Polly Hemming hung out with the Nannas for a couple of hours when we were on the lawn at Parliament House in Canberra recently. Polly is the Director of the Australia Institute’s Climate & Energy program.
Polly spoke to the Nannas and her key points were:
If you want to stop putting greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere you:
Stop
Putting
Greenhouse gases
Into the atmosphere.
And it doesn’t matter where they’re emitted because we feel them here. And that’s what’s nuts about this idea………..
When the government says we can be a renewable energy superpower, we can help the world reduce its emissions globally – that’s an implicit acknowledgement, or an indirect acknowledgement that we are currently helping to increase global emissions. They just don’t follow that logic.
So we know that producing and burning fossil fuels – coal, oil, gas – is by far the largest source of these greenhouse gas emissions. The next largest source is probably land clearing and deforestation which of course doesn’t just release CO2 into the atmosphere, it breaks that carbon cycle.
So if you want to stop making climate change worse, first and foremost you stop extracting and burning fossil fuels and you stop clearing land.
That’s the solution – the policy solution. We’re told that that’s unrealistic and naive.
- So you don’t subsidise these activities.
- You don’t make them easier.
- You don’t promote them.
- You don’t tell people how critical they are for the economy.
- You don’t travel to other countries promising that you will keep selling them fossil fuels or convincing them to keep buying them.
- You stop doing these things.
- You might even tax them.
- Regulate them.
And unless you stop doing these things, you’re not going to make any difference. So it doesn’t actually matter how many wind turbines you build. It doesn’t matter how many times you say “renewable energy superpower”. It doesn’t matter how many times you avoid having the conversation about fossil fuels. More renewables doesn’t automatically displace or replace fossil fuels.
So it’s great to hear how the regions are going to have more renewables and it’s going to create jobs, but unless every politician is saying we are going to be addressing fossil fuels ………………………..
We need to see an end to fossil fuel subsidies and approvals. They’re kind of just tinkering at the edges. We need to see a bit more bravery from the cross benchers – that’s what they were voted in for. And they need to address this root cause – you can’t just pick and choose what you want to talk about when it comes to climate change.
So you stop doing the things that are putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, then you do the things that will minimize further harm – or even repair some of the damage and restore ecosystems. You plant trees, you subsidise public transport, you make walking and riding easier, you get those clean industries up and running, you incentivise renewable energy, you use your foreign policy influence to influence other countries to help wean them off fossil fuels, replace them with something, and help them adjust their economies.
And unfortunately we’ve already done so much damage that adaptation plays a role too. And you put all your weight behind all these things, and you make sure that your policies are not directly contradicting each other.
You don’t announce a
NET ZERO AUTHORITY
and then announce a
FUTURE GAS STRATEGY
because you are wasting everyone’s time
We know what is causing emissions going into the atmosphere, so
No New Fossil Fuels
End Native Forest Logging – it’s not a state problem, the Federal government can do that, and they don’t need the EPBC Act
Stop Subsidizing Fossil Fuels