SYDNEY, Australia – Minutes after taking the stage to declare victory in Saturday’s Australian election, Anthony Albanese, the incoming Labor prime minister, has promised to transform climate change at the root of conflict. politics as a driving force for economic growth.
“Together, we can end the climate wars,” he told his supporters, who cheered for a few seconds. “Together, we can capitalize on the opportunity for Australia to become a renewable energy superpower.”
With that comment and his win – along with an increase in votes for candidates outside the two-party system who has made fighting global warming a priority – the likelihood of a significant change in Australia’s climate policy has suddenly increased.
How far the country goes will depend on the final results that are still being counted. But for voters, activists and scientists, who have spent years in despair, lament The fossil fuel industry is holding about the conservatives who have run Australia for most of the past three decades, Saturday’s results led to an unusual reversal.
A country known as global lagging climatewith the 2030 minimum targets for cutting carbon emissions, ultimately putting aside the denial and delay approach to climate change that most Australians take, in the pollssaid they no longer wanted to.
“This is the long overdue climate election that Australia has been waiting for,” said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University. “It was a pivotal moment in our national history.”
However, it remains to be seen whether the factors leading to such change can be as strong and convincing as the already entrenched opposing forces.
In Australia, as in the United States, ending or changing decades-old traditional energy habits will be difficult.
In the last financial year alone, Australia’s federal, state and territory governments provided approximately 11.6 billion Australian dollars ($8.2 billion) subsidies to the coal and other fossil fuel industries.
An additional 55.3 billion VND Australian dollars ($39 billion) has been pledged to subsidize gas and oil exploration, coal-fired power, coal railways, ports and carbon capture and storage (although most carbon capture projects fail).
As Dr. Gergis pointed out in a recent essay, “That’s 10 times more than Emergency Response Fundand more than 50 times the budget of National Recovery and Rehabilitation Agency. ”
In other words, Australia is still spending more money supporting companies that make the planet warmer than helping people cope with the costs associated with the greenhouse gases they emit.
Over the past few years, investment in renewable energy has also increased, but not on a similar scale. And during the election campaign, Mr Albanese’s Labor Party tried to avoid addressing that mismatch directly.
On Election Day in Singleton, a bustling town north of Sydney in New South Wales where more than 20% of residents work in the mining sector, Labor banners read “Send a miner to Canberra” ” was hung next to National Party signs, part of the conservative coalition departure, which read, “Protect local mining jobs.” And candidates on both sides are optimistic about the region’s mining future.
“While people are buying our coal, we will definitely sell it,” said Dan Repacholi, a former miner who won the Labor Party seat.
The coal mining industry is thriving in the region, but so is private investment in renewable energy, especially hydrogen. “We are going to have a big boom here through both of these industries going up and up,” said Mr. Repacholi.
During the election campaign, Mr Albanese positioned himself as a “medium” candidate, pledging to support new coal mines as well as renewable energy – largely to keep green-collar areas. like Singleton.
But now he will face a lot of pressure to go further on climate, faster.
The major clash against the Conservative coalition on Saturday included a foothold for Australian Greens, who may eventually be needed by Labor to form a minority government.
Adam Bandt, leader of the Greens, has said that a ban on new coal and gas projects would be a top priority for the party in any power-sharing deal.
Some of the new independent lawmakers who have lobbied for Australia to raise its 2030 target to cut carbon emissions to 60 per cent below 2005 levels – far beyond Labor’s pledge of 43 per cent – will also cause pressure on Mr. Albanese and the opposition.
“Both politics will have to reorient themselves,” said Saul Griffith, an energy policy expert. support policies that would make it easier for people to power their cars and heat their homes with electricity. “This is a very clear message about the climate.”
Like many other experts, Mr Griffith said he was not particularly interested in bold official promises to end coal mining, which he said would fade on its own due to economic pressures.
New gas projects pose a bigger problem. A huge mining effort is being planned for the gas fields of Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory could generate enough carbon emissions to destroy any hope of Australia meeting its reduction targets on par with other developed nations.
Climate action advocates mainly hope to start with legislation like the one introduced by Zali Steggall, an independent group, that would establish a framework for setting more stringent emissions targets and towards them through rigorous research and science.
Robyn Eckersley, an expert on the politics of climate change at the University of Melbourne, warns that Labor, the Greens and independents need to “play the long game”, keeping in mind that carbon tax causes backlash put Australia’s climate policy back by almost a decade.
She says that fixating on a single number or idea hinders progress and motivation.
“It’s important to achieve something and build consensus around it,” Professor Eckersley said. “There are debates about how to improve it is better than swinging back and forth between what and what.”
Mr Griffith said Australia had taken a step forward in becoming a global model for the energy transition that climate change requires by taking advantage of the record-breaking uptake of rooftop solar. . More than one in four Australian homes now have solar panels, outpacing every other major economy; they provide electricity for about a fifth of what it costs through the traditional grid.
“Real climate action must be led by communities,” Mr. Griffith said. He thinks the election results are encouraging because they show the issue affects more voters.
“It’s a less divisive political gathering, it comes from the center,” he said. “It’s a middle-class uprising, and therefore climate action is non-partisan.”
Sadly, it had to go through a lot of suffering to get there. Australia has still not recovered entirely from record-breaking wildfires in 2020, followed by two years of widespread flooding.
The Great Barrier Reef also just experienced sixth year bleaching – worryingly, for the first time in a La Niña climate model, when cooler temperatures generally prevent overheating.
“People no longer need to use their imaginations to try and understand what climate change looks like in this country,” Dr. “Australians have had to live with the consequences of inaction.”
Yan Zhuang Contribution reports from Singleton, Australia.
