Back in 2009, The Black Eyed Peas’ Boom Boom Pow topped the Billboard Hot 100. That was also the year in Australia when Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd tried to introduce a scheme to curb carbon emissions.
The Liberal National Party opposition opposed his legislation and, without the conservatives on board, Labor depended on support in the upper house of parliament from the Greens. But the Greens opposed it on the ground that it did not go far enough. Bye-bye, Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
In 2012 Rudd’s successor, Julia Gillard, introduced a carbon tax. The year’s hit by Gotye — Somebody That I Used to Know — was apt. The short-lived tax was repealed two years later after the Liberal National Party took power. Happy [or not, depending on your view] by Pharrell Williams topped the Billboard in 2014.
In a country that relies heavily on mining to underpin its economy and standard of living, the broken record of carbon policy is playing a familiar tune in 2023. A new government is on stage. But there is no guarantee it will be able to play a new tune.
It did not start like this. Australia’s politicians generally supported a push by the Toronto Conference on Changing Atmosphere in 1988 (the year of Faith by George Michael) for developed countries to stabilise emissions at 1988 levels by 2000, and to cut them 20% by 2005.
But consensus fell apart after Australia’s 1991 recession, when inertia, self-interest, ideology — and well-documented campaigns to sow confusion and cast doubt in people’s minds about the clarity of the science — prevented Australia from taking meaningful steps.
The mismanagement of Australia’s energy and climate policies are a lesson in nonleadership. Labor keeps fighting policy arguments about greenhouse gas reductions against its own union allies representing mining workers.
The Liberal National Party emphasises what carbon pricing would do to the cost of living and argued ahead of one election in 2019 that to encourage electric vehicles would “end the weekend” by forcing people out of four-wheel drives because they are expensive, will not tow trailers or boats or reach camping spots.
But with bushfires and floods ravaging the country — sometimes concurrently — Australia has no choice, and the public mood seems to accept this. The Labor government elected last May set a new 43% emissions reduction target (albeit of 2005 levels, not 1990 levels, which the EU uses as its baseline) by 2030.
Still, decades of uncertainty have given power companies little confidence to make new investments in energy-generating capacity. While the country has lots of solar power and wind, it is not clear what long-duration energy storage and generation facilities will be available to tide the economy over when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. The country’s coal-powered fire stations are held together by rubber bands and sticky tape.
In February the Australian Energy Market Operator — a body that manages the connected electricity market for Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia, covering about 88% of the population — warned that from 2025 the lights are at risk of going out without “urgent and ongoing investment” in new capacity. (Western Australia and Northern Territory are so far from the rest of the country that they have their own networks.)
Last month the market operator said of a total pipeline of potential projects adding up to 209GW of capacity of mostly large-scale solar, wind and storage, only about 10GW is currently committed. The debate now is about gas, a fuel that can be turned on to generate power when other sources are not available. But it is also a fossil fuel.
Labor once again dominates the lower house of parliament, but needs the Greens’ help in the senate to pass new legislation — in the parliamentary session that started this week — for its Climate Safeguard Mechanism, aimed at reducing emissions by the 215 biggest resources and manufacturing companies.
The Greens say they will only support it if it outlaws all new coal and gas projects. On Monday Labor environment minister Tanya Plibersek called the Greens “self-righteous”. Meanwhile, the Greens say the planned scheme already relies too much on offsets that allow companies to reduce carbon emissions on paper, but not in practice.
The Black Eyed Peas said it 14 years ago, but we’re still feeling it on climate policy in Australia: “I’m so 3008, you so 2000 and late ... that future boom boom boom — let me get it now.”
• Bleby is a senior reporter with The Australian Financial Review, based in Melbourne.
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