… , we can exit coal by 2030. Here’s how to do it.
That’s the title of my recent article in The Conversation. It’s a summary of a report, titled Getting Off Coal: Orderly, Early Transition to Minimise Impact for Australian Economy which was published recently by The Australia Institute.
John Quiggin 
While undertaking this reform is a must do, and has to happen no matter what, it’s a fact of life that job transition programs are pretty uniformly terrible, and leave workers out in the cold. We need to get much better, much more creative at this part of the solution.
In re “If we could design JobKeeper within weeks …”:-
– What’s this “we”?
– “They” couldn’t and didn’t, except in the sense that all you have to do to separate conjoined twins is to slice them down the middle. That’s why Jim Chalmers et al are making constructive criticisms of what has been done so far and of what is currently impending.
– While a powerful ILLUSTRATION, it no more holds as a valid ARGUMENT than the idea that if “we” can go to the moon, “we” can solve world poverty, war, etc. At most it shows that we can redeploy efforts, but not that doing that would be effective.
Oh, and the short time scale for deployment of plans does not imply that they were made that quickly, though in the case of Jobkeeper I strongly suspect that they were, any more than the Schlieffen Plan was made in 1914 (it was actually reviewed and updated right up until 1914, but it didn’t start from scratch then). People have been working in the wage subsidy area for decades, though, so that work was indeed available to draw on had “we” so chosen.
Coking coal will have to go too, on a longer timetable. Arcelor-Mittal. SSAB, and Voestalpine are all building pilot hydrogen DRI plants: the technology works, and it’s now a matter of getting the hydrogen price down. That can be done by replicating the early deployment subsidies that did the same job for wind and solar.
Will it be done? I think so, because power is shifting to green industries and away from fossil. Australia’s strong export-dependent coal industry is an outlier. The US coal industry is bankrupt, and the Indian is heading there fast. Coal is dead in the UK and Spain.
We have someone as sane, intelligent, knowledgeable and realistic as Professor John Quiggin in this country and yet the damn politicians still won’t listen to him. This has been a source of frustration to me ever since I read “Work for all : full employment in the nineties” – John Quiggin & John Langmore.
Still waiting for something real, effective and future-oriented to happen in this country. It’s one minute to midnight now for climate-change change. The urgency is great. So little time is left.