Labor’s emission impossible: Albanese sets climate target he cannot deliver
Labor is tearing itself apart over a climate outcome 30 years away.
This year, more than most, should have brought home to politicians, commentators, activists and voters that life is unpredictable. In January, Josh Frydenberg suggested that bushfire relief payments could jeopardise his forecast $7bn budget surplus. In May, there was too much pandemic turmoil to deliver the budget. And in October, he announced a $214bn deficit.
We started the year looking forward to the Olympics, interstate and international travel, and joining others at work, weddings and concerts. Even now, many dare not plan Christmas festivities for fear of COVID-19 rules and the predilection of some premiers for hard border closures.
Yet Labor is tearing itself apart over a promised energy mix and economic model for 2050. Yep, Anthony Albanese and his climate and energy spokesman Mark Butler want to contest a federal election, likely next year, based on an emissions-reduction outcome that they cannot deliver for at least 10 more federal elections.
By the time we can judge Labor’s net zero by 2050 outcomes, Albanese will be 87 years of age. For so long we have complained about the myopia of politicians not seeing beyond a parliamentary term; now we get decrees on the never-never.
The climate debate has long been more about emotion and gestures rather than rational policymaking. But now, as the world grapples with real and present dangers, it is beyond absurd.
If there is a federal election next year, we might expect voters to be more interested in the handling of the pandemic and its economic consequences than emissions-reduction targets for when their kids become grandparents. We might weather three more pandemics before then.
Joel Fitzgibbon has been banished to the backbench because he preaches energy pragmatism and political reality to a party that took radical and uncosted climate and energy plans to the last election.
Instead of accepting his blindingly obvious warning about repeating the same mistake, Butler and other big-city, safe-seat ideologues denounce him, expressing their determination to convince those silly voters that they were wrong.
Left-of-centre parties might do better if they occasionally accepted the wisdom of the electorate. To fathom what the world might look like 30 years ahead, it is useful to look in the rear-vision mirror (three decades ago cars did not have rear-view cameras).
In 1990, most of us had never heard of the world wide web, or emails. Only 1 per cent of us had a mobile phone, and they were clunky things, not even smart enough to receive text messages. We rented videos from stores, CDs were modern, DVDs were yet to come and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth had not been invented. Online shopping, digital advertising and pay television were all foreign concepts — and our lifestyles, workplaces and economy have been dramatically transformed since.
With all these gizmos, energy consumption has increased by about 20 per cent per household. And an increasing population has led to a doubling of our total electricity generation.
Unsurprisingly, the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions rose steeply in the latter part of the century but over the past two decades we have pushed them down. They are now only about 10 per cent higher than they were in 1990 and are heading lower.
Over the same period, emissions in China have grown by more than 400 per cent — from 60 times Australia’s emissions to more than 250 times.
Yet Albanese and his frontbench team want an election campaign debate about how much further we will cut emissions by the time Kristina Keneally hosts her 81st birthday party and Greta Thunberg is nudging 50.
Our politicians have trouble keeping promises from one sitting week to the next, but Labor wants us to take them on trust over 30 long summers. They are having a lend. I am old enough to remember when they promised not to impose a carbon tax.
This grandstanding exposes the liberal left elements of politics — from both major parties — time and again. Liberal state governments have already pledged themselves to the same target, knowing they need do nothing nor carry any cost — or be accountable for its delivery.
These promises are as substantial as a social media hashtag. In NSW, for instance, the government and its Liberal ministers fully subscribe to this energy nirvana, while their cabinet and Coalition colleagues from the Nationals publicly scoff at the target.
The Nats are right; their Liberal partners are like Miss Universe contestants aspiring to deliver world peace. Only shallow politicians and the gormless green-left media pretend that these pledges make sense.
Federal Labor’s latest reversion to this agenda has been prompted by Joe Biden’s election victory. When Barack Obama won the Democrat nomination in 2008, he famously declared that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”.
Biden must have been disappointed with his two terms as vice-president because now he wants to tackle the same cause from scratch. Before the final results of this election are in, he has signalled a commitment to net-zero emissions by the time he is 107 — with the power of virtue-signalling, apparently, you can save the planet from your basement.
It would be a serious mistake for Labor to think the US election result means much for Australian or global climate policy. The US will rejoin Paris, sure, but Australia never left.
The reality is that Biden almost lost the election. Climate and energy was one of the few policy debates to emerge during the contest, and it did him enormous damage in the final fortnight of the campaign. The Democrats worked assiduously to minimise their candidate’s role in the election campaign and keep the focus on their main election pitch — demonising Donald Trump.
But in the final debate, Biden could not help himself, boasting of his plan to “transition” away from fossil fuels. Trump moved in for the kill.
“Would you close down the oil industry?” the President asked. “I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” replied Biden, in an answer that haunted the rest of his campaign, especially in Texas and Pennsylvania.
He held on for a narrow victory, as we know, but to read it as an endorsement of his climate policy is the inverse of reality.
The wildly pro-Biden media tried to ignore the energy and climate issue, but as Trump barnstormed Pennsylvania and other industrial states with his energy warning, he seized all the momentum of the final days of the campaign — Biden spent the last 10 days hiding his climate plans, not spruiking them.
The Democrat even faced the ignominy of being called out by a CNN fact-check. Even these shameless Biden barrackers and hardcore Trump traducers could not deny the reality of the Democrat candidate’s deception.
Biden protested in the debate that he had never said he opposed fracking, and CNN found: “It is false that Biden never said he opposed fracking.”
Biden has no clear mandate on climate policy and his reduced majority in the House of Representatives and likely minority in the Senate will hinder the aspirations of “The Squad” pushing him to ever more progressive policies.
For Labor politicians here to ignore a long list of climate policy failures at home and point to the US as the beacon for a “green new deal” is to drastically misread politics on both sides of the Pacific.
In 2007, at the height of a severe drought as well as international hysteria promoted by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the UK’s Stern Review, both major parties promised action on climate change, but the Coalition under John Howard refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Since that election, and Kevin Rudd’s subsequent surrender on an emissions trading scheme, every federal election has been won by a party promising to limit climate action (Labor held on narrowly in 2010 with that carbon tax promise).
The only time the Coalition went with a leader strongly associated with climate action — Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 — it lost 14 seats and barely clung to power. After leadership turmoil in 2018, a series of scandals and ongoing budget struggles, the Coalition was ripe for defeat last year but their greatest asset was a radical climate and taxation agenda proposed, but not explained or costed, by Bill Shorten. The idea that Labor would do the same next year under Albanese speaks to either stupidity or martyrdom.
The grand delusion is laid bare here when we remind ourselves that Australia accounts for only 1.3 per cent, and falling, of global greenhouse emissions — so we could shut down our nation for no environmental gain as our emissions are replaced within months by China, Indonesia and others.
Morrison knows that under Paris, Australia is broadly committed to net-zero emissions sometime between 2050 and 2100. But the less he says about this the better — he benefits from differentiation on this issue.
Driven by activist shareholders and government subsidies, business pushes in this direction. We cannot guess what technology will deliver over the coming decades — nuclear, alone, is an untapped silver bullet in many nations.
Fitzgibbon might want to retake the policy and the party for Labor’s sensible Right, or he might just want to save his Hunter Valley coalmining seat. But he is certainly injecting reality into the debate, and he surely will win public support from some powerful unions.
In 2050, the energy debates of 2020 will be but footnotes of silliness in the history books.
If I am wrong, I will publish a humiliating apology before I turn 90.
More Coverage
Federal Labor on a collision course with miners over green push
The federal government has made a powerful enemy for itself in the west after the Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA said it would fight Labor’s push for so-called nature-positive laws.
More undergraduates signing up for teaching: Labor
The federal government has released new data showing more undergraduates are applying to become school teachers than in previous years, as it works to tackle the nation’s crippling teacher shortage.