New IPCC report shows Labor’s approach is deadly and reckless

Don’t worry. We’ll do climate action later.

It feels like that has been the perpetual catch-cry of the current government and its various defenders and advocates through social and traditional media.

It’s the through-line that appears prominently in their election campaign, when first elected and now, not that far off one full third into their term leading the country. Their weak target of 43% was defended, rigorously, on the grounds that they’ll ramp up ambition at some unspecified point in the future, both before and after the election.

And the current big debate, surrounding the scheme known as the ‘Safeguard Mechanism‘, essentially puts off mandating real climate action among the highest emitters (mostly coal and gas companies) by allowing full compliance with reducing baselines to be met using cheap, highly-suspect and deeply insufficient carbon offsets, instead of real reductions within the companies covered by the scheme (along with a smorgasbord of other loopholes). It is a policy designed with one philosophy in mind: Don’t worry. We’ll do it later.

Last night, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its ‘synthesis’ report, covering its sixth assessment reporting cycle. The heart of this report is the precise opposite: you have to act now. “All global modelled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot, and those that limit warming to 2°C (>67%), involve rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade”, states the IPCC, in the ‘summary for policymakers’.

In the scenarios in which we avoid as much of the impacts of climate change as we can muster, greenhouse gas emissions plummet from now. Not tomorrow, not in 2025, nor in 2030. Now. Carbon offsets are not mentioned in the summary (the full report is yet to be released), but the working group 3 report specifies “minimal reliance on offsets” (main report, section 13.9.4) as an important change required for net zero emissions targets.

The reality: the world – along with Australia – is on a trajectory aligned with far greater warming than 1.5 or 2 degrees. Whether you look at real policies or even at ambitions, all signs point in exactly the wrong direction.

Easily the biggest point in the report echoes a point stated by the International Energy Agency in early 2021: in a world where we’re trying as hard as possible, we stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure at the same time as massively reducing demand for fossil fuels.

“Estimates of future CO2 emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructures without additional abatement already exceed the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5°C (50%)”, write the IPCC. “Projected cumulative future CO2 emissions over the lifetime of existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure, if historical operating patterns are maintained and 12 without additional abatement, are approximately equal to the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 2°C with a likelihood of 83%”.

In plain language: if you dig up even more fossil fuels and burn them, they’ll add enough planet-warming gases into the sky to trap so much heat that we blast past targets, bringing a slew of catastrophic impacts. If you can squint at the graphic below, find 2 degrees on the left hand side of each ‘burning embers’ diagram, and then follow your eyes across the colour scale of the risk impact for that. Comfortably the first off the rank of fossil fuel victims is the Great Barrier Reef:

There is no ‘do it later’ for exiting our current catastrophic pathway. But at the same time, there is no widespread recognition of the urgency of action.

The Labor party have constructed a nightmarish fever dream in Australia, where aiming for disastrous deep red and purple impacts on the graphic above is “reasonable” and “responsible” and “adult”. Those arguing to align with the desperate and endless pleas of the world’s scientific community calling for immediate action are cast as hyper-emotional activists.

I hope you’re getting some idea of just how gut-wrenching and absurd it is for the approach of acting right now on climate change to be cast as ‘making the perfect the enemy of the good’. Does anything in the IPCC report’s projections look like “perfection”, to you? Does any of it look like a glittering, fantastical utopia? It looks, to anyone who reads even the headline summary of the synthesis let alone the (literally) tens of thousands of pages of detail, that we’re in deep, irreversible trouble in the best-case scenario, and bound to a living nightmare in our current trajectory.

The spectacle of AEMO’s ‘Gas Statement of Opportunities‘ (why on Earth are we still putting out advertisements for new fossil fuel infrastructure??) being released a few days before the IPCC’s bright, blaring red alarm on greenhouse gas emissions is just another layer on top of this entire mad haze. The government’s response has been to falsely claim new fossil gas is required to run power stations to meet demand during wind and solar lulls. The reality is that the filthy fossil gas industry wants to continue selling the cause of climate change to the rest of the world – and actively work, with all their might and their influence, to put us on the ‘living nightmare’ trajectory. The government’s response has been full, proud complicity.

Safeguard will likely pass, with Labor, the fossil fuel industry and traditional media outlets having successfully maintained the mad state of affairs; one in which we actively aim and fight for the worse climate scenarios to occur. It’ll be painted as a win for Common Sense, Bipartisanship, and Adults In The Room.

The reality will be seven years of avoidable stagnation in industry while massive new coal and gas projects fully cancel out any emissions reductions in power and transport. Feeble reviews of Safeguard and offsetting that fail to address the root cause of the problem and instead tinker around the edges will come and go. It will be a tragedy, but specifically it will be a tragedy celebrated as a success by everyone fighting for just another decade of fossil fuel profits.

If the government were to take climate action seriously, they’d regulate the fossil fuel industry and necessary heavy industry completely differently. The fossil fuel industry would be phased down at a pace that allowed for full worker and community protection, while mandating real emissions cuts that those coal and gas companies keep promising, but never delivering (such as methane reductions and CCS). Heavy industry would be incentivised to take action where technology already exists, the research funding massively increased, and rising regulations introduced to catch any laggards.

We’re so far from that. Today’s news has been a spectacle of both the reason we’re so badly screwed playing out in real time – with Senators and lobbyists finger-wagging the Greens for being ‘too ambitious’, while the IPCC’s findings are reported directly before or after that with, truly, zero connection made between the cause and the effect.

This morning, Radio National paired a climate scientist with Kerry Schott, the chair of a carbon offsetting lobby group, obviously urging this mandatory carbon offset scheme to pass quickly (and seemingly, without a disclosure of conflict of interest). “It is sensible to leave some things to the review, rather than trying to second-guess everything now”, Schott will say today at her impeccably-timed National Press Club speech. “We just simply cannot turn off coal and gas like that because we would have no power”, she told Radio National. Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie, also interviewed, said “I simply think we need a starter point, and the Greens I’m sick and tired of them – this is your starter!”

Pass the bill and worry about the details in the future.

We’ll do it later. What’s the rush?