Climate back on the agenda as Labor attacks direct action

Labor is positioning to oppose direct action emissions policies at the next election, ensuring climate change will remain a key battleground.

Opposition climate change spokesman Mark Butler. Picture: Gary Ramage

Labor is positioning to oppose direct action emissions policies at the next election, ensuring climate change will remain a key battleground.

Opposition climate change spokesman Mark Butler on Tuesday attacked the Morrison government’s Climate Solution Fund as a scheme that funnels “billions of taxpayers’ dollars to big polluters”.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor had revealed the remit of the $2bn fund would be expanded to finance emission reduction technologies across the economy, including in the high carbon sectors of resources, manufacturing, transport and agriculture.

“Angus Taylor’s latest three-word slogan — technology not taxes — is a joke coming from a government whose only climate response has been to funnel billions of taxpayers’ dollars to big polluters,” Mr Butler said.

He left the door open to supporting carbon capture and storage — a technology that captures carbon emissions from high-emitting projects and stores pollution underground.

But he pushed back against the technology receiving direct subsidies from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which the government is likely to allow, with the Coalition pushing for the agency to support the “widest range of low emissions technologies”.

Mr Butler said the Rudd government expanded research and development for CCS but the program was abolished by Tony Abbott. “Labor has been clear in the past that we would not support a raid on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to cover up the fact that this government abolished funding for CCS programs,” he said.

Mr Taylor, who on Tuesday issued the government’s response to a climate change review chaired by former Business Council of Australia president Grant King, is also pushing for a “co-investment program” to accelerate technological change in heavy industry and transport.

EY Asia Pacific managing partner of climate change services, Matthew Bell, said the government’s decision to allow businesses to earn credits for beating their emissions targets made the safeguard mechanism look more like an emissions trading scheme.