It’s a poor reflection on the knowledge that Scott Morrison has on the climate crisis, and if Angus Taylor has any more clues as to what the problem is, he’s certainly not letting on.
After scorning most of the developed world with his half-baked ideas at COP26 Morrison has arrived back in Australia, full of bravado – god only knows where he gets that from – announcing an empty policy on electric vehicles (EV). No encouragement through subsidies, but $178 million basically for filling stations. In the same week Morrison and Taylor announce a proposal to spend $550 million – yes, over half a billion of your money – for further research and development of carbon capture and storage, a process (not yet a technology) that either doesn’t work at all, or performs well below the expectations and boasts of the mining industry. The process of CCS also attracts generous taxpayer funded subsidies.
Electric vehicles work, carbon capture and storage does not.
Carbon capture and storage would not qualify as a clean energy process, even if it worked. The theory of the process is to take carbon from the atmosphere and from factory and plant emissions, liquefy it, and pump the liquid into porous and permeable layers of rock. The oil company Chevron have been trying to master this technique since at least 2014 at their Gorgon project on Barrow Island and it is a failure. Angus Taylor was until recently fully behind the Gorgon project, happy to say how successful it was. Taylor has since moved to the Santos camp and is doing the same job for Santos for their CCS project at Moonba … and this man has the unbelievable title of Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction!
