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Climate change and carbon capture: John Ashton on Lateline

By Quentin de Molliens

TONY JONES: I’ve got to ask you a final question, since you raise that. Six hundred power stations, coal fired power stations, using dirty coal effectively, are on the drawing boards in China and India. The environmental scientist Tim Flannery in this country says, if they build those, it is game over. I presume from what you are saying you believe the same thing. How do you stop them if they simply refuse to listen and say, “We need those power stations for our future?”

JOHN ASHTON: I think the figure you are quoting is the International Energy Agency figure, which is for new build up to 2030, and so the name of the game is to ensure that as many as possible of those power stations come with carbon capture and storage. I think, actually, you can’t contemplate, if you really are serious about trying to deal with this issue, a future in which you don’t start to get carbon capture and storage into that build. You have to go to China, to India, to North America and to Europe with propositions that are feasible, given the politics of those countries. We have to get down the cost curve as quickly as possible, so that the additional cost is not too big in relation to the cost of building the power station in the first place. We don’t know how quickly we can get that down, that cost curve, yet. That’s why we want to do demonstrations. That’s why you have, I think, eight projects in Australia that are either pilot or demonstration-scale on carbon capture and storage, so we can understand that landscape.

We have to build a proposition that makes sense to everybody, the financing makes sense to everybody, including, probably, a significant dimension of public finance to leverage private capital into those projects. It’s something that we all have an interest in because, frankly, if we don’t do it, there aren’t going to be any winners. I think - coming back to my earlier point, I think that as we become more aware of the scale of this problem and the urgency of this problem, it will become easier to get people around the same problem, working out how to do that.

TONY JONES: John Ashton, it’s been very good of you to take the time to come and talk to us on Lateline tonight and contribute to the debate in this country, we thank you very much.

JOHN ASHTON: Tony, thank you very much. It’s been a great pleasure.