Media asleep as Labor botches energy policy
As usual, most Australian environment journalists remain asleep. They were strangely quiet about the failure of last month’s COP30 climate meeting in Belem, Brazil, to map out a new, higher path for global emissions reduction targets.
Journalists who had been desperate for COP31 to come to Australia have been silent about the failure of 180 of the 195 nations signed up to the Paris emissions reduction accord to submit their 2035 targets ahead of the latest COP, as required. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen released ours in September saying Australia would lead the world with a 2035 target of between 62 and 70 per cent reduction on 2005 emissions.
This column asked on November 2 why Australia would want to lead the world and imperil its own heavy industries.
Rather than look at what’s really happening after Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris accord, media attention in Australia has focused on South Pacific Island nations that science shows are not sinking.
The Albanese government allows itself to be blackmailed by the region’s leaders as we try to keep China out. Never mind any ocean warming in the South Pacific would reflect China’s contribution of a third of annual man-made CO2 emissions.
Now journalists are obsessing about whether in his new role as COP president for negotiations ahead of next year’s COP31 in Turkey, rather than Adelaide, Bowen can handle his regular job while negotiating a pre-COP meeting in the South Pacific that will cost us a fortune and achieve nothing.
This parochial navel-gazing comes as many countries in the northern hemisphere reassess the damage they are doing to their own economies in trying to accelerate the phasing out of fossil fuels to meet an arbitrary 2050 net-zero deadline.
Feeding into slowing ambitions is a new consensus that warming trends predicted in 2015 when Paris was signed were overblown, perhaps by as much as 100 per cent.
Whereas scientists were openly talking about warming of as much as five or six degrees by 2100 back then, the latest consensus is less than three degrees. Many are settling on 2.5 degrees even if the world junks net zero by 2050. Given we are at 1.4 degrees now, this is only another degree over the next 75 years.
Here a politically naive Coalition has made itself the issue with a drawn-out, divisive debate about whether to drop its support for net zero by 2050, something former Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison signed up for ahead of COP26 in Glasgow in 2021.
The media left at the ABC and Nine newspapers has ignored the drift away from global climate ambition to focus on demographic challenges the axing of net zero will present Opposition Leader Sussan Ley in metropolitan Australian electorates, where younger demographics are firmly behind climate action.
Over at Sky News and the News Corp tabloids, commentators imagine an Australian populist uprising built on rejecting net zero and high immigration, both reminiscent of Trump’s MAGA movement and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which leads the polls with 30 per cent of the British vote.
Australia’s compulsory preferential voting system would make the rise of a new populist movement more difficult here.
This column reckons the Coalition would do better to critique high power prices, network rollout failures, environmental destruction caused by wind and solar farms, and an apparent halt in actual emissions reductions under Labor.
All of this is likely to resonate when voters start to understand what is happening in the northern hemisphere – especially with reliability issues after blackouts in Spain, Portugal, California and Texas all triggered by high penetrations of wind and solar power that affect grid system inertia.
Ley has been out selling her new policy – “Affordable and Responsible: The Liberal Plan for Affordable Energy and Lower Emissions” – but it is light on detail and vulnerable to a Labor-driven media scare campaign. Remember Labor’s false claims ahead of May’s election that Peter Dutton’s nuclear plans would cost more than $600bn and kill Medicare?
ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson gave Ley a brutal grilling on the new policy on November 17, interrupting her 35 times and wrongly insisting the policy was a smokescreen for reintroducing coal-fired power that is being phased out.
The contrast with Ferguson’s interview of Bowen on November 26 was stark. She was much less aggressive and let Bowen speak at length, interrupting him only five times. Bowen was allowed to deny – against all evidence – that network costs are increasing electricity prices. He was not asked about the rising cost of firming through battery and pumped hydro projects.
Arriving just before Ley’s policy was the International Energy Agency’s 2025 World Energy Report, released on November 12. ABC journalists saw it as a repudiation of Coalition claims that renewable energy was pumping up prices.
It was a selective reading given the report speaks of a 10-year time frame before renewables become cheaper. It is also clear in previous IEA work that power prices in the short term rise as a country’s penetration of renewables energy rises. This column dealt with the issue on March 31.
ABC political lead David Speers on the ABC website on November 13 argued the IEA’s discussion paper on power prices would be a problem for Ley.
Speers did concede the IEA report says there is “less momentum than before behind national and international efforts to reduce emissions”.
This column reckons when Speers looks at the three energy scenarios the IEA maps out he focuses too much on the “net zero by 2050” path when the wider context of the report suggests the world may not meet net zero or even its existing commitments but may continue on its present path.
Here is where the opposition needs to be smarter. Even on the IEA’s CPS (Current Policies Scenario), global temperatures by the end of the century rise by 2.9C above pre-industrial levels. This is about half the old IPCC RCP 8.5 scare forecast that persuaded the then Prince Charles to declare the world would face doom if it did not phase out fossil fuels before 2030.
The IEA’s STEPS (Stated Policies Scenario) scenario, in which countries act on existing commitments, cuts that warming to 2.5C.
The IEA also admits many of the technologies needed to meet its optimum net zero by 2050 scenario do not yet exist.
Readers interested in understanding how warming predictions became so overheated should look at pieces published by Roger Pielke Jr on The Honest Broker site on Substack during November.
Pielke Jr is criticised by global warming activists but he is also a respected political scientist, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and former staff scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research.
Pielke Jr created a stir when invited to address a climate impact seminar at Cornell University on November 11. Readers can check out his piece about the event on Substack – “The Last Gasp of the Climate Thought Police”, published on November 16.
He ridicules the Paris accord in a November 22 piece, “The Paris Delusion”.
“To achieve deep decarbonisation … (of) more than 80 per cent by 2050 would require decarbonisation of more than 8 per cent a year every year. The world is currently decarbonising at 2 per cent a year … no country has ever sustained a rate … even approaching 8 per cent.”
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