Anthony Albanese bets leadership on zero emissions

Labor has decided to live or die by climate change. Anthony Albanese has bet his leadership and the Labor Party on the bushfires shifting our political culture such that the public accepts the gains from net zero carbon emissions by 2050 outweigh the losses.

Labor asks people to accept this act of faith. It is a tactical gamble by Albanese that the summer has shifted Australian values. The 2050 target is transformational in its consequences. Its logic is a carbon price but Labor rejects that.

Albanese pledges the target without a plan, guidelines, implications for industry and regions or the slightest explanation on how to manage the millions of winners and losers, what compensation — if any — he envisages, and how it would be financed. The big emitters have yet to embrace this target.

The detail will come before the next election. This means Labor must build its economic policy around its climate change agenda, an epic step. Albanese seeks to prevail where Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten failed.

The upshot is the Morrison government and the Business Council of Australia will release their own road maps for this 2050 journey before Labor.

By this decision Labor pins its future as a party on climate change and its economics. Albanese has doubled down on Shorten’s 2019 stance but adopted a more distant 2050 target to minimise the upfront electoral damage.

The tactic makes sense but is high risk. Setting a 2050 benchmark to transform the economy, energy markets, prices and emissions is a grand hoax without any of the policy mechanisms to achieve it.

Telling the Australian people that the scientists, economists and modelling experts can show that net zero at 2050 will be a nirvana of more jobs and cleaner energy might not be as easy a sell to a cynical electorate as Labor thinks.

Albanese is following the Kevin Rudd method from 2007 — elevate climate change to define yourself as a leader of the future as opposed to Scott Morrison (or John Howard then). This must constitute a political threat to Morrison. And Albanese will have plenty of allies.

The 2050 benchmark is winning global and local acceptance. It has international momentum. It is backed by global finance, multinationals, the Australian states, the business council, banks, corporates, environmental groups and the progressive media. There will be rebel Liberals who want to sign up, a disciplinary test for Morrison’s side.

But Albanese will face immediate pressure on the question: is his pledge credible? This is because, as the UN points out, many nations pledge net zero by 2050 but have no game plan to get there.

Morrison unleashed an immediate attack: Albanese can’t say what it costs, what industry will be affected, how many jobs will be lost. The prospect of Morrison pledging the 2050 target this term — he has it under review — is now even more unlikely. The climate change war will continue.

Albanese invokes Ross Garnaut’s idea of Australia as a clean energy superpower. His vision is Australia at 2050 with more jobs, lower emissions and lower energy prices. He bets the Australian people will now decide “the cost of inaction is too great”.

Labor, it seems, took this decision influenced by the bushfires, the polls and the belief that sentiment had changed decisively on climate change. It is, however, highly unlikely this summer’s mood will be permanent.