Minimum Something (1 – Targets)

by Ketan Joshi In Longform 4 Comments

Navigation

Audio files here, or visiting Soundcloud, here.

When former PM Scott Morrison released his ‘net zero’ plan in late 2021, it was hollow. A bunch of accounting tricks and vague promises. But as a final fuck you to Australians, his department didn’t even bother lying about the last 15%. It was net 94 million tonnes, not net zero. At that point, Morrison was so checked out, they weren’t even trying to hide their all-encompassing nothingness.

This time last year, Morrison lost the federal election to Anthony Albanese and his Labor party. And what Labor have spent their first year doing, in terms of climate policy, has been more than nothing. There have been policies, parliamentary debates, things being passed and terabytes of PDFs.

But it has been as little as they can get away with. My god, have they dedicated real effort to ensuring that every policy and every action is nothing more than a tentative toe in the water, and holy hell do they fight with real passion and intensity against any push to do better.

Over the first year, they’ve laid the groundwork for a bad first term. Their climate targets are designed, from the ground up, to avoid ambition. Their industry and fossil mining policy is designed and approved by the worst emitters, and an outbreak of ‘something-is-better-than-nothing‘ ensured it remained fossil-friendly as it took its final form.

The transport sector’s policies are just about to undergo the same. The power sector’s glory days are passed because the prospect of controlled coal shutdown and new renewable incentives are both unmentionable. And because the government can’t talk about a controlled exit from fossil fuel production, they’re sentencing both the workers and the country to actual catastrophe, no matter what the world does, and no matter the growth of a ‘clean energy superpower’.

They are one third of the way through their term. There are 6.5 years left to 2030. They are the government of one of the world’s most fossil-reliant nations. This is the critical decade – if the curves don’t start bending now – today, and tomorrow – we’re screwed. The ecosystem of solutions for climate change grows every day. Public support never stopped rising, strengthened by the fact that climate action helps ease the impacts of an energy crisis that’s bringing billions in profit to fossil fuels. Labor’s big moment should be now, but they’ve frozen in the spotlight. 

Yeah, they’re not Morrison, or Turnbull, or Abbott. They don’t do nothing. But all they’ve done is as little as possible: minimum something. 

 

A target should test you

Remember 2015? PM Tony Abbott ate an onion. The Force Awakens was released. And a guy named Bill Shorten set a net zero target for the year 2050, along with an emissions reduction target of 45% by 2030. That was at the lower end of 40-60%, recommended by the remnants of the independent government climate advisors, the ‘Climate Change Authority’ (CCA).

Fast forward to December 2021, nearly six years later. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese prepares to announce an updated 2030 target. Since 2015, Australia has been ravaged by bushfires, a major IPCC report has been released, and renewable energy has grown cheaper, fast. Here it comes, the fans murmured. The moment we’ve all been waiting for.

The expectant smiles collapsed into frowns. In a document published by consultancy Reputex, Labor showed that plugging all of their existing policies into a model resulted in an emissions reduction of 43% – and, so, that was the target. A weakening by 2%, from the target they had set six full years prior.

The 43% isn’t really a target – it’s more of a projection of their current policy suite. To set a 2030 target this way is to openly reject the concept of ambition – of a target that reflects the real spectrum of possibility in front of you, and the demands of the physical Earth system. It is a declaration: we won’t try harder.

Labor fought like a centrist rottweiler (it’s rabid, but it still watches the West Wing) to ensure that the 43% target was legislated, despite the occasionally murmured admission that legislating it is mostly symbolic. Labor and its various defenders in media and business moaned reproachfully about what they’ve called “the climate wars“; a term they refuse to define. Not a problem, when you realise they define climate peace as the immediate and uncritical, unchallenged passage of all climate policies, no matter how bad or counter-productive.

‘Blocking our insufficient policy we’ve designed to be as weak as possible? You’re delaying climate action!!’

The revisionist bogeyman of the 2009 blocking of the CPRS by the Greens was yelled often, and with real reproach. A weaponised emotional memory, there to ensure anyone holding them to a standard higher than ‘not Morrison’ was sent packing. Labor get criticised for having no fight in them, but that’s not fair. You should see them defending bad climate policy.

Labor insisted in their defence – constantly – that 43% is a “floor, not a ceiling”. I still find this brain-meltingly absurd. The entire point of a target is that it’s a minimum goal, not a maximum limit, or a range. It was offered like it was some extra special promise, when it just described the dictionary definition of target. It spoke to the weird corners they had to go to defend the indefensible.

Plenty of effort has gone into trying to present their weak settings as very brave. In an interesting but problematically forgiving review of the Albanese government’s first year, former Labor staffer Sean Kelly writes that:

"Albanese has a long list [of significant actions], but in particular points to the government’s actions on climate and clean energy, including the way they have changed Australia’s place in the world"

Courtesy of Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans, this chart nicely illustrates that Albanese’s commitment puts Australia behind the UK, Germany, the EU, the US (their target strengthened since this chart was made), Japan, Canada and South Korea. On the target alone, Australia remains a laggard, and that’s before we get to everything else.

In Labor’s pre-election policy document, they compare their target to Canada, South Korea and Japan, but they don’t correct for the different baselines, which is dodgy as hell, and they should be ashamed of doing Angus-Taylor-style shit like that.

Has Albanese actually looked at the world? He’s going to have to, at some point, considering both Bowen and Albanese want to host COP31 in 2026. The idea is that it would be hosted in partnership with Pacific nations, but those same nations are demanding that Australia do far, far better on its climate policies. “Awarding Australia hosting rights to COP21 in anticipation of it changing its ways risks rewarding it for decades of recalcitrance. Instead, Australia must change its ways first”, said the Australia Institute. And holy hell, do they have a long way to go.

Though recent emissions data only cover the first half-year, it’s clear there is no inherent strong and systemic downward trend in emissions. At current levels, net zero will be reached in the early 2100s, along with the 43% target being comfortably missed (it’s worth noting that the Albanese government is using the same tactically-selected data revisions to boost their narrative in emissions data that the Morrison government did, revising fuzzy land-use data but ignoring severely under-reported methane, to ensure data’s always revised downwards).

If you’re concerned it’s too early to judge, why don’t you take a stab at the angle of the dotted orange curve in 1 year’s time? Or 2 years? Want to bet on it?

Labor better hope their 2021 modelling was cautiously conservative, because if the policies underperform, even slightly, they’re in trouble. If technologies hit social, cost or legislative roadblocks, even temporary ones, they’re in trouble. And if Labor ends up systematically badly off track for their target, we know for sure they won’t ratchet up their policies in response. Which means they will be in more trouble than they can possibly imagine.

When asked to list Labor’s greatest climate achievements of the past year, legislating the 43% “target” often came first. This, alongside very serious criticism of too much ambition. “I’m a firm believer in under-promising and over-delivering”, PM Albanese told NineFax Journalist David Crowe. This is fundamentally exactly the wrong way to think about climate action, and targets.

The recent history of Australia’s climate projections shows something significant: what we think is possible is something that changes over time. For instance, Australia’s old 2020 renewable target of 41,000GWh was revised downwards out of fears it was too hard to reach. And still, breezily, the original target was exceeded (imagine where we’d be if that target had been strengthened and extended, rather than weakened).

When it comes to climate solutions, the range of possibilities is in a constant state of flux. Stuff that was unthinkably difficult becomes almost boringly feasible in the space of months, now. This state of affairs is incompatible with cowardice, or centrism, or neophobia.

In his profile of Albanese, Sean Kelly counters the centre-right characterisation of Labor, and (cautiously) predicts a slow-burn pathway to deeper, greater action in the near future:

"It is at least possible that the government’s centre will turn out to be what Albanese so often talks about: a patient commitment to long-term government in the pursuit of building a society in which nobody is held back and nobody left behind"

Sure, it’s possible. But we can say with confidence that it’s absurdly unlikely. Between 2015 and 2021, Labor weakened their 2030 target from 45% to 43%, despite an explosion in the potential opportunities for climate action in those years. When the circumstances change again in the next seven years, the Labor government will have performed no adjustments to their 2030 target (with the possible exception of weakening it further, I guess). They are not responsive to circumstance, or the realm of possibility. They hate that realm.

Perhaps Labor held back on ambition purely to get elected, and now they’re in, they’ll let it rip. Except, they’re already preparing for the next election, and the one after that, and thanks to a 2019 loss, they’re still under the obviously wrong impression that climate ambition results in lost elections. No; they’re in a state of perpetual paranoia, and they’ve fallen 100% for the right-wing meme that climate action is unpopular.

It’s worth noting that at some point soon, Labor will need to set a 2035 target. By drawing a straight, linear line out from 2030 to 2035, they’ll probably settle on a 55% target, announced in early 2025 for COP31 and the next election. The fives rhyme, too – a huge bonus. Hashtag Fifty-five by thirty-five. It’ll be absurdly insufficient, but Labor will argue moving any faster would be destructive to the economy. Because it’s a bigger number than 43%, it’ll be breezily and totally uncritically seen as an increase in ambition rather than a continuation of the current mediocrity. And it’ll be green-lit by a ‘Climate Change Authority’ advisory body that has been gutted and replaced with vested interests, who are more than happy to give a tick of approval to climate delay.

Labor legislating the 43% target was seen as a ‘step in the right direction‘. But when Labor takes a step in the right direction, it happens in a way that reveals they never want to take a 2nd, or a 3rd, or a 4th. They fight like demons to avoid setting their ambition any higher. They can’t even perceive their own insufficiency; in their minds the weak commitments are world-leading, history-shattering moments. Accumulated superstitions and fears around being ‘too fast’ on climate will never fade. There will be no more steps in the right direction.

There is too much fundamentally wrong in their approach. They won’t fix themselves; they have to be pushed and pressured into it. This process has already been tested in climate policy and, um, look. I’ve got bad news.