(AU New Daily) Road To Net Zero: What The Rest Of The World Thinks About Australia’s Climate Policy

New Daily -  Zac Crellin

Leaders around the world have slammed Australia's stance on climate change. Photo: TND

Australia is becoming a pariah on the world stage when it comes to climate policy.

From initially refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, to remaining dependent on coal, successive Australian governments have repeatedly  adopted policies that put them at odds with their foreign counterparts.

Ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, here’s what world leaders and environmentalists have said about Australia’s climate change track record.

Sir David Attenborough has blasted Australia over its continued use of fossil fuels. Photo: Getty

Sir David Attenborough

British environmentalist and documentary filmmaker Sir David Attenborough has repeatedly slammed Australia’s climate policy in recent years, including on Triple J Hack in 2019.

"You are the keepers of an extraordinary section of the surface of this planet, including the Barrier Reef, and what you say, what you do, really, really matters."
Sir David Attenborough

“And then you suddenly say, ‘No it doesn’t matter … it doesn’t matter how much coal we burn … we don’t give a damn what it does to the rest of the world’.”

During the January 2020 bushfires, Sir David told the BBC it was “palpable nonsense” for Australian politicians to deny the link between the fires and climate change.

Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama has called on Australia to take more responsibility on climate change. Photo: Getty

Pacific leaders

The Pacific islands are already experiencing the effects of rising sea levels, extreme weather events and collapsing ecosystems due to climate change.

Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama has often referred to the relationship between Australia and Pacific nations as like a family, with all countries needing to support one another.

In a 2020 interview with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Mr Bainimarama singled out Australia alongside the US and China as “major players” who need to make stronger climate commitments.

"To anyone who may think that Australia is too small to make a real difference, there are a number of small island states in your backyard that beg to differ."
Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama

Statesmen from some of the most-at risk countries in the region have also repeatedly called out Australia.

In 2019, former Tuvaluan prime minister Enele Sopoaga accused Scott Morrison of denying the effects of climate change in the Pacific.

“There is no point in making declarations after declarations every annual summit we meet and yet we are dragging our feet on that and I continue to call on my friend, Prime Minister Morrison of Australia, to do the right thing,” Mr Sopoaga later said at the Virtual Island Summit 2020.

In a 2018 opinion piece, former president of Kiribati Anote Tong accused Australia of “failing in its duty as a regional leader”.

Mr Tong has also referred to China as “the lesser of two evils” compared to Australia when it comes to providing assistance in the fight against climate change.

Greta Thunberg has slammed many countries – including Australia – for a lack of climate change urgency. Photo: Getty

Greta Thunberg

During the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-2020, climate activists around the world sounded the alarm.

Among the most prominent voices was Swedish School Strike for Climate organiser Greta Thunberg, who was just 16 years old at the time.

"Not even catastrophes like these seem to bring any political action. How is this possible?"
Greta Thunberg

“All of this still has not resulted in any political action. Because we still fail to make the connection between the climate crisis and increased extreme weather events and nature disasters like the #AustraliaFires,” she wrote on Facebook in January 2020.

More recently, the student has taken aim at world leaders in general.

“Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” she said at the Youth4Climate summit in Milan last month.

“This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not led to action.”

Selwin Hart is a United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Action. Photo: Getty

The United Nations

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on rich countries to phase out coal by 2030.

Selwin Hart, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Action, went as far as to single out Australia during a speech at the Australian National University this year.

"If the world does not rapidly phase out coal, climate change will wreak havoc right across the Australian economy: From agriculture to tourism, and right across the services sector."
Selwin Hart, Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on Climate Action

“Similarly, construction, housing and the property sector, in a country where the vast majority live on or near a coastline. It will be even more catastrophic in your neighbourhood,” Mr Hart added.

Meanwhile, a 2015 report from the Africa Progress Panel led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan slammed Australia’s lack of climate progress.

“With one of the world’s highest levels of per capita emissions, Australia has gone from leadership to free-rider status in climate diplomacy,” it said.

Former French environment minister Laurence Tubiana is one of the key architects of the Paris Agreement. Photo: Getty

The architect of the Paris Agreement

Laurence Tubiana is a former French environment minister and current head of the European Climate Foundation.

She was one of the main architects of the Paris Agreement, and singled out Australia in 2019 for wanting to carry over old credits from previous climate goals, some of which were acquired under more lax standards.

“If you want this carry over, it is just cheating,” Ms Tubiana told the Financial Times.

"Australia was willing in a way to destroy the whole system, because that is the way to destroy the whole Paris agreement."
Laurence Tubiana, key architect of the Paris Agreement

In an opinion piece from December, Ms Tubiana put Australia’s climate inaction in perspective.

“To the rest of the world, Australia’s national-level inaction, based largely on the claim that climate is a left-right political issue, is bizarre,” she wrote.

“The world needs Australia to re-engage on climate, and Australia is better placed than most to thrive as the fifth industrial revolution kicks in.

“Or as a famous 2006 Australian advertisement said, where the bloody hell are you?”

Barack Obama mentioned Australia by name while talking about climate action. Photo: Getty

Barack Obama

During a 2014 speech at the University of Queensland, then-US President Barack Obama made the rare move of pointing out the real risks of climate change in Australia.

"Here in the Asia-Pacific nobody has more at stake when it comes to thinking about and then acting on climate change."
Barack Obama

“Here a climate that increases in temperature will mean more extreme and frequent storms, more flooding, rising seas that submerge Pacific islands.

“Here in Australia it means longer droughts, more wildfires. The incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened.”

Mr Obama also urged countries like Australia to break free of the “false choice between development and pollution”.

The Sydney Morning Herald later reported that parts of this passage were ad-libbed out of frustration over then-prime minister Tony Abbott’s climate change denial.

Fast-forward to 2021 and the Biden administration has slammed Australia’s emissions trajectory as being “insufficient”.

The OECD

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an organisation comprising of 38 countries, including Australia.

It’s not known for diehard environmentalism, but it has nevertheless criticised Australia’s climate change policies over the years.

“The least-cost approach to meeting these emission targets would involve an economy-wide carbon price,” the organisation said in a report in September.

“However, if the political environment precludes such an approach, other existing instruments will need to be scaled up and new sector-based solutions considered.”

"Innovations are less likely to be environment-related in Australia than in other OECD countries."
The OECD

The OECD also called for the government to support the uptake of electric cars, and to ensure a just transition for Australia’s 40,000 coal industry workers.

Links

• UN’s top climate adviser says Australia must phase out coal
• Australia’s weak climate action to blame for PM’s snub at global summit
• ‘Insufficient’: Biden administration criticises Australia on climate
• Sir David Attenborough warns of climate 'crisis moment'
• OECD slams Australia for its net zero headway
• Strong climate targets make strong friendships, Fiji tells Australia
• Former Tuvalu PM hits out at US and Australian climate inaction
• While my island nation sinks, Australia is doing nothing to solve climate change - Anote Tong
• On This Day: Greta Thunberg leads 150 countries in global climate strikes
• ‘Blah, blah, blah’: Greta Thunberg lambasts leaders over climate crisis
• Australia singled out as a climate change 'free-rider' by international panel
• An analysis of the political challenges facing Scott Morrison
• A breakdown of the financial costs of climate inaction

Adapt And Grow: Australia Should Grasp The Positives Of Climate Change

Crikey - Richard Holden

There are ways to take advantage of a warmer climate that can help defray the costs.

Image: Private Media

Author Richard Holden is a professor of economics at the University of New South Wales and president-elect of the Academy of the Social Science.

COP26 in Glasgow has four core areas of discussion:

1. securing net zero
2. adaptation
3. mobilising finance
4. “work together”

The second — adaptation –is perhaps the most concrete, but also the least discussed.

 According to the official program, discussions of adaptation will revolve around working together to enable and encourage countries affected by climate change to:

• protect and restore ecosystems
• build defences, warning systems and resilient infrastructure and agriculture to avoid loss of homes, livelihoods and even lives.

The first point to note about this is that adaptation is important even when we take aggressive action to reduce emissions.

In the language of economics, emissions reduction and adaptation are complements not substitutes — doing more of one makes it easier to do more of the other.

It’s going to be a lot easier to successfully build resilient infrastructure and agriculture if climate change is less bad than predicted.

And there will be more bang for the buck in working towards net zero if we can adapt more effectively to the effect of climate change from which we can’t escape.

The second point is that it’s useful to distinguish between “adaptation” and “mitigation”. No lesser a scientific authority than NASA observed that adaptation can best be described as:

Adapting to life in a changing climate. [This] involves adjusting to actual or expected future climate. The goal is to reduce our vulnerability to the harmful effects of climate change (like sea-level encroachment, more intense extreme weather events or food insecurity).

By contrast, mitigation is reducing climate change itself.

As NASA says, this “involves reducing the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, either by reducing sources of these gases (for example, the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat or transport) or enhancing the “sinks” that accumulate and store these gases (such as the oceans, forests and soil)”.

Image: Private Media

If there’s a climate win to be had, let’s just take it — and worry less about the journey

Part of the goal of mitigation is to stabilise accumulated greenhouse-gas levels so that natural adaptation can take place — or at least be less severely impacted.

 Now these are conceptually different things. But distinguishing between them also points to things that countries like Australia should do differently. Parts of the country are clearly affected by changing weather patterns.

Bushfires wrought havoc just before COVID-19 hit. Droughts have been devastating — and increasingly so. The Great Barrier Reef is under grave threat. Whatever the cause, we can and must do more to reduce the effects of climate change.

When it comes to mitigation — stablising greenhouse-gas levels — Australia has a relatively little known but important scientific advantage.

The world’s oceans hold 25 times more carbon than the atmosphere, and all living plants and animals combined. Oceans used to hold even more carbon. This raises the intriguing possibility of using technology to boost oceans’ capacity to reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere.

If we want to get to net zero emissions then having significant negative emissions technologies (NETs) is crucial.

Here’s where Australia’s comparative advantage comes in. We are the main gateway to the Southern Ocean, which is the global marine environment with the greatest potential for carbon capture.

And a group of Australian and international researchers at the Centre of Innovation for Recovery of Climate Change, Australia (CIRCA) is leading a long-run initiative to develop and deploy these technologies. (Disclosure: I am a member of CIRCA.)

The idea behind ocean NETs is to manipulate algal production rates, use inorganic ocean chemistry, and develop “sea-water splitting” to release hydrogen as a fuel and capture carbon dioxide.

The basic science of this is well understood, but research on how to scale and deploy these technologies responsibly is crucial.

Australia is at the global frontier of this work.

Then there’s taking advantage of any potential upsides of a warmer climate, like longer growing seasons and increased crop yields.

That’s not to say (as certain conservative, climate denialist former prime ministers of Australia have) that these potential benefits outweigh the costs of climate change. Just that we should take what we can get from climate change — in part to help defray the cost of dealing with the downsides.

Australia has a lot of work to do — and, frankly, diplomatic ground to make up — when it comes to climate change.

But it’s worth remembering that although we might not be under the kind of threat that countries like Tuvalu or Bangladesh are from rising sea levels, we have already experienced the devastating effects of climate change.

We can and must adapt. And we are also well positioned — both geographically and scientifically — to lead efforts in mitigating these effects.

Links

• Responding to Climate Change
• If there’s a climate win to be had, let’s just take it — and worry less about the journey
• The emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) due to human activities is the leading cause of climate change.
• Good COP or bad COP? Why the Glasgow summit is a big deal for Australia
• How the environment could save the economy, post-pandemic
• (AU The Conversation) Climate Change Means Australia May Have To Abandon Much Of Its Farming
• (AU Crikey) Morrison Government Spends On Adapting To Climate Change Rather Than Taking Action To Fight It
• (AU) New Focus On Climate Change Adaptation But No Sign Of 2050 Emissions Commitment

(AU The Conversation) Better Building Standards Are Good For The Climate, Your Health, And Your Wallet. Here’s What The National Construction Code Could Do Better

The Conversation - Trivess Moore | Alan Pears | Erika Bartak | Nicola Willand

Shutterstock

Authors Trivess Moore is Senior Lecturer, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University Alan Pears is Senior Industry Fellow, RMIT University Erika Bartak is a PhD Candidate (& ESD Consultant), Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne Nicola Willand is Lecturer, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University

The recent IPCC report highlighted we must urgently transition to a low carbon future.

One low hanging fruit is to improve the sustainability of new and existing housing.

Minimum performance and quality requirements for new housing in Australia are set via the National Construction Code.

The last significant change was in 2010 with the introduction of the six-star requirements. These requirements are at least 40% less stringent than international best practice.

A suite of proposed changes to energy efficiency section of the National Construction Code are a good step forward. However, a lot more can be done.

And improving building quality requirements isn’t just good for the climate — it also delivers enormous health benefits, slashes energy bills and makes our homes more comfortable.

Change is underway

Proposed energy efficiency changes for the National Construction Code 2022 include:

• an increase in the minimum thermal performance of homes from six stars to seven stars
• whole-of-home requirements for performance of heating, cooling, hot water, lighting and pool heating equipment
• new provisions designed to allow easy addition of on-site solar photovoltaic panels and electric vehicle charging equipment
• additional ventilation and wall vapour permeability requirements.

The Regulatory Impact Statement — a document aimed at helping government officials understand the cost-benefit impacts of a proposed regulatory change — has also been released.

Overall, it finds the costs for proposed more stringent requirements will outweigh the benefits for society.

In better news, it finds that for the majority of households, any increase in mortgage repayments from the additional costs of higher standards will be offset by a reduction in energy costs. In other words, you save so much on energy costs over time that it doesn’t matter you have to borrow more to pay for these building features.

There is critique of the Regulatory Impact Statement from stakeholders such as the Victorian government and the Green Building Council of Australia. Critics have pointed to the limited consideration of health and well-being, the impact to the energy network, and the climate emergency.

There are also issues with key economic assumptions which do not reflect environmental impacts of decisions and concerns delivery costs to households have been overestimated, potentially encouraging a “do nothing” policy position.

Public consultation is open until October 17.

Research shows homes can increase performance by one star simply changing from their worst to best orientation. Shutterstock

What do the changes mean?

The proposed changes are important steps towards reducing carbon emissions. Currently less than 5% of new housing in Australia is built to achieve seven or more stars. These changes will affect thousands of new dwellings every year.

The seven-star standard will reduce heating and cooling energy for new housing by about 24%, slashing energy bills. The changes future-proof housing by reducing costs to add renewables or electric car charging once the house is built.

And with issues of mould and condensation in Australian housing, changes will make our housing healthier.

Historically, higher standards have been met by boosting specifications like insulation and double glazing. These new standards will shift attention to cost-effective strategies like orientation and site-responsive design, as it becomes harder to achieve higher stars through specifications alone.

Research from Sustainability Victoria’s Zero Net Carbon Homes program show homes can increase performance by one star simply changing from their worst to best orientation.

There’s room for improvement

These proposed changes are a good step forward. However, more can be done.

A decade ago research and case studies showed that seven star housing was achievable for little additional costs.

YourHome and developments like The Cape make seven or more star house designs freely available, showing we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

The recently announced Green Star Homes Standard will also help to drive innovation beyond minimum performance requirements.

Our energy regulations are still measured per square metre (rather than per dwelling/person) and are predominantly concerned with operational energy demand.

To further reduce carbon emissions, we need to acknowledge the influence of house size and materials usage on total energy consumption and factor in the carbon footprint of building materials.

Additionally, the code does not use future climate data when demonstrating compliance. This means that our housing may not be fit for purpose in our future climate.

We will need more focus on summer performance. This should include performance in late summer and autumn, when the sun is lower in the sky, but extreme heat will be more likely. This will require solutions like adjustable shading.

There is little accountability across the construction industry to ensure builders comply with the design. Shutterstock

As-built verification is a critical inclusion in new schemes such as Green Star Homes; we need similar mechanisms in our construction code to ensure as-built compliance. There is no point improving regulations on paper if we can’t deliver it in practice.

While the focus of these changes is on new housing, we must not forget the millions of existing homes which need to undergo deep retrofits to improve sustainability and performance. The new standards will need careful adaptation to suit alteration and addition projects.

Tools like the National Scorecard Initiative aim to help homeowners in existing dwellings improve performance but more could be done with regulations to ensure existing housing is part of the push towards a sustainable housing future.

Links

• Low-energy homes don't just save money, they improve lives
• Sustainable housing's expensive, right? Not when you look at the whole equation
• This is the most sobering report card yet on climate change and Earth’s future. Here’s what you need to know
• Aiming for mediocrity: The case of australian housing thermal performance
• Low-energy homes don’t just save money, they improve lives
• Mould and damp health costs are about 3 times those of sugary drinks. We need a healthy housing agenda
• National Construction Code 2022 (pdf)
• Australia’s still building 4 in every 5 new houses to no more than the minimum energy standard
• Free Home Designs
• Size does matter: Australia’s addiction to big houses is blowing the energy budget
• Home energy ratings for existing homes