After many months of speculation, The Nationals have formally abandoned a commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
The leader of the Nationals, David Littleproud, said the party would shift its focus to climate adaptation instead of being “focused solely” on reducing emissions, noting Australia’s small share of global emissions.
Let’s use a fire fighting analogy to explain why this is such a bad decision:
The Nationals say given Australia’s relatively small share of global emissions, the country should keep pace with other nations in cutting emissions rather than leading.
You get called to a house fire. If you apply The Nationals approach you could say that your contribution as an individual fire fighter is quite small. You’re just one person. So why even bother trying to save the house? Of course that would be a ridiculous approach to take. And that’s not how firefighting works: we act as a team to stop a fire or save a house. It’s exactly the same with climate change – we all need to do our part and if we co-ordinate our actions, we have a good chance of succeeding.
The ’Australia is a small overall emitter’ argument is a classic climate blocker narrative that aims to try and justify why Australia should not work too hard to reduce emissions. They say that, given Australia’s relatively small share of global emissions, the country should ‘keep pace’ with other nations in cutting emissions rather than leading on emissions reductions. This conveniently ignores the fact that Australia is historically a large per capita emitter of greenhouse gases. Anyone who pays attention to the debate around global emission reductions will know that there is a strong expectation that ‘the rich must go first’ in showing leadership on reductions. If wealthy nations like Australia aren’t willing to lead, why should emerging power houses like India and China act?
Countries like the USA, Canada and Australia have built their economies over many decades by industrialising and consuming huge volumes of fossil fuels. Australia’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions per capita are amongst the highest in the world. This represents a historic debt to the poorer people of the world – including our neighbours in the Pacific, who are seeking to access the resources and energy they need to provide their people with a dignified life. We can pay this debt by taking action now to reduce emissions at home and halting the export of fossil fuels, while assisting our neighbours to adapt and thrive in a changing world.
‘The Nationals will focus on adaptation measures’
In firefighting, crews need to tackle a fire as soon and hard as is possible. Sitting back and letting the fire grow is a recipe for disaster.
To say they will slow mitigation efforts and focus on adaptation is exactly the same as deciding to not fight the house fire and instead start a discussion about how they will re-build the house once it has burnt down. We all know that Prevention is always better than a Cure: It is better to stop something bad from happening than it is to deal with it after it has happened.
With climate impacts already locked in, we do need to plan for adaptation (often called climate resilience). But to focus solely on responding to those impacts rather than reducing our contribution to the cause of the problem would be a dangerous betrayal of all Australians, especially those living on the front line of these impacts: rural and regional Australia.
What the Nationals position means for rural Australia – more disasters
The Nationals attack anything that would make climate better. They have long campaigned against the energy transition, fuelling conflicts over transmission lines and renewables. Now the party says its proposed model would set an “aspiration” to reduce emissions by 30 to 40 per cent by 2035, far below the federal government’s commitment to cut emissions by 62 to 70 per cent.
They have no plan to reduce climate disasters, and hence protect rural and regional communities. They aren’t supporting people in the bush. They only support coal and gas companies.
National Party federal leader David Littleproud has said that this isn’t ‘climate denialism’.
But the reality is that if the National Party did believe and care about climate impacts they would have a plan to do something. That is, to slow, then stop the burning of coal and gas which is causing the heating climate. And they would put up plans to help communities across the continent who are already facing increased risks of extreme floods, fires and storms. The fact that they have none of these, and instead continue to obsess about costly and dangerous nuclear power, demonstrates their true lack of interest in the welfare of regional communities or a safe climate.
HEADER IMAGE: ABC.
Australian Firefighters Climate Alliance 