Page 8 - Climate Control News magazine March 2023

News
CEDA calls for urgent lift in labour capacity
LEFT: Project delays are due to a forecast shortage of more than 100,000 workers.
who have education rates substantially higher than Australian-born workers.
Licensing presents a particular barrier to suitable employment for migrants whose skills have been developed overseas.
CEDA estimates one in five people employed in Australia work in an occupation subject to registration requirements.
“This proportion varies from a low of 13 per cent in the ACT to a high of 21 per cent in Queensland. Internationally this is not unusual: regulated workers are estimated to account for between 15 and 35 per cent of the workforce across EU countries and in the United States,” the whitepaper said.
“In some areas, occupational licensing cov- erage continues to increase. For example, the Victorian government is in the process of introducing a new registration and licensing scheme for building tradespeople, beginning with carpentry then extending to over 20 dif- ferent trades.
“Compared with the United Kingdom, for example, licensing is much more restrictive in Queensland and NSW for building trades such as electricians, plumbers and painters.”
CEDA said Australia could gain $5 billion a year in productivity benefits simply by introduc- ing licensing reforms and removing mobility restrictions across all occupations.
AUSTRALIA NEEDS A critical lift in labour capacity to keep the economy afloat and to over- come a long list of workforce challenges identi- fied in a recently released Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) whitepaper.
CEDA said the public infrastructure pipeline announced by governments in recent years has been delayed due to a forecast shortage of more than 100,000 workers.
At the same time Australia will need a sus- tained lift in labour to install around 33 giga- watts of new domestic generation in just over a decade to be on track for net zero by 2050.
“This is the equivalent of almost doubling
current generation capacity in New South Wales,” the whitepaper said.
“The government and the tech sector have a shared commitment of 1.2 million tech jobs by 2030, necessitating 650,000 new roles over the next eight years.”
The whitepaper blames the mismatching of skills as a big contributor to Australia’s work- force problems.
“The mismatching of skills for migrants arriv- ing between 2013 and 2018 is estimated to have cost $1.25 billion in foregone wages,” the report said.
This mismatch has been made worse by a weak labour market integration of immigrants,
Shutdown due to methane leak A SLEW OF unmeasured methane leaks from
platforms and pipelines off Australia’s coast have released large amounts of the dangerous greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
The most recent case was at Santos’ John Brookes platform off Karratha, which was shut down by the industry regulator after a danger- ous methane leak.
Methane, which is otherwise known euphe- mistically as “natural gas,” is almost 90 times worse than carbon dioxide for global warming.
A new study from Princeton University and Colorado State University has shown that cur- rent methods for estimating methane emissions from offshore oil and gas production severely underestimate gas released by the offshore fossil fuel industry.
Using the UK as a case study, the research concludes that greenhouse gas emissions from offshore gas and oil are wildly underestimated.
“Australia and the UK measure methane emissions in a similar way,” Friends of the Earth
Santos has not responded to the study.
CLIMATECONTROLNEWS.COM.AU
Australia’s Offshore Fossil Gas campaigner, Jeff Waters, said.
“This US study should ring very loud alarm bells here in Australia as well. The way we meas- ure methane emissions has to change if we are to get a realistic picture of how much we are polluting the atmosphere.
“Australians can often be heard saying that our contribution to global warming is tiny because of our relatively small population, but how would the figures look if we added this methane leakage to our figures?” Jeff Waters asked.
Santos hasn’t responded to the study.
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