Emissions target talk is just hot air

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese in Sydney on Tuesday. Picture: Dylan Coker

Whether Labor has a medium or a long-term target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — 2030 or 2050 — is a meaningless illusion.

Labor’s policy platform abandoning an emissions target for 2030 or 2035 and focusing on a net-zero emissions target by 2050 merely gives Anthony Albanese more time and flexibility. The ALP’s choices going into the next election are: (1) accept the Coalition’s reduction target of 26-28 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030 which Australia signed under the Paris Agreement; or (2) adopt a lower target and be laughed out of town; or (3) go back to the angst-ridden toil of nominating a medium-term target that can be costed and taken to the people.

The political reality for Labor and the Opposition Leader is that there will have to be some sort of policy that can be quantified and costed on emissions targets within at least a decade of the next election.

The ALP would merely be using the zero emissions by 2050 as a cop out.

Labor is riven by differences over climate change policy and the cost of cutting emissions.

Bill Shorten’s defeat at the last election was due in part to the 2018 platform committing him to an emissions reduction target of 45 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030 and a 50 per cent renewable energy target.

As Labor resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said on Tuesday after The Australian exclusively revealed the Labor policy, medium-term targets for an election in 2021 or 2022 were “redundant”.

Labor climate change spokesman Mark Butler says there will be emissions targets set before the election but they will focus on zero by 2050.

As much as the realists don’t want any Labor emissions target before 2050, climate change warriors and Coalition strategists will impose one and Albanese will face the same problem Shorten did at the last election: how much will they cost the economy?