WA’s environment watchdog stripped of power to assess big polluting projects

Environment Minister Reece Whitby has announced plans to strip the state’s environmental watchdog of the power to assess greenhouse gas emissions on big polluting projects as it hunts for green tape duplication.

The major change to the Environmental Protection Authority’s remit was included in the state’s new greenhouse gas emissions policy for major projects, which was tabled in parliament on Tuesday.

WA Environment Minister Reece Whitby in Parliament today.

Major projects in WA with an estimated output of 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide or more annually will now be assessed only under the Commonwealth government’s safeguard mechanism, which was beefed up by the Albanese government last year.

It means the EPA will not be able to cast judgment over whether the government should approve polluting projects based on their greenhouse gas emissions.

Relinquishing state-based assessment of greenhouse gas emissions to avoid duplication assessments was a key recommendation from the controversial Vogel-McFerran review of the EPA handed to the government in December last year.

In a brief ministerial statement on Tuesday, Whitby told parliament that, having considered the Vogel-McFerran review and constitutional advice from the solicitor-general, the state determined the most appropriate regulator of greenhouse gas emissions was the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth’s safeguard mechanism requires all large polluting projects in Australia producing more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year to track to zero emissions by 2050.

Whitby said the Albanese government’s reforms to the mechanism last year created a nationally consistent approach to reducing emissions that had been lacking during the Coalition years of government.

“These reforms will reduce net emissions from designated large facilities to zero by 2050, such emissions currently contribute more than half of Western Australia’s total emissions,” he said.

The Chamber of Minerals and Energy Rebecca Tomkinson said the policy change was a welcome coordination across state and federal governments.

“Where a facility is already regulated under the Commonwealth’s Safeguard Mechanism, additional state-based regulation is not required, so the duplication can be removed,” she said.

Greens MLC Brad Pettit accused the government of “washing their hands” of responsibility to assess greenhouse gas emissions on some of the dirtiest projects in the pipeline like Woodside’s Browse gas project.

“Regulatory changes to the way the EPA assesses greenhouse gas emissions for major projects are deeply troubling given Western Australia is the only state where emissions are rising,” he said.

Whitby said if the Commonwealth tinkered with the safeguard mechanism in the future, proponents would be required to alert the state of changes to their obligations, and they may have state limits applied or reestablished.

He also reaffirmed the government’s commitment to legislate the state’s target of net zero by 2050, but did not put a timeframe on when that will happen.

Conservation Council executive director and Greens upper house candidate Jess Beckerling said the new policy dealt WA out of environmental assessment processes and ceded control to Canberra when it came to reducing emissions.

“The safeguard mechanism has no role to play in considering climate impacts on WA’s nature - only the WA EPA has been able to do that,” she said.

“As WA’s nature lurches from crisis to crisis, the WA government is stripping our state of protection from the runaway impacts of fossil fuel pollution.

“The only people benefiting from this are big fossil fuel polluters in WA, at the expense of any ambition for investment in renewable energy and the clean energy transition.”

WA’s greenhouse gas policy created political shockwaves in 2019 when the EPA released a draft policy recommending that new projects or extensions that put more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air offset all those emissions right away.

It caused a meltdown in the state’s resources sector, with executives from Chevron, Shell and Woodside immediately lobbying former WA premier Mark McGowan to pressure the EPA to reverse its decision.

The EPA eventually revised its policy to require new projects to demonstrate how they would reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

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