Month: September 2025

The Australian federal government led by Labor’s Anthony Albanese has just announced an “emissions reduction” target for 2035 of “62-70%.” You can read about the ins and outs of this in Crikey, Crikey, the Guardian, the Conversation, the ABC , the Australia Institute, Climate Council  etc.

As the last notes  if the point of the exercise is “to contribute to keeping heating well below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, after which climate impacts become especially catastrophic and severe” well then “to have a strong chance of meeting this goal, Australia would need to set a net zero target for 2035).“

In this piece I (who the hell am I? (!) want to step back from the (important and justified criticism of Team Fossi, sorry Team Albanese and take a more historical perspective.

The essay below is divided into four sections.  The first three are historical – covering 1988-1996 (“let’s make promises”), 1996-2014 (“let’s NOT make promises”/”let’s get this off the table so I can have a government”) and 2014 to the present (“A brain Paris-ite ate my brain”).  The final section – “what next/what does it all mean” – suggests kayfabe is no longer an adequate epithet, but “the peek-a-bo Fafocene” might just work.

Period 1: 1988 to 1996  – “let’s make promises, but with caveats”

The possibility of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere really screwing things up first appears in a parliamentary document in September 1969 

[source]

– a Senate Select Committee on Air Pollution had been warned about this by a professor working in Tasmania.  In 1973 some Treasury bureaucrats had mentioned the issue in order to dismiss it and laugh at hippies.  In 1981 one of the sets of spook agencies – “The Office of National Assessments” had produced a report on “the Greenhouse Effect.” It’s not clear if Malcolm Fraser’s cabinet (Treasurer one Honest John Howard) paid any attention whatsoever.  

Things changed after 1985.  Atmospheric scientists had high credibility and media reach because of the recently discovered “Ozone Hole”. A scientific meeting in Villach, Austria, set the ‘greenhouse effect’ running. Australia was well-positioned to respond, thanks to Barry Jones, the Minister for Science. He had set up a “Commission for the Future” (in the face of hostility and derision from his Labor colleagues, of course) and it had worked with the CSIRO’s Atmospheric Physics division to start to inform people via “The Greenhouse Project”.

1988 was the year the issue properly exploded, internationally and nationally. In June an international conference in Canada on “The Changing Atmosphere” ended with the “Toronto Target” – the proposal being that rich nations commit to reducing their carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by 2005, against a 1988 baseline.

That 20 per cent was itself a compromise

Various State governments expressed tentative interest.  Then Federal Minister for the Environment Graham Richardson tried to get Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s Cabinet to adopt it  in May 1989, before being shot down by Treasurer Paul Keating..

The Hawke Government prevaricated. It won the March 1990 Federal Election, which was agonisingly close for the Liberals (who had gone to that election with a proposal to go BEYOND the Toronto target and do the 20 per cent cut by the year 2000).  

Matters came to a head though, in October.  The Second World Climate Conference was about to happen, and was regarded as the starting gun for negotiations for an international climate treaty. Australia, represented by new Environment Minister Ros Kelly, could not turn up in Geneva empty-handed.  A compromise was hammered out, known as the Interim Planning Target which intoned the relevant dates and numbers and then added

“…the Government will not proceed with measures which have net adverse economic impacts nationally or on Australia’s trade competitiveness in the absence of similar action by major greenhouse-gas-producing countries.”

See also  – Cabinet papers 1990-91: déjà vu? We’re having the same debate about climate as we were then

Where did these caveats come from? There’s a lovely anecdote in “The business response to climate change: case studies of Australian interest groups“ the 2005 PhD thesis of Guy Pearse (not the actor) which I can’t help but add –

{I mean it strikes me that the policy trajectory going way back to the late eighties—we were headed in one direction when we had that interim planning target, and then there was a sudden shift in trajectory and pretty much we have stayed on it ever since. Because while the media coverage in recent times would give the impression that the Howard Government have been the one that has made the big shift and been the international pariah and so on—you can actually trace that line back in terms of policy to a cabinet decision when Kerin was around and Richo was around.} 

That’s right, that’s right. 

{And there was a battle in cabinet where they said—OK, we will keep this interim planning target but always on the proviso that Australia will not take any action which jeopardised the economy.} 

Dick Wells wrote those words with Craig Emerson. 

{And they have been pretty much the same ever since. The trajectory has been pretty much the same?} 

Craig Emerson was the economics adviser to Keating at the time—and he is now a shadow minister, right. They sat—I can remember the cabinet meeting very clearly—because Ros Kelly was banging them around the ears—and called them liars and all sorts of things—but the cabinet decision that went up was rejected and I can remember it was about eight o’clock at night and Craig and Dick were sitting in the conference room in John Kerin’s office trying to redraft this cabinet decision. And Keating wanted to go and have dinner with his family and so Keating is standing over them—he is not prime minister at this stage—he is the treasurer. And he is standing around over the top saying – ‘come on you bastards.’ And they are trying to draft these caveats. All right—and so they drafted those caveats, and so then they reconvened cabinet and they signed off on the cabinet decision. And, Ros Kelly never forgave them. [13;415–32]

Footnote 699, page 355

As green groups noted at the time, there was so much hedging as to make this meaningless.

In the end, the treaty signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 included nothing like the Toronto Target, which had very few national governments behind it.  The treaty (what we now call the UNFCCC) had no targets and timetables for any emissions reductions by anyone, thanks to the US threatening to veto the whole deal if these were included. The closest that we came to an official target was an aspiration to return emissions to 1990 levels by 2000.

Climate policy, and especially emissions reductions policies were definitively destroyed when Keating came from the back-benches to topple a tired Bob Hawke, who had no answers to the new Liberal leader, one John Hewson (he has changed his tune on the importance of environmental issues – at the time, he clearly did not rate them as important).

A “National Greenhouse Response Strategy” was utterly toothless and meaningless.  It seemed not to matter to anyone in power.  However, the UNFCCC was ratified more quickly than had been anticipated and this meant that the “Conferences of the Parties” (COPs) were going to start sooner rather than later.  Australia was in an awkward position – with a clearly inadequate set of policy tools.  Keating told people not to concentrate on the “amorphous” issue of climate change. A carbon tax was proposed, and given a boost by evidence from the first “Greenhouse Gas Inventory” not only was Australia never going to hit the Toronto Target, it wasn’t even anywhere near returning to 1990 levels by 2000. 

1996 to 2013: “let’s not even pretend”/”dammit, I have to push through a policy”

The second period is a decade of determined resistance to action for a decade, followed by a few years of extraordinary policy chaos and bloodletting.

John Howard became Prime Minister in March 1996. He was and remains the poster-child for “anti-reflexivity.”  In April 1997 he told ABC radio that Australia should never have signed, let alone ratified the UNFCCC.  But the previous government had said yes to the “Berlin Mandate” in April 1995, meaning at the third COP rich nations were expected to turn up with pledges to reduce their emissions.  Howard sent emissaries around the world trying to convince other nations’ governments that Australia was a special case  (“differentiation”), and deserved exemptions. His position sparked indifference, contempt and occasionally outright mockery.  However, through sheer intransigence and exhaustion, Australia managed to get (I would say ‘extort’ an emissions “reduction” target of… wait for it… an 8 per cent increase in its emissions. The Environment Minister received a standing ovation from his Liberal and National Party colleagues.  And in fact, it was worse than that – the 108% figure was de jure, but de facto the increase in emissions was, thanks to a clause pushed through at 3am in a conference hall in Kyoto, Japan, as delegates fell asleep, meant Australia really had 130% of its 1990 emissions as its “target.”

Reader, if you’re 35 or older, you must remember what happened next – even though the deal was insanely generous, Howard refused to ratify, announcing his decision on World Environment Day 2002.

Ratification of the Kyoto Protocol then became a bizarre symbol of virtue/vice, despite the fact that the whole thing was a totally inadequate farce. There’s a good 2010 academic article you can read about this, if you’re so inclined – The Veil of Kyoto and the politics of greenhouse gas mitigation in Australia.

Anyway, in September 2006 the climate issue returned to the Australian political scene, really for the first time since 1990 (this is not to throw shade at those activists who tried to get it onto the agenda).  John Howard was then forced into one of his U-turns, and appointed a group of fossil-fuel representatives to work with a civil servant to produce a study on the possibility of an Emissions Trading Scheme (something Howard had personally vetoed in 2003, btw).

The point here is that if you are going to have an emissions trading scheme, then questions of what you are aiming at, in terms of percentage reduction of emissions, or a temperature target or whatever, can only be fudged a little bit.  The whole point (in THEORY) of an ETS is that you only have a certain number of “emissions reduction certificates” available, and the price of these goes up as they become more scarce (again, in THEORY).

So, if you’re only planning a small “reduction”, lots of certificates can be issued… (keeps the price low, but the consultants and bankers can still get rich, and big polluters can pretend to be pure at low cost. What’s not to love?)

Kevin Rudd, newly minted Labor leader, swept the 2007 election, started the process of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and took himself off to the COP in Bali, Indonesia. There the very first cracks started to show, because the Europeans wanted him to sign up to a 25 per cent in emissions by 2020, and he dug his heels in at the 5 per cent he’d already committed to.

But EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas says he has voiced regret to a top Rudd adviser that the PM did not back an EU-led proposal calling for carbon emission cuts by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

(source)

The next few years – 2007 to 2012 – are scarcely believable – it makes Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs look like a particularly saccharine Disney rom-com.  There were all sorts of announcements of provisional targets, by 2050 (still a long way off, of course, unlike now). Guy Pearse’s Quarterly Essay, Quarry Vision, is a great read on all this.

Ultimately, in order to form a government after the 2010 election that had resulted in a hung parliament, Julia Gillard, who had toppled Rudd, had to agree to introduce an emissions trading scheme (Rudd had failed in this, and had been too cowardly/chaotic to go for a double dissolution election).

Again, the question of what the percentage reduction target was there, with the Greens wanting a higher target, but knowing that this would mean a higher carbon tax (remember, the theoretical point of a price on carbon is to drive behaviour change – for individuals, investors, technology etc)

Gillard got her “Clean Energy Future” legislation through, but Opposition Tony Abbott, helped enormously by the Murdoch media, had destroyed it and her.  As Prime Minister he repealed the ETS (but was unable to do away with some other things in the package, so they were slowly white-anted).

2014 to present (“a brain Paris-ite ate my brain. Why is it so hot?”

The whole UNFCCC process had almost collapsed at the December 2009 Copenhagen conference (it turns out the Danes somewhat over-estimated their hosting capacity and diplomatic prowess).  The French had stepped in, and basically the whole thing got saved because an old and discredited (and discreditable) proposal got dusted off.  “Pledge and Review” meant that nations would make promises, then get together periodically to see how they were doing and whether the latest science meant they really needed to up their pledges.

When proposed in 1990 this was laughed at as an obvious recipe for inaction and failure.  By 2013 or 2014 it had become “a pragmatic way forward and how dare you extremist virtue signallers allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

This being the UN, there had to be a three or four letter acronym, to make it all sound official and effective, and to bewilder the ignorant herd.  And the acronym was “INDC” – intended nationally determined contribution..

So the whole pretend aspect of target-setting has basically been institutionalised.  The loopholes and bullshitting opportunities are endless. That’s really all you need to know about this latest (last?) phase.

Under Tony Abbott, we had this.

“On 11 August 2015, the Government announced that Australia will reduce greenhouse gas emissions so they are 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. According to the Australian Department of the Environment’s 2030 target document:

[i]n terms of reduction in emissions per capita and the emissions intensity of the economy, Australia’s emissions intensity and emissions per person [will] fall faster than many other economies…emissions per person [will] fall[s] by 50–52 per cent between 2005 and 2030 and emissions per unit of GDP by 64–65 per cent.”

You can almost hear the teeth gritting, (source).

A few weeks later, he was toppled by Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull clung to power, but then had to abandon his “Notional Energy Guarantee”- 

“Australia removed requirements from its National Energy Guarantee plan that would have mandated that greenhouse emissions from its power industry decrease by 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.”

(source)

It didn’t save him, and he was replaced by Scott Morrison, a flat earth… sorry, flat out marketing genius.

“Morrison went to Glasgow armed with the same short-term emissions reduction target (a 26-28% cut compared with 2005) set under Tony Abbott six years ago.

The prime minister was in the awkward position of having to tell the summit in his speech that the country would probably make a 35% emissions cut by 2030 – official government projections said so – but that he would not commit to doing it.”

(source) 

 But then, in 2022, Everything Changed and the adults who care about the world and are willing to stand up to the fossil fuel companies took power.

Yes, sarcasm is indeed the lowest form of wit.  But it is all the lowest form of politician deserve, isn’t it?  I think there is a strong and getting stronger case to be made that Albanese is a bigger climate criminal than John Howard.

Before I get philosophical, let’s check in on Australia’s annual C02 emissions

(source)

What does it all mean?

If we’d listened to the scientists and activists who were pushing the Toronto Target back in 1988, and taken those actions (one percent reduction per annum would more or less have done it, and that was achievable via energy efficiency, a bit of light fuel-switching etc) then we would STILL be facing serious problems with the climate.  But they would, I suspect, be manageable.

Instead, globally, emissions are about 70 per cent higher than they were in 1990.  

(source)

That, combined with sink failure (deforestation, ocean acidification) has meant that the blanket of carbon dioxide that traps heat on our planet (in moderation a very good thing) isn’t 350ppm as it was when those people met in Toronto, but about  428ppm, and climbing rapidly.

We’re in such deep and hot shit, and most of us have no idea.

Targets functioned (we should begin to talk in the past tense when referring to meaningful climate policy, imo) as a way of soothing ourselves that matters were in hand, that pragmatic action could be taken. It was a way – as per the Veil of Kyoto article – of not talking about wider deeper transformations that were becoming unavoidable because the incremental had been thrown in the bin.  Targets still function that way, I guess.

Kayfabe or peekaboo?

For the last few years I have talked about climate policy, and climate activism (see my review of a dreadful documentary here) as “kayfabe” – the make-believe that wrestlers and fans engage in willingly and knowingly, about the “characters” (faces and heels) being real.

I think that’s no longer adequate as a metaphor, for three reasons. First, because kayfabe can continue indefinitely. Second, because there’s a kind of enjoyment to it.  Third, because it takes place between consenting adults.

I think I am going to shift to “peekabo” – where a child covers its eyes with its hand and thinks that because it can’t see you, you can’t see it.  Most children grow out of this delusion by, what, age 5?  We (2) are playing peekabo with the climate (and therefore other systems) of the only habitable planet for many light years.  It’s aggravatingly stupid, and has proven fatal, we just don’t know it yet.

There is a brilliant cartoon by the brilliant David Pope – “you are now leaving the Holocene” (see interview with him here)

We are entering the Fafocene.

Footnotes 

1.  My bona fides –  I did a PhD that covered the period 1989-2012, looking specifically at four episodes of public (incumbent) opposition to carbon pricing (there were other, more private ones).  
2. The whole question of who “we” is in this sentence and others above is for another time.  #NotAllHumans