Two years ago, when the former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison gave in to diplomatic pressure and turned up at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, the story of Australia’s response to the climate crisis was straightforward. There wasn’t one.
Morrison mustered a bit of half-hearted rhetoric and re-heated climate funding, and suffered through the fallout of French president Emmanuel Macron accusing him of lying, but did nothing to dispel the view that Australia had no meaningful climate policies and was a roadblock at the talks not far removed from the Russians and Saudis.
Things are more complicated now. Australia has competing climate stories, each with an element of truth.
The positive version is that Labor under prime minister Anthony Albanese has made significant strides in the 18 months since it was elected, having introduced policies, landed two pieces of climate legislation, and proven itself a non-disruptive contributor on the global stage.
That’s visible on the ground at the vast, sweaty former World Expo site on the outskirts of Dubai that is hosting Cop28. Australia’s climate change minister, Chris Bowen, chairs the umbrella group of countries, including the US, UK, Canada and Japan. The assistant climate minister, Jenny McAllister, was picked to co-lead a stream on how to deal with climate adaptation.
Delivering the national statement to the conference on Saturday, Bowen argued Australia had made more progress on climate in the past 12 months than in nearly a decade under the rightwing Coalition.
He listed successes: an underwriting policy to help reach a target of 82% renewable electricity by 2030; a limit on total pollution from the country’s biggest 215 industrial sites; offering residency to climate refugees from the tiny, low-lying Pacific island nation of Tuvalu; projections suggesting the 2030 emissions target – a 43% cut compared with 2005 – is within reach.
While he was pleased with what his government had achieved, he said he was not satisfied. “We have all come so far, yet we find ourselves at the beginning, not the end,” Bowen said.
On the question of whether Cop28 can reach agreement on the need to phase out fossil fuels – one of the major issues at the heart of the fortnight-long conference – the minister has offered a strong line. “We need to end the use of fossil fuels in our energy systems,” he said.
The country is already moving away from coal in its electricity grid – cheap solar panels are making old and increasingly faulty fossil generator economically unviable – but it is so far doing little to reduce its production of coal and gas for global markets.
This is Australia’s second story: it remains the world’s third biggest fossil fuel exporter, and allows energy companies to reap tens of billions of dollars each year selling coal and liquified natural gas (LNG), mainly to north Asia.
Greenpeace has estimated 30 coal and gas developments that have been submitted to the government for approval could lead to more than 20bn tonnes of emissions across their lifetimes. It is highly unlikely all will go ahead but if they did to their full extent that’s roughly equivalent to 40% of annual global CO2.
The biggest proposed development is a massive expansion of LNG exports from the Burrup Peninsula, in the country’s remote north-west. The development, led by the oil and gas giant Woodside, includes two new gas fields and a near 50-year extension of the life of an existing processing facility so it can run until 2070.
The Australian government’s position on this is the country alone cannot end the global fossil fuel trade because its customers would just get gas from somewhere else. It claims if the relationship is maintained they can work together on a clean transition.
Critics say this argument – sometimes known as the drug dealer’s defence – would carry more weight if there was a clearer plan to help these countries kick their dirty habit.
Some initial steps are being taken in this direction but Australian policymakers give wildly varying messages on the path ahead. The Labor premier of gas-rich Western Australia, Roger Cook, recently said his state should keep exploiting its gas reservoirs because otherwise people could run out of energy and die.
There are also questions over how effective Labor’s domestic policies are at cutting pollution. A new analysis by the Climate Action Tracker released during Cop28 finds the improvement in the country’s future emissions trajectory is mostly due to an upward revision of how much CO2 will be absorbed by the country’s land and forests.
This expected rise in natural sequestration means industrial greenhouse gases would only have to be cut by 24% between 2005 and 2030 for Australia to meet its 43% pledge.
A boost in the amount of carbon stored in the land would obviously be welcome but scientists stress it is not necessarily permanent – particularly on a continent as bushfire and drought prone as Australia – and it will only be truly meaningful if it leads to a decrease in the total CO2 in the atmosphere.
Otherwise it could just allow Australia’s industrial sectors to pollute at a higher level than they would otherwise have to, safe in the knowledge the country can claim it is meeting its emissions target.
The Climate Action Tracker calls this “creating an illusion of progress, while the atmosphere suffers”.
As Bowen says, this can’t be the end point. Next year the government has promised plans to cut emissions from sectors it has so far barely touched, including transport, industry, buildings and farming.
But the argument over Australia’s responsibility to curtail its fossil fuel exports – which last month prompted more than 100 people to get themselves arrested blockading the world’s biggest coal port – is likely to only grow, and come further into focus as Australia bids with Pacific countries to host its own Cop in 2026.
