Coalition leads ‘obstructionist’ forces on climate

On Monday morning, Tropical Cyclone Alfred seemed to be running out of puff.

About 300 kilometres off the Sunshine Coast and moving further away to the south-east, it was downgraded to a category 1 storm and seemed to be on the verge of breaking up. Then something extraordinary happened.

It rapidly reintensified. Following that, it radically changed course and began heading generally west towards Brisbane.

Science tells us that for a cyclone to form, it requires sea temperatures above 26.5 degrees – hence the descriptor “tropical” cyclone. Once established, it’s not unusual for cyclones to travel beyond the tropics. They just don’t form, or in this case re-form, outside the tropics.

Alfred did, though, and the reason was that the water temperature off the southern Queensland coast, 500 kilometres south of the Tropic of Capricorn, was a balmy 27 degrees.

“Meteorologists and climate scientists are likely to study Alfred for years to come,” says Matt Kean, chair of the Climate Change Authority, the independent statutory body charged with advising government on climate policy.

“Yes, there have been rare cyclones that have passed through that corner of eastern Australia in the past, but the behaviour of a storm that should have broken up but re-formed off Brisbane … it will be scrutinised carefully.”

Kean was speaking with The Saturday Paper on Wednesday and was careful not to sound insensitive to the human dimension of what was to unfold. The politics of the situation are undeniable, though, at this point in world affairs.

“We hope and pray residents in south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales are going to make it through this storm unscathed. But it should serve as a reminder, if we needed one, that we have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and encourage other nations to stay the course,” says Kean.

“Only the inattentive or deliberately obstructionist to climate action would deny that the heating up of our atmosphere and oceans played a role,” he says.

To elaborate on the second part of that sentence first: climate change was a factor in Alfred’s behaviour in several ways, says David Karoly, Climate Council member, former climate scientist with the CSIRO and professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne.

First, he says, sea surface temperatures, not only in the Coral Sea, but around Australia, were the hottest ever in 2024, about 0.89 degrees above the 1961–1990 average.

The East Australian Current, says Karoly, “is at record-high temperatures, and it’s pumping more heat southward … close to the south-east Queensland coast and northern New South Wales”.

That heat, both in the ocean and the air, also meant Alfred produced more rainfall than might normally be expected from a category 2 system. Then there is the sea level rise.

“The coastal storm surges, erosion and coastal flooding will be much worse due to the sea level rise in the region, which is more than 20 centimetres since 1900, due to climate pollution,” says Karoly.

The observed pattern of cyclones and hurricanes is that they are becoming less frequent but more intense and inclined to rapidly intensify. For reasons not yet well understood, they also tend to last longer, to move more slowly and erratically, and even stall, increasing the danger from prolonged rainfall, winds and high seas.

All of which seems to fit the behaviour of Alfred: its long meander down the Australian east coast, its quick intensification, its protracted battering.

Alfred may be a historical anomaly – not for 50 years has a cyclone hit where it has – but it is likely a harbinger of things to come as Earth warms and the tropical zone expands.

So to the first half of Kean’s comment, calling out the “deliberately obstructionist” forces working against action on climate change.

The most obvious impediment is the United States president, Donald Trump.

On the first day of his second term in office, January 20, Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change and end American contributions to funds intended to help poorer nations decarbonise and cope with the consequences of a hotter climate.

Trump’s day-one order was not unexpected; it is a repeat of what he did in his first term. The Biden administration rejoined the Paris accord and enacted extensive, and expensive, measures to counter climate change.

Trump and his denialist cronies are now systematically moving to dismantle those measures, going even further than they did the first time around. His administration has cut incentives for electric vehicles, rolled back fuel-efficiency standards, declared an “energy emergency” and moved to dramatically increase oil and gas production. “Drill, baby, drill” was a campaign slogan.

The US president has frozen funds already appropriated for clean energy projects, banned wind farms on public land and federal waters and threatened to block even projects on private land.

With the help of Elon Musk’s misleadingly titled Department of Government Efficiency, Trump is slashing worker numbers in agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The new administration is putting a stop to scientific research into climate change and scrapping any and all aid projects directed at climate mitigation. It is scrubbing large rafts of environmentally protective regulation and has even removed the words “climate change” from government websites.

Trump has encouraged other national leaders to quit the Paris accord. So far, only the anarcho-capitalist president of Argentina, Javier Milei – the man who gave Elon Musk a big chainsaw to symbolise slashing government – has shown any serious interest in joining the US, Iran, Libya and Yemen outside the pact.

Trump and his Republican party acolytes are not only withdrawing government from the effort to combat climate change, they are pressuring the private sector to do likewise.

Their malign influence is, for example, apparent in the sudden flight of a number of large financial institutions from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-sponsored organisation set up to encourage banks to align their lending and investment decisions with the goal of cutting greenhouse emissions.

Between the time of Trump’s election and his inauguration, CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorganChase all withdrew from the alliance. One Australian bank, Macquarie Bank, has also quit the NZBA.

These institutions appear to be motivated by the fear Trump and co will go after them in the legislature and the courts if they fund renewable energy projects, rather than fossil fuels.

All of this amounts to but a partial list of the myriad actions by which the new US administration is working not just to obstruct measures to mitigate climate change but also to accelerate climate change.

Perhaps the one thing that can be said for Trump is he has the courage of his convictions – misguided though they may be. He has frequently branded climate change a “hoax”. Back in 2017, after he first assumed the presidency, he complained the Paris climate accord would “undermine our economy, hamstring our workers, weaken our sovereignty, impose unacceptable legal risks, and put us at a permanent disadvantage to the other countries of the world”.

In his reasons for quitting the accord, he is at least more forthright than those countries that remain party to it – such as Russia and a number of petro-states – but do not honour their commitments and also work to undermine the accord’s goals.

“Most countries want to be seen to be in compliance with the Paris Agreement,” says Robyn Eckersley, professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, who specialises in climate policy. But there’s a handful of countries out there who know no shame and who don’t care if they’re not compliant.” She includes the federal Coalition parties in the list of the shameless, “because they don’t take it seriously”.

It’s hard to argue with her, given the federal opposition’s enunciated approach to emissions reduction targets.

The current commitment, set by the Albanese government, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.

Last June, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told The Australian newspaper he would not stick with that target if the Coalition won government.

There was “no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving”, Dutton said.

The official data shows the 43 per cent target is achievable, however, or at least very close. The most recent accounting by the Department of Climate Change projected Australia’s emissions to be down 42.6 per cent by 2030.

Any backsliding on the 2030 target would amount to a breach of the Paris Agreement. The provisions of the accord are quite clear. Article 4.11 provides that any country can adjust its target – termed its “nationally determined contribution” – at any time. Such adjustment can only be made, though, “with a view to enhancing its level of ambition”.

In other words, it can set a higher target but not a lower one.

The Paris Agreement also requires that parties set new targets every five years and that those “will represent a progression beyond the Party’s then current nationally determined contribution”.

That is, they must ratchet up the emissions reduction target.

Says Eckersley: “All the parties were supposed to stump up their 2035 target in February, in the lead-up to the next COP in Belém, Brazil, in November. Only a small handful of countries have, although we expect most of those to roll in during the course of the year.”

Australia was among the countries that missed the February deadline. The government and Climate Change Authority blamed Donald Trump.

“It’s necessary to reassess and recalculate the assumptions that will inform the Climate Change Authority’s advice to the government on Australia’s Nationally Determined Contribution,” said Kean in December.

A more cynical interpretation is that the Albanese government wanted the issue pushed beyond the election.

There is little doubt, however, that Labor would, if returned to government, set a more ambitious target in time for the Belém COP, although it is questionable whether it would match the 75 per cent reduction that Eckersley and other climate experts deem consistent with keeping global heating below two degrees.

Peter Dutton has also committed the Coalition to a 2035 target and to remaining a signatory to the Paris Agreement if it forms government at the next election.

But there is cause for doubt.

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Constance, a former New South Wales state cabinet minister, who is contesting the federal seat of Gilmore on the state’s South Coast, said during a candidates’ debate that a 2035 target was “off the table” if Dutton won the election.

Constance subsequently was prevailed upon to recant. Nevertheless, Kean, who is also a former NSW government minister, can see no way a Coalition government could avoid breaching the Paris accord.

The problem is its promise to build nuclear reactors. In contrast with Labor, which plans to get Australia to net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 largely through wind and solar generation, the Coalition plan proposes that 38 per cent of the nation’s power would come from nuclear.

Nuclear takes a long time to build and the Coalition plan would rely on coal and gas to keep the lights on in the interim.

According to an analysis by the Climate Change Authority a couple of weeks ago, this would increase total carbon emissions by some two billion tonnes.

Under a Dutton government, Kean tells The Saturday Paper, Australia would not meet its 2030 target until after 2035.

When the authority report dropped, the opposition’s response was to take aim at the messenger. There were suggestions Kean would be sacked. The shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, wrote to Kean, accusing the authority of departing from its mandate and engaging in “a political critique of the opposition’s energy policy”.

Kean shot back, telling Guardian Australia: “I’m not going to be bullied or silenced for standing up for the science and the evidence by Ted O’Brien or anyone.

“Nor will the reality of climate change be bullied or silenced by political pressure.”

Experts have swung in behind Kean, noting that the modelling commissioned by the opposition also identified billions of extra tonnes of greenhouse emissions.

Says Tony Wood, director of the energy program at the non-partisan Grattan Institute: “It was weird that they bashed up Matt Kean and threatened his job, when all he was saying was the same thing as the report they commissioned.

“You don’t have to do a sophisticated piece of modelling to work out if you delay [the phase-out of] coal as much as they said, and you slow down renewables as much as they said, you get more emissions.”

Wood is disdainful. “They haven’t got a nuclear policy. They’ve got a nuclear idea.”

Kean remains defiant.

“I’d be more than happy to correct our research if the Coalition could demonstrate that we’re wrong. If they have a different estimate about how much carbon emissions fallout we’ll get from their plan, we’d love to hear it.”

Kean chooses his words carefully, and when he says “obstructionist”, it is pointed.

The reason Australia is now on track to meet its emissions reduction target is because of a suite of policies introduced by the current government, such as fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles, the safeguard mechanism requiring big emitters to progressively reduce their emissions and various incentives for investment in clean energy.

All of which the Coalition voted against.

In its opposition to renewable projects, particularly offshore wind, in its promise to remove regulations around the approval process for fossil fuel projects – “We’re going to bring on more gas by the bucket load,” opposition resources spokeswoman Susan McDonald told The Australian – in its championing of nuclear energy, it sometimes sounds more than a little Trumpian.

There are even echoes of Trump’s disinformation. In September 2023, Trump declared to a rally against offshore wind in South Carolina that “windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before”.

A few weeks later Dutton took a trip on a boat to the site of a proposed wind farm off the NSW South Coast. On returning to land, he declared opposition to the project on environmental grounds.

“When you look at the whales and the mother and the calf that we saw out there, the dolphins – all of that is at risk,” he said.

There is no scientific evidence that wind turbines harm whales.

Given the Dutton Coalition’s trenchant opposition to measures to address climate change, there are those who speculate that Australia could follow the US out of Paris.

Kean doesn’t dismiss that possibility.

But, he adds, “I would say the policies the Coalition have announced so far suggest, at best, a dirty remain.”

The 2022 election, coming so soon after the Black Summer bushfires, is often described as the climate election. Since then, though, voters’ concerns have shifted. Climate has receded as an issue as people have focused on the cost of living.

As Cyclone Alfred spun towards the Queensland coast, I put it to Kean that it might remind voters climate is still the biggest, most urgent issue of them all.

“Whether we realise it or not, every election is a climate change election, because our environment, our economy and the prospects of future generations are all on the ballot,” he says.

“To truly represent us, politicians of any hue should be pressed to explain how their policies are going to set us up to succeed or fail in a world that is inexorably heating up.”

It will heat even faster under the likes of Trump and Dutton.

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