Australia’s emissions have declined slightly over the past year, but the path to its 2030 climate target remains uncertain.
National emissions in the 12 months to September 2024 reached approximately 434.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO₂-e). [1]
This represents a 0.5% decline from the previous year, continuing a modest downward trend. [1]
Yet key sectors like transport and fossil fuel extraction continue to offset more significant gains made in electricity decarbonisation. [2]
Australia’s Sector Emissions Breakdown
The country’s emissions come from six primary sources tracked by the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory. [2]
As of June 2024, emissions across these sectors totalled 440.6 Mt CO₂-e: [2]
Electricity generation: ~30% of national emissions; falling due to renewables
Transport: rising 1.9% year-on-year due to diesel and aviation demand [6]
Agriculture: stable to slightly falling; methane remains a major component
Stationary energy (non-electricity): e.g., manufacturing and mining fuel use
Fugitive emissions: methane leaks from coal and gas operations
Industrial processes: emissions from materials like cement and steel
Electricity emissions have declined due to solar and wind uptake, particularly in the National Electricity Market. [2]
In contrast, transport emissions remain stubbornly high, with road freight and domestic air travel responsible for most increases. [6]
State and Territory Emissions Profiles
Emissions vary dramatically by jurisdiction, shaped by each state’s energy mix and dominant industries. [3]
According to the State and Territory Greenhouse Gas Inventories for FY2022–23, the largest emitters by volume are: [4]
New South Wales (NSW): dominated by coal-fired electricity and road transport
Queensland (QLD): large coal and gas extraction; high fugitive emissions
Victoria (VIC): brown coal electricity remains a major contributor
Smaller states and territories reveal other trends:
Tasmania: lowest per capita emissions; high hydro reliance; manufacturing is top sector
Western Australia (WA): oil and gas dominate
Northern Territory (NT) and South Australia (SA): heavy emissions from LNG and mining
Progress and Gaps
National emissions are now around 27–29% below 2005 levels, depending on whether land-use changes are included. [1]
This positions Australia close, but not comfortably, on track for its legislated 43% reduction by 2030. [5]
The federal government’s Climate Change Authority warns more ambitious action is needed to decarbonise transport, manufacturing, and gas exports. [5]
Without sharper cuts, especially in fossil fuel projects and diesel use, Australia risks missing its 2030 target. [6]
Conclusion
Australia’s climate progress is real, but fragile.
Gains in electricity are at risk of being undermined by growth in fossil-heavy sectors like transport and extraction.
State-by-state variations reveal where new efforts are most urgently needed, from cleaner freight systems in NSW to reducing gas dependence in WA and NT.
Environmental activist David Suzuki (Image: Kris Krug)
Author
Ketan Joshi is a writer, analyst, and
communications consultant focusing on clean energy and climate
change.
He previously worked in climate and energy for private
companies and government agencies, and now writes journalism
and commentary from the front lines of climate and energy
battles around the world.
He is based in Oslo and consults to organisations addressing
the climate crisis.
Veteran environmentalist David Suzuki believes the time has passed us to stop climate change. He’s wrong.
As I recently wrote, “tactical” fatalism
is used by fossil-friendly governments (or the fossil fuel industry
itself) to culturally enforce a broad sense of helplessness.
Performative fatalism is different. This
is where big-name figures and big social media accounts (often
specialising in a self-described “doomer” mentality) make a habit of loudly announcing the inevitability of climate change and the pointlessness of mitigation.
These messages go ultra-viral, while their
authors claim to be maligned truth-tellers issuing unpopular nuggets of
reality. These people are not in league with the fossil fuel industry,
but the reward mechanisms of corporate social media sites have resulted
in a convergent evolution between their messages and those of coal, oil
and gas companies.
A recent statement from a very significant name in the environmental movement has given them new energy.
According to veteran environmentalist
David Suzuki, it is “too late” to stop climate change. In an interview
with Canadian outlet iPolitics, Suzuki said: “Now, it is too
late. I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late … the
focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because
they are based around humans.”
The hyperactive “climate.apocalypse” Instagram account, boasting several hundred thousand followers, describes
it this way: “At 89 years old, David Suzuki says it’s too late to stop
climate change. The fight is lost. It’s time to hunker down and prepare
for what’s coming.” More than 100,000 likes.
These moments of popular helplessness flare up during collective instability and stress. Michael Moore released the profoundly shitty documentary Planet of the Humans right in the middle of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. It packaged the worst tropes of performative fatalism,
packed with eco-fascist population-control ideas and reams of
disinformation, but it was perfectly timed and had millions of viewers.
The message of climate fatalism is just as
wrong as the worst climate deniers. It is absurd to claim that it’s
“too late” to stop climate change. We know for sure that it is possible
to prevent the release of greenhouse gases. The atmosphere heats in
response to the volume of greenhouse gases we pump into it. The less we
add, the less the heating.
If you accept the basic science
explaining how we make things worse, you must accept the basic science
of how we stop making things worse. It is an almost weirdly linear
relationship:
Source: Figure SPM.10 in IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
We
also know that the collective policy, technology and activism efforts
of our entire species since the 1990s have resulted in a noticeable
reduction in reliance on burning fossil fuels, compared to the parallel
universe in which we did nothing at all.
You can see this when you view
the world’s carbon emissions compared to the spaghetti spread of
scenarios published many years ago. We have avoided both the worst- and
best-case scenarios, and have ended up somewhere in the middle:
Source: Robbie Andrews, Global Carbon Budget 2024
Thisrecent study found implemented policies to date likely reduced global
emissions by “several billion tons of [carbon dioxide equivalent] per
year compared to a world without mitigation policies”, equivalent to
between 4% and 15% of 2020’s total global emissions.
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Working Group Three
report dedicates several pages to this, saying, “There is robust
evidence with a high level of agreement that mitigation policies have
had a discernible impact on emissions.”
A
good chunk of this relates specifically to the surprisingly rapid growth
of wind and solar, which you can see nicely reflected in the shifting assumptions
in the IPCC’s own scenarios, leaning more heavily on renewable energy
and electrification and less on fossil fuels, carbon capture and
nuclear.
In the electricity sector in particular,
supply and demand are precisely matched. If new wind power or solar
power is generating something, something else is generating less.
In regions of the world with growing demand, renewables are taking the
edge off fossil fuel growth, and in areas with stagnant or falling
demand, renewables are accelerating the demise of fossil fuels.
Either
way, wind and solar are pushing out fossil fuels, and the core task at
hand is switching from insufficient progress to sufficient progress.
Australia’s power sector is a nice illustration of the simple fact that renewable energy actively reduces the combustion of coal and gas:
Donald
Trump’s election feels reminiscent of the first year of COVID-19. A
deep blanket of anxiety and instability is impacting the US and
countries with close ties. In this haze, fatalists find new purchase.
Whatever Suzuki’s intentions, his comments fuel real and serious
feelings of helplessness and despair.
There is danger in fatalism that goes well
beyond creating dejection and justifying inaction. The broad feelings
of helplessness and hopelessness are a boon to both authoritarian,
fascist governments and the fossil fuel industry, both of which rely on
few realising how brittle their grip on power is.
There
are direct links between “doomer” communities and increasingly explicit
agreement with eco-fascist elements.
One prominent self-described
“doomer” recently described
themselves as an “eco-Nazi”: “The one and only solution to the problem —
the FINAL solution — is to make Planet Earth a human-free zone.” Gaming
social media algorithms to loudly reinforce the physical terror of
climate impacts and then insisting there’s nothing we can do to stop
those impacts feels pretty sinister to me.
The times are bad. Suzuki’s statement
seems inspired more by a gut reaction to Trump than any desire for
social fame. But bad times should trigger new strength in understanding
our agency. Declaring climate mitigation a dead end does nothing but
help those working to make that false statement true.
There is nothing
mandatory about coal, oil or gas. We know that the fossil fuel economy
bleeds, and it can only survive if we collectively succumb to its
constantly repeated message of inevitability.
Yes, there are debates
about the deeper systemic, transformational changes required in human
societies to accelerate the elimination of dangerous fuels. None of that
is relevant to the simple truth that it is not too late to stop fossil
fuels, no matter what the doomer-boomer nexus insists.
