Councillor Chris Harris

On 10th March 2008 I presented a motion to Council calling for Council’s support of the community campaign to stop the sell off of the state’s electricity system.  My motion was not supported by Labor, Liberal or Clover Moore Party councillors.

The sell-off is not a done deal and the campaign to keep power in public hands is still being waged.

Privatising electricity will lead to higher power bills, lower levels of service and increased greenhouse gas emission. If Treasurer, Michael Costa, gets his way and the electricity system is sold off to the highest bidder, the people of  Sydney will end up worse off.

Privatising essential public utilities like electricity and water leads to increased prices and reduced services as the new private owners try to maximise their returns. We have seen this happen with past privatisations from the Commonwealth Bank to Telstra to Sydney Airport.

Private owners will try to increase power consumption to maximise profits, the exact opposite of what we should be trying to achieve. Increased consumption of electricity will lead to potential blackouts and will increase greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to dangerous climate change.

The Greens think that it is the role of government to show leadership by dealing with global warming and climate change. Electricity generation by burning coal is the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. The state government should be looking at phasing out the burning of coal and replacing it with renewable energy alternatives. Reliable technologies such as solar thermal and wind already exist and are being employed in other countries as a replacement for the burning of coal, gas and oil. The Greens are very concerned that the government will offer guarantees to any purchaser of the power stations and that the move away from coal will be much more difficult as a result of those guarantees.

Think about it logically - would you hand over billions of dollars for a bunch of power stations when you were unsure of their future viability? You would want an assurance that government would not do anything that would lessen the value of those power generators. That’s why power generation should remain in public hands - so that the government wll be free to make whatever decisions that it needs to when considering the future of energy in a low emission environment.

Many residents of the city of Sydney are doing their bit to battle climate change by installing solar power and recycling water but the challenge can’t be met by individual households alone. The state government should be taking the lead on climate change, not sending us backwards.

 A copy of my motion appears below:

1. The City of Sydney opposes in the strongest terms the NSW Government’s plans to privatise NSW’s publicly-owned electricity retailers and enter into long term leases of the state’s generators.
 
Privatisation would:
•         weaken the ability of the people of NSW to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and urgently respond to climate change,
•         result in job losses and reduce working conditions in the electricity industry,
•         increase financial hardship for consumers, and in particular for low income households and pensioners,
•         reduce state revenues by at least $1 billion per annum, as profits are shifted from the public purse to private corporations and
•         destroy public control over essential energy assets. 

2. Council also believes that privatisation would impact severely on local government as major electricity consumers.
3. Council calls on the NSW Government to better manage NSW’s future energy needs and take urgent action in response to climate change by investing in energy efficiency in homes and businesses and increasing its renewable energy targets.
4. The General Manager urgently convey this motion to the NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Treasurer Michael Costa; the NSW Local Government Association, all City of Sydney based MPs and MLCs, Unions NSW and the Total Environment Centre.
5. The reasons for Council opposing the sell-off are to be widely advertised including in local newspapers, on the Council website and by media release. 

We have received a few requests for electronic versions of our campaign brochures, covering such topics as greening Sydney rooftops, a solar-powered Sydney, sustainable housing and rainwater harvesting etc.

Here are links to pdfs of our current brochure and the previous Solar Thermal brochure.

The major parties remain wedded to coal-fired electric power, pinning their last hopes on the ‘clean coal’ theory. But even if collecting, transporting and burying coal’s greenhouse emissions one day turns out to be possible and affordable, the stuff still has to be mined and transported.

On a round trip from Kooragang Coal Terminal to Mt Arthur mine, near Muswellbrook, each coal train burns at least 3,200 litres of diesel (about 1,000 litres empty on the down and 2,200 loaded on the up) and around 40 litres of engine oil, for a net load of 7,800 tonnes of coal.

There are also currently about 70 coal ships queued up waiting to get into the port, predicted to rise to 90 by April.

In contrast, the sunlight delivered to a solar thermal power plant arrives free, every day.

But what about the economic consequences of phasing out coal power generation? Read the rest of this entry »

Last night’s Four Corners program on ABC TV showed how the climate-change denial industry uses many of the same spin-merchants who used to work for Big Tobacco obscuring the link between smoking and lung cancer.

One of their new campaigns is about cutting ‘Greenhouse intensity’ rather than absolute cuts in Greenhouse emissions. Watch out for this weasel word - it means that if an economy grows by a percentage, it can raise its permitted emission levels by the same amount. We need deep and absolute cuts if we are to minimize the effects of climate change.

Meanwhile Greens Senator Christine Milne has put one of Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s bright ideas into perspective. He wants to phase out incandescent light globes in favour of low-energy bulbs, nationally. Read the rest of this entry »

The Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made headlines by concluding there is a 90% chance that human activities are the main driver of global warming. The conservative report is laced with terms such as ‘likely’, ‘more than likely’ and ‘very likely’ when assessing the known global indicators such as hurricane intensity, temperature rise and sea levels.

Yet if the blogs of major newspapers are any indication, most advocates of the old fossil fuel economy have not read the report and are still trotting out anti-greenhouse arguments based on pseudo-scientific ‘factoids’.

The report is also conservative because it deliberately does not take into account much of the ice sheet melt now taking place, mainly because the data are insufficient for strict scientific evidence.

But Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has pointed out that the IPCC stopped its data collection at 2005. Since then, ice sheet melt had accelerated alarmingly. Read the rest of this entry »