The Guardian
- Adam Morton
Official modelling could give you the impression the Morrison government
has achieved something meaningful. But you would be wrong
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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
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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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