When people describe themselves as agnostic we take it to mean they don’t know what they believe. The dictionary tells us it comes from the Greek “agnostos”, which means not knowing.
Now the word has crept into Australia’s climate debate. At the launch of their “Affordable and Responsible” plan last week, both Coalition leaders Sussan Ley (Liberal) and David Littleproud (National) spoke of their plan’s “technology-agnostic” approach to reducing emissions.
Agnostic is the right word. Both leaders cautioned against discussing the future because neither has a clue as to how the “breakthrough” technologies they briefly mentioned – blue hydrogen (hydrogen made from fossil fuels), carbon capture and storage and small modular nuclear – can be deployed at the scale needed to affect global emissions. Because they can’t.
Both leaders said they accept that human-induced warming is real and that cutting emissions is important, but, said Ley, “it’s all about affordability”. “Why wouldn’t you … prioritise affordable energy instead of the ideology of an 82 per cent renewable grid by 2030, which everyone acknowledges cannot be reached?”
Ideology? Ambitious targets are our only hope. Australia is a significant global player as both an influencer and, to our shame, a fossil fuel supplier. We must be a leading voice for the one single action known to have a chance of slowing planetary heating, ending their use.
The Coalition has determined that renewable energy, a key weapon in our climate struggle, is its enemy while gas- or coal-fired power is the most affordable when it’s actually the most expensive. Our real economy versus their fanciful ideology is the catch-cry of fossil fuel’s most ardent supporters, led by Barnaby Joyce and Senator Matt Canavan.
Last week’s indifferent public response suggests that this false claim hasn’t worked for now, but as Ley pointed out the next election is still years away, allowing ample time to work up the slogans and get the message out. For which you need money, and for that you just need to know where to look.
One place to see money at work is Belem, on Brazil’s Amazon River, which has just hosted tens of thousands of COP 30 delegates. Often thought of as environmental talkfests, these meetings have increasingly become a focus of industrial lobbying at a scale and intensity rarely seen in world affairs.
The climate journalism group DeSmog reported that global agribusiness giants paid nearly 200 Brazilian social media influencers to extol the virtues of livestock farming and cropping, which between them have deforested about 20 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, a crucial regulator of global climate.
But the biggest lobbying presence, as always at these meetings, was the fossil fuel contingent, and it got what it paid for – no mention in the final communiqué of the one thing that’s completely essential if we’re to escape this enveloping climate crisis, a phase-out of fossil fuels. Reprehensible, but unsurprising.
Yet there are glimmers of light. Unlikely as it seems, the Albanese government’s climate policy may be in for a serious makeover. In Belem, in the process of ceding next year’s COP meeting to Türkiye, climate minister Chris Bowen secured the role of “president of negotiations” for that meeting, to be held in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya.
At the same time a breakout contingent led by Colombia and the Netherlands announced they would co-host the first of what is planned as an annual event, an international conference aimed at ending fossil fuel use globally, next April at Colombia’s main coal export port, Santa Marta.
Unexpectedly, considering our country’s reputation as a fossil fuel exporter, Australia joined 23 others in signing the “Belem Declaration on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels”. It’s not hard to see why; the list of signatories includes most of the nations of the Pacific on whose behalf Australia had been seeking to host COP 31 next year.
The fact that Bowen signed on to the fossil fuel phase-out statement while negotiating his pivotal COP organising role signals that he sees the Colombia-Netherlands proposal as something he needs to be part of.
At the same time, his COP role also gives him a rare opportunity to introduce new thinking to a UN framework fraying at the edges and threatening to break under the weight of decades of self-serving deals and missed opportunities.
With those Pacific communities breathing down his neck, Bowen may yet serve up a COP 31 for the ages. Success in Antalya would also leave the Coalition’s policy to abandon previously-agreed climate goals looking even shoddier than the train wreck it is today. If that’s possible.