13/12/2020

(AU) Spinning Emissions: Australia's Climate Projections Are Not What They Seem

The Guardian - 

Official modelling could give you the impression the Morrison government has achieved something meaningful. But you would be wrong

Energy minister Angus Taylor (left) and Scott Morrison. ‘Australia remains miles away from the government’s claimed goal of one day reaching net zero emissions, and with no path to get there.’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/EPA

Great news! The government says Australia is on track to meet the greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for 2030 it set as part of the global Paris climate agreement. Cue the page one headlines, the fireworks, the “mission accomplished” banner on the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln.

Or something like that. You could certainly be left with the impression the Morrison government had achieved something meaningful following the release of the annual official emissions projections data on Thursday.

As usual, the government’s media management was highly skilled, and some political reporters were captured by it. It got its message out. But the reality of what the document says is more complicated. The first thing to stress here is in the title – these are only projections. The report tells us what we might expect to happen under current policy settings. It is frankly weird the primacy projections have been given in public debate, given what matters is actual cuts. And things will definitely change in the years ahead.

In terms of the actual numbers, the bottom line is that – at a time when other countries are announcing increasingly ambitious targets – the government expects national emissions to fall by only 6.8% this decade.

That projected drop is almost entirely due to a surge in electricity production from wind and solar that the Morrison government has tried to slow, not accelerate. In most other areas of the economy the projections suggest there will be no change in emissions over the next decade, or they will go up.

The level of chutzpah here is too often ignored

The report breaks down the numbers in several ways, but the key point it makes is that the country is more likely to be on track to hit its 2030 target (a 26%-28% cut compared with 2005 levels) than it was a year ago.

Back then, the projection was that emissions would be just 16% below 2005 levels by 2030 – more or less where they are now, and well short of the 2030 goal.

The update says we are now likely to be at 22% below 2005 levels at the end of the decade – better in relative terms, though still not at the target and far short of what every scientific and diplomatic assessment says we should be doing.

Despite the shortfall, the government issued a press release spinning the projections as confirmation Australia is “on track to meet and beat” its 2030 target. It makes this case in two ways. Both require leaps of logic.

The first relates to the much-discussed “carryover credits” from the Kyoto protocol, which Scott Morrison has repeatedly suggested the government could use, but now probably won’t, to meet its 2030 target. Despite the rhetoric, the projections report assumes they will be available and could kick the country over the line.

The level of chutzpah here is too often ignored. The government claims to have “over-achieved” on the unambitious emissions targets Australia set for itself under the Kyoto protocol, the initial international climate pact that expires this year, and should be able to claim credit for that against its Paris agreement target, an entirely different deal.

Many of these credits come from the first period of Kyoto protocol, which covered the years 1990 to 2012, when the Howard government set itself a target that allowed Australia to actually raise its emissions by 8%.

Morrison and his emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, are arguing that Australia deserves a reward in 2030 for beating a goal that allowed it to increase carbon pollution two decades ago.

Not surprisingly, much of the international community sees this as a bad joke, and told the government it wasn’t going to fly at a summit in Madrid last year. No other country is trying to use this type of Kyoto credits, and the commitment under the Paris deal was to ratchet up emissions cuts, not find ways to avoid them.

The report also suggests the government may be on track to meet its target if it factors in the technology investment roadmap, a policy it rolled out earlier this year. Put that in, the report says, and we are actually on track for a 29% cut by 2030.

It is entirely unclear what the basis for this is. Perhaps there is modelling somewhere to explain this, but we haven’t seen it and experts in the field say it is hard to see how there could be. A low-emissions technology statement released in September sets “stretch goals” to lower the cost of five “clean” technologies, but says nothing about a timeframe or an emissions reduction plan over the next decade.

The independent analysts at RepuTex were among those to say they could see no justification for the government claiming the roadmap would deliver any emissions cuts in the short-term.

Creating the impression of action where little exists

Beyond the claims about targets, it is worth examining more closely why the emissions outlook has improved since last year, when so little action is expected in the years ahead.

The short answer is that government officials have routinely overestimated what national emissions will be, particularly from electricity, as they have failed to appreciate how quickly wind and solar would be taken up.

It means that almost every year projections of future emissions come down, making it appear easier to meet targets – not necessarily because governments have done anything, but because the modelling is catching up with reality.

A cynic might say this serves the Coalition’s purposes. At times, it has been used to create the impression of action where little existed.

Taylor says the government is now on track to meet its 2030 goal largely due to $5.3bn in funding announced in the past two budgets, including some topping up for climate agencies that were running low.

The report tells a different story. It says emissions from the power grid are expected to fall 35% over the next decade, and that the country is projected to get 50% of electricity from clean sources by 2030.

The idea the Morrison government deserves credit for this might politely be described as a stretch.

While the commonwealth is helping pay for some improvements in transmission and backing some energy storage projects, the clean energy influx is mainly due to three things: the now-filled 2020 national renewable energy target; the plunging cost of solar panels; and the growing number of state-based schemes.

The federal Coalition has nothing to do with the last two, and actively worked against the first.

Under Tony Abbott, it looked at abolishing the large-scale renewable energy target and found it couldn’t, but ended up reducing it. Once the target was met last year it chose not to extend or replace it, prompting the states to take a greater role in accelerating solar and wind energy.

Its resistance to the rise of clean energy goes further than just vacating the field. Before the last election, Taylor accused federal Labor of planning to put “a wrecking ball through the economy” with climate policies that included what now appears a modest goal of reaching 50% renewable energy by 2030, and the government continues to raise concerns about the ambitious Victorian and NSW renewable schemes.

Meanwhile, it claims the emissions cuts the transformation will drive as its own success.

If you remove electricity from the equation, Australia’s scorecard is ugly

Projections of emissions from electricity are likely to come down even further next year, when NSW’s massive 12 gigawatt clean energy underwriting program, which passed the state parliament last month, is properly factored in.

At the moment, for reasons that are unclear, the projections assume the growth in renewables will skyrocket over the next five years and then slow after 2025. If the NSW plan is delivered as promised it should effectively build the equivalent of Australia’s current renewable fleet in 10 years – more than enough to put the Morrison government’s 2030 climate target genuinely within reach.

It will be interesting to see if federal Coalition MPs are still criticising the state scheme when that happens.

While renewable energy is projected to continue to grow, the reason the Morrison government isn’t on track to meet its 2030 target yet is, well, everything else.

Emissions from transport, stationary energy (basically, fossil fuels in industry other than electricity and transport), fugitives released during coal and gas extraction and agriculture are all projected to flatline or increase over the next decade.

This isn’t surprising – the Morrison government is yet to enact significant policies to deal with any of them.

While transport emissions have fallen during the Covid-19 pandemic, they are expected to increase to historic highs in the years ahead, largely because the government has no plan to support the uptake of clean cars in the way comparable countries have.

Transport is only part of the issue. If you remove the electricity sector from the equation, Australia’s scorecard is ugly. Climate Analytics calculated that the combined emissions output from the rest of the economy is projected to be 13% higher in 2030 than 2005.

Given electricity is only about a third of national emissions, this is a major problem. It leaves the country miles away from the government’s claimed goal of one day reaching net zero emissions, and with no path to get there.

This is what the rest of the world sees. It’s why Morrison was denied a speaking slot at a global climate ambition summit this weekend after boasting in parliament he would use it to challenge his critics.

The projections report suggests it is quite possible the Morrison government could soon be able to claim it is on track to meet its 2030 target based on cuts in electricity and a drop in forest clearing since 2005.

But to claim this as good news misses the point. The obvious question raised by the projections – and increasingly the international community – is this: since it is so easy to get to that unambitious goal, and given the urgency of the problem, why is Australia not prepared to do more?

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