6 days Ago By Ketan Joshi
And we’re back. Following on from , here’s a rundown of the second half of the energy debate between Chris Bowen and the Coalition’s Ted O’Brien, where a series of journalists ask questions of the pair. The first question is from News Corp’s Greg Brown, who somewhat angrily grills Bowen for sticking with the party’s economy-wide 43% target for 2030 and a target of 82% renewable energy by 2030.
Bowen casually claims last year’s projections modelling shows Australia is ‘on track’ to meet that reduction. Brown claims the business community opposes the targets, which doesn’t seem to be backed up by anything I can find. Bowen is somewhat overstating how ‘on track’ Australia is, here – in addition to broadly presenting climate targets and ambition in a problematic way.
While the do ultimately project emissions to be around 43% lower than 2005 levels by 2030, that leans very heavily on the land-use sector ‘reabsorbing’ the continued emissions from power, mining, transport, industry and agriculture. In fact, from the 2023 report to the 2024 report, future power sector emissions to 2030 were actually revised upwards – and historical power sector emissions have been higher than previous projections. It was revisions to land-use (both changes in the view of the future, but also massive and strange methodological changes resulting in wild revisions of historical data, too) that provided most of the shift to being ‘on track’: As I , the government has been leaning hard on wild revisions to land-use data (more dramatic than anything the Coalition did) to claim progress, even while emissions are not ‘over-performing’ against older forecasts, which should have been raising alarm bells instead.
The most recent projections report shifts towards being more confident in projecting deeper emissions cuts from both the Safeguard Mechanism (a mandatory carbon offset purchasing scheme for industry) and the vehicle efficiency standards. On the power target, it is hard to avoid the fact that the past few years have seen a departure from the steep trajectory required – according to , that’s true for both the 82% target and the sector-specific emissions target laid out in the 2021 Reputex report. What stands out to me though is the insinuation in Brown’s question: if you are off track from a target, the best response is to just ditch the target rather than figure out how to get back on track.
There is already material progress – the Clean Energy Council’s latest quarterly report shows a boom in renewable energy construction and that’ll flow through to power and emissions data in the coming years regardless of who wins the election. But the 2024 CCA progress report does indeed highlight that much more needs to be done. I’m just not sure that News Corp has ‘stronger climate policies’ in mind here – they seem to be pushing for a total retreat from climate ambition in response to the wiggles and challenges of the past few years.
Now, O’Brien responds. “When they came to office, the Coalition had reduced emissions by 29% on 2005 levels. You know what it is today? Around 29%.
They actually haven’t budged. This is the problem: emissions aren’t even going down”. He’s overstating slightly (the latest report shows emissions have fallen 31%) but he’s largely correct – the fall in emissions of the past decade has largely stopped in the past few years.
What he fails to mention is that the majority of emissions reductions that occurred during the Coalition’s tenure were either from the problematic land-use sector, or from the impact of Labor’s renewable energy target policy – a policy they tried, and failed, to scrap when in government. “Labor, the Coalition – nobody in this country will be able to achieve the emissions target set by Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese”. It feels like the idea of the 2030 target as “unachievable” has become ossified in professional energy spaces in Australia, but the simply reality is that even if fossil emissions rise, the land-use sector data can be fudged to fake achievement of the target.
O’Brien’s solution of course is not to improve the target and accelerate climate action, but to give up entirely. He correctly assumes this brand of fatalism and laziness is popular in the business community, and he presents a classic climate delay trope: over-focusing on the “costs” of climate action and giving some hints as to how the Coalition would go about falsely justifying cuts to climate policies (some messy modelling that claims it’s too “costly”). What follows is a long, protracted exchange between O’Brien and Bowen debating the way costs are presenting in their models of the future.
O’Brien is stuck on ‘total system costs’ in AEMO’s ISP (what he claims is $600 billion), and Bowen prefers ‘net present value’, which is $120 billion. O’Brien regularly repeats the that their plan will be 44% cheaper. These massive and deeply uninteresting numbers are hurled around debates and headlines, but there’s very little chance they mean anything to most people.
Replacing Australia’s entire fleet of coal and ags generators with anything is going to be very expensive, but it also has to be done. Is this a useful debate when both sides exclude the financial benefits of not choking the planet to death with planet-warming pollution? It’s strange that this didn’t happen earlier, but my nemesis Chris Uhlmann appears, and asks a question that is weird enough to be worth repeating in full: “Chris Bowen in December 2021 you commissioned modeling which showed and you pledged that you would drop power prices by now by $275 for residential uh homes uh you committed to it again in April 2022 when you were told that that modeling was flawed you continued to commit to it in 2023 and 2024 even though electricity prices were rising you continued to be committed to it when you started subsidizing power bills. “Now this year as subsidies now cracked through a new record and they’re going through the end of the year you’re spending billions of dollars on that, you are now claiming that electricity price falls due to subsidies are a fall in an electricity bill.
Now electricity prices are rising, aren’t they Minister, that’s written into every electricity bill isn’t it Minister and if you can’t admit that simple fact here today why should anyone believe anything that you say?” Bowen: “Well, thank you for the question Chris. I’m not exactly sure, uh, what your question really is, in reality”. Yeah .
.. I’m not sure either.
It’s a good reminder of how Sky News Australia have essentially presented far-right blogging with the style and tone of professional journalism. O’Brien gets asked whether the party will ditch nuclear plans if they lose the election (I think the more fun question is whether they’ll ditch them if they win, but that’s just me). And he claims: “nuclear has proven, around the world, to be the fastest way to decarbonise electricity grids father than any other form of technology through the historical examples”.
You will notice the word “fastest” in there – this is a long-running trope enhanced by a bunch of graphics shared around by nuclear power advocates that carefully centre nuclear construction in France last century. The relatively simple reality, as you can see from Ember’s , is that in the 30 countries with some non-zero amount of nuclear power, in 2024 only two have managed to see a share greater than 50%. And while the top 5 wind and solar countries have seen an eye-watering increase in share from those two technologies, the top 5 nuclear countries are mostly stagnating or falling in the share of nuclear: Ted O’Brien doesn’t clarify whether Australia would leave the Paris Climate Agreement if their modelling showed it was too ‘costly’ to hit targets, sparking some media coverage – and he later the intent to stay in.
A similar flurry in June last year, with Peter Dutton to leave Paris. It’s reflective of their headspace right now: they want to appeal to their conservative base, but the more they look and , the worse their poll numbers slide. Nothing particularly new or major seemed to come out of this debate, but a few themes emerged consistently.
Exhausting spats about the specifics of models took up most of the time, but the fundamental nature of why we’re doing any of this – to tackle climate change – seems to have been entirely forgotten by everyone in these rooms. Can you really focus narrowly and solely on “cost-of-living” when climate change threatens whether or not people are living? The Coalition’s energy future is lazy and retrograde. If there’s even a slight deviation from targets and ambitions, their first instinct is to ditch them entirely.
It isn’t a view entirely unwelcome in Australia’s energy industry, or among commentators at large media outlets, who seem to agree that if you’re not on track to meet a target, you should get rid of the target instead of doing more to meet it. It’s all a flimsy rationalisation for a near-term future of dragging coal power lifespans out for as long as possible, coated with a unchecked extraction of fossil gas. Labor’s energy future is ambitious.
But ambition only really means something when you have people checking rigorously whether it’s being followed. Their improved ‘Capacity Investment Scheme’ is obviously causing a resurgence of new build, and that is good, but it isn’t clear whether that’s enough to put Australia back on track for 82% renewables. The Safeguard Mechanism isn’t likely to cause deep reductions any time soon thanks to unlimited carbon offsets, and the vehicle efficiency standards will take a long time to take effect (and the magnitude of that effect is questionable, too).
This could have been an opportunity for journalists to ask real questions about the ways Labor can reasonably get back on track to real climate action, but it was a debate about footnotes in PDFs rather than the hard realities of climate and energy..
