Nick Rowley, a former climate policy advisor to Tony Blair, joins Lateline to discuss the environment.
Transcript
TONY JONES: I'm joined in the studio now by Nick Rowley, a founder and director of the climate change consultancy Kinesis, and a former senior policy adviser on sustainability and climate change to the British prime minister Tony Blair.
Thanks for being here.
NICK ROWLEY, DIRECTOR OF KINESIS: Pleasure.
TONY JONES: We saw the spontaneous round of applause from the delegates at the Bali conference, to the announcement that Australia had actually ratified the Kyoto Protocol. I mean, what sort of impact is this likely to have, in reality?
NICK ROWLEY: Well I mean, I think that in looking at the Bali meeting, which is a very significant UN meeting, they take place annually. The Bali meeting is a big meeting.
Hopefully you're going to get an agreement with regard to a road map which is going to help develop what the parameters of a post 2012 treaty are going to be. And for a country, that over the last 10 years that has pretty much been lock step with the United States, not in being party to the negotiations, playing an active role but really saying, 'well, the current protocol is inadequate, there are problems with it' and really not engaging in a positive way.
For Kevin Rudd, today, in his first act as Prime Minister it appears, to actually ratify the global climate treaty and for that announcement to be made in the context of this UN meeting, is significant.
Indeed in speaking to some of the people who were already there, and part of the Australian delegation as I did today, they were saying to me 'well, you know, you walk down corridors and people are actually walking towards you rather than walking past you, or actually not wanting to engage with you'.
So there was a focus globally, on the position of the Australian Government and that the Australian Prime Minister is actually going to this meeting I think also is very significant.
TONY JONES: I'll come to that. He's invested a lot of political capital in this as his very first act, hasn't he?
NICK ROWLEY: He has, he has. And yet, I think that Kevin Rudd understands that this is a very, very challenging area of policy.
And if you look at his appointments - he's appointed Penny Wong to head up climate change and water, Peter Garrett is there in environment. We've got Wayne Swan, who was actually in London, just prior to the Stern review into the economics of climate change, receiving briefings in the UK Treasury.
Kevin Rudd, as well as making this very much part of his individual political project as Prime Minister, I think he's building a team around him also who can help develop the policy response required, both internationally and domestically.
TONY JONES: Yes. The policy response is going to be extremely complex, as we know. The critical question is, how are those different roles going to be broken down? It looks like Penny Wong has been given the difficult task of negotiating and doing the mathematics, if you like. Peter Garrett for vision, is that the way you see it?
NICK ROWLEY: Well I don't know if it's just for vision. I mean we in Australia - although I wasn't around in Australia for all of his greatest songs - but nonetheless many people in Australia relate to Peter Garrett as the man on the stage who used to have a funny dance and sing-songs.
But I think internationally, he does have a pretty high profile amongst people who understand environment policy. So he's not perceived in the UK or in Europe as someone who sort of sings songs and has decided to have a political career. He's seen as someone who's pretty serious and robust on environment policy and a pretty smart man when it comes to actually selling the sort of actions and policies required to tackle the climate problem.
Even just looking at your program tonight. It was a program largely concentrated on the climate problem, but it wasn't a program that actually even talked about major forms of energy supply.
It was talking about deforestation, it was talking about farming and indeed it was talking about private transport. Now it just shows that if you're going to have an adequate policy response to a problem of this complexity, you have to look across the policy landscape in government.
I think that if you look at the appointments that Kevin Rudd has made and some of the administrative arrangements, I think we can - it's early days to make conclusions about how these things operate in practice - but I think that you're looking at a form of leadership in Australia now that is not saying well this is just an area of environment policy and we need to do a few tokenistic things.
I think we're looking at a government that potentially is going to start adopting climate policy calibrated around some very clear principles, around what the targets are that need to be established and indeed, hit within the domestic economy, how you're going to monitor performance against those targets. And indeed be brought accountable for them.
So if you look at the sort of politics of climate change, you look at the policy response, some of that response in any jurisdiction - I'm not just talking about Australia - has been quite superficial. Some of it has been more robust. But putting solar PVs on the roofs of schools is not a bad thing to do. I think it's a good thing, I think but it's more to do with actually engaging with the public on the issue, than really serious emissions reduction.
TONY JONES: Some of the relief we saw, in fact the expressed relief from the conference delegates is that as you pointed out, Canberra had broken step with Washington. Will Kevin Rudd's move have any effect at all, with the current US Administration and their views on this?
NICK ROWLEY: I don't think so. I think that really George Bush is someone who, well, I mean maybe this is a little unfair, but it's almost beyond redemption in relation to his perspective on this area of policy.
He convened a meeting in last September, which was the 15th largest emitters in the world. And although there was a fair amount of rhetoric about the importance of the UN process, essentially that is viewed within Europe and other countries around the world as a bit of a spoiling exercise. My view is that that will change. I think that it is very likely that the next president of the United States that should be in office by January the 20th, 2009, is likely to take a far more progressive view on this area of policy.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to have in the US, like we had in Australia - a complete change in terms of their perspective on the Kyoto Protocol. But I think that pretty soon after the election of the next US President, you're likely to get some form of emissions trading system domestically within the US, and a far more positive level of engagement internationally on this issue.
And that is going to be very significant. Because I think that that is part of unlocking the very complex lock which is how one can get commitments from the rapidly developing economies - China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa and Mexico.
TONY JONES: And importantly, this change of government in the United States will definitely take place before the next big round of talks at Copenhagen?
NICK ROWLEY: Well I think that what can we expect from Bali? I mean Bali really is sort of the start. Bali hopefully, there's going to be an agreement in relation to a process and a road map, whereby the broad parameters of a global treaty can be agreed by 2009.
In 2009 the UN meeting will be taking place in Copenhagen. In Copenhagen I believe, well, certainly after a change in government in the US, I believe highly likely after a change in government with a new president, that has a far more progressive view.
Also that that meeting is taking place in Europe, and means that it is highly likely to attract heads of state. And certainly from the work that I did when I was working at Downing Street with Tony Blair, I've got a very firm view that when it comes to the really serious diplomatic breakthroughs, in terms of this problem, that is going to happen at a head of state level, not just at a level of environment ministers.
TONY JONES: In order to shut down the election campaign debate over Peter Garrett's comments about whether Australia would sign a new global treaty if developing countries like India and China were not subject to mandatory reductions, Kevin Rudd came out and said it's absolutely fundamental, it's a precondition.
Does that make his negotiating position already pre-ordered, if you like, and too difficult therefore?
NICK ROWLEY: Well, that was an election campaign and of course, election campaigns we all have, if anybody's working around election campaigns as I have in the past is that, one's blood pressure tends to get pretty high, and decisions are taken in response to the broad sort of flow of a campaign rather than the sort of policy merits of any position.
I think that certainly there need to be commitments from those rapidly developing economies and I think it's highly likely that there will be. But I don't think that we're going to get a treaty, which has a single level of targets that all economies around the world need to sign up to.
I think we're going to have to have a response which is calibrated to the domestic, economic and political circumstances within those countries.
TONY JONES: So everyone commits to reductions at some level, but it happens on different tracts. In fact, Kevin Rudd did, I think, during the campaign make that point?
NICK ROWLEY: That's right, on different tracts. So although you have an economy maybe like India's, that may not be willing to sign up to mandatory emission reduction targets at this point in time, you would have an ability for them to do so later in the piece.
But also they would commit to actually doing something and therefore, the question is what would that be? Well it might be that they have a clear commitment to a certain proportion of their energy supply coming from renewable sources.
They have a certain commitment to certain forms of energy efficiency, or avoiding deforestation. So there are plenty of things that any large economy can do to help tackle the climate problem within a global treaty, that is not actually part of a broad cap and trade system as crudely understood.
TONY JONES: It's a big question though, because India and China as we understand it with their plans - we spoke to Tim Flannery about this earlier this year - with their plans on the drawing board to build 600 new coal-fired power stations could upset the whole apple cart if they're allowed to continue with those plans. I mean do we actually have the luxury to allow them to proceed on a different track?
NICK ROWLEY: Well, I mean it's what that track is, is the key question. You've got around about 80 per cent of primary energy being generated in China, by coal-fired power stations. That simply is not going to change that much over the coming 10 to 20 years.
But then the key question is how can you actually apply new technologies, cleaner coal technologies to actually reducing the emissions impact of that energy growth?
I hope I'm not a naive optimist in this area, but I think that cleaner coal technology has enormous potential. I don't say that as an expert, I say that as someone who's spoken to some of the people up in Newcastle who are working for CSIRO on some of those technologies.
TONY JONES: Yes but the problem is, as far as I understand it, maybe this is happening now, but when I spoke to Nicholas Stern earlier this year it evidently wasn't happening.
Who's doing the geological surveys in India and China to find the holes to put the CO2 into, that is, the giant aquifers, the saline aquifers?
Do they exist in these countries? Are they near to where the coal-fired power stations are? If we don't know that, we can't solve the problem.
NICK ROWLEY: Well I'm tempted to say, here's a map that I prepared earlier, but unfortunately I don't have that map, it's not my area of expertise.
But of course it's a very important question. I mean if you look at Australia, there are, as I understand it, there's quite major potential for sequestration of CO2 from places like the La Trobe Valley. If you go to the Hunter Valley, the geomorphology of that area actually mitigates against that. So that presents a really difficult and...
TONY JONES: Can you imagine how much trouble we're in, if the geomorphology, as you call it, of India and China where the coal-fired power stations are, and where they're planning to put 600 more, doesn't work, then we're in serious trouble aren't we?
NICK ROWLEY: Tony, we're in serious trouble on climate change anyway, okay? And my view is that unless we find some way of cleaning up coal-fired power stations in rapidly developing technologies, then you know, it ain't going to be nuclear that gets us there. We've got the - I mean, despite statements made by former Australian prime ministers about the enormous potential of nuclear.
You've the most ambitious new nuclear building program in the world ever, in China. They aim to have around about 30 new coal-fired power stations by 2030. Say they do that, that equals 6 per cent of their energy needs. The great bulk of their energy will be provided by coal.
I just go back to the people who really do look into this whole area and they're saying there is enormous potential, technically, to not create clean coal - which I don't believe exists, but cleaner coal within these rapidly developing economies. And they will say it's not actually a technical problem, what it is, is a policy and political problem. We need to get very clear incentives to having those economies using those new technologies very quickly.
TONY JONES: We'll go back to the beginning. We heard about the symbolic importance of Australia signing or ratifying the protocol. What about the simple fact that developing countries are hardly likely to listen to a country that got a special deal on its Kyoto emissions can actually increase them?
Won't Australia be under an enormous amount of pressure to do something about that obvious disparity, between them and the underdeveloped countries?
NICK ROWLEY: Well the whole circumstances whereby the negotiation took place in 1997 for the very, I think 'undemanding' might be the word, target that was signed up to by Senator Hill, is a bit of interesting climate history.
The way I sort of look at this is, if you go back to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, five years then passed and in 1997 the world negotiated the Kyoto Protocol.
Now what was the level of public awareness in relation to this issue, back in 1992 or indeed in 1997? We've got about five years from now where we sit in 2007, until we need to land an adequate global treaty by 2010, but we're going off a far, far higher base in terms of the level of public engagement and the level of political engagement around the world on this issue.
You almost can't want to be re-elected in a democracy without a progressive view on this issue. This is something well beyond the classic left right divide. Some of the most progressive people and leaders around the world on climate policy are from the right, whether that's Nicholas Sarkozy or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Angela Merkel in Germany. This is getting beyond party politics.
And that is what really fills me with some sense of hope, that over the coming two years to be landed in 2009 at the Copenhagen meeting, we can agree, not a treaty which has very clear caps, is based around the sort of Kyoto rather rigid framework, but is actually calibrated around what needs to be achieved in terms of the global emissions reduction in target. And is pretty flexible in terms of how it is, the players in the game who all need to play in the game can be part of achieving that emissions reduction.
So I don't fret too much about how Australia or the current Government is going to be viewed in relation to its performance on what was a deal that was done in 1997.
I think it's far more important and looking at the evidence of what's being said, at least by the new Australian Government, we need to be absolutely focused and rigorous around what the parameters are for that global treaty. And how Australia can be part of building that new global treaty over the coming little while.
TONY JONES: Nick Rowley, that's a good place to leave you for now. We'll see you again, no doubt. Next year in fact, for us.
And we'll leave you there.
NICK ROWLEY: Thank you, Tony.
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