Making the cut
Australia has reduced its 2005-level emissions by 18% without any significant economic impost, while supposedly climate progressive countries have failed to make any cuts. By Nick Cater.
Joe Biden called an international summit last week to parade his administration’s virtue on climate change. He pledged to cut 2005-level greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, a goal twice as ambitious as that set by the Obama administration. It was left to Greta Thunberg to expose the emptiness of the promise. The ramped-up targets were “reliant on future, fantasy-scaled, currently barely existing negative emissions technologies”, she said.
On this point at least, Thunberg and Scott Morrison are on the same page. The Prime Minister is reluctant to commit his country to net-zero emissions by 2050 without the technology to get us there. As Thunberg said, “we can fool others and even ourselves, we cannot fool nature and physics”.
Honesty is a lowly ranked virtue for the climate cognoscenti, who sharpened their keyboards to savage Morrison for his performance at Biden’s summit. Nine Media’s Peter Hartcher was incensed at the PM’s chosen backdrop. The Sydney Opera House was a symbol of boldness and ambition, he wrote, but Morrison’s contribution was timid and complacent. In Hartcher’s view, Biden’s supposed disappointment in Morrison was apparent by his low ranking on the list of speakers, 22nd out of 40. Number one was China, incidentally, a country that is hardly the most dependable climate ally.
China’s contribution to global emissions grows year by year. In 2018 it was responsible for 28.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than those of the entire OECD. While developed nations such as the US and Canada punish business and consumers with threatened carbon taxes, China has no plans to begin reducing emissions until 2030. It pledges to reach net-zero by 2060, 10 years after the deadline to become “strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful”, a target agreed by the 19th Party Congress.
In the climate debate, the problem of China is frequently subsumed by the declining self-belief of liberal democracies. The incoming Biden administration has mainstreamed the language of catastrophism, crossing the rhetorical tipping point from risk to an existential threat. It is the policy equivalent of the melting of the Arctic permafrost, exponentially increasing the risk of policy overreach, since an existential threat radically alters the cost-benefit equation.
It works like this. In 1997, Biden’s finance secretary, Janet Yellen, then chair of Bill Clinton’s council of economic advisers, said steps to avoid global warming would not be allowed to jeopardise the president’s progress toward revitalising the economy. “Any policy he ultimately endorses on climate change will be informed by his commitment to sustaining a healthy and robust economy,” she told a Senate committee on July 17 that year.
Today, Yellen, as Biden’s economist-in-chief, has joined the climate emergency panic. Last month she described climate change as the biggest emerging risk to the US financial system. That’s quite a call when US government debt is at $US28 trillion, inflation is building, COVID-19 has yet to be tamed and Chinese belligerence grows by the day. Yellen proposes a carbon tax beginning at $US40 a tonne and rising every year until 2030.
If Biden were looking for a way to kill the economic revival that began under his predecessor, Yellen has provided one. In a speech last week, she said the science demanded “bold and urgent action, nothing less than transforming important sectors of the global economy”. She admitted the measures would “adversely affect firms and workers in some industries”, a polite way of saying some Americans will lose jobs.
The catastrophic threat to the US economy of which Yellen speaks is not climate change, but the Biden administration’s overreaction, driven in part by the imperative to show he is different to Donald Trump.
Worse policy choices still are being made across the border in Canada, where Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax will rise to $CA170 per tonne by 2030. The government has not released any quantitative economic analysis of the impact of the tax, but modelling by the Fraser Institute forecasts a loss of 184,000 jobs and a 1.8 per cent fall in GDP, which will lead to a decline in average wages of $CA1540 a year. In the unlikely event Canada can persist with these measures without a civil war, the chances of meeting its Paris target, a 30 per cent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030, are slim. It will overshoot its 2020 target and its 2025 target, since its greenhouse gas emissions of 730 Mt CO2 equivalent in 2019 were barely 1 per cent less than in 2005.
Australia, the alleged climate change villain, has cut emissions by about 18 per cent over that period. In 2005, the average Australian’s carbon footprint was 30 per larger than the average Canadian’s, but today they are roughly the same.
The same comparison can be made with New Zealand, land of the sainted Jacinda Ardern, which has failed to reduce its emissions since 2005. NZ’s plan, such as it is, to be carbon neutral by 2050, ignores agriculture, the sector that produces the largest greenhouse gases.
How good is Australia, as the Prime Minister once famously asked. In 2018, our actual reductions since 2005 in proportionate terms were on par with The Netherlands and better than those of Lithuania, the US, Austria, Japan, Norway, the Czech Republic, Estonia, NZ, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Israel, Slovenia, Turkey and Latvia. If they were to be measured per capita, we could add Denmark, Belgium, Slovak Republic, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Ireland to that list.
Since it would be churlish to apply a partisan edge on this topic, we shall simply note that the Coalition has been in government for 10 of the 16 years since 2005. The achievements have been made without a carbon tax and a relatively small impact on the economy and employment.
Labor’s natural inclination would be to imitate the Biden administration’s posturing in search of plaudits from The Sydney Morning Herald. The party would be wise to learn the lessons of recent electoral history and observe the fate of leaders in both parties who have taken this path.
Listen to Nick Cater discuss this piece with 2GB’s Michael McLaren