The former federal mandarin also warns carbon credits will become ‘scarce and expensive’ and investment decisions need to be made sooner than many realise.
Blair Comley, left, was formerly a mandarin in Gladys Berejiklian’s NSW state government before becoming a director at EY. He says governments, companies and sectors can’t afford to go-slow on the carbon shift.
With Australia on a bipartisan course to net zero emissions by 2050, Blair Comley says the pressure on business to act in 2022 is driven by consumers, capital markets, employees and the genuine physical risk of a warming planet. Mr Comley is a former secretary of the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet, and a top federal bureaucrat who helped design the GST and the former federal Labor government’s climate package.He became one of the victims of Canberra’s “climate wars” in 2013, when Tony Abbott’s government fired him from his job in the department of resources, energy and tourism, alongside other public service chiefs removed in a “night of the short knives”.
“You’ll still have some people quibbling a little about what exactly the pace of change will be, and what will be the absorptive capacity of society and the economy. But the end point is now basically not in dispute.” “So that kind of future back thinking is a check on when is this really going to hit me, and in areas where there are big lead times that can mean action is required a lot earlier than you think.”
EY’s new net zero centre reflects what Mr Comley as the increasing importance of managing the decarbonisation challenge.“I used to say, when I was in government, that we would be successful when the conversation has moved out of the sustainability office into the CEOs office and the board.
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