“This is a gift,” trilled the climate activist Simon Holmes a Court this week, after Peter Dutton signalled a resumption of hostilities in Australia’s long climate war.
By Thursday, Dutton had refined his message, emphasising during a press conference that a Coalition government would stand by the target of reaching net zero by 2050 but would not risk “destroying the economy” with a 2030 target of 43 per cent, or a 2035 target that is expected to fall in the range of 65 to 75 per cent.“I am not going to sign up to a policy that the prime minister is proposing at the moment during a cost-of-living crisis,” he said.
This so-called “ratchet mechanism” is at the heart of the treaty and is seen as the only way the world might reach the goal of stabilising the climate later in the century. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and its climate chief, Simon Stiell, refer to the 2020s as “the crucial decade”.
Wei Sue, acting chief executive of Climateworks Centre, a climate and business think tank that operates throughout the region and is based at Monash University, agrees. Late last year the energy department published a report suggesting Australia was heading towards 42 per cent by 2030 – 1 per cent shy of the goal.
But he rejected Dutton’s suggestion that the potential of missing a target was cause to abandon the effort. They want action on climate, says Reed, but Dutton has inoculated himself on this by backing the more distant 2050 target and restricting reactors to Nationals seats. And though there is significant risk in the nuclear strategy, Australians are not as fearful of the technology as they once were.