Is Scott Morrison ready for the global challenge of ‘net zero’ emission?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: AAP

The climate change argument has moved from the science - whether it’s happening or not - to whether, and how, the world can achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The implications of this change for Australia are impossible to overstate.

This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 26, in Glasgow in November will be as significant a watershed as COP 21 in Paris in 2015, except this time it won’t be about measuring and limiting degrees of warming, but about targeting emissions directly instead: the world is now being pressed to sign up to net zero emissions by 2050.

Britain’s Conservative government kicked off its chairmanship of the conference last month by calling for other countries to join it in pledging net zero. At the same time, the Business Council of Australia put its own stake in the ground with a “scoping study” also calling for net zero by 2050.

The ALP on Friday formally adopted it as policy, which will ensure the government does not. But Scott Morrison has started working on his Glasgow speech, which looks like being a reworking of Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s effort in Madrid last December — that is, it will be about technology.

Apparently the government will put out a “technology road map” next month that will presumably be a series of kites to see which ones fly. Morrison’s task will be to keep up with the new global conversation about climate change without uttering the words “net zero” and definitely without reheating the National Energy Guarantee and thereby alienating the Queensland section of the Coalition.

“We favour technology over taxation,” Morrison declared this week.

“You want to get global emissions down? That’s what you need. Meetings won’t achieve that. Technology does and I can tell you taxes won’t achieve it either.”

The BCA has placed itself squarely at odds with this rhetoric with this month’s scoping study, which says: “The simplest, most efficient method of achieving this transition is a price signal that places a value on lower-emissions.”

As the host of the bushfires that played a big part in shifting world opinion towards more radical action on climate change, the Australian speech in Glasgow will get quite a lot of attention, but whoever gets the job of delivering it (and it should be the Prime Minister, not the hapless Taylor) will have a tough job of sounding vaguely convincing while talking only about technology.

Nowhere as tough, though, as the job of actually achieving zero net emissions by 2050 or of preparing Australia for a post-fossil fuel world. Australia’s prosperity has been built to a large extent on selling fossil fuels, but we are now a tobacco company.

The government has been deceiving coal miners and their communities that there is a future for their product, trying to play both sides of the Blue Mountains, and insisting that Australia can stand aside from the global push to decarbonise. But this has been a political rather than economic or scientific posture that was always going to be exposed as a lie.

Some of the scenes encountered on the fire grounds by the Southampton Rural Fire Service during the bushfires of 2019.

As Paul Kelly wrote in his article on this subject : “The coming epic clash over net-zero carbon emissions reduction targets by 2050 is not just about the economy and climate change; it is about Australian democracy in an age of globalisation and universal climate threat.”

What the UK, the UN and now the BCA are calling for is nothing short of an economic and political revolution for Australia, but it is also what the world has been edging towards since Kyoto in 1997. It seems 2020 may be the year when the implications of this 23-year-long slow walk will be laid bare.

In the Financial Times this week, economist Martin Wolf wrote that to achieve net zero “we must move beyond (burning fossil fuels) almost completely”.

A zero-carbon economy, he wrote, would require four to five times as much electricity to be generated as there is now, and all from non-fossil fuel sources. Hydrogen consumption would have to increase enormously.

Hydrogen is one of the technologies that the Morrison government hopes will get it off the hook in November, but the transformation required is pretty much impossible on its own.

In its scoping study, the BCA put a number on the investment needed: $22bn each year until 2050, in order for Australia to be part of the global investment requirement of $440bn per year that will be needed to deliver net-zero emissions. And that’s on top of a price on carbon, not instead of.

The task is not just about funding that, it will require a fundamental shift in how the Australian economy works, rethinking the viability of large parts of the country, and the role of government in supporting regional areas and intervening in the market.

And don’t forget livestock: there is a real and rapidly developing threat to the meat industry, partly from the need to limit greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to achieve net zero by 2050, but also from the global groundswell towards veganism and away from industrial-scale killing and processing of animals. And if you think that’s not a big deal, you’re not paying attention.

In addition to that, we are currently getting a lesson in the vulnerability of exports to China - especially services like education and tourism - through the coronavirus epidemic.

So Australia has been suddenly confronted with a series of external economic policy challenges, on top of the homegrown one of chronic low wages growth, that will require the kind of sophisticated national planning and consensus building that has been entirely absent for well over a decade - ever since the attempt to fashion a bipartisan energy policy in 2009 was torpedoed by the right-wing of the Liberal Party, led by Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott.

Is the Morrison government even remotely capable of the leadership required to turn that around and come up with a plan based on national consensus?

It doesn’t seem like it.

Alan Kohler is the editor in chief of eurekareport.com.au