A Look Back At Australia's (Not In A Good Way) "Extraordinary" Performance At COP-26
As the climate talks in Glasgow reach their midpoint, it’s worth taking a look back at Australia’s extraordinary performance in the first week. Fresh from the G20 meeting in Italy where he refused to agree to a ban on coal, the first thing Scott Morrison did upon arrival in Glasgow was a stand-up press conference, which barely mentioned the words climate change.
Next, he was up on the podium pronouncing his new net zero target as the best game in town, proudly proclaiming that Australia will overachieve its 2030 target, forgetting his climate informed audience was only too aware that without formally committing to increasing that target, it was pure spin. It will not be lost on many that the 20% reduction he claims already is not the result of anything done by his government but rather due to the rollout of renewables in the power sector, which his government has opposed. Australia’s reductions by 2030 are likely to happen anyway due to state action.
Nor will it be overlooked that his net zero target appears not to be zero at all: the few hard numbers deeply embedded in his report suggest that Scott Morrison’s net zero is more like a 66% reduction by 2050 from 2005 levels. For all of this, he won Australia’s first “Fossil of the Day” award from the Climate Action Network. Another gross exaggeration in Morrison’s net zero is its strong reliance on storing carbon in agricultural soils, but scientific experts said that the amount of carbon the government was claiming could not physically be done.
Meanwhile, energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor got Australia’s second Fossil of the Day award by holding a press conference amid great hoo-ha with gas giant Santos to promote carbon capture and storage, a technology that continues to fail. There is no better way to describe the significance of this by just pointing out that the amount of carbon that Santos proposes to capture per year is just 0.27% of Australia’s 2005 emissions. It will be used to produce even more gas and oil, and the government will subsidise it by assuming the long term liability for any release of carbon from its storage.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/08/which-side-of-history-will-the-morrison-government-be-on-when-glasgow-is-over