The alarming news about Peter Dutton walking away from our 2030 emissions reduction target unfortunately doesn’t come as a surprise. The sad, but predictable, thing is that it’s become the norm for him to walk away from commitments that no longer suit him.
Sadly it’s this flagrant disregard for essential measures designed to mitigate the effects of climate change that he sees as his mission.
Sure the process towards use of more renewables and emissions reduction is hamstrung by having to guarantee supply. So we have challenges but the alternatives like nuclear reactors and carbon capture and storage are super expensive and not (yet) viable. We are in a transition stage and there will still need to be a reliance on coal/gas for some time. But the sensible course is to have targets, and to be working towards them. Especially short-term targets because they are a measure of whether we are on track to achieve (in this case) the ‘net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050’ target. Would anybody in their right mind think a 2050 target is achievable without monitoring progress towards that target?
It has become an accepted mantra amongst certain members of the political class that as climate change is a global problem there is not a lot of reason for us to change our ways as Australia’s contribution to emissions is small by world standards (about three per cent). Though this ‘inconveniently’ excludes all the emissions caused by burning of Australian coal/gas in China, India, Korea and Japan, etc. Newcastle NSW is still one of the world’s largest coal-exporting ports.
Is there a cynical side to Mr Dutton’s agenda here? He has chosen this time, as the seasons change, when neither floods nor fires are as intense and hopes that people don’t make the connection between more intense fires and floods and his undermining of climate change measures. But sure as this is the land of fire and flood they will return with devastating force.
So ‘yes’ there are the daily cost-of-living pressures (which are favoured political trigger points). But society is more complex than that and other short- (and long-) term goals are critically important.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
