The actual value of Australia’s ten-year carbon emissions plan remains to be seen, but as the government sales pitch got under way last week, the contrasting responses of the Greens on one side and Sussan Ley’s fraying Opposition on the other marked it as a political success.
The defeat of Labor’s carbon tax a decade ago showed how easily big plans can collapse under a campaign of doubt. So far, weight of evidence, disciplined marketing and a more informed public are keeping that particular demon at bay.
But nothing is ever settled, least of all now as the Albanese government commits Australia to a 2035 target range of 62 to 70 per cent below the level of emissions in 2005.
“Ambitious but achievable” is climate change minister Chris Bowen’s take-home description of the target ahead of lobbying in New York this week for Australia’s bid to join Pacific nations in hosting the 2026 Conference of Parties (COP 31) in Adelaide.
If parties base their decision on national ambition the 2035 target should seal the deal for Australia over Turkey, our sole remaining competitor. Other countries have ambitious targets, especially in Europe, but Turkey isn’t one of them.
Treasury modelling indicates this won’t be easy. The 62 per cent minimum target will require that half of new car sales up to 2035 must be electric, and that in 2035 the number of solar panels on homes will need to be be twice today’s figure, commercial solar installations three times higher, agricultural emissions six per cent lower and electricity generation about 15 per cent higher.
Of course it’s not enough. The Australia Institute, the Climate Council, the Greens and the broader environmental movement cited public and scientific support for a tougher target range along with powerful evidence in the government’s own dire risk analysis, released a couple of days earlier.
That’s the real-world position, based on what the real world needs. Then there’s the human-world position based on what leaders and others say humanity needs, boiling down to the argument that cost is more important than ambition.
There was a lot going on in that space last week. Responding to Labor’s 2035 and 2050 (net zero) targets, Coalition MPs and senators found themselves in a policy quagmire.
Senior WA liberal MP Andrew Hastie came out against the bipartisan 2050 target, then leader Sussan Ley declared the Coalition didn’t support setting climate targets even when in government. She quickly returned to correct the record: she didn’t support setting targets from opposition but recognised “the importance of targets in government”. But the damage was done.
Objecting to Bowen calling Coalition tactics “delay and denial”, Nationals leader David Littleproud protested that he believed in measures to limit man-made climate change but “not at any cost”. An ambitious target, he said, would wreck the economy at a time when other countries (notably the US) were pulling back.
As it happens, Treasury modelled the Coalition option of no interim target before 2040. It found such a “disorderly transition” in an economy like Australia’s would mean a more uncertain business environment, higher unemployment with lower wages, higher power prices and lower living standards.
It goes without saying that global warming is a current emergency calling for the toughest measures possible. The government’s approval of Woodside’s 45-year gas hub expansion on the eve of the climate plan was, the Australia Institute calculated, “equivalent to building 12 new coal power stations”. But nearly all those emissions will be recorded as belonging to countries importing the gas, not Australia. Unless those rules are changed, it won’t undermine the new target.
I take a little comfort from a New York Times article last week by the celebrated US climate writer David Wallace-Wells. With his country electing to be a petrostate, he wrote, China “is fast becoming what people in Silicon Valley, raised on science fiction, like to call the world’s first electrostate.”
He highlighted the fact that China – whose carbon emissions have been declining since 2023 – added more solar power just in the year to June than America has ever had, and so far in 2025 has installed twice as much solar as the rest of the world combined. And the solar revolution is taking off in the Global South, with imports of Chinese solar panels by a number of sub-Saharan countries rising tenfold, and in a few a hundredfold, since 2023.
No longer the touchstone of democracy, the US is also on the wrong side of economic history. Far from a global setback, we should see the Trump administration’s shift to fossil fuels as an opportunity for alternative paradigms. In this brave new world the cold, hard numbers of economics may yet save us.