Comment: How Australia's attempted carbon trickery is stoking India to pollute
In the closing backroom negotiations at the United Nations climate conference in Madrid this week, the full impact of Australia’s proposal to use accounting tricks to nullify its commitments to cut carbon emissions became abundantly clear. In response, India for the first time proposed using credits from old "clean development" projects under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol as a way to water down the targets it committed to under the Paris Agreement in 2015.
While Morrison said on Thursday that emissions were lower on average than under the previous Labor government, the troubling point is that after a reduction and then plateau from 2013 to 2017, emissions have begun to rise again in 2018 and 2019. With some minor exceptions at the state level, our politicians have been strangely silent. Or, like Labor leader Anthony Albanese on Thursday, busy declaring support for opening the southern hemisphere’s biggest new coal basin. Scientists have already made clear that burning the coal from Adani’s Carmichael project would, by itself, put the Paris Agreement temperature goals out of reach.
No doubt a campaign for a climate plebiscite would generate arguments that plebiscites should only be used for moral and social conscience issues, not ones that go to the heart of Australia’s economic prospects. Moralising aside, it is worth recalling that then-opposition leader Tony Abbott proposed in 2011 that there should be a plebiscite to test Australians’ support for a carbon tax. So the flipside should be acceptable as well.
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