Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's announcement that his government was committed to cutting CO2 emissions by 62-70 per cent by 2035 has everything to do with political grandstanding, and nothing to do with saving the planet.
It was no coincidence that the announcement was made on the eve of the visit to the United Nations General Assembly, where Mr Albanese announced that Australia would recognise the state of Palestine and hopes to host the next international climate conference in 2026.
This was before jetting off to London for photo ops with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and assorted leaders of other social democratic parties, to address the UK Labour Party Conference where an unpopular British PM is staring down his critics, and to visit King Charles at Balmoral. Not bad for a staunch republican!
It is significant that in global terms, Australia releases around one per cent of the world's emissions, which are now running at about 40 billion tonnes per year. The countries with the largest emissions include China, India, the United States, the European Union and Russia, and in most of these, emissions are rising rapidly. China alone produces over 30 per cent of global emissions, and its emissions are rising while Australia's are falling.
You would never get these facts from the report of the Climate Change Authority, which Mr Albanese and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen used to justify the further cutbacks in Australian energy use over the next decade.
When Labor came to power in 2022, it set an interim target to reduce greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) by 43 per cent by 2030.
According to the Climate Action Tracker website, Australia will fall far short of reaching its 2030 target, and its emissions will be around 10 per cent higher than the official target.
Even the ABC is sceptical of the government's latest announcement. One of its journalists wrote recently:
"Annual carbon pollution remains more or less at the level it was in 2022.
"New sources of fugitive emissions (which account for about 20 per cent of the national total) are being approved in the form of new mines and extended gas projects.
"There are ad-hoc policy frameworks in place to manage those emissions, such as the safeguard mechanism, but these are still largely articles of faith, too new to have demonstrated any real performance in cutting pollution.
"Similarly, vehicle emissions look unlikely to fall any time soon in a way that you'd notice in the national carbon account.
"EV sales seem stuck below 10 per cent of new vehicles sold - putting a serious question mark over the Climate Change Authority's advice to the government last week that half of all cars between now and 2035 need to be emission-free (i.e. electric vehicles)."
The Prime Minister and Climate Minister Chris Bowen have never acknowledged that Australia cannot and will not reach its 2030 target.
Despite this, they have now announced a new target, up from 43 per cent in 2030 to a huge 62-70 per cent just five years later!
To make it look as if they are serious about reaching the 2035 target, billions of dollars will be spent to subsidise what Chris Bowen repeatedly describes as "the cheapest forms of energy", wind and solar.
In addition, the government is spending big to support the construction of a new network of power transmission lines to connect wind and solar units to the existing electricity grid, and to guarantee prices of renewable energy, so as to ensure the very high private investment needed to build and operate them.
Additionally, the federal government is subsidising the roll-out of predominantly Chinese-made electric vehicles, which most Australians do not want.
Leith van Onselen from MacroBusiness, who formerly worked in the federal Treasury, wrote recently:
"The hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments required to meet Australia's emissions reduction targets will drive up Australian energy costs and taxes, resulting in further deindustrialisation as what remains of Australia's manufacturing industry is sent offshore, ultimately making us poorer."
The Prime Minister clearly thinks that if he is able to strut the world stage as a champion of renewable energy and secure the COP31 Climate Change Conference in 2026, people will forget the government's failure to meet its emission targets, just as they did not worry about the fact that Albanese did not meet his promise before the 2022 election to cut electricity prices.