“$300 billion, not $9 trillion:” Net zero report authors put record straight after Nationals inflate costs 30-fold

The authors of a much quoted Net Zero Australia report have – somewhat belatedly – sought to put the record straight, after the Nationals, and others, predictably used their headline grabbing $9 trillion costings to end their support for the policy.

The Net Zero Australia report was released in 2023 by Melbourne University, the University of Queensland, and the Nous Group, and deliberately played up the $9 trillion in an attempt to grab media attention.

It worked, and the number has predictably been used by naysayers to repeatedly bash the federal and state governments over the cost of net zero policies.

But now the authors have decided to point out – more clearly than they ever did in the original document – that the real additional costs of reaching net zero are a tiny fraction of that number, in fact 30 times smaller, at just $300 billion spread over 25 years.

But it’s probably too late to bother.

The Nationals a few days ago officially dropped their support for net zero by 2050 as a policy goal – ignoring the overwhelming climate science that supports it – and have used the same Net Zero Australian report as a basis for their argument.

 “It’s going to cost $9 trillion,” Nationals leader David Littleproud said this week on Nine, and just about everywhere else.

As Renew Economy pointed out at the time, that $9 trillion figure includes spending on business as usual, including the purchase of family cars – eventually electric – that were all grouped together to make a big scary, headline grabbing number.

Which may have been deliberate, given that the study was sponsored by companies with significant fossil fuel interests.

Now the universities that have decided they have had enough of the report being “misrepresented” and pointed out that the additional cost of reaching net zero by 2050 is actually $300 billion, not $9 trillion, and it will be spread over the next 25 years, and nor will it be a direct cost to consumers.

“Different individuals and groups have been misrepresenting key cost estimates from the NZAu Australia Project as ‘the cost of Australia reaching net zero’,” the authors, representing the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland and Princeton University said in a statement.

” These misrepresented costs have typically ranged from $1.5 trillion to $9 trillion. The Steering Committee of the NZAu Project team is releasing this Statement to again clarify our findings on this matter.”

They say that the most up to date report makes this clear.

“Using the total costs of achieving net zero by 2050 … relative to the total costs of continuing to maintain the energy system without targeting any decarbonisation, slide 41 of this Report finds that ‘the cost of Australia reaching net zero’ is approximately $300 billion, with all annualised energy costs falling as a fraction of the projected GDP and discounting reducing all these costs further.”

But, given that the Nationals and the conservative critics don’t even accept the science of climate change, what are the chances they will correct themselves on this one?

About net zero! The horse has bolted. The academics should have done better the first time round, although their fossil fuel sponsors will be thankful they didn’t.

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