Australia’s emissions position absurd

Views from around the world. These opinions are not necessarily shared by Stuff newspapers.

The Morrison government’s refusal to commit to zero net emissions by 2050 is as inherently absurd as Donald Trump’s insistence he didn’t lose the presidential election.

But while Trump’s delusions are both pathetic and tragicomic, their impact is limited. He will soon be gone. That is not true of the Coalition’s flawed belief it can continue to put off hard decisions on energy policy and climate change.

That is why Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, singled Australia out for a very public ‘‘naming and shaming’’ this week. When an individual of her stature tells the world your record on climate is ‘‘suicidal’’, your policy making has been ‘‘unstable, volatile and unpredictable’’, and elements of your approach to meeting the Paris Agreement targets (by using ‘‘carry-over credits’’ from Kyoto) display ‘‘a total lack of integrity and [are] not something that does Australia proud’’, people are going to listen.

State governments here are still arguing over how to tax vehicles that aren’t subject to the fuel excise, and the uptake of electric vehicles is among the lowest in the developed world. Transport contributes to almost 20 per cent of Australia’s emissions and this proportion has been rising for decades. Time to act is running out. No government, least of all ours, can afford to keep looking the other way.