Despite Labor’s grandstanding about its credentials as a climate leader, in March 2023, the federal minister for resources, Madeleine King, signalled the continuation of “business as usual” in her resources statement to Parliament, saying:
Some fail to acknowledge this, but Australia’s coal and gas resources are essential for energy security, stability and reliability both domestically and across the Asia-Pacific and will be needed for decades. From Hanoi to Hyderabad, Seoul to Singapore, families rely on Australia’s natural resources to provide the energy security they need.
She emphasised that gas is critical to our trading partners’ net-zero pathways, saying that as nations such as Japan and South Korea pursue their net-zero targets, they will continue to require gas for decades.
But the truth is that transitioning from coal to gas is like switching from cigarette smoking to vaping — the outcome is still very bad for your health and simply delays the inevitability of having to quit smoking altogether. Given the rapidly deteriorating state of the climate, time is the one thing we no longer have. Every day we delay, we risk breaching critical thresholds needed to maintain planetary stability.
Promoting gas as a necessary transition fuel also fails to consider the fact that renewable energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in the world and is growing exponentially. The International Energy Agency’s “Renewables 2023” report details how the world is on track to build enough solar, wind and other renewables over the next five years to power the equivalent of the United States and Canada. It also highlights that onshore wind and solar power are cheaper than both new and existing fossil fuel plants, and that the price of solar panels halved in 2023, driven by China, the world’s renewable powerhouse.
Here in Australia, while Labor has an ambitious target of 82% renewables in the electricity sector by 2030, they still only accounted for around 36% of electricity generation in 2022. That means the remaining 64% is still being generated by fossil fuels, with coal alone accounting for 47%. Although the development of the renewable energy sector has started to reduce Australia’s reliance on coal, declines have been modest, with the share of coal in the electricity generation mix falling from close to 60% in 2021 to around 55% in 2022. Over the same period, gas increased its share of power generation from 7.7% to 8.9%.
But according to the Clean Energy Council, Australia’s investment in the clean energy industry was $6.7 billion in 2022; that’s just over half the amount spent by the government subsidising the fossil fuel industry.
The government’s reluctance to move away from polluting industries stems from the fact that Australia is the third-largest fossil fuel exporter. Energy companies reap tens of billions of dollars each year selling coal and liquified national gas (LNG), mainly to the North Asian countries of Japan and South Korea.
Right now around 90% of coal and three-quarters of all gas produced in Australia is exported. In 2024, the Climate Change Authority reported that emissions generated from the use of Australia’s coal and gas overseas amount to approximately three times those generated domestically, accounting for around 4% of global emissions.
But what is odd is that the authority says: “Customers of Australia’s fossil fuel imports will decide when they phase them out and there is a risk that as Australia reduces its fossil fuel exports, other countries may increase their exports to fill the gap.”
Instead of taking the ethical lead and choosing to limit the supply of products we know are cooking the planet, we are using the drug dealer’s defence that if addicts don’t buy from us, they’ll get their fix somewhere else. Instead of enabling countries hooked on their dirty habit, Australia could instead choose to take them to rehab and help them get clean.
The main culprit is Japan, which gets about 40% of its LNG from Australia, with the head of the Japanese energy giant Inpex, Takayuki Ueda, telling parliamentarians in April 2023 that he feared any restrictions imposed on new gas developments could result in “a direct threat to the rules-based international order essential to the peace, stability and prosperity of the region, if not the world.”
Although tensions with China are thawing, it is a reminder that energy policy is closely tied to geopolitics, which is becoming increasingly harder to navigate in a war-torn world. Fearmongering aside, the truth is that Japan’s net zero plan is heavily reliant on CCS [carbon capture storage] technology, the fantasy get-out-of-jail-free card that threatens to ruin us.
While I don’t doubt Labor’s intentions are good, and I accept that the challenge the government faces is monumental, unfortunately it is still unwilling to address the root cause of the problem, which is Australia’s continuing reliance on fossil fuels.
The industry’s dominance over our political system is currently blocking the scale and speed of the renewable energy transition. Despite Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen’s comments at COP28 that a “phase-out of fossil fuels is Australia’s economic opportunity as a renewable energy superpower,” we are yet to realise this vision. Despite all the talk, the Climate Change Authority’s assessment of progress towards reducing emissions concluded that: “Australia is not yet on track to meet its 2030 targets.”
The problem is that many gas producers like Australia are promoting methane as a “transition” fuel to support the shift away from coal, while also using the need to protect their export markets as a reason why we can’t reduce our reliance on fossil fuels any time soon. Although the burning of natural gas for electricity is generally considered less emissions-intensive than coal, unintentional “fugitive” emissions released during the extraction, processing, storage and transportation processes can offset the benefit of its lower carbon intensity.
The other major issue is that even though methane breaks down more quickly in the atmosphere, it is around 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide, measured over a 20-year period, meaning that the burning of gas will exacerbate global warming in the near term. So while methane may be sold to the public as the lesser of two evils, rest assured that it is still a highly destructive greenhouse gas.
Given that Australia is one of the world’s top two exporters of LNG [liquid natural gas] and coal, fossil fuel lobbyists exert a very strong influence on our political debate, diplomacy, economic strategy and policy development both domestically and internationally. Trying to pivot away from fossil fuels has proved to be political poison in Australia, time and time again, despite the nation being highly vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate.
As our next federal election approaches, we need to ask ourselves if we are going to be the ones to remove the social licence for the continued exploitation of Australia’s coal, oil and gas reserves — whether for domestic or international consumption — to avoid destabilising the Earth’s climate. Is Australia honestly doing enough to secure a liveable future? Or will corporate bullies stop us from doing what really needs to be done?
This is an edited extract of Joelle Gergis’ Quarterly Essay Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future (Black Inc.).
