At the recent climate talks organised by the US, Australia tried its best to look as if it was doing something. Ketan Joshi of Renew economy summarises the attempt in his piece Morrison finds shameless new way to fake climate action as world steps up
Japan, Canada and the US announced updates to their 2030 climate targets. Korea promised to end overseas coal financing, and China has promised to peak coal usage by 2025. Australia, meanwhile, announced, very literally, nothing new.
Australia’s current state of climate action falls within two categories. The first is thimbles of cash poured into whichever technology has a zero percent probability of impacting the revenue streams of fossil fuel operations, at least not prior to the retirement age of current executives and politicians. That’s fossil hydrogen and CCS.
The second category is also a dense bush of confusion and misdirection. It involves twisting the numbers tracking and targeting climate action to artificially manufacture emissions reductions where there are none. And in the tiny space of time that Morrison was audible, he crammed in a lot.
The first was representing Australia’s emissions as proportions of either population or GDP, instead of absolute values. That’s because if population or GDP rise, and emissions stagnate, the numbers still look like they’re falling. Morrison has been twisting emissions values into so many different versions he got tangled over his own words, saying that “achieving our 2030 targets will see emissions per capita fall by almost half of our emissions per unit……ah, by of GDP by 70%”.
The sheer density of deceptions in the speech were exhausting. “Already we’ve reduced our emissions by 19% on 2005 levels” – the only dataset I know of that estimates 2020’s total emissions is the December 2020 department emissions projections, and that definitively says it’s 16.6%. “More than most other similar economies” […] Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, excluding the controversial land use sector accounts, are rising far faster than every country Morrison and Taylor used for comparison.