Stop new gas! Save our green bank!!
Stop new gas! Save our green bank!!
We have an opportunity right now to stop the Federal government’s attempt to use taxpayers money to subsidise new gas by stopping new gas their attack on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), Australia's green bank. And we need your help.
The Federal Government is trying to pass the misnamed Clean Energy Finance Corporation Amendment "Grid Reliability Bill 2020”. Within this Bill are proposals to gut the two very organisations that have enabled much of whatever success Australia has achieved in tackling global warning. The government wants to use the CEFC to fund the so-called gas led recovery.
The CEFC (Clean Energy Finance Corporation) and ARENA (Australia Renewable Energy Agency), both hardy survivors from the Gillard/ Greens alliance government are being targeted and deformed by the Federal LNP.
This is hardly surprising given the government’s tenacious commitment to prolonging Australia’s marriage to fossil fuels, demonstrated by the intended ‘gas-led recovery’. What is particularly perverse and galling is that they propose to do this using the two independent organisations established specifically to promote clean, renewable, profitable energy.
In a nutshell: The CEFC:
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation is a green bank whose mission is to lend funds to projects that produce zero-emissions energy.
It is run by an independent board.
As a profit-making entity the CEFC is to avoid projects that make a loss.
Profit generated from successful lending then flows to help finance ARENA
The Grid Reliability Bill 2020, soon to be debated in the Senate, intends to change all that.
The Bill rebadges gas as a ‘low emissions technology’ thereby clearing the way for new gas exploration and development to be funded by the CEFC. This is a spurious distortion. Gas is a fossil fuel. Gas is not a ‘technology’. Funding new gas would reduce the capacity to fund other truly zero-emissions projects. It is essentially subsidising global fossil fuel corporations and is a travesty of the original mission of the CEFC.
The Bill would enable the CEFC to fund projects that do not make a profit but are allowed to run at a loss. Implicit in this is the protection to fund projects that may become stranded assets. It is a very strange fiduciary model for a lending agency, that seems to recognise the very real probability that lending for gas is not financially sound in the long (and short) run.
The Minister (for now, Angus Taylor), not the relevant qualified Board, will be able to direct a sizeable percentage of the funding towards projects he supports, by both the CEFC and ARENA.
ARENA, already suffering funding cuts, would be further starved of funds flowing from an incapacitated CEFC.
In short, the Grid Reliability Bill would allow funds to be taken from zero emissions projects to subsidise more fossil fuel development (despite profitability) at the direction of the Minister and will reduce the overall capacity to fund and nurture climate-saving technologies and projects.
This at a time when Australia is declared to be 1.4 degrees Celsius warmer, global warming is perilous, tipping points loom, a hot summer is upon us and governments and businesses around the world scramble to act on this dire global situation. The treatment of the CEFC and ARENA in this Bill is ideological, dangerous and stupid.
The proposed changes will not improve the reliability of the grid. The necessary improvements to the grid can be accomplished within the existing powers and parameters of the CEFC. The cunning, misleadingly titled Grid Reliability Bill is to enable the subsidising of new gas.
The Grid Reliability Bill has passed the House of Representatives. It is now before the Senate. A Senate Inquiry has happened and Labor and Greens Senators on the committee have declared they will not support the Bill in its current form but offer amendments. Their amendments to the Bill are incapsulated below:that the purposes of the CEFC not be redescribed and distorted to enable the funding of greenhouse gas as a ‘low emissions technology’.
that loss-making investments are impermissible.
that the Minister is not given the power to override the CEFC board in making investment decisions thus allowing the minister to make loss-making investment in gas.
If Labor, Greens and cross bench Senators agree to oppose the Grid Reliability Bill, without the required amendments, it could be defeated.
We urge you to write to your local members (all parties), Senators, cross-benchers to block or amend this Bill. We have developed an email writing guide to assist you to write to your MP, Senators and cross-benchers. This guide contains everything you need to help...
Stop investment in gas!!
Save the Clean Energy Finance Corporation!!