Scott Morrison told: go big or go home on net zero

Scott Morrison will need to radically increase spending on hydrogen development and low emissions technologies to give credibility to his pathway to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

Scott Morrison in parliament on Thursday. Picture: Gary Ramage

Scott Morrison will need to radically increase government spending on hydrogen development and low emissions technologies to give credibility to his “non linear” pathway to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

Australian Industry Group head of energy, climate and environment policy Tennant Reed said back-ending emissions ­reductions beyond 2030 would ­require “spending big upfront on getting technology prices down”.

“Pumping money into things is important, but we are talking a lot more here than for some grants for demonstration (hydrogen) projects, which is most of what is happening at the moment,” he said. “You actually need to provide demand for hydrogen.

“There are many different ­policy structures that can do that kind of thing, but whatever they are, they are big. They don’t necessarily match a ‘softly, softly, let’s focus on the long-term ­approach’.

“So aggressive policies, ­whether they are aggressive big spending and subsidies, or they are regulations that require the use of low emissions technologies to get them deployed more, or it is pricing mechanisms, or the ­hydrogen equivalent of a renewable energy target. There are any number of designs, they just have to be big to move the needle.”

The Prime Minister is set to take a net-zero by 2050 target to next month’s climate change conference in Glasgow. But the government will not formally update its 2030 target to reduce emissions by 26-28 per cent of 2005 levels.

With Australia’s 2030 target half that of the US, Mr Morrison this week said there was “no such linear trajectory to 2050”.

“That’s not what our plan relies on,” he said. “We know that you have to invest in the technologies, many of which will have long lead times, that will ensure that the 2030 targets that we will not only meet but also beat. You need to follow the technology path here.”

Grattan Institute director Tony Wood said Mr Morrison was waging a “naively optimistic argument”. “It is a great way of kicking the can down the road, that is for sure,” he said.

Mr Wood said Australia would be given a carbon budget of about 12 billion tonnes by 2050 on making a net-zero commitment.

“As the government knows, the real number is not the single point in time target – it is the carbon budget,” Mr Wood said. “If you put it off and you have to do more later, that means you have a much more significant economic and technical slope. Morrison ­almost creates the idea that we can merrily go along emitting 500 million tonnes a year until 2049 and then go to zero in 2050 and that will be problem fixed.”

With the government trying to wedge Labor on 2030 targets, ­Anthony Albanese backed Mr Morrison’s claims the pathway to net-zero was not linear. “Of course it’s not linear,” Mr Albanese told Sky News.