Why the world is moving away from net zero and the Coalition is right
The Coalition’s new policy reflects what’s happening overseas. But over many years, Labor has constructed so many taxpayer-funded institutions, whose primary purpose is to cheer on maximum climate change action, that it’s difficult for Australia to have a sensible debate.
Far from reigniting some destructive climate war, the Coalition is attempting to reconnect the national debate with reality. In this it may succeed or fail. But the world is moving away from net zero, as the Coalition rightly wants to do. The world is not moving away from efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So the Coalition’s nuanced position – reduce emissions, but not by the extreme measures implied in net zero – is sensible in itself and what comparable countries are trying.
I first wrote seriously about climate change during the Gillard government. As foreign editor spending much of my time in Asia, I could see that the government’s propaganda – that the world was abolishing fossil fuels and imposing carbon taxes – was baloney as far as Asia was concerned.
Yet because there is so little investigation of primary sources in Australian commentary, and Labor has bamboozled the debate with all its pro-government expert bodies and an ideologically committed ABC, it’s very hard for elementary facts to penetrate the Australian debate.
Don’t take my word that the world is moving away from net zero. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the COP meeting in Brazil recently that global consensus on climate change action had collapsed. He’s half right. There never really was a global consensus. The International Energy Agency recently released its World Energy Outlook 2024. Last year, like all recent years except during Covid, total global greenhouse gas emissions rose, to a record 38 gigatonnes.
Nothing is more misleading in the whole energy debate than unrealistic modelling based on ropey assumptions. One of the most common and intellectually debilitating tricks is to assume the world, or a given nation, reaches net zero by 2050 and then model all policy as if it has to lead to that outcome. The IEA uses various scenarios for modelling. The only one that counts is based on actual current practices. Under that scenario it sees no decline in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
It reports coal remaining a key global energy source for many decades while gas is absolutely booming. Last year the world derived more energy from coal than ever before in the history of the human race. Yet how often have you heard on the ABC, or from government figures, that the world is “decarbonising” or “transitioning”, meaning that it’s moving decisively away from fossil fuels.
The world, so far, is not seeing the substitution of intermittent renewable energy for fossil fuels, but the addition of vast amounts of renewables to fossil fuels.
In coming decades the world is going to need vastly more energy than it has ever needed before. There are billions of people to move out of poverty into middle-income status at least. That means billions of people going from low energy use to middle energy use at least.
As everyone outside of official Australia knows, fossil fuels provide cheaper energy than renewables do. Billions of people in India, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as still a large number in China and Latin America, will carbonise before they may decarbonise a long way down the track.
From a different point in the ideological spectrum, the Climate Action Tracker website recently commented that there has been “little or no progress in warming projections”.
A couple of months ago the Economist magazine, the high sacramental organ of liberal internationalism, ran a seminal cover story and a series of analytical pieces urging the world to drop the net zero slogan, because it has absolutely no chance of being achieved and substitutes flim-flam for substance in policy debate.
Countries notionally committed to net zero have no intention of achieving it. Now, a policy or an analysis is not necessarily right because the Economist says so. But no one, not even the Olympian intellects of the Albanese government, could call the Economist unsophisticated, in denial about the science or a mouthpiece for the far right or fringe political forces.
Yet, in essence, the Economist’s position is the same as that of the Coalition. There should be a genuine effort to reduce greenhouse emissions, but net zero is neither achievable nor helpful.
Net zero is of course an entirely fraudulent concept; the idea that modern society can flourish without adding, net, a single zot of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s ludicrous.
How will aviation work in a net-zero world? Will all the planes be built from green steel? Will the planes all use biofuel? In which case we’ll need a few extra planets to grow all the biomass. How will agriculture work in net zero? Electric vehicles are much heavier than regular vehicles. You can’t have an electric tractor. Nor can cattle be persuaded never to break wind.
While net zero is demonstrable nonsense, the ambition to reach lower levels of carbon emissions is sensible enough.
The Coalition is being lampooned for contemplating the possibility of more coal-fired power stations. According to the IEA, global consumption of coal has doubled in the past three decades. In 2024 China used almost five billion tonnes of coal out of the nearly nine billion tonnes used globally. Coal use will expand not only in China but in India, Southeast Asia, Africa and some other parts of the world.
Australia still gets the majority of its energy from coal. Hi-tech modern countries such as Japan and South Korea build coal-fired power stations and Germany put mothballed stations back to work. The IEA reports on a big expansion in nuclear energy – all these world governments apparently not listening to Albanese ministers routinely ridiculing nuclear power in question time.
The modelling that informs much Australian debate is exceptionally ropey and unreliable but all modelling is very limited. The growth of AI and data centres means the demand for electricity will rise massively. Economic models even of a few years ago did not anticipate this. Similarly, the idea that electric vehicles can simply replace all or most conventional vehicles will run up against the simple physical constraint that there just aren’t enough critical minerals in the world for this to happen.
The information is all there for the Coalition to win this debate. It will need to run very negative, along the lines of: Labor’s net zero means higher prices, higher unemployment, industry deserting Australia, and so on.
The Coalition, in abandoning net zero, gives itself two possible futures: political oblivion, or winning a central policy debate. To win that debate it needs relentless campaigning energy and all its senior people across all the information all the time. At least now there’s an outside chance that reality will figure in the Australian energy debate.
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