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RIO Tinto has joined the growing chorus against the Rudd government’s proposed emissions trading scheme, with its head of strategy Doug Ritchie calling the scheme foolhardy and saying it could cost the miner $3 billion over a decade.
In its first in-depth public comments on the scheme, Rio, one of Australia’s biggest coal producers, will today issue proposed amendments to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme that, if accepted, would get the big miner backing the scheme.
“At its simplest, this is nothing more than a complicated tax that is biased against our most competitive industries and those we rely upon most for our standards of living, the capital intensive export industries,” Rio strategy managing director Doug Ritchie told The Australian yesterday.
“To put a scheme in place that is biased against those industries, compared to anyone else in the world, is foolhardy.”
Mr Ritchie said the scheme, which the coal industry says will cost $14bn over 10 years, would cost Rio $3bn in that time.
The amended carbon reduction model that Rio would support would also cost the miner, he said, but he could not say by how much.
Rio wants coal included in an emissions-intensive industry assistance program and it wants methane gas fugitive emissions, released when coal is mined, excluded from the trading scheme.
“The CPRS is the only emissions trading scheme that includes coalmining fugitive emissions,” Rio says in the documents to be released today.
The company also says other emissions trading schemes, such as that going through the US Senate, will set an international benchmark against which Australia will have to compete.
That implies it would be better to wait for the US scheme to be passed.
Rio also wants emissions-intensive industry assistance maintained at initial levels until 80 per cent of all global emissions are covered by comparable carbon constraints, and more support for low-emission technology by excluding it during start-up periods.
Macarthur Coal chief executive Nicole Hollows, who stressed she supported reducing greenhouse gas emissions, also railed against the inclusion of fugitive coal emissions.
“We don’t know how to measure it, we don’t know how to capture it in an open cut mine and there is no technology to reduce those emissions now,” Ms Hollows said yesterday at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia lunch in Melbourne. “So there’s nothing we can do to reduce those emissions but cut production.”
