Australia Reckons the World Should Follow Its Lead on Climate Change

Despite being the highest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions from coal on a per capita basis, the Australian government thinks world leaders should follow its lead on climate change mitigation strategy. 

Or at least so thinks Assistant Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Tim Wilson, who on Tuesday morning demurred in the face of questions about whether the government should increase its questionably generous 2030 emissions reduction target of 26 percent.

“What we actually need is other countries to follow our lead. While we’ve committed to net zero by 2050, we’ve got the UK now asking for wriggle room and backsliding on their commitment. China hasn’t even committed to net zero by 2050,” Wilson told ABC Radio National on Tuesday. 

He was only half right. China has committed to net zero by 2060 (admittedly meaningless), while Wilson’s reference to the UK is a nod to recent comments made by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who said Western nations should be given a “climate change pass” while they wean themselves off Russian oil in the midst of Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Wilson was pressed on whether the government would consider firming up a more ambitious emissions reduction target in the wake of the release of the UN’s third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The report found that the world would need to commit to “transformational change” over the next three years in order to reverse upward trending greenhouse gas emissions.

Speaking after the release of the report, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the findings offered themselves as a “file of shame” riddled with a “litany of broken promises” made by governments from across the world.

Guterres accused governments and companies of lying to people about their commitments to reducing emissions, and said humanity is “firmly on track towards an unlivable world” as global emissions are set to increase 14 percent by the end of the decade. They need to be heading 45 percent in the other direction. 

Just last month, Guterres described Australia as one of a dwindling cohort of “holdouts” among the world’s leading economies yet to commit to meaningful 2030 emissions targets. 

The Morrison government, however, hasn’t shown any signs of changing tack or even caring, really. If anything, things are running at odds with the advice of leading climate scientists the world over at a devastating pace. 

Late last month, The Australian reported that Energy Minister Angus Taylor had planned to accelerate seven new fossil fuel projects. Taylor tried to justify the move by turning attention to the gas crisis crippling Europe, where prices are currently up some 300 percent as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It’s a move that is set to pour close to $50 million worth of grants into accelerating “priority gas infrastructure projects” across Queensland, NSW, and Victoria. Unsurprisingly, the plan was described by Guterres, as “madness” that could risk “mutually assured destruction”.

Taylor’s gas acceleration pledge is just a drop in the ocean of fossil fuel-related controversy the Morrison government has created since it took office in 2019.

Under Morrison’s leadership, the federal government has not only been slow to act on the most basic of climate mitigation tactics but it has actively sought to contribute to Australia’s uninhabitability.

The Narrabri gas project, under development in the Gunnedah Basin in New South Wales, has become a portrait of the government’s efforts. 

In October last year, documents obtained by The Guardian showed the NSW government had just months earlier urged the Prime Minister to remove the project from the federal government’s “fast-track approvals” list, for fears giving it the green light would “undermine public trust”. 

Even still, the federal government found a way. Public trust in the Morrison government’s climate change mitigation tactics has over the last 12 months shown signs of rapid deterioration. 

In an Essential Poll cast back in October last year, at the height of the buzz surrounding COP26 in Glasgow, 65 percent of respondents who identified as Coalition voters said they would support “more ambition” for 2030 or net zero. Since then, Morrison hasn’t offered them much hope of getting it.

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