The danger of those running hard in exactly the wrong direction on climate
By: Ketan Joshi
Tags: Corporations, Government, Climate

It is 2020. Climate impacts are no longer predictions; they are descriptions. Wildfires in Australia and California, floods in Bangladesh, countless other daily news reports. These impacts are beginning to accelerate, but so are efforts to properly detach fossil fuels from human existence.

Just in the past week, California just announced a ban on the purchase of fossil cars by 2035. China has sent shockwaves around the world by announcing a net zero by 2060 target. General Electric announced it will stop making parts for coal plants.

Promises aren’t sufficient, and each could end up as platitudes rather than progress. Decarbonisation has plenty of catching up to do, and it’s still far behind, but some of these runners are accelerating and gaining ground. That’s not enough, but it’s not nothing, either.

Among this, some have chosen to run as hard as possible in precisely the wrong direction. Governments and companies are making awful decisions, at a time when excuses of ignorance or uncertainty have long past. Since we all need to heaving at the same bearing, we need to take a look at those sabotaging the effort.

Australia’s government is running hard in the wrong direction

The Australian government’s post-bushfire climate policy response has been to aggressively move backwards; worsening policy positions as it increases support for fossil fuels and botches the first steps of the energy transition.

The support for fossil fuels is being channelled primarily through the ‘gas fired recovery’, a post-COVID policy package that makes it rain taxpayer money for the people who extract fossil gas from the ground, move it around and burn it for power.

“Gas has chosen itself” Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, September 2020

The botching of energy policy has been happening for roughly twenty years now. In the early 2000s, the Howard government proposed ignoring solutions like wind, solar and carbon pricing, and incentivising a ‘technology’ based approach. ‘Zero emissions’ became ‘low emissions’, as fossil fuels were envisioned as continuing business as usual, with some slight reductions from experimental technologies like ‘carbon capture and storage’. Leaked minutes from meetings of the ‘low emissions technology advisory group’ revealed this nugget:

“Minister [Ian MacFarlane] stressed the need for absolute confidentiality. He said that if the Renewables Industry found out there would be a huge outcry”

Just under twenty years later, MacFarlane is Chief Executive of a fossil fuels lobby group, and the government’s “Low Emissions Technology Statement” has been released, hand-waving away efforts to accelerate transitions in electricity and transport, instead opting to provide funding to fossil fuel projects. ‘Technology not taxes’ describes a scheme in which technologies are being funded by taxes — specifically, high emissions technologies. The ‘technology’ focus is deceptive labelling: it is far more about reducing new technology than it is about increasing it.

To work hard to expand the extraction and burning of a fossil fuel while intentionally obscuring the vast opportunities for deployment of mature technologies like wind, solar, batteries, power lines, electric vehicles and heat pumps, is to step directly backwards.

Companies are running hard in the wrong direction, too

You don’t need to look particularly far to find empty climate promises. The CEO of Amazon (a company that recently promised to build the eye-wateringly ironic ‘climate pledge arena’) promised $10 billion for climate projects earlier this year, with the first grants due out by the end of summer. Well, in the northern hemisphere, it’s the end of summer, and there has been nothing.