The average cruising speed of a Boeing 737-700 is 828km/h, no matter which end one flies in. So it was hard not to feel some sympathy for the Prime Minister when he was badgered to explain why he wouldn’t be attending the COP27 climate conference in Egypt in November 2022.
“I can’t be in all places at once,” Anthony Albanese told journalists. “It’s as simple as that.”
The spatiotemporal limitations that apply to every prime minister hadn’t stopped Albanese from calling Scott Morrison “weak” a year earlier when he initially decided not to attend COP26 in Glasgow.
“He should represent Australia,” Albanese said. “If he doesn’t, that’s because he’s embarrassed about Australia’s position.”
As it turned out, Morrison changed his mind and attended Glasgow, only to be further mocked by Albanese for failing to increase Australia’s 2030 target.
For the record, Albanese didn’t turn up at COP28 in Dubai and he has not shown his face at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, which draws to a close at the end of this week.
Could it be embarrassment keeping Albanese away? Indeed, he has reason to feel sheepish, judging from the latest quarterly National Greenhouse Accounts published by the Department of Climate Change and Energy.
Australia’s annual CO2 emissions have flatlined under Labor. We were responsible for 438 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in the year to June 2022, a 28 per cent reduction on 2005 emissions. Emissions in the year to June 2024 totalled 440 million tonnes.
So, despite Labor’s bragging and despite all the pain, it has yet to make a gram of progress towards reaching its target of a 35 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. Energy prices have rocketed, thousands of hectares of remnant vegetation have been despoiled, the ugly stick has hit landscapes, and farmers have been trussed with green tape. Yet there has been zero progress towards net zero in a mere 26 years.
The government might trot out excuses such as the post-Covid boost to the economy or the self-inflicted surge in immigration. The underlying explanation, however, is that reducing carbon in the atmosphere is extraordinarily difficult. Setting targets is one thing, achieving them quite another.
The electricity sector was responsible for 39.8 million tonnes of emissions in the March quarter of 2022 under Angus Taylor’s watch. In the March quarter this year under Chris Bowen, the total was 39.2 million, a fall of a miserly 1.5 per cent. We can safely say Labor’s 2030 target of an 82 per cent carbon-free electricity grid will not be met. Neither will it hit its overall emissions reduction target of 35 per cent without a moratorium on immigration coupled with a humungous economic recession and a few pandemics.
Australia isn’t the only country struggling to meet the absurd expectations of the global climate elite. In 1995, when the first Conference of the Parties was held in Berlin, the world was emitting 23.5 billion tonnes of carbon. Last year’s total was 37.5 billion tonnes, an increase of 60 per cent.
By any measure, the COP process has been a total failure. The annual nagfest has been hijacked by groups with divergent political agendas, like the redistribution of wealth from rich to poor nations. It is a honey pot for renewable energy rent-seekers, who want governments to skew energy markets in their favour, squeeze out their competitors, subsidise their businesses and fatten their profits.
If the 67,000 delegates at COP29 had an ounce of shame, they’d polish off the caviar and head home with their tails between their legs. The vanity targets set under the Paris accord won’t be met.
The unintended consequences of the zero-2050 fantasy have been severe. Trillions of dollars in global capital have been allocated towards achieving a singular, unachievable goal using unproven technology. It has distracted Western governments from the strategic challenge of energy security. Many European countries were deeply exposed to the disruption of oil and gas imports after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The rush towards renewables is driving a dangerous new dependency on China, which processes 67 per cent of the world’s lithium and has cornered 80 per cent of the global solar market. Paradoxically, China, the heaviest carbon emitter by some way, is on track to become the world’s only green energy superpower. Yet the heavy manufacturing involved has increased the country’s consumption of coal. A notional reduction of emissions in the Californian transport sector from switching to electric vehicles, for example, will correspond to a rise in emissions in China’s manufacturing sector.
In the absence of progress towards the Paris targets, the climate mafioso’s standover tactics have turned away from emissions and towards finance.
“Pay up or humanity will pay the price,” UN secretary-general António Guterres warned delegates last Tuesday. “It is time to deliver.” Guterres called for more government spending. “Tear down the walls to climate finance,” he said. “Public finance will mobilise the trillions of dollars developing countries need.”
Guterres is a member of the Portuguese Socialist Party and served as prime minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, presiding over a rise in government spending from a record low of 6.2 million euros when he entered office to 8 million euros when he left. Guterres is not the kind of person you’d want as treasurer of your local bowls club, let alone as a global leader on fiscal policy.
It is little wonder pulling out of the Paris accord is one of the priorities of Donald Trump’s second presidency, along with scrapping EV mandates and green energy welfare subsidies.
With the US withdrawal, none of the world’s four largest emitters – China, the US, India and Russia – will be on board with the 2050 target and, given that they produce 60 per cent of the world’s emissions, zero 2050 must be recognised as an ex-target, nailed to the perch like a Norwegian blue parrot whose days of pining for the fjords have expired.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
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