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Hydrogen: Hype, hope, or hard work?

By Tony Wood, Alison Reeve, and Richard Yan - Grattan Institute, December 2023

Life after coal exports: Worker solidarity and the transition

By Li Mei Brusey, Tim Lang, Grant Howard, Matthew Jeffrey, Maddy Yerbury, and Zane Alcorn - Green Left, November 24, 2023

Industrial Workers in Australia Are Leading the Fight Against War

By Chris Dite and Arthur Rorris - Jacobin, May 11, 2023

Workers in an industrial trading port in Australia are now at the forefront of the fight against war with China*, demanding that jobs and environmental protections take precedence over militarism.

On May Day, thousands of workers from in and around the industrial trading city of Port Kembla in New South Wales (NSW) rallied against the AUKUS deal. AUKUS will see Australia procure nuclear-powered submarines from the United States, and is designed to counter the rise of China as a global power. To date, this was the biggest demonstration against the pact held anywhere in the world.

AUKUS potentially involves Port Kembla hosting a US nuclear submarine base. This would come at the expense of the region’s developing green energy infrastructure. The protesting workers argued that the current drive to war will endanger the city and imperil the many thousands of union jobs that would be guaranteed by a green transformation.

International media outlets in AUKUS partner countries and China have begun to take notice. The workers of Port Kembla will now prove decisive in shaping not only their own futures, but Australia’s role in the biggest conflict of the era.

Jacobin spoke with Arthur Rorris, secretary of the South Coast Labour Council, to find out how this small city came to take the lead in the fight for jobs and peace.

May Day 2023 Port Kembla

We remain absolutely opposed to the use of nuclear fuels for the generation of electrical energy

ETU NSW & ACT Secretary Allen Hicks at May Day

2023-24 Federal Budget could shape Australia’s future in the global energy transition

By Amy Watson - Australian Council of Trade Unions, March 14, 2023

The Business Council of Australia, Australian Council of Trade Unions, World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia and the Australian Conservation Foundation are re-joining forces to represent Australian businesses, workers, and our environment in a joint submission to the 2023-24 Federal Budget.

Prepared by Accenture, Sunshot in 2023: Accelerating towards Australia’s renewable exports opportunity, outlines three key areas of focus to secure a leading role for Australia in the net zero economy, and to ensure all Australians benefit from the global energy transition:

  1. World-leading renewable exports industries
  2. Sufficient domestic renewable buildout
  3. A coordinated, long-term just transition for workers and communities

Australia has made positive steps in each of these key areas, but with major shifts in global policy and significant investments being made by key trading partners, more must be done to maximise Australia’s economic opportunities.

In August 2022, President Biden signed a massive A$532 billion clean energy stimulus package to make America a heavy lifter on clean energy transition. In February 2023, The European Commission followed with its A$410B ‘Green Deal Industrial Plan,’ and a Joint EU-US Taskforce on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was established. South Korea allocated A$90 billion to its ‘Green New Deal,’ and Japan intends to issue A$220B billion in green transition bonds. Even Saudi Arabia plans to invest A$400 billion to become a world leader in renewable hydrogen exports.

The report outlines three specific Budget priorities to accelerate Australia’s transition and grow our renewable export capabilities to ensure we don’t fall further behind:

  1. Commit A$10 million in the 2023-24 Budget for the Net Zero Economy Taskforce to develop a National Renewable Exports Strategy
  2. Develop a National Renewable Infrastructure Plan to urgently accelerate the development of new renewable energy in Australia
  3. Establish and fund an independent national-level Energy Transition Authority

Sunshot 2023 is the second report from the alliance of partners, after its 2021 report Sunshot: Australia’s opportunity to create 395,000 clean export jobs, which set a vision for a low-emissions future with six renewable export opportunities. This updated report concludes the six opportunities could now support over 400,000 jobs and contribute over A$100 billion to the Australian economy by 2040.

Significant developments in global climate policy and energy markets have transformed the terrain for Australian policymakers, major economies have accelerated their shift to renewable energy, and extreme climate-induced weather events have displaced communities and impacted our economy.

Now, huge pools of capital are coalescing around clean technologies, and global competition for investment is intensifying.

Despite being home to some of the best sun, wind and critical mineral resources in the world and having a geographical advantage positioned close to the major economies of Asia, if we don’t match the ambition and pace of our trade partners, we risk losing our window of opportunity and access to the capital required to realise our ambition as a global leader.

Coal industry workers in Australia are taking their destiny into their own hands

By Léo Roussel - Equal Times, September 30, 2022

The coal industry is to Australia what the Second Amendment of the US Constitution (granting citizens the right to bear arms) is to the United States: it would be hard to imagine the country without it. With fossil fuels still accounting for 92 per cent of Australia’s energy mix, including 29 per cent for coal in 2021, the industry is still vigorously defended by lobbies, even in parliamentary circles and the corridors of ministries.

Australia’s conservative former prime minister Scott Morrison famously held up a piece of coal in Parliament in 2017, when he was finance minister, admonishing his colleagues not to be afraid of it. When he became prime minister, he also directly surrounded himself with lobbyists like John Kunkel, former vice-chairman of the Minerals Council of Australia, who he appointed chief of staff in 2018.

In the Hunter Valley, a region north of Sydney in the state of New South Wales, the local economy is still dominated by coal. From the mines to the cargo ships departing from the port of Newcastle, the industry directly and indirectly employs more than 17,000 people. “Newcastle is the world’s largest coal port,” says Dr Liam Phelan, a researcher at the University of Newcastle (Australia) specialising in the uncertainties and risks of climate change. “Coal mining has been a part of life here since white people arrived in Australia.”

For many years, mining projects were still supported and approved, not least by the Morrison government, which was widely condemned in Australia and around the world for its inaction on climate change. But the tides have begun to turn. In May 2022, voters ousted ‘ScoMo’ and returned Labor to power. The new prime minister Anthony Albanese has promised to make Australia a “renewable energy superpower” and to reduce the country’s CO₂ emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 – a target that the scientists of the Climate Change Authority nonetheless still consider to be insufficient.

Leaving energy transition aside, the Australian coal industry has already seen its exports slow in recent years, partly as a result of the trade war with China since 2020, while domestic demand has shifted to cleaner energy sources which are gaining ground. According to Clean Energy Council’s 2022 energy report: “The Australian renewable energy industry accounted for 32.5 per cent of Australia’s total electricity generation in 2021, which represented an increase of almost 5 percentage points compared to 2020.”

To hit 82% renewables in 8 years, we need skilled workers – and labour markets are already overstretched

By Chris Briggs and Rusty Langdon - The Conversation, August 17, 2022

In just eight years time, the Labor government wants Australia to be 82% powered by renewable energy. That means a rapid, historic shift, given only 24% of our power was supplied by renewables as of last year.

To make this happen, we must rapidly scale up our renewable energy construction workforce. Last week’s energy ministers’ meeting calls for assessment of the “workforce, supply chain and community needs” for the energy transition. The government’s jobs and skills summit in early September will tackle the issue too. While it’s positive the government is focused on these challenges, the reality is we’re playing catch-up.

Why? Because Australia is already stretched for workers, and it takes time to give new ones the skills they will need. Our research estimates the renewable energy transition will need up to 30,000 workers in coming years to build enough solar farms, wind farms, batteries, transmission lines and pumped hydro storage to transform our energy system. Most of these jobs will be in regional areas.

In coming decades, Australia will invest around A$66 billion in large-scale renewables and $27 billion in rooftop solar and battery storage. This creates openings for industry development like the $7.4 billion market opportunity for an integrated battery supply chain and manufacturing which builds on our strengths, such as wind towers.

If we get this right, we can create new manufacturing and supply chain jobs and reverse the long drift of these jobs overseas. But if we get it wrong, skill shortages could derail the vision of a new energy system by 2030.

Blockade Australia: Our Perspective

By staff - Black Flag Sidney, July 27, 2022

Blockade Australia (BA) is a climate activist group whose primary strategy is to shut down activity at fossil fuel sites and disrupt the economy as a form of protest. So far, they have coordinated two major blockades in NSW: in November 2021, they disrupted $60 million worth of coal exports for eleven days in the Port of Newcastle; in March 2022, activists blockaded terminals for five days at Port Botany; at the end of June, they attempted a six-day blockade of Sydney’s economic centre.

Their activism has been met with alarming state violence. Earlier this month, around one hundred police raided a BA camp of activists and made several arrests. The Port Botany blockade earlier this year triggered the bipartisan enactment of new laws in NSW Parliament, increasing the penalty for protesting without police or state approval to up to $22,000 in fines and/or two years’ imprisonment. These laws will affect all protests which are unapproved by police, and should be fiercely opposed.

BA doesn’t formally adhere to a specific political ideology, although their social media activity suggests anti-capitalist and anti-electoral leanings. They aim to create a “consistent and strategic” disruption “that cannot be ignored,” to temporarily shut down the fossil fuel industry’s operation and force a “political response,” though BA does not define what this would look like concretely.

Overall, BA’s strategy relies on small affinity groups rather than a political organisation to coordinate individual non-violent disruptive stunts, a strategy which places them outside of the mass movement for working class liberation. It’s important to note here that we condemn in the strongest terms the state violence against BA activists. We express our solidarity to activists who, like us, are interested in building “power… opposing the colonial and extractive systems of Australia.” We argue, though, that BA cannot build this power with isolated actions and sporadic disruption alone.

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