Net zero is a political victory, but heat’s on Coalition to show convincing climate change plan
The government would have you believe it is not. But accusing Liberal MPs of climate denialism has the risk of suggesting anybody else who is sceptical of the mandated approach to reach the 2050 target is an idiot. Much like anyone who disagreed with the Indigenous voice to parliament was labelled a racist.
But could the same be said of one of the world’s leading energy economists – dubbed the “green economist” by the BBC – Sir Dieter Helm?
The clash between science, or knowledge, and politics may go back to Plato and Aristotle but it never gets old.
Helm is professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford. In 2015, he was reappointed chairman of the British government’s natural capital committee, and in 2021 he was knighted for services to not only energy policy but also the environment.
Critics may argue that this was bestowed upon him under the Tories, so it doesn’t count. Sure, but wasn’t it also Boris Johnson who badgered the world into adopting net zero by 2050 at the Glasgow Climate Change conference in 2021 – COP26?
On the issue of COPs, this is what Helm had to say about the 30th shindig underway in Brazil.
“Incredibly, Brazil has cut a new road through the Amazon to allow all those delegates flying to COP30 to get to the meeting,” he wrote in The Times.
“Hard to make this stuff up. Nevertheless, world leaders, to the extent they turn up, will no doubt yet again tell us they are ‘saving the planet’.”
Helm doesn’t fly in aeroplanes because of the carbon they emit. He rails against the deforestation of the planet, which he says has led to the Amazon, for instance, going from one of the world’s greatest carbon sinks to a net emitter of carbon because of the scale at which it is being destroyed.
What Helm laments the most is that the world seems to have forgotten about the sequestration side of the equation and, more important, carbon consumption.
Helm says the renewables-only solution is a costly fantasy but more radically suggests that applying a carbon tax on consumption of anything with carbon in it would be more effective at cutting emissions.
He is bewildered by the notion that in Britain, for instance, deindustrialisation may have reduced the nation’s emissions profile but consumption of carbon by importing the same products it used to make hasn’t changed the nation’s overall carbon footprint. And after all, isn’t it the global level of carbon that matters?
The same argument could be made in Australia.
Helm is another recent intellectual to oppose the net zero by 2050 target in the belief that it is less a target than an ideology that is on a collision course with economic reality. A victory of politics over science.
“The greenhouse is getting ever hotter as the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere keeps going up – at a rate of two parts per million every year since 1990 and last year at three ppm,” he says in a podcast aired last week.
“Now it is 425 ppm, up from 275 ppm before the industrial revolution and on course for over 500 ppm. The next generation is going to be appalled by what we have done.
“The answers are painful, but either they are faced up to or we carry on wasting money and without making any difference to climate change.
“First, if we want to stop causing climate change, our net-zero target is the wrong one: it should be net-zero carbon consumption (rather than production) and preferably derived from a global target focused on the increase in carbon concentration in the atmosphere.
“That global target should be based upon ppm, not a target measured in degrees centigrade: 1.5C is for the birds anyway, and we will go through 2C.”
Helm has long been a proponent of technology as the ultimate solution. Machines will find a way. He isn’t much liked now by environmental groups, which disagree with his assessment of the ultimate cost of renewables.
This is not to say Helm’s view would in any way be consistent with the Coalition’s new position. Far from it; Helm would be too green for the Liberals, while ironically not green enough for the activists.
Angus Taylor – who as energy minister in the previous Coalition government insisted that if Australia was going to sign up to net zero back in 2021 it had to be on a “technology not taxes” basis – was a former student of Helm at Oxford.
No surprises as to where some of Taylor’s thinking on all this began.
But herein lies the problem with the Liberals’ proposal to abandon net zero and a target on anything at all, by replacing it with almost nothing.
Without a credible emissions reduction pathway, or indeed attention to the sequestration issue, the Coalition has no hope of appealing to a majority of voters, whether they are in teal seats or elsewhere. While energy costs may be the primary political argument Sussan Ley wants to make – and this will have appeal – the key to flipping voters will be an ability to convince enough of them there is a credible plan beyond a rhetorical commitment to bring down emissions at the same time as bringing down power bills.
Any measure of opinion in Australia will tell you that up to 75 per cent of voters support net zero. This would include some who probably don’t know what it means.
So, even if the Coalition can win the cost and prices argument (and that’s a big if), unless it also has a believable narrative on emissions and how it intends to reduce them, voters are unlikely to be turned, or at least enough of them to make any difference.
It’s not clear yet whether those who are still celebrating their political victory last week inside the Liberal partyroom are yet aware of this challenge or whether the Coalition in its current state is capable of managing such a balancing act.
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The principal question the Coalition appears to be asking Australians is whether people believe it’s possible to support climate change action but think net zero is a stupid and costly idea at the same time.