With the US crazy on climate change, we're better off with China

When you hear that malevolent old fool Donald Trump tell the United Nations that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, it’s hard to resist throwing up your arms in despair. If mighty America won’t set a good example, what hope is there for the rest of us?

But nature abhors a vacuum. And if the Americans are too busy making themselves great again to want to keep leading the world to a better future, my guess is that the aspiring great power China will be only too happy to take the reins.

Truth is, the Yanks have never been fully committed to leading the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. When the Democrats are in power, they make the right noises, but whenever the Republicans take over they revert to uninterest. Until now, they’ve been like our Liberals, never openly opposing action to limit climate change, but never keen to get on with doing anything.

You’d be hard-pressed to believe there was a majority of climate-change believers in Congress. It’s never taken over national leadership of the transition to renewable energy.

Rather, as our Climate Council lobby group has explained, what progress the Yanks have made has come from pro-climate action state governments, which cover more than half of the US economy, as well as many companies sticking to the goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

And America’s record on emissions of greenhouse gases isn’t as bad as you might expect. The world’s second-biggest economy (when you measure it correctly, taking account of the fact that $US1 buys a lot less in the US than it does in China) accounts for the second-largest share of annual global emissions, 11 per cent.

Its annual emissions have fallen a little in recent years, driven by a shift from coal to natural gas and increased use of renewables for electricity. Even so, the decline to date isn’t big enough to meet the Biden administration’s goal of reducing emissions by at least 50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

But here’s the point: China is the great contradiction. On one hand, being the world’s largest economy (correctly measured), it’s the world’s greatest single emitter, accounting for about 30 per cent of global emissions. (Since you didn’t ask, Australia’s share of annual emissions is 1 per cent, although our emissions per person are an embarrassingly high 22 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.)

On the other hand, China is the country doing most to move to renewables. The Climate Council says that, since 2020, China’s solar capacity has almost quadrupled, and its wind capacity has doubled. It achieved its 2030 renewable energy target six years early.

This momentum on clean energy is occurring at the same time as more coal-fired power stations are being built. But the new stations are replacing old ones, causing no net increase in coal-fired power. Indeed, in the first half of this year, coal-fired generation fell by 3.4 per cent compared with last year’s first half.

China’s climate pollution seems to have peaked in recent times, actually dropping in the first half of this year. This would be up to five years ahead of the Chinese government’s expectation. If this peak and downturn are sustained, this is, as the Climate Council says, “a major milestone in the worldwide shift to clean energy”.

Last week, while Trump was at the UN trumpeting his stupidity to the world, President Xi Jinping was there to announce China’s commitment under the Paris Agreement to reduce its emissions by at least 7 to 10 per cent by 2035.

The modesty of this promise prompted disappointment and disapproval. But before people’s righteous indignation reaches too high, there are a few points to remember.

First is the statisticians’ distinction between stocks and flows. Everyone tends to focus on this year’s flow of greenhouse gas emissions, which adds to the existing huge stock of gases in the atmosphere, which has been building up since the Industrial Revolution.

Obviously, if the stock is already too high, any annual addition is bad. We should be reducing our annual addition ASAP. But it’s the huge existing stock of gases in the atmosphere that’s doing almost all the damage.

If we ask which countries contributed most to the stock of gases, it’s the big rich countries: the US and parts of Europe. Our efforts over the past 200 years to make ourselves as rich as we are today created the climate disturbance. The poor countries during those 200 years, including China, contributed stuff-all to the problem.

China’s biggest annual emissions are explained by its population, 1.4 billion people, plus its success in raising their material standard of living from poor to middle-income in just a few decades. Its emissions per person are still only about half ours.

It would be the height of hypocrisy for the countries that got rich by wrecking the world’s climate now to tell the poor countries they must abandon their efforts to make their citizens even remotely as well-off as we are.

That’s why no one in the rich world is entitled to criticise the Chinese for their huge emissions. And it’s why we should be hugely impressed and grateful for their great effort and success in moving to renewables.

Next, remember that China is the global leader in renewable technology manufacturing. It supplies 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels and 70 per cent of electric vehicles. It’s also the leading world supplier of wind turbines. If it isn’t already the biggest in batteries, it will be.

China’s massive output of clean machines has slashed the world cost of renewables relative to fossil fuel energy, and is now powering the switch to renewables in many countries, including ours.

Finally, when tempted to criticise China’s modest promise to reduce emissions, remember that whereas our politicians tend to overpromise and underdeliver, the Chinese prefer to do it the other way – as their recent overshoots well demonstrate.

With the Yanks going off the reservation, we’re in safer hands with the commos.

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Albanese takes his usual each-way bet on climate change

After last week, Anthony Albanese and his Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen are entitled to a great sigh of relief. They made it through without anyone noticing what a weak job they’re doing of protecting our children and grandchildren’s future.

They began the week belatedly releasing an official report telling in shocking detail just how bad our lives will become if we and the other rich countries fail to do enough to stop global warming. They ended the week setting a target aiming to do insufficient over the decade to 2035.

They offered a masterclass in convincing people you’re doing something to fix a problem when, in reality, you’re doing more to make it worse than make it better. If there was an Oscar for fooling the punters, these guys would win it.

And how did they do it? By waving around % signs. As required by the Paris climate change agreement of 2015, we have committed to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses by 43 per cent of their 2005 level by 2030.

In readiness for the next United Nations climate change conference in Brazil in November, we’ve had to set a target for further emission reductions by 2035. And last week the target was revealed: further reductions to between 62 per cent and 70 per cent of the 2005 level.

Brilliant. Those people who don’t care about climate change could grumble that 62 per cent is too much, while those who do care about it could complain that 70 per cent is too little.

Fortunately for Albanese, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said she was “dead against” the new target, while the greenies attacked it as inadequate.

Well done, Albo. This is surely the oldest trick in politics. If you can get yourself between someone saying you’re doing too much and someone else saying you’re doing too little, you make yourself look moderate and reasonable. You’re the epitome of the Sensible Centre.

This is Albanese, the man who’s been in politics for so long he’s forgotten why he wanted to be a politician, doing what by now comes naturally: taking an each-way bet. You’ve got a problem? I’m happy to do a bit to help.

Of course, I won’t help you so much I annoy other people. I might lose their votes. I don’t want to actually fix problems, just be seen trying to fix them.

This is Albanese, the man who’s been in politics for so long he’s forgotten why he wanted to be a politician, doing what by now comes naturally: taking an each-way bet.

But the other part of last week’s illusion was that setting a target for what you’ll have achieved in 10 years – or 25 years in the case of net zero – isn’t the same as actually doing something. It’s just promising to do something sometime.

And don’t forget that pollies face elections every three or four years. This makes setting targets for the distant future the easiest thing a politician can do. You reckon Albo and Bowen will still be around in 10 years to face the music?

What about 2050? By then, every pollie associated with the net-zero commitment will be long dead. Know the great advantage of that? You won’t be around for your grandkids to ask you why you didn’t try a helluva lot harder to stop them ending up in the poo.

What’s lost when we debate whether 70 per cent is better or worse than 62 per cent, is that neither is sufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the global average temperature increase to “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”, while also pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

As the independent Climate Council has said, “to contribute to keeping heating well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, after which climate impacts become especially catastrophic and severe”, we’d need to set a net zero target for 2035.

And debating percentages avoids the question, 62 to 70 per cent of what? Well, annual emissions, of course. But why has Australia chosen 2005 as the base date for reductions? What’s special about 2005?

Let me tell you. That base was chosen in 2015 by the Abbott government. Why? Because by then, it was clear that 2005 was the peak year for emissions. They’d fallen a lot since then. That was a year of much land clearing for farming but, since then, state governments had been able to greatly reduce land clearing. Cutting down trees and shrubs releases carbon dioxide. Allowing them to continue growing absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Get it? In 2015, we picked 2005 as our base date knowing there’d already been a huge reduction in our total emissions because of changes in our land use. So, in the battle to reduce emissions, we gave ourselves a big head start.

As the Australia Institute has shown, if you exclude the marked decline in emissions from land use, our emissions have been flatlining. The modest reduction in emissions from electricity has been sufficient to offset the growth in other sectors. We’ve made no progress in transport or industry. But there’s little scope for land use emissions to continue falling.

So, apart from setting targets, what has the Albanese government been doing to reduce emissions over its three-and-a-half years in office? Not much. It has patched up the Coalition government’s “safeguard mechanism” which, in theory, will require some of our biggest polluting industries to reduce their net emissions. Trouble is, they can do so by buying dodgy carbon credits.

Labor hasn’t even saved itself about $12 billion a year by eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. In fact, the Albanese government has been making things worse by approving 10 coal projects, approving the drilling of more than 200 new gas wells and agreeing to extend Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project out to 2070.

Regardless of whether they’re sufficient, it’s not at all clear the government will be able to achieve its emission reduction targets for 2030 and 2035. If it was fair dinkum in trying to halt climate change it would have re-introduced the thing that could hasten the transition: a carbon tax.

But no, much safer to just have a bob each way.

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