LLast week was a big deal for anyone who cares about faltering efforts to deliver on the Paris agreement and tackle the climate crisis. It is possible that it will come to be seen as something of a milestone. The biggest step forward did not come in Canberra, where an increasingly circular debate is taking place over Australia’s first climate change legislation in more than a decade.
That is not meant to dismiss the Albanian government’s climate change bill or the crusading parliamentarians working to strengthen it. Australian legislation matters, primarily as a confidence boost for investors looking to support clean energy and other climate solutions. It sets minimum targets (a 43% cut by 2030 compared to 2005 and net zero by 2050) and includes some useful transparency and accountability measures. But the reality is that there is hardly anything in it.
It does not include any mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or funding to drive change. Anyone flipping through its 16 pages might wonder what all the fuss is about.
No, the real change last week was in the US, where an agreement has been reached between the Democratic leaders and the party’s perennial climate stumbling block and coal superfan, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.
Just two weeks ago, Manchin, a millionaire thanks to a family coal business and the US Senate’s top recipient of oil and gas money, was being called “the man who single-handedly condemned mankind”a villain and a variety of unpublishable things after promising to use what is effectively his deciding vote to again block serious climate legislation.
It was widely assumed that was all, but Manchin surprised almost everyone on Wednesday by announcing that he would back $369 billion ($527 billion Australian) in climate and energy spending.
If it passes Congress, it is likely to be genuinely transformative. The bill allocates huge amounts for tax credits on renewable energy and battery production, rebates on green home electric vehicles and appliances, support for environmental justice projects in communities disproportionately affected by the climate emergency, and funding to address highly potent methane emissions.
The authors say it could bring the country a 30% to 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels and put Joe Biden’s 50% reduction target within reach.
Not everything in the bill, optimistically called the Inflation Reduction Act, is positive for the climate. It also includes significant fossil fuel concessions, which were deemed necessary for Manchin to cross the line. There will be new leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, a step that would break a Biden election commitment, and faster approval processes for gas pipelines.
At another time, these types of measures could have provoked a stronger negative reaction. Some critics have argued that while the fossil fuel elements in the deal are overshadowed by support for renewables, could drive growing demand for gas which locks it well into the future. But Democrats and climate action activists mostly hailed the bill as a breakthrough. His position can be summed up as a combination of ‘the positives are huge’ and ‘this is much more than nothing we expected a week ago’.
The expectations in Australia are, of course, in a different place. As the Coalition continues to absent itself from an adult climate policy conversation, the heart of the debate lies somewhere between last year’s Labor assessment of what was politically achievable after years of electoral losses and science-based positions. of the Greens and the independents.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen’s position, basically that Labor will stick to its modest election commitments but not stand in the way of deeper cuts, is not an unreasonable starting point given where we have been, but it has been undermined. for Anthony Albanese’s outlandish suggestion that expanding Australia’s coal export industry might be good for the climate because local coal is “cleaner” than foreign coal. It’s an old line from the coal industry that, as Graham Readfearn has explaineddoes not accumulate.
The prime minister’s other rhetorical device has been to misrepresent the Greens’ push for a moratorium on the development of new coal mines and gas fields as an attempt to rapidly shut down existing fossil fuel developments, claiming it would have a “devastating impact”. In the economy”. It’s blatant politics, but it’s unlikely to matter by 2025, when voters will be able to judge the Albanian government for what it has actually achieved.
The key questions will be something like this. Have you implemented the climate policies you promised in a way that prepares the country for the future? Has he persuaded Australians that his emission cuts are real and not greenwashing? Have you been honest with the communities that will be most affected by the inevitable change and have you made a plan to support them?
Has he overturned dishonest claims by the Coalition and others who try to blame Labor for increases in energy bills caused by international factors? And has he used the power of incumbency to set an ambitious 2035 emissions reduction target that sets a new trajectory and makes the 2030 target debate redundant?
We’ll have a pretty good idea of how much of this will be seen in the next 12 months.
In terms of new climate spending, the government is offering nothing on the scale of what is planned in the US, but has introduced legislation for tax breaks for electric cars and says $20bn will be dedicated to building the links. of electricity transmission needed to get the country to 82% renewable energy by 2030.
But the big questions will be about how Labor tackles industrial pollution and future coal and gas proposals.
Bowen promised a discussion paper later this month on options for the government to use the safeguard mechanism, a Coalition policy that has been around for years without achieving anything, to reduce runaway emissions from mainstream industry. Labor has enjoyed support from the business community for its climate goals, but negotiations over the backstop, which will decide how quickly the 215 big emitting facilities and mines have to make cuts, is where things could get tricky. The minister won’t have much time to discuss the details. He has promised that the revamped safeguard will be up and running by July next year.
Labor have made it clear that they have no intention of banning new fossil fuel mines outright, regardless of what the world’s climate scientists say, the secretary general of the UN Y the international energy agency He says. But a well-designed safeguard mechanism could at least make it much more difficult to develop new coal and gas fields.
Total industrial emissions will have to start to decline. Obviously allowing new fossil fuel projects will make this more difficult and put more pressure on existing polluting companies to make deeper cuts. But the government has also said that large emitters exposed to the trade will be protected. Something will have to give. One option would be to impose much stricter emissions requirements on new fossil fuel proposals than on those already in operation.
A simpler approach might be to simply introduce a climate test, often called a climate trigger, into national environmental laws so that major new developments can be blocked or reduced if they cause substantial emissions. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has promised reform of those laws next yearwith details to come.
While the government is considering all this, it will also have to decide what to do with the carbon credits. Many big polluters under the safeguard mechanism want to use them, which would mean that they are actually paying someone else to act while they continue to emit. But the integrity of the national carbon credit system is under a cloud, having been described as a fraud and “largely a sham” by one of its architects.
A review is underway, led by former chief scientist Prof. Ian Chubb. Your answers at the end of the year, including on whether there should be limits on the number of credits that can be used, will go a long way in deciding whether Labor can deliver the meaningful change that is needed.