Peter Dutton has revved up Australia’s climate war – and scientists and business are in despair

“This is a gift,” trilled the climate activist Simon Holmes a Court this week, after Peter Dutton signalled a resumption of hostilities in Australia’s long climate war.

Holmes a Court’s organisation, Climate 200, famously backed the so-called teal independent candidates who stormed federal parliament during the last election, harnessing inner-city fury about, among other issues, the Coalition’s inaction on climate.

Last weekend Dutton, the Liberal leader, made clear what his policy statements had signalled for months: he would fight the government over climate at the next election.

The return of the climate war has entrenched old fault lines.Credit: Richard Giliberto

Since, in his view, there was no chance Australia could meet its legally binding target to cut emissions 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, there was “no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving”, Dutton told The Australian newspaper.

Meeting the target would “destroy the economy”, he said.

Which brings us back to Holmes a Court.

“He can’t win those teal seats back on this. This is a gift to the incumbent independents,” said Holmes a Court as business, political and policy wonks digested Dutton’s new stance. “He is writing off those seats.”

One senior moderate Liberal, who asked not to be named, glumly agreed. “It makes the challenge [of winning inner-city teal and Labor seats] harder,” he said.

Nor were the business bodies that once cheered on Coalition climate combat impressed.

The Australian Industry Group, which represents about 60,000 businesses, put out a long and delicately worded “on the one hand”-style statement from its chief, Innes Willox.

“We have supported Australia’s interim emissions targets as a guide path and glide path to meeting the global Paris Agreement goal to limit further climate change,” he said.

“Credible targets are a balance between enough ambition to match our peers and contribute to the Paris goals, and enough grounding to be practically achievable with realistic effort.”

Business Council of Australia chief Bran Black was briefer, and perhaps a little clearer.

“The BCA is committed to Australia achieving net-zero emissions by 2050,” he said. “Interim targets are critical to achieving net zero, providing important milestones to track progress while giving investors certainty to invest.”

The Energy Users Association, which represents commercial and industrial interests, was unimpressed. “Business needs the certainty of a bipartisan approach to invest in technologies that allow it to compete in a low-emissions future,” said the group’s chief executive, Andrew Richards. “Just because this is hard does not mean we shouldn’t do it.”

By Thursday, Dutton had refined his message, emphasising during a press conference that a Coalition government would stand by the target of reaching net zero by 2050 but would not risk “destroying the economy” with a 2030 target of 43 per cent, or a 2035 target that is expected to fall in the range of 65 to 75 per cent.

He cast the position in terms of kitchen-table economics.

“I am not going to sign up to a policy that the prime minister is proposing at the moment during a cost-of-living crisis,” he said.

His position did not settle nerves in a business sector that craves stability and had believed that, at the very least, debate over 2030 targets was settled.

“His comments around destroying the economy – I don’t know where they come from,” said Frank Calabria, the boss of energy giant Origin. “The transition is obviously a significant undertaking. Clearly we are having to invest if we’re to achieve our goals for the climate over time. We will need to retire coal plants and introduce renewable energy.

“There’s a lot of merit in getting on with it. The key thing is that it [the transition] is done in a way that’s orderly.”

What are the implications?

Whatever Dutton might say, backsliding on 2030 targets or ducking 2035 targets would put Australia in breach of the Paris climate treaty, signatories of which are obliged not only to reach net zero by 2050 but to declare and set policy to meet regular, increasingly ambitious interim emission reduction targets.

This so-called “ratchet mechanism” is at the heart of the treaty and is seen as the only way the world might reach the goal of stabilising the climate later in the century. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and its climate chief, Simon Stiell, refer to the 2020s as “the crucial decade”.

After bitter wrangling with the Nationals, former prime minister Scott Morrison took a pledge to the Glasgow climate talks in 2021 to achieve a 28 per cent reduction by 2030. The Albanese government’s updated 43 per cent target was far more warmly received when it was announced the following year, and in November Australia is expected to declare its 2035 target.

While it is unlikely Australia would be somehow turfed out of the treaty for failing to announce credible targets, the implications for the nation are more broad, says Richie Merzian, acting chief executive at the Smart Energy Council and a former Department of Foreign Affairs climate negotiator.

“The Paris Agreement is not going away because it does not suit an Australian political agenda. We can either have a strong voice in negotiations setting the rules, or we can be ignored. If we don’t pull our weight we won’t even be invited into the small rooms where the rules are made.”

Wei Sue, acting chief executive of Climateworks Centre, a climate and business think tank that operates throughout the region and is based at Monash University, agrees.

Failing to set credible targets and back them with serious policy would hit our international standing, she says.

If Australia wants to attract investment for new industries in areas such as critical minerals then it has to set consistent climate policy, she says.

Can ambitious targets be met?

Wei disagrees with Dutton’s argument that the 43 per cent 2030 target cannot be met.

“Analysis by Climateworks Centre back in 2021 found that the cumulative impact of state targets [at the time] would achieve a 37 to 42 per cent emissions reduction across Australia by 2030,” she said.

Similarly, its analysis suggests that by 2035 the nation could reach a reduction of between 61 and 81 per cent, putting the nation within striking distance of the new, more ambitious goals, as long as it continued to invest in the deployment of the infrastructure, focused on smoothing snags in supply chains, and developed the key workforce.

Late last year the energy department published a report suggesting Australia was heading towards 42 per cent by 2030 – 1 per cent shy of the goal.

Since Labor was elected, efforts to deploy renewables at the necessary pace have stalled in some areas due to regulatory log-jams and in a few cases community opposition, but new policies, such as a fuel-efficiency standard and a scheme to supercharge investment in renewables, have been introduced.

The impacts of these are yet to be seen.

Kylie Walker, chief executive of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, said the academy supports an even more ambitious target of net zero by 2035, in line with the position of the Climate Council and the Greens.

She said the academy’s analysis suggested such a target was technically feasible given existing technology such as wind and solar, batteries and pumped hydro, but meeting it would be difficult and demand political, policy and regulatory support from all levels of government.

“Failure would not be missing the target, failure would be not trying to reach it,” she said.

Professor Mark Howden, director of the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University, said current emission levels suggested a 2035 reduction target of about 70 per cent would be needed to keep Australia on track with Paris targets, which would be difficult.

But he rejected Dutton’s suggestion that the potential of missing a target was cause to abandon the effort.

“Imagine you want to run a race and you said, ‘Look, I’m not 100 per cent sure that I can win this so I’m going to pick up and go home’. That’s essentially what’s been proposed here. Whereas I think what most people would do is say, ‘Well, I want to win that race and so I’m going to do the hard work to actually win it’. That’s the argument that we should be adopting.”

So who is Dutton appealing to?

Resolve Strategic pollster Jim Reed believes it carries less political risk than some of Dutton’s opponents believe.

It may well cement teals in inner-city seats, he says, but the contemporary Coalition is more interested in suburban and regional voters. The policy suggests, he says, the party is chasing neither climate-concerned teal voters nor their neighbours who populate the senior ranks of big business and its lobby groups.

His research suggests Australians are happy with the Coalition’s support for gas, and neither know much, nor care deeply, about the technicalities of the Paris Agreement.

They want action on climate, says Reed, but Dutton has inoculated himself on this by backing the more distant 2050 target and restricting reactors to Nationals seats. And though there is significant risk in the nuclear strategy, Australians are not as fearful of the technology as they once were.

What about the business sector’s craving for stability? “There is no stability. Trump could win the next election. The far right is on the move in Europe. A Western consensus on emissions trajectory is not a given.”

One senior government source said that though Labor did not seek this fight, it believes it can win it, even on cost-of-living terms.

In the past, Labor has fought climate issues on moral and scientific grounds. It stands by them, but it believes the economics are in its favour, too. There are not just investment and jobs in transition but household savings. “There is a reason a third of Australian homes have solar and it is not because they are woke. It is cheaper,” the source said.

The Nationals are welcoming the coming skirmishes, too. Leader David Littleproud was months ago the first to call for a moratorium on grid-scale renewable development outside cities, where transmission lines and wind farms are in some areas unpopular, and boasted this week that his party had led the nuclear campaign.

Whatever the political implications, climate scientists remain horrified at the shocking speed at which the Earth is warming due to the global political failure to cut carbon emissions.

This week the European Union’s Earth observation unit, Copernicus, reported that May marked the 12th consecutive month of record-breaking global average temperatures. The past year is the hottest on record, already 1.63 degrees above the pre-industrial average.

For his part, Holmes a Court remains certain Dutton has it wrong, that there is no path to a Coalition government without the inner-city seats he appears to be ceding.

He makes no apology for his part in culling the parliamentary Liberal Party of moderates who might have opposed Dutton’s new hard line, saying they have failed to help shape the party’s position on climate for a generation.

Donations have soared this week, he says.

Climate 200 will not only back the incumbent teals but is now looking at growing community campaigns in more than a dozen more seats.

“The Coalition has either got to move back towards the centre or die, and I don’t really care which.”

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