Courtesy of The Daily Telegraph.
22.09.2025
The Albanese government’s commitment to 70 per cent emissions reduction could be this government’s political death warrant if it’s handled properly.
Having legislated a 43 per cent reduction target for 2030, that it will fail to meet; and an 82 per cent renewable energy target, that it will fail to meet; the government has doubled down on failure in its five year plan by announcing even more ambitious and even less achievable targets for its ten year plan.
Australia won’t meet Labor’s targets but could commit national economic suicide in the attempt.
Running our power system to cut emissions rather than to produce reliable and affordable power has already meant that we subsidise renewables to increase their penetration; we subsidise coal to keep the lights on; and we subsidise consumers to prevent a voter revolt.
Already, the result has been much higher power prices, the closure of much heavy industry and the demand for subsidies from the rest.
There is only one renewable energy superpower – that’s China that’s supplying the solar panels and wind turbines that are undermining our economic strength and increasing our strategic vulnerability.
This is madness – and it will just get worse, much worse under this government – that’s peddling a false environmental apocalypse to justify up-ending people’s lives in ways they would never accept if they were told the truth.
Apart from much higher power prices due to the need for reliable back up for unreliable renewables, achieving 70 per cent would mean the end of heavy industry in this country, the near total replacement of our vehicle fleet, much less meat in our diet, and much less air travel in our lives.
Then there’s the devastation of prime agricultural land and pristine national parks with forests of wind turbines and carpets of solar panels taking up a land area at least one and half times the size of Tasmania.
And a complete failure to take advantage of the AI revolution because we will lack the reliable power to drive it.
Then there’s the cost. The government says this “transition” is the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution but refuses to cost it other than to say that a disorderly transition would cost $2 trillion more than an orderly one.
The Business Council of Australia recently costed a 60 per cent emissions reduction target at up to a half a trillion dollars.
The Net Zero Australia study put the cost at up to 1.5 trillion dollars by 2030 alone.
When pressed, the government falls-back on saying the cost of action will always be less than the cost of inaction.
Yet we know that the cost of inaction is “virtually nothing” because that’s what the former Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, told the senate would be the global impact of Australia’s effort to cut emissions.
Trying to reduce emissions is a worthy objective, provided it’s at minimal cost, because physics tells us that all things being equal, an increase in atmospheric CO2 would warm the planet.
But there’s no reason to think that mankind’s CO2 is the only or even the main contributor to climate change – if it were, how are previous climate changes to be explained?
The trouble with maintaining a commitment to achieving Net Zero by 2050, come what may, is the straitjacket it places on all policy. That why it has to be dropped – and the sooner the better.
At one level, an argument about what might happen 25 years hence, or at least eight elections away, is an exercise in political theology.
But keeping such a commitment, while opposing the government’s current reduction target, just means that even more herculean measures will be needed later.
It’s also worth remembering that every time the Coalition has fought on climate and energy – in 2010, 2013, and 2019 – it’s done well.
And every time it’s effectively me-tooed Labor it’s done badly.
My side of politics owes it to the country and our future to have this fight.
The above is excerpted from former prime minister Tony Abbott’s remarks at the CPAC convention, Brisbane, this past weekend.
