The new climate denialism: Labor’s Net Zero Plan
The Albanese government has released its plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050, with a target of 62 to 70 percent reductions by 2035. It is a hoax.
There are two ways to obstruct climate action: denialism and deceit. The Liberals have given us plenty of experience with the former. Labor is trying its hand at the latter. Its “Net Zero Plan” intends to neutralise the political issue of climate action (not the actual emissions) through a smokescreen of good vibes and creative accounting. When Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison was dragged kicking and screaming into presenting his net-zero plan in 2021, it was widely derided. Chris Bowen, now federal climate minister, at the time said it was a scam, not a plan. The same can be said for his, which differs very little in its essence.
Like Morrison’s, it is imbued with techno-mysticism, praying that solutions like green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage become commercially viable, to prevent any real costs to capitalists. Like Morrison’s, it cooks the emissions books so long they’ve turned black—claiming that Australia has already reduced emissions 29 percent on 2005 levels (every year Labor and Liberal governments arbitrarily raise the amount of carbon they estimate the land is taking out of the air). Like Morrison’s, it lets companies continue to increase their emissions. All they have to do is pay for some carbon credits to “offset” them.
Labor’s targets, despite what Albanese claims, are not “backed by the science”. In fact, the Climate Change Authority, which developed them, revised its numbers down after consultations with business. The Australian Academy of Science supports a target of 74 percent by 2030 and net-zero by 2035 as the only path consistent with the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping well below 2 degrees warming. Yet even this would be insufficient, as either of these targets—as the Academy points out—covers only a fifth of Australia’s emissions: those produced within its borders, never mind all the coal and gas exported overseas!
Yet to say that the target needs to be higher, or the plan more effective, misses the point. The point of the Net Zero Plan is to help us reconcile the irreconcilable—Labor claims to be reducing emissions while expanding fossil fuel exploitation.
Since Labor formed government in 2022, it has approved 31 new coal, gas and oil projects. In an analysis released this month, “The Albanese Government’s fossil fuel approvals”, the Climate Council estimated that these projects’ total lifetime carbon emissions will be 6.5 billion tonnes, equivalent to fifteen years of Australia’s current emissions. The colossal North West Shelf “carbon bomb” is meant to run until 2070, twenty years after we ought to have entered Labor’s new utopia of “green jobs and growth”.
In squaring this circle, the best thing Labor has got going for it is the Liberals themselves. Incapable of shedding its climate denialism, the Coalition has been the perfect foil, allowing Labor to present itself as a sensible climate pragmatist. It can pull off a feat the conservatives never could—cementing Australia’s climate-wrecking future under the mask of progressivism.
The consequences are extreme, as the first National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) makes clear. After delaying it for almost a year, the federal government released this report just days before its Net Zero Plan, hoping to control the story. It’s no surprise why—the NCRA spares no detail about the destruction the climate crisis will wreak. There are plenty of the ever-reddening heat maps you might expect, but the report also considers the details on the ground, like how heat will warp railways and impede supply lines, and how harsher droughts will increase suicide rates. It’s as close as you get to a totalising view of the cataclysmic crisis we’re facing.
Heatwaves are already the deadliest natural hazard in Australia, and will increase in intensity in the coming decades. At 3 degrees of warming, the NCRA predicts that heat-related mortality will more than triple in Melbourne and quintuple in Sydney and Darwin. Plant life will suffer greatly, swathes of our natural environment being destroyed and some of our most important carbon sinks being crippled. Between 40 and 70 percent of native plant species will be at risk.
More than 1.5 million people in Australia will experience sea level rise and coastal flooding by 2050 (when the NCRA expects us to hit 2 degrees warming), doubling to 3 million by 2090 (at 3 degrees). Combined with the threat of bushfires and inland flooding, 1 million homes will be at “very high risk” by 2050, rendering them uninsurable.
Indigenous Australians will be worse affected. The rate of sea rise in the Torres Strait is almost double the Australian average, and flooding will double by 2050. Remote communities deprived of adequate telecommunications infrastructure, housing and health care will be isolated when disasters strike. At the same time, the poor city suburbs where Aboriginal people are overwhelmingly concentrated are already urban heat islands, barrios of concrete and asphalt (like Blacktown and Sydney’s outer west) where heatwaves will kill the greatest numbers of people.
Labor is paving the way for this future. Its plans and targets are not half-measures but cover for expanding fossil fuels. We can’t allow them to obscure that fact.
