The Western Australian Labor government has ditched plans to reduce carbon emissions, according to a report by the ABC.
In 2023, Roger Cook’s government was supposed to legislate interim targets to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions on the way to 2050. This was going to happen in the Climate Change Bill 2023, which never made it through the state parliament. Now, according to the ABC, that bill will be replaced by the Clean Energy Powerhouse Bill, which has no interim emissions reduction targets at all.
Instead of reducing carbon emissions, the new bill would shift the goalposts by setting targets for expanding carbon capture and storage, “green exports” and renewable energy generation. Speaking in response to the ABC report, Cook tried to spin it as a step forward: “The globe’s the winner, but it may mean that Western Australia’s emissions increase relative to the rest of Australia, because of the important role that we’ll play in the global push to decarbonisation”.
In reality, the winner is the state’s massive fossil fuel industry, dominated by climate criminals Chevron, Woodside and Shell, which had $35.8 billion in sales of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the 2024-25 financial year, equivalent to almost 8 percent of WA’s annual economic output.
The new targets let these companies dodge the heat. The “green exports” target is about setting goals for commodities exported from WA to be produced with renewable energy. Together with the target for renewable generation in the general power grid, this dodges the elephant in the room: that the vast majority of WA’s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions aren’t recorded here.
A 2024 report by the Australia Institute found that almost 90 percent of the LNG produced in WA is exported or consumed in the process of enabling exports. When the LNG is shipped offshore, it’s no longer counted in domestic emissions or energy statistics.
Carbon capture and storage encompasses technologies that aim to remove carbon from the atmosphere and either use it in other industrial applications or store it underground. One problem, though, is that it is not yet anywhere near effective enough to be a reliable bet in the long term.
Last year, the Global CCS Institute estimated that the entire planet’s maximum capacity for carbon capture and storage would remove 64 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per annum. The most recent government figure for Western Australia’s annual emissions (in 2020-2021) was just above 80 million tonnes.
The other problem with carbon capture and storage is that it encourages the extraction of more fossil fuels. The carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere is often used to extract more oil from depleted reserves through a technique called enhanced oil recovery. This is the main reason fossil fuel companies invest in carbon capture research—that it can be spun as a way to address climate change is a nice bonus.
At the end of the day, carbon capture and storage is a nice-sounding cover-up for the fossil fuel industry to do more of what it’s already doing: making mega profits by condemning the planet to a climate apocalypse.
The state government has preserved its nominal goal of net zero emissions (presumably not counting exports) by the distant 2050. But a report commissioned by fossil fuel giant Woodside predicts that Western Australia wouldn’t reach net zero even if the pace of new renewable energy production was ramped up to ten times historical rates.
Dropping the interim emissions targets is the latest in a series of backwards steps by Roger Cook. Last year, his government lied about the impact of Woodside’s operations on ancient Indigenous rock art in Murujuga, around the Burrup Peninsula, so that an extension to the notorious North West Shelf Project would be approved. In 2024, he personally intervened to remove climate impacts from consideration in the approval of industrial developments. In 2023, his government backed down on the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act after an intense, racist campaign by the state’s mining and farming capitalist class, who wanted to reserve the right to exploit Aboriginal land, even if it meant destroying sacred cultural sites.
The only ambition that would be meaningful in averting climate catastrophe would be to shut down the fossil fuel industry. But those running the country are making too much money from it to even consider the question, especially in the great petrostate of Western Australia.
