Western Australia has blazing sun, stunning Indian Ocean beaches, wide open roads and, for the first time in a while, a potentially successful AFL team. It also has an occasional separatist urge. That tendency may partly explain why its government thinks it shouldn’t be expected to act on the climate crisis in the same way as the population on the east coast.
Anthony Albanese and members of his cabinet have given implicit support to its climate position. The prime minister has fallen in behind the WA Labor government as the premier, Roger Cook, has backed fossil fuel expansions and argued that an increase in the state’s emissions would be good for the climate because its gas exports reduce coal burning in Asia.
Documents released under freedom of information laws show the government has advice that tells another story: that WA gas risks slowing Asia’s shift to clean energy.
Meanwhile, annual pollution from the resource-rich state was up 4%, based on the latest data. Its emissions have grown 17% since 2005 while those from every other state have been reduced, mostly due to the rise of the gas export industry. Despite this, the WA government has continued to argue it is serious about addressing the problem.
None of this is new. But two revelations over the past week have further challenged that claim. They deserve attention across the country, and particularly in Canberra.
The first revelation, reported by the ABC, was that the Cook government was planning to drop a long-held, but consistently delayed, promise to introduce legislated targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.
A leaked document relied on by the ABC, also seen by Guardian Australia, shows the state intends to instead set targets starting in 2035 for renewable energy and carbon capture and storage – a technology that is used to justify further fossil fuel use but is not yet viable at scale, despite decades of promises and billions in pledged funding. A green exports target would start in 2040.
The documents say the bill would keep the goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, just without the interim emissions targets that provide a pathway to get there. The legislation appears explicitly designed to avoid inclusion of goals that could in any way impinge on the gas export industry in the state’s north.
You don’t have to be a genius to work out that means ongoing pollution. But if you were in any doubt, the second revelation was here to help.
It came in a modelling report commissioned by Australia’s biggest gas company, Woodside, that confirmed what you would expect – WA is miles away from being on track to reach net zero emissions by 2050. The consultants Deloitte Access Economics found the state could miss that goal by decades even if a contentious $30bn Woodside development proposal – opening the Browse gas basin – did not go ahead. It estimated hitting the net zero target would require renewable energy to be deployed at a rate 11 times faster than over the past decade.
Rather than conclude that meant all effort should go into driving the rapid transition needed, the report found that developing Browse would lead to only a marginal shift towards gas power in the state and emphasised its projected economic benefits. The cost of the damage caused by the extra emissions, including those released after most of the gas is burned overseas, didn’t get a mention.
Let’s step back for a moment. WA is the only Australian state without an interim target to reduce its pollution before 2050. Other states have substantial goals to cut climate pollution by roughly half or more by 2035, compared with 2005 levels.
They won’t all achieve their goal. The Queensland Liberal National party government has a coal fetish and is planning to miss a legislated 75% cut without openly saying so. But the 2035 targets were introduced with a clear rationale, based on a scientific consensus that avoiding the worst of the climate crisis requires deep emissions cuts as rapidly as possible. Waiting more than 20 years before acting is delay, not action.
It’s been easy to miss in much of the political and media discussion about what to do with it, but gas remains a fossil fuel. It is mostly methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and it releases carbon dioxide when burned. A US study found if compressed into liquified natural gas for export it can be dirtier than coal once emissions from extraction, piping, processing and shipping were counted.
The world needs gas to meet demand in existing energy systems, probably in small amounts as a backup in electricity grids, and in some limited industrial cases where there are not yet viable alternatives. But a serious government should be trying to use no more gas than necessary, get off it where possible and make a public case for why this is necessary.
Instead, the Albanese government last month rejected a push for a national gas tax that would have required multinational petroleum companies to pay more for the Australian resources they extract and sell offshore. A week earlier, its offshore petroleum regulator backed a substantial expansion of pipelines and wells at the US energy company Chevron’s Gorgon project off the WA coast. It followed the North West Shelf gas processing plant being granted a life extension of up to 70 years.
Another big decision lies ahead. A verdict on the Browse development – according to Woodside, Australia’s largest untapped gas basin – is expected before the end of the year.
Experts say there is a stronger than usual legal case that it could be blocked on environmental grounds, given the risk to protected species. It would allow drilling near the extraordinary and remote Scott Reef, which is home to migratory whales, threatened turtles and sea snakes, and more than 1,500 other species.
But Australian governments have yet to show a willingness to deny fossil fuel companies what they want. This particularly applies in WA, where Cook sometimes likes to give the impression he effectively runs the country, given his apparent influence on some Albanese decisions.
What’s unarguable is this: his sun-kissed state is making it harder for federal Labor to meet its much-vaunted climate targets. A question for the prime minister – whose government continued fossil fuel subsidies and near ignored climate and the environment in Tuesday’s budget – is whether he intends to do anything about it.
