Net-zero target is the emperor with no clothes
There’s not a centre-right party in the English-speaking world, Nationals senator Matt Canavan points out, that remains committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
That the Morrison government had such a commitment, while never remotely expecting to meet it, reflected a failure of nerve that has caused much of today’s problem for the Coalition.
In the US Donald Trump rejects net zero utterly. In Britain both the Conservatives and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which is leading national polls, have repudiated a net-zero target. So did Canada’s Conservatives, who forced the Liberal Prime Minister, Mark Carney, to abandon carbon taxes. New Zealand’s government has kept the notional commitment but reversed Labour’s main policy actions.
So if the Coalition keeps net zero by 2050 it will be an outlier among centre-right parties. Of course, to win an argument you have to be able to mount an argument. The best place to start would be the facts.
It would be useful to dial down emotion and concentrate on what’s actually happening. Then we could perhaps make a sensible response in the national interest.
A good compilation of some key facts came in the March-April edition Foreign Affairs essay by Daniel Yergin, Peter Orszag and Atul Arya. The authors are not right-wingers. They’re sympathetic to net zero but recognise it won’t happen by 2050 or, though they don’t spell this out, for decades later.
In 1990, they report, hydrocarbons made up 85 per cent of global primary energy. Some 35 years of climate change action later, hydrocarbons now account for 80 per cent. Even this figure may be a little low. The reputable Energy Institute says fossil fuels were 82 per cent of global energy in 2024.
Not only that, in 2024 the world generated more energy from coal than in any year in human history. Global greenhouse emissions rose. Yet Chris Bowen mocked the opposition for doubting net zero. If you doubt net zero, he claimed, you’re doubting basic reality. But the facts adduced by Yergin et al, and a million other sources, are irrefutable. Net zero is not real.
The world is not heading towards net zero and there is no energy transition. Or at least there’s no transition where renewable, or intermittent, energy – namely solar and wind energy – are replacing fossil fuel energy.
Huge, vast amounts of renewable energy have been added to the global system but this has been in addition to fossil fuels, not in replacement of them. Greenhouse gas emissions were 33.9 gigatons in 2020 and 37.4 gigatons in 2023. Yet these basic facts never enter the Australian debate, partly because the ABC has more or less come to an effective editorial decision to ignore them and to censor them.
Thus when Sarah Ferguson was effectively debating Barnaby Joyce (under the guise of an interview) recently on the ABC’s 7.30, she made a rhetorical thrust to the effect that 120-odd countries had committed to net zero.
Wouldn’t you think a senior journalist would be more interested in what countries were actually doing rather than what notional aspirations they had signed up to, in most cases as non-binding “commitments”?
Yergin points out that previous energy transitions didn’t result in less energy being used by the old fuels. Coal replaced wood, but in fact the world uses more wood for fuel now than it did at the start of the coal revolution. Oil, it seemed, would replace coal. But in fact coal use in 2024 was three times greater than it was in the 1960s. This illustrates the so-called Jevons paradox. A technology becomes so cheap that people invent new uses for it.
Not only that, previous energy transitions were mostly motivated by cheaper costs for the new energy sources. But as Yergin makes clear, switching to renewable energy sources involves massive extra costs. It’s much more expensive than the energy it replaces.
As is well known, China today accounts for 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the US and EU combined. India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and Iran are among the top 10 emitters. No one in the developing world is going to put net zero, or climate change considerations generally, ahead of development.
Yergin points out some three billion people use less electricity a year than the average American refrigerator. A critical analytical point that Yergin demonstrates is that the developing world will carbonise before it decarbonises, simply because renewables are so much more expensive.
He cites the trillions and trillions of dollars that would be needed to build renewable energy sources for all these folks, not to mention the two billion population increase forecast over the next couple of decades. It won’t be done because it can’t be done.
I could go on reciting similar facts endlessly, but let me offer you just two other straws in the wind. Alan Kohler on the ABC’s national news last Sunday became the first ABC presenter or commentator I’ve ever seen notice a basic fact about net zero.
The world will not get there or anywhere near there, he said, as he reported that both China and India in 2024 approved more new coal-fired power plant construction than at any time in the last decade. Yet every climate change advocate in Australia claims China is heading to net zero even as it obviously, manifestly, clearly, incontrovertibly, is not. Kohler’s basic statement of fact should be referenced in every ABC discussion of net zero from now on.
Finally, consider this week’s Economist. The Economist is the journalistic incarnation of Davos Man, a high-gloss rendition of every globalist piety there is. Sometimes its journalism is brilliant, but it makes many analytical mistakes. This week it crossed a Rubicon by declaring the world should abandon net zero by 2050 as a hard target and conceive of it as a “more of a guideline strategy”. It further commented that many nations’ net-zero pledges “are barely physically imaginable, let alone politically feasible”. Bizarrely, saying this sort of thing in Australia gets you labelled a crank.
It is not the climate wars initiated by the Coalition that have been the enemy of good policy but the thought-police quality of the ABC and the progressive political class that not only polices acceptable remarks on climate change but actually refuses to admit most relevant facts.
The Albanese government won’t make its climate targets, but really, who cares? The targets aren’t important. A reliable power supply at an affordable price ought to be the priorities. Australia has an obligation to remain wealthy and take effective mitigation steps where necessary.
Wealthy nations are typically reducing emissions, though net zero is an inherently fraudulent and impossible concept. We ought to have a mature national debate on a realistic national response, including cost. The difficulty for the Coalition is its two-faced approach up till now, its lack of powerful advocates while it insanely keeps Canavan on the backbench, and the need to make a nuanced argument. Yes, we’ll reduce emissions, but we won’t hurt the economy in the process and we won’t be bound by net zero, which virtually no other country will achieve either.
It’s a tough gig but politics, like life, wasn’t meant to be easy.
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