EU to Australia: Global warming isn’t ‘crap’

Global warming skepticism makes the country a difficult ally for Europeans.

Australia is an unlikely ground zero in the EU’s fight to push through ambitious carbon emission reductions.

Ahead of the Paris climate summit at year’s end, European officials increasingly fear that if this large and wealthy industrialized economy Down Under bucks the trend of major greenhouse gas cuts, then other big countries could follow their lead.

The EU’s climate and energy chief, Miguel Arias Cañete, pressed Australia’s environment minister by phone last week as diplomats from all corners of the globe gathered in Bonn to negotiate the draft agreement for the Paris talks. Arias Cañete continued his diplomatic offensive this week at the Pacific Islands Forum in Papua New Guinea, with a planned meeting with Australian government representatives, including Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who once called the idea of human-caused climate change “crap.”

The anxiety over Australia underscores a broader concern among European Union officials as the crucial Paris conclave approaches. The bloc is far ahead of most countries in making expensive emissions reductions to reduce the impact of global warming — but they don’t want to hang out there alone.

The Pacific Island nations have also jumped in on the persuasion campaign, attacking Australia for being too timid in its approach to cutting emissions.

“What we are talking about is survival, it’s not about economic development,” Anote Tong, president of Kiribati, said at the forum, according to Australia’s ABC News.

Australia’s Liberal government disappointed many last month when it sent the United Nations a pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels.  Countries have agreed to publicly specify what climate actions they plan to take after 2020 before the start of the COP21 summit, a so-called intended nationally determined contribution, or INDC.

Australia’s target “is at the low end of commitments from other developed economies, and therefore it could do more,” said an EU diplomat familiar with the climate talks.

The EU’s goal is to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030, from 1990 levels.

But in Environment Minister Greg Hunt’s view, the Australian pledge is already on the more ambitious end of the scale — especially in a government where some called for an emissions reduction target of closer to 14 percent, and whose prime minister has in the past been resistant to talking about climate change at all.

Abbott has softened his position on climate change since becoming prime minister in 2013, but has still stressed that the issue should be tackled in a way that does not “clobber the economy.”

These comments highlight the fundamental difference between the climate change debate in Australia and in Europe.

In Australia, a resource-based economy that relies on exports of coal, gas, iron ore and other raw materials, the question of whether climate is even a problem still rages in the upper echelons of government. In Europe, it’s broadly taken as a given among the largest political parties, said Connie Hedegaard, the EU climate action commissioner between 2010 and 2014 and now chair of the environmental organization KR Foundation.

“When I saw that they were submitting an INDC, I thought, ‘At least at the top they are realizing that they should stop talking about whether climate change is a problem or not,’” she said after returning from a trip to Australia.

Small victories

That Australia even made a pledge should therefore be seen as a victory in itself, and proof that the “international process” does put pressure on governments, Hedegaard added. “I’m not sure we would have seen any proposal from the Australian government at this stage had it not been for the embarrassment of not submitting an INDC.”

Australia believes its promise marks “significant progression” from its 2020 target of reducing emissions by 5 percent from 2005 levels, and represents a “fair contribution” to the Paris deal, according to an Australian source familiar with the climate discussions. However, it also emphasizes that the key to achieving the COP21 goal — of limiting the temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius — is “global cooperation.”

“We could stop producing coal tomorrow, and every Australian could ride a bicycle, and we would still have almost no impact on global emissions,” the source said. “It could even make things worse — if we stopped producing our coal, countries would burn more higher-emissions coal.”

NGOs such as the Climate Institute in Australia, however, argued that the target would keep the country among the top polluters by 2030. Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions per capita stood at 16.2 tons in 2011, compared with 7.1 tons in the EU, and 16.8 tons in the U.S.

“This target is bad for the climate and bad for our international competitiveness,” John Connor, the institute’s CEO, said in response to the pledge.

Nearly like-minded

Australia and the EU already agree on many areas in their climate talks, although there are also some disagreements, the Australian source said. “We’re essentially not too far off from being like-minded in international negotiations.”

Pressure to amplify Australia’s ambition before the COP21 is therefore expected to focus on details such as the tools it uses to curb emissions, rather than the overarching target.

The government has yet to specify how it intends to cut emissions between 2020 and 2030, and its pledge says it will unveil new policies between 2017 and 2018. The EU’s central tool for achieving its targets is the Emissions Trading Scheme, which forces polluters to pay to emit carbon. The existing system is flawed, with a surplus of emissions allowances and low prices that fail to encourage a shift away from dirtier fossil fuels. But the European Commission is working to bolster the system after 2020, with a set of reforms proposed in July.

Australia had a carbon pricing scheme too, but it only lasted two years. Abbott repealed the policy in 2014, less than a year after his election, and replaced it with the Emissions Reduction Fund up to 2020, which supports projects that curb pollution.

While Australian foreign affairs and environment officials do continue to talk about climate with their EU counterparts, appeasing European governments does not appear to be the Abbott government’s priority, said Kellie Caught, national climate change manager at WWF Australia.

“I think it would be fair to say that the Australian government has aligned itself more with Japan and Canada than with the EU over the past two years,” Caught said. Canada and Japan were the two countries most resistant to setting ambitious targets at the G7 summit in June.

Emissions policy has become an emotive political issue in Australia. In 2012, the EU and Australia’s previous Labor government announced plans to connect their emissions trading schemes by 2018 at the latest — in what would have been the world’s first inter-continental tie up. During the 2013 election campaign, Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition vowed to repeal the system.

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“The emissions trading system became a symbol for what divides the Australian parties,”said Hedegaard, who represented the EU in the emissions trading discussions.