It’s climate Christmas! But data dump shows Australia has a long way to go on emissions | Adam Morton

The wonks call it climate Christmas – the federal government’s Australian climate change information dump that happens shortly before the end of the parliamentary year, and just as the annual UN climate summit kicks off.

It’s impossible to cover it all in one short session, so this is necessarily only a first look, but the hundreds of pages of data published in five papers on Thursday tell us a lot about where Australia is on the climate crisis, and where it is going.

Perhaps most notable is the annual progress report by the Climate Change Authority, the independent advisory body that has restored its funding and role since Labor was elected.

This is blunt on the scale of the damage already being done to people and nature as a result of man-made global warming. “This is what 1.1C degrees of warming looked like this year: news about wildfires in countries like Hawaii, Spain, Greece and Canada; floods in China, India, Pakistan and Nigeria; and heatwaves in the UK, Europe and India,” the report said.

“July 2023 was the warmest month in more than a century of global temperature records, and thousands of climate records were broken worldwide. The risks of cascading effects and tipping points are increasing. Winter sea ice in Antarctica was at a record low in 2023 and ocean currents were slowing. Only strong and urgent action to reduce greenhouse gases can put us on a much safer climate track.”

This summary, both shocking and familiar, repeats and absorbs. But the authority is equally blunt on the evidence of the outright economic risks to Australia if it fails to act, which are still less well understood.

It says time is running out for Australia to make the move to a “prosperous net zero economy on our own terms”. The message is: change comes one way or another. Australia can either quickly seize the opportunities of a low-emissions world, or suffer the consequences if it is forced upon it.

Those consequences are brutal economic disruption. It describes Australia as a “small, open and emissions-intensive economy, dependent on foreign capital inflows and export earnings” that can “expect to feel the full force of the global transition to net zero emissions”.

Chris Bowen makes a similar case, albeit using different language. In its annual climate statement to parliament, the Minister of Climate Change argued the Albanian government acted, but warned of challenges ahead.

He said a race for global capital was well under way, spurred by the extraordinary A$560 billion clean energy incentives and tax credits included in the US Inflation Reduction Act, with the EU, Canada and Japan among those that have introduced measures in pursuit. He could also have mentioned China, which was found in two reports this week building wind and solar capacity at twice the rate of the US and Europe combined.

Bowen said while Australia had world-leading resources in solar, wind and critical minerals, these alone would not make it a renewable energy superpower. He summarized: “Having a clearly articulated plan for the transition is no longer optional, but a baseline expectation of capital markets.”

Does Australia have a clearly articulated plan? Bowen says yes. The climate Christmas report deluge tells us that there is a lot of detail to come.

The immediate picture is not great. The new quarterly emissions data for June, covering Labour’s first full year in office, shows pollution increased by 0.8%.

There are some ok-ish excuses for this. Transport emissions rose by 8% as people emerged from Covid-19 restrictions. And agricultural emissions went up because it was wet. Crops and livestock were abundant.

Labor can argue that this backlash was basically fixed when it took power. But it is also true that the government has yet to release policies to prevent pollution from transport and agriculture from continuing to rise.

A report on emissions projections, also released Thursday, tells the story. It says current policy should bring the country to a 42% reduction in emissions by 2030 – almost in line with the government’s target of 43%. – and a reduction of 53% by 2035 (compared to 2005). Those numbers are due to two things: solar and wind energy replacing old coal generators to clean up the power sector, and changes in land use that are mostly unrelated to climate policy.

Bowen will take considerable credit for the decline in electricity emissions, assuming it comes off. He last week announced a significant expansion of taxpayer underwriting of renewable energy and storage, and heeding calls that more was needed to drive private investment.

But other parts of the economy – transport, large industries, mining and farming – are still projected to emit about the same amount of CO₂ in 2030 as in 2005. As Australia’s major fossil fuel exporter, which are mostly not captured in household emission numbers, but contribute much more to the global problemit is not sustainable.

On Thursday, Bowen rejected some steps that the Climate Change Authority believed could have helped. This included co-ordinating a national phase out of domestic gas connections and setting a target of zero emissions from cars by 2040, which would effectively mean replacing the national fleet in 17 years.

Both would have been politically and logistically challenging. The coalition is in full opportunistic mode on the climate crisis. Peter Dutton’s haughty intervention on Thursday was to joke that Bowen would take a people smuggler’s boat to the Cop28 summit in Dubai to avoid emissions. But the country is not going to get where it needs to be without political courage, and changes in the way we live.

There comes a moment that has not received much attention, but may address some of these issues. Next year, the government will release sectoral decarbonisation plans for each of the areas in which emission reductions are needed – energy, transport, industry, resources, agriculture and land, and buildings.

If done well, this should provide pieces currently missing from the Australian emissions reduction puzzle. This could pave the way for an ambitious 2035 target – one that is significantly higher than emissions projections currently suggest – and a better chance of a future on something approaching our terms.