(AU) Australia Needs A Climate Policy Turnaround - Not A Pathetic Crab Walk

Sydney Morning Herald - Kevin Rudd

Author Kevin Rudd was the 26th Prime Minister of Australia, serving from December 2007 to June 2010 and again from June to September 2013.

Scott Morrison's attempt last week to crab walk away from his government's insistence on being able to use so-called "Kyoto credits" to achieve Australia's formal commitments under the Paris Agreement was inevitable.

Morrison's position was not only legally baseless and at odds with the rest of the world, it did nothing for the atmosphere.

His "crab walk" is also an early sign of the pressure that will be brought to bear by the Biden administration. But the government would be mistaken to think this soft shoe shuffle will be enough to change our status as an international climate pariah, especially when we are no longer able to hide behind there being a climate denier-in-chief in the White House.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

President-elect Biden has made clear his determination to put the fight against climate change at the centre of his domestic agenda and to rally the rest of the world to lift our collective climate ambition. Despite Morrison making low-emissions technology a priority for co-operation in his congratulatory message to Biden, Australia's seven years of climate inaction is well known in Washington.

Remember it began when Biden was Obama's vice-president. Sometimes the conservative political class in Canberra suffers from the delusion that their destructive record on climate has been quarantined to the Australian domestic debate. It hasn't. The truth is it is as much a global story as Trump's giant wrecking ball on climate – with our record of inaction powerfully brought into contrast with the "Great Australian Inferno" last summer which received worldwide coverage.

Similarly, both the Democrats and the wider international community are under no illusion that the Murdoch media has been the great global political enabler for both Morrison and Trump's destructive records of climate inaction. Watch this space as not just Australia but the world turns on Murdoch as the global repository of climate change denialism.

The reality is that Australia lacks both short-term ambition and long-term vision on climate action. In Biden's eyes, this will set us apart from other countries that also need to do more in the short term – including China and Japan – which at least now have clear pathways to decarbonise their economies by mid-century.

President-elect Biden has made clear his determination to put the fight against climate change at the centre of his domestic agenda. Credit: AP

That is why if the Kyoto credits were Morrison's first climate crab walk, it won't be his last. The next will be Morrison saying that the time has finally come to move towards carbon neutrality by 2050 – not least because Europe and possibly the US are threatening carbon tariffs against the countries that don't. But the risk here is that Scotty from Marketing’s objective is to simply throw something to the chattering classes while doing nothing of real substance in the critical decade ahead.

Morrison must do two things: honour the commitment Australia made in the 2015 Paris Agreement to increase our appallingly low national target to reduce greenhouse gases by 2030; and, second, to put in place the domestic policy changes to give effect to a new and genuinely ambitious national target.

Instead, despite attempts by Boris Johnson in recent weeks, there is a real risk that Morrison will seek to try to cut off any pressure from the incoming Biden administration by slipping under the rug a "reconfirmation" of Australia's existing lacklustre 2030 target before the end of the year. This would immediately attract global ridicule, not least because Australia's existing commitments are so anaemic.

Back in 2014, when Tony Abbott announced Australia's current target to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030, he explained it was chosen on the basis it mirrored the same target the Obama administration had put on the table. That was a lie. The Americans had promised to reach this goal five years earlier – a massive difference in terms of gigatons of carbon.

According to a report published last week by the Asia Society Policy Institute and Climate Analytics, Biden is likely to now commit the US to a new target of cutting emissions between 38 and 54 per cent by 2030. By the government's own measure, this will now be the benchmark for what Australia should do.

Thankfully, in the five years since Australia's current 2030 target was tabled, the cost of renewables has plummeted and low-emissions technologies have radically improved. That's precisely why the Paris Agreement put in place a mechanism for countries to increase their ambition every five years.

This brings us to the question of how Australian domestic policy actions must also give effect to our international targets.

The tragedy is that the vast bulk of Australia's greenhouse gas reductions over the past decade have been delivered by the actions our government put in place before we left office in 2013 – and despite the fact the conservatives recklessly repealed our price on carbon.

First, our introduction of a Mandatory Renewable Energy Target has driven renewables from 4 per cent of the national electricity supply in 2009 to roughly 21 per cent today.

Second, our national program to subsidise solar panels for Australian homes.

Third, and despite the real problems in implementation which have been well documented, our Energy Efficient Homes package which significantly reduced demand for domestic heating and cooling in one-fifth of our national housing stock – cutting the equivalent of almost 20 tonnes of carbon through to today.

So, in addition to committing to a substantive increase in our Paris commitment for 2030, the time has come for Morrison to enunciate a series of similar substantive national measures to get there.

These measures should include changing the national building codes to make solar panels mandatory for all new residential and non-residential construction.

Or is Morrison just too gutless to do what is right for Australia, forever fearful of Dutton and the far right of the Liberal and National parties breathing down his neck, for whom chanting the coal mantra will forever be their pathetic political anthem?

Links

• Kevin Rudd on the economic impacts of climate change
• Australia, Climate Change and the Complacent Country
• Labor's battle over climate change action
• Australia will lose more than $3 trillion and 880,000 jobs over 50 years if climate change is not addressed, Deloitte says
• ‘New jobs, new industries, new wealth’: Kevin Rudd’s vision for a green recovery out of the pandemic
• ‘Shocking legacy’: Turnbull blasts News Corp’s climate change coverage in fiery exchange
• Ex-PMs unite in Australia in bid to curb power of Murdoch empire
• Climate change—reducing Australia’s emissions
• Gillard on climate action: “It was done. And … we can do it again in the future”
• Survey shows Australian support for Paris Agreement and net zero target
• Revved-up Boris leaves old fossil Oz for dust