Scott Morrison puts pricey Canadian climate club on ice

Scott Morrison has urged world leaders to adopt realistic climate-change goals, admonishing Canada for its carbon price strategy.

Scott Morrison addresses Joe Biden’s climate summit from Sydney on Thursday night. Picture: Christian Gilles

Scott Morrison has urged world leaders to adopt more realistic ­climate-change goals based on achievement, admonishing Canada for its $170-per-tonne carbon price strategy to reach its updated 2030 emissions reduction target.

The Prime Minister, who appeared at Joe Biden’s climate leaders’ summit late on Thursday night, said Australia’s path to net-zero emissions would be achieved by “technology, not taxes”.

The summit, involving 40 world leaders including China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, featured a raft of new emissions-reduction pledges ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in November.

The US, Britain and Canada all updated their medium-term emissions goals, but China and India — two of the world’s biggest emitters — made no new climate policy promises at the summit.

Mr Morrison on Friday said that if developing economies were expected to change what they were doing, “then we have to be able to deliver the commercial technology that enables them to make that change”.

“That is not going to come ­because some politicians sit in a room and say some things,” Mr Morrison said.

“It is going to happen when Australia can present to an industrialist in Indonesia or Malaysia, or in Vietnam or China, or in India, and say: ‘You can do exactly what you are doing in this plant with this hydrogen catalyst and this technology, and you can employ everyone you’re looking to employ, and you can make the steel you’re looking to make, or the aluminium, or whatever it might be.’ ”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose country has consistently fallen behind advanced economies in driving down emissions and pulled out of the Kyoto accord, told the virtual summit that Canada would impose a carbon price to cut emissions by 40-45 per cent below 2005 levels.

Mr Morrison said he “won’t be doing that in Australia”, and instead urged a more practical international response, declaring: “Carbon emissions don’t have an accent, they don’t have a nationality.

“When you have countries the size of the United States and their economy, but particularly China, where they continue to build coal-fired power stations every week, and the emissions will continue to rise until 2030, those emissions combined will add significantly to the carbon load that the world will be dealing with over the next 30 years,” he said.

Speaking at the climate summit, which was marred by a series of technical glitches, Mr Xi said developing nations like China — the world’s biggest emitter which will continue building coal-fired power stations in the near future — needed more support from ­developed countries.

Mr Xi said China would seek to limit increases in coal consumption over the next 10 years, and “strive to peak ­carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060”.

Mr Morrison, who was pushed down the list of world leaders and muted when he began delivering his address, focused his speech on actual achievements in emissions ­reduction and low-emissions technologies.

“It’s right to speak to our ambitions at this summit. It’s also right to focus on performance,” he said. “You can always be sure the commitments Australia makes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are bankable … future generations will thank us not for what we’ve promised but what we deliver. And on that score, Australia can always be relied upon.”

Mr Biden, who increased the US emissions reduction pledge to 50 per cent by 2030, said greater ambition would set America “on a path of a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050”.

“We have to move quickly to meet these (climate change) challenges,” he said. “We’re here at this summit to discuss how each of us, each country, can set higher climate ambitions that will, in turn, create good-paying jobs, advance ­innovative technologies, and help vulnerable countries adapt to climate impacts.

“But the truth is, America represents less than 15 per cent of the world’s emissions. No nation can solve this crisis on our own, as I know you all fully understand. All of us, all of us — and particularly those who represent the world’s largest economies — have to step up.”

While the US had wanted Mr Morrison to bring a more ambitious climate change target to the summit, the federal government will work to ­update the nation’s emissions reduction trajectory before the November UN COP26 conference in Glasgow.

Mr Morrison said he wanted to hit net-zero emissions as soon as possible, and “preferably” by 2050.

“I’ve heard a lot of people make a lot of commitments in this area, and I’ve heard it from countries that frankly haven’t had any reduction in their emissions,” he said.

“I have heard it from countries whose emissions are still rising.”