won’t be a new, coal-powered power station ever built again. And that’s different from the story as it looked a dozen years ago.

Ross Garnaut:

Now, with the whole world committing to going to zero emissions, as it did in Paris, that was the decision of the Paris Agreement 2015, there was a decision to hold temperature increases below two degrees and as close as possible to 1.5. Well, two degrees will require zero net emissions in the world as a whole by 2050.

Ross Garnaut:

If the whole world goes towards zero emissions, then everyone will be using zero emissions energy, renewable energy. Australia has by far the best combinations of renewable energy of all of the countries on earth. And very much better than other developed countries. And they are the main competitors for these very capital intensive forms of energy. And Australia therefore should be the lowest energy cost country in the zero emissions world economy.

Ross Garnaut:

Now, you need an awful lot of electricity, an awful lot of energy, to produce metals like aluminum or iron with zero emissions. Currently, Australia is quite a big exporter of aluminum using coal. But in the zero emissions industry of the future, you won’t be able to make aluminum that’s made from coal.

Ross Garnaut:

The Chief Executive of the two companies that make aluminum now in mainland Australia, Rio Tinto, which owns the Gladstone smelter and the Tomago smelter. And Alcoa which owns the Portland smelter, the Chief Executives of those two organizations have said they won’t be making aluminum with coal-based electricity in a couple of decades time. Plants will have to either be based on renewable energy or they’ll be closed.

Ross Garnaut:

And when all of the world is making aluminum with zero emissions, electricity will be the low cost way of doing it. Now, we’re already the world’s biggest exporter of aluminum oxide, aluminum ore as bauxite or turned into alumina, the alumina plants in Gladstone and in the south west of WA. If you’ve got the lowest cost electricity and you’ve already got the alumina, you are the natural place to turn it into aluminum.

Ross Garnaut:

So our strength in aluminum smelting will be much greater in the renewable energy world economy of the future than it was in the coal based electricity economy of the past. So shifting to renewable energy not only will give plants in Portland, Tomago and Gladstone a future. When currently using coal, they don’t have a future. These should be expanding industry, should become much bigger in Australia.

Ross Garnaut:

Iron is an even bigger possibility. Currently iron is made from iron ore mostly by putting in coke, from coal, in a blast furnace. Well, that’s a very emissions intensive process, 7% of all the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from blast furnaces turning iron ore into iron metal.

Ross Garnaut:

In the zero emissions economy to which we’re all committed in the future that will be made from hydrogen made from renewable energy. Again, we will have a tremendous advantage being the source of the iron ore and also the lowest cost source of renewable energy. The natural economic place to make iron metal will be Australia.

Ross Garnaut:

So we’d have to be real duds, real dimwits not to be a major iron producer with huge employment and income from iron production in the zero emissions economy of the future.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, I think that’d be very welcome news for all the AWU members that make steel now living in the country at the moment, and alumina and bauxite mining. But one of the things I was trying to get you take on, you talk about Australia as the world’s smelter. One of the challenges we have as an energy nation is that we want, unlike every other country in the world that exports gas, we are now the world’s largest gas exporter. We’ve been silly enough to not reserve any of that for ourselves. Every other gas exporting nation does that. I mean, how do you consider that policy, in light of the energy transition we need to make, and the role that gas should play in the energy transition?

Ross Garnaut:

I think you’re being rough on Australia. Not all Australians are tarred with that brush. West Australia is the biggest the gas state and that does have domestic reservation. And WA’s gas is the cheapest gas in the developed world now. So WA’s made itself a natural place for a lot of energy intensive industry and petrochemicals.

Ross Garnaut:

Eastern Australia is different. But don’t say that all Australia has that policy. WA didn’t. Certainly, we did ourselves economic damage by encouraging over investment in LNG plants in Gladstone. We actually put in more plants than we had gas. And that created a scarcity.

Ross Garnaut:

And we went, in Eastern Australia, from having the developed world’s cheapest gas, so that Melbourne, Geelong and Adelaide were all quite substantial cities for gas-based manufacturing. We killed our advantage in that. And in fact went from having the world’s lowest cost gas to amongst the highest cost gas in the world as a result of over investment in export in Gladstone.

Ross Garnaut:

I think this was simply a failure to think through analytically all of the implications of that over investment in Gladstone export capacity. If you like, we didn’t think it through. We were a bit dumb.

Misha Zelinsky:

I think that’s a really good point. And the WA policy, of course, only extends as far as the WA waters, but it doesn’t capture the Commonwealth waters. So it’s an imperfect policy in WA, but still a much better policy than we have in the East Coast. So thank you for clarifying that.

Misha Zelinsky:

The other question I had, and you talk about this in your book, but I’m curious, maybe you could talk about the prospect of carbon farming and what exactly that means in terms of smarter land use? I mean, I know one of the things you talked about in the Garnaut Report was us becoming more reliant on kangaroo meat, for example, given the nature of Australia’s soil base. But can you talk about the smarter land use and carbon farming?

Ross Garnaut:

Yeah, on the kangaroo point, which was about one page of my 650 page report back in 2000, that got a lot of attention. But it is true that kangaroo’s a very healthy meat. And it is a zero emissions meat. And it’s the traditional meat of Australia. Australians lived on kangaroo for 60,000 years and we had more of that in our diet even if we fed more of it to our pets rather than using mutton or old beef. Then it would be helpful to emissions.

Ross Garnaut:

But on carbon farming, there’s more carbon in the top two meters of soil than there is in the whole of the atmosphere plus all of the living things, all of the living plants and animals on earth. So just incrementally increasing the carbon content of soils could have very big leverage over carbon in the atmosphere.

Ross Garnaut:

And the process is that living things are putting down roots, dying leaves, the residuals of plant matter, which can become long term additions to the carbon content of soils if you manage soils in different ways. And quite evidently this could be very big. And there’s certainly big opportunities for this in parts of Australia.

Ross Garnaut:

But there’s also opportunities for capturing more carbon in biomass. And in both my reports, and also in Superpower, I talked a little bit about some of the ways this can be done. But if you’ve got large parts of Australia, for example, the Valley country, the Mulga country, country with low productivity grazing, we don’t care very much about the vegetation on it. So then it’s carrying a lot less carbon and living plants than was there a long time ago. Carefully manage that in different ways and there can be a lot more carbon absorbed into the plants. Quantitatively, potentially very large. But you can also harvest that in a sustainable way. And more plant biomass can grow behind it. So you can harvest sustainably without diminishing the carbon stock. And then use that biomass as a basis for various industries, chemical industries, petrochemicals industries that currently use coal, gas and oil. And use of the biomass in those petrochemical industries, chemical industries will have zero emissions. Whereas use of coal, gas and oil has very high emissions. So that can be another path to the zero emissions economy.

Ross Garnaut:

And I mentioned in the book that Australia has got very big advantages in growing biomass, huge land area compared to our population. And it’s that opportunity that means that we can have a comparative advantage in biomass for industrial use just like we’ve got a comparative advantage in renewable energy.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, that certainly paints a very positive picture about some of the economic benefits. One of the things I’d like to get your take on, just turning back to the covid-19 crisis, and we’ve certainly seen supply chains under stress. We’ve already seen China and the US engaging in what’s called a decoupling. As they sort of pull apart their supply chains on security grounds and also economic protectionist grounds. How do you see this impacting on Australia? And do you see, first, what are the risks? But also what’s the case for more domestic capability in light of the crisis?

Ross Garnaut:

Just on the general question, closing up global supply chains, that would make us poorer. Australia had a huge growth in wages and average living standards in the nineties through higher productivity. And a lot of that came through greater use of international trade, specializing more in the things we did best.

Ross Garnaut:

And we had another growth in incomes in the first decade of the century on the basis of the China boom and increased exports to China. So, let’s be clear, de-globalization means taking away the increases in living standards we had then. We’d have to have lower wages, lower incomes, if that process went very far.

Ross Garnaut:

Now, we may need to accept lower wages on security grounds. But I think we should not unquestionably accept reductions in living standards for security reasons. So we should question the basis for that. And only restrict trade where there’s a really good security reason for doing it.

Ross Garnaut:

Sometimes businesses that benefit from protection will argue for breaking up global supply chains and use security arguments, but they’re really just arguing their own book. And I don’t think we should accept lower wages from reduced trade just because someone says it’s important for our security.

Ross Garnaut:

Let’s analyze whether the particular restriction on trade really is important for our security. Some things might be. We might need an industry making surgical masks and other protective gear in the pandemic. And that might cost us more than relying on imports. But let’s not just accept what someone says about that because every restriction on trade will mean lower wages and a lower standard of living.

Misha Zelinsky:

Do you see opportunities that could emerge, for example, China dominates rare earth metals, which is what people make batteries. Australia actually has quite a bit of it, though we’ve only got a small developing industry. Do you see there’s opportunities, as the world de-couples, that Australia could potentially use that to its advantage as well as maximize its security in the world security?

Ross Garnaut:

Well, if de-coupling goes far enough, then a lot of our rare earths will stay in the ground. Because de-coupling means America first and not relying on countries across the Pacific like Australia. So, I think we’ve got to be careful about that argument. We’ve got a wonderful endowment of a lot of minerals that are important in the new economy. A lot of the battery materials, processing those could be a huge source of growth in incomes. We could do that competitively with China or anyone else. And a healthy global trading system will make those industries bigger, will increase employment and incomes. De-globalization in the big countries on this earth though will get in the way of us taking advantage of those endowments.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, Ross, I’m sure I could talk to you about this all day but you’ve got plenty of things to be doing up there in sunny Queensland. But thank you very much for joining us on Diplomates. And really appreciate the time and the insights.

Ross Garnaut:

And very good to talk to you, Misha, and all the best.