The world is on track for catastrophic warming and climate disasters are multiplying. Yet the Albanese government’s new climate targets refuse to meet the urgent need for action.
The government’s own Climate Risk Assessment, released a few days before the targets, lays out the horrifying consequences of global heating for Australia.
Fires, droughts and heatwaves, alongside sea level rise and coastal flooding, will have a catastrophic impact. Current global pledges for action would result in heating of 2.9 degrees, it notes.
Days of extreme heat will double at 2 degrees of heating and more than quadruple at 3 degrees, driving more heat-related deaths and droughts. Parts of Australia would regularly face hellish 52 degree temperatures.
Albanese tried to brand his newly announced 2035 targets as “ambitious”, with Climate Minister Chris Bowen saying anything higher was “not achievable”.
But that’s only because they won’t stand up to the coal and gas companies or threaten business profits.
Even a target of 75 per cent cuts to emissions by 2035 would leave the world headed for more than 2 degrees of warming, according to the Climate Council, well above the safe limit of 1.5 degrees agreed at the global climate summit in Paris a decade ago. Labor’s target of 62 to 70 per cent by 2035 falls well short of this.
But it gets worse. Buried in the government’s Net Zero Plan is the admission that between 2030 and 2035, 13 per cent of the claimed emissions reductions will come from offsets or the fantasy of carbon capture and storage.
It claims that by 2030 gas export facilities will be implementing “carbon capture and storage technology” when it’s “cost effective”, even though it has repeatedly failed to work on any large scale.
It is pledging $52 million in extra funding for a second round of its “Carbon Capture Technologies Program” that it says will “continue to accelerate the development of new carbon management technologies”.
The picture out to 2050 is even worse, with the government estimating one third of current emissions will continue despite the aim of reaching net zero by that date.
The target is only met through the hope that carbon offsets will double between 2035 and 2050. It says this will be “primarily driven by reforestation activities”.
The scandals about the use of dodgy offsets under Australia’s offsets program and over-counting of how much carbon they actually store shows how hopeless Labor’s climate targets are.
Fossil fuel expansion
The mining and export of coal and gas makes up 18 per cent of our domestic emissions, according to the Australia Institute, not including the final emissions when the fuels are burned overseas.
But instead of phasing it out, the Albanese government is continuing to expand the industry.
Last month alone it approved another two massive fossil fuel projects. It gave final approval for another 45 years to Woodside’s carbon bomb North West Shelf gas project in WA. Its domestic emissions alone each year will be equivalent to another coal power station.
It also gave the nod to expanding Glencore’s Ulan coal mine in NSW until 2035, allowing it to produce another 18 million tonnes of coal.
This is because Labor is deeply committed to allowing fossil fuel companies to keep making massive profits exporting coal and gas, valued at an enormous $130 billion last year.
Instead of any government plan to roll out increased use of public transport or rail freight instead of road transport, it is simply hoping that electric cars and new technologies like hydrogen fuels become cheap enough for businesses to adopt them.
Far more is possible. The Climate Council’s Seize the Decade report outlines how even existing technology could slash our emissions by 75 per cent by 2030, going further than the government’s target for five years later.
But Albanese is not prepared to impose the costs on business necessary for this to happen.
Taxing the rich, and the fossil fuel companies that have made billions out of destroying the planet, would allow government spending to build the renewable energy, housing and transport we need.
It could provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in green manufacturing, public transport and land management to ensure mining and fossil fuel workers were guaranteed alternative work on good wages.
But winning this kind of action requires building a mass grassroots movement backed by union and working class power.
This will mean fighting both Albanese’s continuing expansion of the fossil fuel industry and his determination to support capitalism and company profits at the expense of workers and the planet.
By James Supple
