This Parliament began with great hope around the environment and climate. Labor had committed to real climate action and meaningful, if unambitious, emissions reduction goals, rather than Scott Morrison’s risible 2050 net-zero target. Teal MPs committed to an ambitious climate agenda had replaced do-nothing Liberal moderates whose only climate action was to wring their hands as they were rolled by fossil fuel interests within their partyroom.
But the Parliament ends with a Labor government firmly in the control of the fossil fuel industry, with the ALP axeing its own election commitments on the environment as our fossil fuel exports surge. Meanwhile the Coalition has backtracked not merely on the Morrison government’s climate position but the Abbott government’s position. It’s been a stark demonstration of how Labor securing a two-seat majority in 2022 was the painful difference between an end to the long years of climate inaction and business-as-usual for a country that is now one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel exporters.
Nor are fossil fuel interests shy about their control of federal Labor. The leader of Western Australia’s rotten petrostate claque, Roger Cook, yesterday boasted of killing off discussions between federal Labor and the Greens to implement Labor’s 2022 election promise to establish a federal environment protection agency. Federal Labor’s promises on the environment, it seems, come with an asterisk that they will only be implemented with the permission of the fossil fuel lobby.
Only on domestic electricity generation has Labor in any way lived up to its commitments. Unlike the Morrison government, or the NSW Labor government, Labor’s Chris Bowen has been focused only on expediting the transition to renewables, not propping up coal-fired power, and has brought substantial money to the table via the Rewiring the Nation and Capacity Investment Scheme programs. The contrast with the Morrison government here is stark: federal Labor is committed to a rapid transition to renewables backed by storage.
Elsewhere, however, it’s been business-as-usual or worse. Labor has declined to put an end to the scam of Human-Induced Regeneration, which means 30% of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCU) — used by heavy carbon emitters as offsets for their pollution — are bogus. If one includes the number of Units based on carbon emissions abatement that would have happened anyway and are thus not “additional” to the status quo, up to 85% of ACCUs do not represent genuine abatement. The reformed safeguard mechanism — the centrepiece of Labor’s climate policies — relies heavily on ACCUs and “safeguard mechanism credits” to enable big polluters to continue to operate in a business-as-usual manner; only intervention by the Greens inserted any meaningful overall emissions cap into the mechanism in 2023.
Labor meanwhile continues to approve new and expanded coal mines and gas fields. Coal exports are forecast to rise back over 200 million tonnes in the next two years, while gas exports have settled at levels 60% higher than in 2016. Based on projected output and planned developments, Australia’s total carbon exports — 30 billion tonnes between 1961 and 2023 — are estimated to increase by another 15 billion tonnes between 2023 and 2035. Labor is spending taxpayer money to enable exports with its $1.5 billion investment in a gas export facility at Middle Arm in Darwin, and half a billion dollars on geological surveys that will be handed for free to fossil fuel companies, in support both of more gas exploration and the toxic fantasy of carbon capture and storage.
In short, Labor has ensured that Australia remains the world’s second biggest carbon exporter after the Putin regime. The Coalition’s years of delay and denial seem innocuous compared to Labor’s commitment to export as much CO2 as possible.
The Coalition itself hasn’t stood still — it has gone backwards. It has abandoned even Tony Abbott’s laughable 26% emissions abatement target by 2030, and has explicitly committed to keeping coal-fired power stations going long after they have become unviable, and expanding domestic gas use. It’s now clear that, as pathetic as it was, the Morrison government was the high point of Coalition climate action — and that point will never be seen again if Dutton becomes prime minister.
The harsh lesson of this term of Parliament is that no major-party government can be trusted to take real climate action. Only a minority government supported by crossbenchers with a genuine commitment to ending the iron grip of fossil fuel interests on government will bring an end to what is now a decade-plus of delay and denial.
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