Nine years of coalition rule have created something of an optical illusion. The previous government’s climate plans weren’t just void of ambition. The party was astoundingly talented at constantly making the problem worse.
Labor have come to power with a climate plan that’s above rock bottom. Gaze on it relative to the past, and it looks to the untrained eye like something relatively good. But that’s the wrong way to look at the danger we face from coal, oil and gas. Every missed opportunity, every unavoided emission is harm to life that’s impossible to reverse.
This is urgent. Effort must be maximum, not middling. To leave potentially avoidable emissions untouched is to commit a gruesome sin against the people who voted you in. Labor may be doing this less than the worst-case scenario, but they’re still doing it – and they’re putting incredible energy into defending it.
How to defend the indefensible
It was a little stunning, to say the least, to hear Prime Minister Anthony Albanese blaming the past decade of climate failures in Australia on the Greens. The thin, worn logic of this claim is that by voting down the CPRS policy back in 2009 alongside the Coalition, the Greens were solely responsible for triggering the sequence of events that occurred afterwards – the re-election of the Coalition and a subsequent nine years of rapidly accumulating emissions.
It’s whiplash-inducing revisionism. The CPRS was objectively a terrible piece of policy; a litany of dodgy international offsets and fossil subsidies blended with greenwashing and ultra-weak targets, the result of aggressive lobbying from the fossil fuel industry. And its rejection in parliament was followed by a future partnership between Labor and the Greens resulting in the implementation of a carbon pricing mechanism, along with a suite of other agencies and policies that have stood the test of time. It was a case of a political party failing on its responsibility to prevent avoidable climate damage being held to account.
I struggle to think of a better example of where holding to a principle on preventing the harm of fossil fuels as much as possible resulted in a good outcome. Despite that, in the Centrist Expanded Universe, the idea that everything can be blamed on that single vote from the Greens has become canon.
The other frequently deployed piece of rhetoric from the past few days is the idea that Labor’s 43% 2030 target is a “floor, not a ceiling”. The line’s been used several times in recent weeks, and has been repeated eagerly across the party’s supporter base on social media, in response to criticism of the target as insufficient.
Pacific Island nations want Australia to increase our 2030 carbon reduction target beyond 43%, but @AlboMP says he’s got no plans to be more ambitious: “This (43% target) is a floor, not a ceiling. This is an opportunity to end the climate wars” #auspol @RNBreakfast @PatsKarvelas
— Julia Holman (@JulesHolman) July 12, 2022
That weirdly hollow and desperate-sounding promise – just hold off, we’ll do better later – is incredibly familiar. “Australia reaffirms its ambitious economy-wide target to reduce greenhouse emissions to 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030, and will exceed it by up to 9 percentage points”, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison said at COP26, last year. ‘Floor not ceiling’ is the contemporary reimagining of the Coalition’s ‘meet and beat‘.
If a target is almost certainly going to be exceeded, it’s not performing the function of a target. These exist to create change in behaviour – to haul the trajectory of the future away from business as usual to an improved state. To avoid emissions that we know we can avoid; and in doing so, save lives and nature. That Labor simultaneously refuse to upgrade their target beyond 43% while insisting that they’re definitely going to exceed it, shows up the true nature of their approach. They deflect criticism by promising over-performance in the future, but also actively and aggressively refuse to be held to those promises through an accountability mechanism like a revised target.
The very definition of the 2030 targets submitted to the UNFCCC as part of the Paris Climate Agreement is that they will “reflect its highest possible ambition”. If Labor are saying reductions are likely to exceed their stated target, they’re openly admitting to betraying the entire purpose of target-setting in that agreement; just as the LNP did beforehand.
Labor’s upcoming climate bill, sold as “enshrining” the 43%, comes packaged with the capacity for the Climate Change Authority (CCA) to advise Labor on targets, but also that the government retains final say on the targets. That’s the same philosophy at work; avoiding accountability and always leaving Labor the option of simply deciding to ignore the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, and the safest, cheapest trajectory to near zero emissions.
For many months now, Labor has also been leaning on the rhetoric of “climate wars”. As I wrote earlier, it’s a false characterisation of the reasons emissions in Australia keep getting worse. But more importantly, and most relevant to the coming weeks, is that it’s part of of a system of defence used to justify Labor not reducing emissions that have to be reduced. The goal here is to set any party or person urging Labor to address the huge swathes of avoidable emissions it’s left out of its policies as somehow stifling the party’s capacity to address the few that it will deal with. It makes no sense, but none of this does.
Labor were, only weeks ago, proudly declaring that their climate plans didn’t need legislation to work to reduce emissions. Now, they’re declaring that anyone opposing the party’s insufficient target will bring about another decade of darkness. Again, it’s a frustrating mix of extreme contradictions. If the policies don’t need to be passed to work, why are they saying anyone opposing their bill is stifling climate action?
The “climate wars” talking points are there to shift blame for the party’s failures onto their critics. It’s callous and cynical, and deeply disappointing.
Another justification for not improving their 2030 target is that they’ve received a “mandate” from the electorate to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030, and only 43% by 2030; and that anything further would be a slap in the face to the trusting voters that elevated them into power. This is incredibly silly; public support for significantly higher climate targets is widespread even among Coalition voters, and notably, the independents and Greens also received a ‘mandate’ from their voters.And wait, didn’t they just say they’ll reduce emissions by more than 43%? That it’s a floor, not a ceiling? Isn’t that ‘betraying’ their mandate?!
We know Australia is capable of over 55% emissions reduction. I'm concerned that a lower target may lock in lower ambition. I spoke about this on RN Drive (Wednesday)#auspol #climateactnow pic.twitter.com/990CVbZkMh
— 🌏 Zali Steggall MP (@zalisteggall) July 15, 2022
All of this speaks to a mindset within the party where emissions reductions are seen as optional, non-urgent and unimportant. They’d rather reheat decades-old lines about the CPRS than deal directly with the substantial policy issues. The entire concept that Labor should be trusted to improve their climate policies in the future comes paired with the party literally reducing its level of climate ambition it formulated seven full years ago, while also explicitly stating that they’re going to stretch that old, worsened target through to 2025. That just feels……gross.
Labor doesn’t actually have a climate target
As I wrote last year for RenewEconomy, Labor’s suite of climate policies are narrow, insufficient and telling in what they avoid. They’re comfortable with interventions in the electricity sector, such as a mechanism to enhance transmission line growth, and have tentative and weak policies in transport and general industry. But mining (fossil mining in particular, comfortably the bulk of emissions), heavy industry and agriculture remain mostly untouched. There are loopholes galore, and many of the Coalition’s worst ideas, such as carbon credits for CCS and for being under Safeguard mechanism baselines.
One other odd response to criticism of Labor’s target has been a plea to focus on policy instead of targets. What this forgets is that Labor’s 43% 2030 policy isn’t actually a target. That’s the percentage reduction that was spat out when Reputex modelled the physical outcomes of a collection of policies that Labor decided it could stomach. Their ‘target’ isn’t really a target – it’s a result. It’s the output of their policy decisions, if everything goes perfectly to plan.
Australia's major political parties are ignoring the science, still, and knowingly condemning us to a terrible, terrible fate #auspol https://t.co/PzavNRq9eb pic.twitter.com/fPJDkna7nM
— Professor Euan Ritchie 🌏 🌳 🐾 🔥 🎶 (@EuanRitchie1) July 16, 2022
Labor insists that their target is a floor, not a ceiling, but a good target is neither. It should be set at a point reasonably above what’s already due to happen, to encourage an improvement from the current status quo. What this really draws attention to is the internal philosophy within this group of people that leads to bad decisions being made on climate.
How did Labor formulate their policies?
They certainly weren’t formulated using advice from the Climate Change Authority (as their original 45% target was in 2015, when they chose the weakest end of suggested ambition). They definitely weren’t formulated using an approach that aligns Australia with keeping the planet under 1.5 degrees of warming, as shown in this Climate Analytics report. No, it wasn’t written with inspiration from the International Energy Agency’s seminal net zero report from 2021, which suggested a range of feasible but ambitious climate solutions to align countries with the upper ambition of the Paris climate agreement.
We can take some rough guesses about what really guided their decision making, based on the outputs but also on the rhetoric of the past few months. It seems designed closely around the policy suggestions of the Business Council of Australia, who suggested a 50% target packed with industry-friendly schemes like carbon offsetting and relying on notoriously deceptive corporate net zero targets. Chris Bowen and other Labor figures very explicitly and repeatedly explained they also designed the policies to not need support from the Greens and the crossbench to be implemented, as I mentioned earlier.
Some hypothesised Labor set weak policies to avoid being attacked by News Corp, by the LNP and by the fossil fuel industry. Weirdly, that’s used in defence of the party, despite that essentially implying that strong climate action is perpetually impossible, and that the bullying of those institutions is functionally effective. Despite that, I think there’s some truth to those being guiding principles for their decisions. This is a bad thing.
There is also the little problem of the hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash being poured into the Labor party as donations from the fossil fuel industry, plus the revolving door of guaranteed employment between the party, lobbyist groups and the fossil industry itself. All of these factors lead to the party badly under-performing on climate policy.
This is what they should be doing instead
Labor should be setting a target somewhere around 70 to 80% of 2005 emissions, by 2030. They need to trigger an emergency redesign of Australia’s energy system; not just to avoid the disastrous impacts of fossil fuel use like Europe’s heatwave happening right now but to protect citizens from the crippling high costs of fossil fuels, from the awful crimes of the countries that predominately sell and control fossil fuels like Russia, and to avoid the thousands of avoidable deaths from direct and severe air pollution.
There is no shortage of detailed, specific policy blueprints outlining how to reach ambitious climate goals that make limiting warming to 1.5c achievable. The IEA’s aforementioned net zero report mentions eliminating coal in power by 2030, banning combustion engine sales by 2035, fully ceasing approvals for new fossil extraction projects right now, and a full suite of economic, behavioural, community and business concepts that can all be tweaked in various ways to suit different countries. Notably, low-hanging fruit like strong incentives for public and active transport, new subsidies and incentives for clean energy, and strong policy regulations and/or bans on fossil fuel infrastructure and mining projects are all feasible and beneficial options.
Saul Griffith’s “Rewiring Australia” details the immediate financial savings from a vast and aggressive electrification push. Significantly more under-discussed in Australia are justice and community driven climate policies, which empower the marginalised and ensure even those with low access to cash and homes can benefit from the process of ditching fossil fuels. There is really no shortage of feasible, detailed and immediately beneficial policies to go far, far beyond 43%, in Australia.
Labor’s target is 43% – lower than their 2015-era target – because they don’t want to engage. They don’t want to have to justify why they’ve decided not to take them on, and they’d rather everyone relitigate CPRS nonsense instead. The vast field of potential climate action left ignored is unforgivable. That is why the suite of talking points used to defend it make no sense – why each of them contradict both themselves and the others. Why the responses are reactionary and defensive, rather than thoughtful.
There is no fundamental, internal drive to treat the climate crisis like a crisis. If there was, we would’ve seen it already. On Monday, the UK will see a heatwave reaching 40 degrees; across Europe that heatwave has already taken lives and will destroy infrastructure. There are no longer any excuses for leaving achievable and strong climate policies untouched, in favour of fossil-friendly incrementalism. Yes, the Labor party are better than the worst possible option. That doesn’t make their failures any less severe; nor does it take away from the fact that the only way they’ll treat this urgently is if they’re dragged, kicking and screaming.
