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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s announcement that his government was committed to cutting CO2 emissions by 62–70 per cent by 2035 has everything to do with political grandstanding, and nothing to do with saving the planet.

It was no coincidence that the announcement was made on the eve of the visit to the United Nations General Assembly, where Mr Albanese announced that Australia would recognise the state of Palestine and hopes to host the next international climate conference in 2026.

This was before jetting off to London for photo ops with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and assorted leaders of other social democratic parties, to address the UK Labour Party Conference where an unpopular British PM is staring down his critics, and to visit King Charles at Balmoral. Not bad for a staunch republican!

Figure It Out

It is significant that in global terms, Australia releases around one per cent of the world’s emissions, which are now running at about 40 billion tonnes per year. The countries with the largest emissions include China, India, the United States, the European Union and Russia, and in most of these, emissions are rising rapidly. China alone produces over 30 per cent of global emissions, and its emissions are rising while Australia’s are falling.

You would never get these facts from the report of the Climate Change Authority, which Mr Albanese and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen used to justify the further cutbacks in Australian energy use over the next decade.

When Labor came to power in 2022, it set an interim target to reduce greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) by 43 per cent by 2030.

According to the Climate Action Tracker website, Australia will fall far short of reaching its 2030 target, and its emissions will be around 10 per cent higher than the official target.

Sceptical

Even the ABC is sceptical of the government’s latest announcement. One of its journalists wrote recently:

“Annual carbon pollution remains more or less at the level it was in 2022.

“New sources of fugitive emissions (which account for about 20 per cent of the national total) are being approved in the form of new mines and extended gas projects.

“There are ad-hoc policy frameworks in place to manage those emissions, such as the safeguard mechanism, but these are still largely articles of faith, too new to have demonstrated any real performance in cutting pollution.

“Similarly, vehicle emissions look unlikely to fall any time soon in a way that you’d notice in the national carbon account.

“EV sales seem stuck below 10 per cent of new vehicles sold – putting a serious question mark over the Climate Change Authority’s advice to the government last week that half of all cars between now and 2035 need to be emission-free (i.e. electric vehicles).”

New Target, More Spending

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Cartoon by Brian Doyle.