Paris Climate Agreement a simple test. Labor, Coalition both fail

The rate at which Australia stops producing and burning fossil fuels pulls the levers of our physical fate more than the tone of the statements emitted by governments and oppositions.

This is important because most coverage of statements around climate targets and global agreements tends to study rhetoric, rather than actions. The phenomenon flared up recently when, during last week’s leaders debate, shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien weirdly refused to commit to Australia staying in the Paris Climate Agreement, but later clarified the Coalition plans to stay in.

This is not the first time there’s been a fight about whether the Coalition would exit the agreement. In July last year, Dutton claimed he’d reduce Australia’s 2030 emissions target (a 43% reduction on 2005’s emissions), which was framed as an action that contravenes the agreement so deeply that it’s equivalent to quitting. In January, Dutton danced weirdly around the question again, muddling the adoption and rejection of targets but generally committing to staying in the agreement itself.

Labor has had to ramp up its climate discourse to argue in favour of hosting COP31 in 2026 (it’s fighting Türkiye for that honour). Dutton will have to care about climate too, because a Trump-era world will see a newly empowered EU able to set stricter standards around border taxes that account for carbon.

But while Dutton gets a flurry of coverage when his party threatens and then unthreatens to quit Paris, there is wildly insufficient scrutiny of whether Labor remain spiritually dedicated to the agreement. Dutton twists the dial on pro-fossil rhetoric while grinning at the audience, testing Australia’s appetite for vice-signalling. But Labor buries its sins deep in layers of wonky data, complex calculations and strange technicalities.

The simplest problem here is that Labor’s 2030 target is absurdly weak. Labor’s first 2030 target was set 10 full years ago, by Bill Shorten. It was a 45% reduction: more ambitious than Labor’s current 43% target set in 2021. As the team at Climate Action Tracker highlight, it is weak as hell (“insufficient”, in their more polite terms).

One of the biggest problems here is that measured emissions don’t just describe fossil fuel combustion and agricultural emissions dumping. Agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels produces the bulk of human-caused greenhouse gases, and drive the heating of Earth. But Australia also includes an estimate of the change in emissions in the land sector, falsely assuming that choosing not to chop down a tree can undo the carbon release of burning a lump of rock you dug up from deep underground.

Doing this completely changes the narrative: instead of long-term stagnation throughout both Labor and Coalition governments, it looks like Australia has seen a steep decline in emissions. A drought ended, resulting in vegetation taking up more carbon. That has been presented as a green light to allow for more burning of coal, oil and gas. That is unforgivable and dangerous greenwashing.

To make matters worse, I have been tracking in detail how these land-use emissions estimations have been quietly revised over the past few years. Measuring human influence on the way land is destroyed or restored is ridiculously difficult and uncertain, and that allows for wild, obscene shifts in methodology.

Every single revision over the past decade has been in favour of the government of the day, steepening “reductions” and, in doing so, allowing those governments to burn more fossil fuels while looking like they’re “on track” to hit targets.

It is really shocking, but Labor knows it is also shockingly hard to explain without turning into the conspiracy-theory-red-string-guy meme, so they can coast along bragging of progress without facing scrutiny from the press pack.

Any political party that was seriously committed to really providing the maximum ambition towards easing the threat of overheating would very simply cut land-use data out of climate targets, and focus on measuring and cutting fossil fuel combustion and agricultural emissions.

The Climate Change Authority’s 2023 progress report briefly toys with the idea of separate targets, but doesn’t actually recommend any changes, merely stating that the authority will “continue to work on these issues”. Since then: radio silence. The 2024 equivalent doesn’t mention it, despite the 2024 revisions to land-use data being the biggest in Australia’s history of tracking emissions data.

I know this isn’t the only issue with Australia’s fossil fuel economy. But something about it strikes me as a significant failure of a simple acid test. A deep commitment to a goal means measuring progress and setting targets that don’t come packed with easy cheats. Dutton is cartoon evil blended with comic incompetence. But Labor uses a fleet of complex trickery to feign progress.

Does it matter whether pollution is dumped with a sheen of faux-progress or a brazen shamelessness? It ruins our habitat and wrecks our lives, no matter the tone of the polluter. The raw physical reality of safety in Earth’s atmosphere is inescapable, eventually. And both major parties are failing to take it seriously.

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