Albanese takes his usual each-way bet on climate change

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

September 22, 2025 — 5.00am

After last week, Anthony Albanese and his Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen are entitled to a great sigh of relief. They made it through without anyone noticing what a weak job they’re doing of protecting our children and grandchildren’s future.

They began the week belatedly releasing an official report telling in shocking detail just how bad our lives will become if we and the other rich countries fail to do enough to stop global warming. They ended the week setting a target aiming to do insufficient over the decade to 2035.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

They offered a masterclass in convincing people you’re doing something to fix a problem when, in reality, you’re doing more to make it worse than make it better. If there was an Oscar for fooling the punters, these guys would win it.

And how did they do it? By waving around % signs. As required by the Paris climate change agreement of 2015, we have committed to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses by 43 per cent of their 2005 level by 2030.

In readiness for the next United Nations climate change conference in Brazil in November, we’ve had to set a target for further emission reductions by 2035. And last week the target was revealed: further reductions to between 62 per cent and 70 per cent of the 2005 level.

Brilliant. Those people who don’t care about climate change could grumble that 62 per cent is too much, while those who do care about it could complain that 70 per cent is too little.

Fortunately for Albanese, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said she was “dead against” the new target, while the greenies attacked it as inadequate.

Well done, Albo. This is surely the oldest trick in politics. If you can get yourself between someone saying you’re doing too much and someone else saying you’re doing too little, you make yourself look moderate and reasonable. You’re the epitome of the Sensible Centre.

This is Albanese, the man who’s been in politics for so long he’s forgotten why he wanted to be a politician, doing what by now comes naturally: taking an each-way bet. You’ve got a problem? I’m happy to do a bit to help.

Of course, I won’t help you so much I annoy other people. I might lose their votes. I don’t want to actually fix problems, just be seen trying to fix them.

This is Albanese, the man who’s been in politics for so long he’s forgotten why he wanted to be a politician, doing what by now comes naturally: taking an each-way bet.

But the other part of last week’s illusion was that setting a target for what you’ll have achieved in 10 years – or 25 years in the case of net zero – isn’t the same as actually doing something. It’s just promising to do something sometime.

And don’t forget that pollies face elections every three or four years. This makes setting targets for the distant future the easiest thing a politician can do. You reckon Albo and Bowen will still be around in 10 years to face the music?

What about 2050? By then, every pollie associated with the net-zero commitment will be long dead. Know the great advantage of that? You won’t be around for your grandkids to ask you why you didn’t try a helluva lot harder to stop them ending up in the poo.

What’s lost when we debate whether 70 per cent is better or worse than 62 per cent, is that neither is sufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the global average temperature increase to “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”, while also pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said she was “dead against” the new target.

As the independent Climate Council has said, “to contribute to keeping heating well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, after which climate impacts become especially catastrophic and severe”, we’d need to set a net zero target for 2035.

And debating percentages avoids the question, 62 to 70 per cent of what? Well, annual emissions, of course. But why has Australia chosen 2005 as the base date for reductions? What’s special about 2005?

Let me tell you. That base was chosen in 2015 by the Abbott government. Why? Because by then, it was clear that 2005 was the peak year for emissions. They’d fallen a lot since then. That was a year of much land clearing for farming but, since then, state governments had been able to greatly reduce land clearing. Cutting down trees and shrubs releases carbon dioxide. Allowing them to continue growing absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Get it? In 2015, we picked 2005 as our base date knowing there’d already been a huge reduction in our total emissions because of changes in our land use. So, in the battle to reduce emissions, we gave ourselves a big head start.

As the Australia Institute has shown, if you exclude the marked decline in emissions from land use, our emissions have been flatlining. The modest reduction in emissions from electricity has been sufficient to offset the growth in other sectors. We’ve made no progress in transport or industry. But there’s little scope for land use emissions to continue falling.

So, apart from setting targets, what has the Albanese government been doing to reduce emissions over its three-and-a-half years in office? Not much. It has patched up the Coalition government’s “safeguard mechanism” which, in theory, will require some of our biggest polluting industries to reduce their net emissions. Trouble is, they can do so by buying dodgy carbon credits.

Labor hasn’t even saved itself about $12 billion a year by eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. In fact, the Albanese government has been making things worse by approving 10 coal projects, approving the drilling of more than 200 new gas wells and agreeing to extend Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project out to 2070.

Regardless of whether they’re sufficient, it’s not at all clear the government will be able to achieve its emission reduction targets for 2030 and 2035. If it was fair dinkum in trying to halt climate change it would have re-introduced the thing that could hasten the transition: a carbon tax.

But no, much safer to just have a bob each way.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.