Banking on a different climate

Some people in the environment lobby might be surprised to hear Arthur Sinodinos talking about climate change action. For a decade, Sinodinos served as John Howard's chief-of-staff and was regularly nominated as one of the country's most influential powerbrokers. But it was a long decade for environmentalists, who often accused the Howard Government of inaction on climate change.

Now Sinodinos is the National Australia Bank's senior adviser on business banking and private wealth and last night he spoke about the challenges of climate change to a community forum in Brisbane. Sponsoring the Run For A Safe Climate was new territory for the bank, he said.

"This is the first time that we have funded a community-environmental event like this," he said. "So for us, it is a bit of an experiment, in a way, because we are really putting our heads out there on the issue of climate change. We've done a lot of stuff internally on the issue but this is probably the first time we are taking a fairly significant public role on climate change and what we believe the community should be doing on climate change."
 
Sinodinos, who left the Prime Minister's office in December 2006, says his views on climate change have not altered from his time served as John Howard's most trusted lieutenant.  "I was involved in a Government that put a proposal for Australia's first emissions trading scheme forward as part of the Shergold report,'' he told Climate Run.

While his fellow Liberals bicker about whether climate change is actually happening,  Sinodinos said NAB was acting on global warming for many reasons. "Gen Y, we find, are very picky about their employers, they want to know what they stand for," he said. Customers also want the bank to act. "But it is more than just picking up a passing fad," says Sinodinos, who recently decided to stay in the private sector and not run for the blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Bradfield. "We are trying to anticipate an issue that will face our customers and we are showing that we are responding to an issue of concern to the community."

It also makes business sense for the bank. NAB is shifting its main Victorian data centre on to a $6.5 million onsite gas-fired generator, which will take it almost completely off the brown-coal fired electricity grid.  The move will reduce emissions by about 20,000 tonnes a year - enough electricity to power about 1400 households - and the bank will pocket $2million in cheaper power bills each year.

The bank is also looking at the impacts of the emissions trading scheme on their customers, as well as the wider impacts of climate change. It is aiming to go carbon neutral next year, through offsets and efficiency, has made a 20 per cent cut on flights in a year and has increased its investments in renewable energy by 88 per cent. By September next year it hopes to have 150 petrol-electric Priuses in the 850-vehicle mobile banking fleet.

In Brisbane last night before he had to leave to catch a flight, Sinodinos heard half of the speech by John "Charlie" Veron, one of the world's leading coral reef scientists. Veron recently addressed the Royal Society in Britain, where he was introduced by Sir David Attenborough. His speech can be seen here. Veron, who discovered and identified more than a quarter of the world's coral species, has abandoned much of his field work to try and get the message out about climate change. He now says the current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - 387 parts per million - have committed the Great Barrier Reef to long term decline. Ocean acidification, he says, has "probably been retarding the growth of corals on the Great Barrier Reef for the last 10 years".

Veron, who is arguing that a "safe" climate for corals is less than 350 ppm - in other words, lower than today's levels and much lower than the types of targets the Rudd Government is talking about.

Sinodinos said he was not in a position to talk about the science of different targets, but he said he does believe that developed countries need to offer trade liberalisation to developing countries as an inducement to agree to binding targets.