Wed Sep 17

Tony Wood on ‘politics trumping climate policy’ and the hard road ahead

Written by: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

The Albanese government this week released Australia’s first comprehensive National Climate Risk Assessment ^[1].

This report details a shocking picture ^[2] of the impact of climate change from now out to the 2090s, revealing heat-related deaths would soar, flooding would increase dramatically and rising sea levels would devastate some coastal areas. However, the report has had a mixed reception, with some of the assessment’s economic forecasts criticised as overly negative ^[3].

The government is also about to announce ^[4] its 2035 target for emissions reduction, with various stakeholders arguing strongly for different levels of ambition.

The Grattan Institute’s senior fellow for energy and climate change, Tony Wood, joined us on the podcast to discuss that climate report and the 2035 emissions target, as well as internal Opposition arguments ^[5] over its commitment to cutting emissions to net zero by 2050.

Wood said rather than taking the new assessment as a precise forecast of what Australia will be like in coming decades, it’s more useful to see it as “a warning of what could happen”.

[…] This is the first comprehensive economy-wide report we’ve seen. I was involved in the Garnaut Climate Change Review in 2008, and it did a similar sort of thing. But this is the first time it’s all been brought together […] It gives you a benchmark against which to measure progress.

[…] We need to be prepared. We need to be adapting and we need to make sure that things don’t turn out to be as bad as this analysis shows they could be.

Ahead of the government announcing its 2035 emissions target, Wood said Australia is currently only on track to cut emissions by around 50% below 2005 levels by then – “so we’re going to have to step up the pace” in this next decade.

Even though we’ve made good progress […] the hard yards are still ahead. So that’s why even [a 60% reduction], whilst it may not be considered enough by the environmental groups in this debate, is certainly not going to be lacking in ambition in terms of achieveability.

[…] But if it’s less than 60% […] it’ll be hard to see how that’s got environmental credibility. And, if it’s more than 75%, hard to see it’s got economic credibility. So they’re the two bookends for this debate.

Wood said partisan “climate wars ^[7]” over the past two decades have slowed down Australia’s progress on climate change:

The politics have trumped policy all the way through, and that is not a very nice place to be if you’re trying to make progress on something like this.

But he said that’s a global challenge, as some countries like the United States pull away from renewable energy and other climate projects, while others, including China, do more.

I think the Australian position very much mirrors the global position in terms of, for many people, climate change becoming less of an issue. And getting that back onto the agenda has got to be important. And unfortunately, I hope it’s not another season of big bushfires or terrible floods and so forth. That would be not the way to bring this back onto to the agenda.