Coal miners represented at Copenhagen

Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) general president Tony Maher addressed the forum, which was the largest gathering of international trade unions committed to action on reducing carbon emissions.
“Australian coal communities recognise the cost of inaction on climate change is far greater than the cost of action on climate change,” he said.
The CFMEU represents more than 20,000 Australian coal workers. It claims that coal jobs will not be lost under the scheme, with at least 10,000 coal mining jobs to be created by 2020 even with the introduction of the CPRS.
“The so-called job losses are not from current levels of employment, but from much higher projected levels of employment that have generally been based on a continuing resources boom,” the CFMEU said.
Maher said if the mining industry is serious about protecting jobs and the communities that rely on coal then they will provide the funds needed to further develop carbon capture and storage technologies on a large scale.
He said that while carbon capture storage would help to reduce Australia and the world’s carbon emissions the technology would only be viable under emissions trading scheme.
“The reality is if we are going to drive real investment in this critical technology then we must put a price on carbon emissions,” Maher said.

Copenhagen shemozzle and serious geopolitics: implications for Australian mining
By Tony Maher – general president, Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU)

At COP15, the UNFCCC Secretariat registered 37,000 participants at a venue limited to 15,000. How this could be allowed to occur remains a mystery. My suspicion is that some groups registered so many it amounted to ‘human spam’. United Nations’ meetings and World Trade Organisation meetings usually provide for engagement with business and ‘civil society’ - environment groups, research institutes, trade unions etc. This is a useful way to generate greater likelihood of community acceptance of the results of intergovernmental negotiations through having a degree of involvement. However, the whole system went into meltdown due to the sheer weight of numbers. We had to queue for hours in the freezing sleet, snow and rain just to get into the venue to register. In fact I witnessed members of various national government delegations being kept out because of the crowds. It became such a mess that the Secretariat then began to limit non-government organisations to 30 per cent of their registered participants. This meant that thousands of people had travelled the world only to find themselves locked out. For the final two days only members of Government delegations were allowed to attend.
Thankfully the Australian Government facilitated the participation of a limited number of business, union and environment group representatives as members of the Government delegation. It will be necessary for this to occur at the outset at future meetings.

Stakeholder involvement
No business leader, nor their environment group counterparts, could complain about the inclusiveness of the Australian Government. For twelve months before Copenhagen, the Australian Government provided regular briefings for all stakeholders about the current state of negotiations and the approach being taken by Australia. During the Copenhagen meeting, the key negotiators and the Minister were available for briefings. Even the Prime Minister found time to brief key stakeholders despite the heavy demands on his time as ‘friend of the chair’.

Geopolitics and local reaction
Despite 15 years of negotiations at the level of officials and environment ministers, the extent of disagreement was such that a new treaty was way beyond reach at the Copenhagen meeting. This much had been clear for months. The task for Copenhagen was to ensure the attendance of leaders - Prime Ministers and Presidents - and to fashion a political agreement to provide new riding instructions for the COP negotiations. When you think about it this is only commonsense. What country adopts a major economic reform without the direct involvement of the leader? The answer of course is none.
While there has been much finger pointing in the aftermath of Copenhagen about who was to blame, I’m not entirely sure that it wasn’t a disappointing but necessary stumble. Many commentators assert that China fought a proxy war using a host of other countries to block measures they objected to. These included emissions targets for developing countries, 2050 emissions targets for any country, and mechanisms for measurement, verification and reporting of emission reduction activity. There is little doubt that they did play that role.
The most important question is why they did it. If it was because they are implacably opposed to emissions reduction then we have a real problem. However it may simply be that China is announcing to the rest of the world that the 21st century is theirs – and it is. For China to reach an agreement which looked like a caucused western government position, complete with a flying visit from US President Obama, would have been in keeping with the West’s view of itself but not China’s view of itself. The much-lampooned Copenhagen Accord keeps alive the negotiations. Small it may be but as the great Australian songwriter Paul Kelly writes ‘from little things big things grow’.
That leaves the question of the position taken by the Australian Government and the implications for Australian industry. In my view there is no doubt that the Australian government played a commendable role. The strategy of developing a political accord was the correct one. The involvement of Prime Ministers and Presidents is essential.
Both domestically and internationally there is a tendency to belittle the efforts of Australian Governments. This might have something to do with 10 years of inaction under the Howard Government but it also reflects the fact that Australia has always looked at the task of emissions reduction in practical terms. That is, you don’t set targets and hope you meet them as some countries do. Australia sets targets based on a plan to meet them.
There will be some in industry, and some on the Opposition benches, who view the weaknesses in the Copenhagen Accord as proof that the world is not ready for a comprehensive program of emissions reduction. That would be a very short sighted view. The pressure will continue. The leaders now have ‘skin in the game’. They cannot walk away.
The Copenhagen Accord did produce the first substantial commitment of finance ($US100 billion per year by 2020). This could be why some developing countries and the small island states began to voice concern at the possible collapse of the talks. As weak as the Accord is, the talks did not collapse.
I am concerned that some mining executives may share this negative view. While it is true that the short to medium term prospects for resources are very strong and that coal is no exception, the long-term prospects for coal (from 2050) will entirely depend on the development of large-scale sequestration. The development of a global agreement is the catalyst we need to inject some urgency into the accelerated development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and other forms of sequestration. We have the G8 goal of building 20 commercial scale CCS plants by 2020, we have the Global CCS Institute but we don’t have the policy and investment framework to deliver the next 200 large-scale CCS plants.
Long term job security and the long term shareholder value in coal, gas, steel, aluminium and any other emissions intensive process is dependent on such low emission technologies and the policy framework that delivers them. To think this policy framework will be delivered by Government in the absence of a clear global agreement is fanciful. The business world in general and the resources sector in particular are better placed with a global agreement than without. I know that many senior business leaders accept this fact but it is not the message being communicated to the public.