It hardly comes as a surprise but according to a government report that was withheld for a week in defiance of a Senate order Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing.
The environment department published its emissions data for the December 2018 quarter on this morning, but only after the Energy and Emissions Reduction minister in Australia’s conservative Liberal-National government, Angus Taylor, first disclosed information from the report in an interview with the News Corporation owned The Australian newspaper.
The data had been due to be published last Friday, under a deadline that was set by the upper house Senate to stop delays in the publication of Australia’s national carbon pollution figures.
The opposition Labor Party and the Australian Greens Party had criticised the process by which the figures were released and warned it would be pursued in parliament.
“Angus Taylor has shown his true colours in his first outing as minister for emissions reduction,” Labor’s climate and energy spokesman, Mark Butler, said.
The latest report shows Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing, driven by rising emissions across several sectors of the economy including transport and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) production.
The figures show emissions rose by 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or 0.7 per cent, in the year to December 2018.
Emissions in the electricity and agriculture sectors were down but those falls were wiped out by increases across every other sector.
Australia’s emissions have been rising since the 2014 abolition of the carbon price mechanism that had been legislated by the last Labor government.
The Liberal-National government’s Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF), rebadged before the recent federal election as the Climate Solutions Fund (CSF), has failed to stall increases in Australia’s overall emissions.
The quarterly seasonally adjusted and weather-normalised figures, which is a statistical tool that takes into account that emissions go up and down due to household and commercial heating and cooling, show emissions increased from the September quarter to the December quarter, something that is typically expected on this measure.
However, the unadjusted data, which should normally show a reasonable drop in emissions from the September quarter to the December quarter, showed only a slight decrease.
“It’s barely a drop,” Tim Baxter, of the Climate and Energy College at Melbourne University, told the Guardian Online.
On the annual figures, which are up, Mr Baxter said: “2018 was higher than 2017. 2017 was higher than 2016. This is the wrong way. We’re going in the wrong direction to meet our (United Nations sponsored) Paris Agreement commitments, let alone deal with climate change.”
Labor and the Australian Greens said the government was trying to avoid scrutiny of its track record.
“Not only did he not release the emissions data by the deadline set by the Senate last Friday, today’s release shows once again why the Liberals will try every trick in the book to avoid scrutiny of their record on tackling climate change,” Mr Butler told the Guardian Online.
“As expected under the Liberals carbon emissions continue to rise, once again exposing the government’s lie that Australia is ‘on track’ to meet even the Liberals’ weak emission reduction targets.”
The Australian Greens climate spokesman, Adam Bandt, told Guardian Online the minister had “continued his contempt of the parliament, seemingly dropping the pollution figures to the Murdoch media before making them public”.
In a media release, Mr Taylor argued that while Australia’s emissions were up, exports of LNG from Australia were contributing to emissions reductions elsewhere because they “were displacing coal”.
“Australia’s total LNG exports have the potential to lower emissions in importing countries by around 148 Mt CO2-e in 2018 by displacing coal consumption in those countries,” he said.
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One Response
Wait for the day in the near future that climate change will cost Australia more than 4 trillion $ as predicted by leading global economists. More than any royalty or wages ever received from coal in our history. Let alone having the worlds most expensive energy destroying our economy and killing the planet in a time of climate emergency.