Net zero? That's so 2021! Why the Paris Agreement is under fire from the political left and right - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

06-08-2025

You can hear Garrett Cullity discuss the ethics and politics of net zero with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens this week on The Minefield.
Australia's roller-coaster ride with climate policy is now turning, predictably, into a tussle over net zero. Under the Morrison government, Australia eventually got around to adopting a net zero target in 2021. Now there are calls to abandon it. The net zero project, according to the critics, is a scam.
These criticisms come from both the political left and the political right.
From the left, the complaint is that the adoption of net zero targets is a smokescreen for business as usual. A net zero target is a commitment that any greenhouse gas you emit into the atmosphere will be balanced by the amount you remove, by some future date — 2050 being the most popular. But then it's just a license to keep burning fossil fuels, pumping the emissions into the atmosphere, while promising to figure out some way of removing them later on.
Meanwhile, from the right, the complaint is that tying ourselves to a net zero target is domestically destructive and geopolitically naïve. With global emissions still rising, the United States has now pulled out of the Paris Agreement while China (which is responsible for 35 per cent of global emissions) operates 1,100 coal-fired power stations (Australia has 19) and builds more new ones than at any time in the last decade, all the while telling the world it will reach net zero by 2060. Thus, while we cripple our own industrial capacity and burden the regions with an expensive energy transition, China presses ahead burning as much coal as it needs to satisfy our consumer demand for solar panels and electric cars.
These criticisms are unsurprising, and they get their force from the fact that there's some truth in them. But they're more unrealistic than the climate policies they criticise. To understand why, we need some context — from philosophy and from history.
The collective action problem
Anthropogenic climate change shares some features of what philosophers and social scientists call a 'collective action problem', with one crucial difference. A collective action problem is a situation where, if each member of a group serves his or her own interests best, everyone ends up worse off than they would have been had they exercised more restraint. That might sound impossible, but it's actually common. Overfishing, pollution, vaccination, traffic congestion — a lot of problems we face as groups have that structure. However many fish others are catching, you will be individually better off maximising your catch; but if everyone does that, there are fewer fish to catch.
In small groups, we can solve collective action problems by relying on pro-social emotions: a sense of fairness, pride in what we achieve as a group, and shame at the idea of being a bludger. Indeed, according to some philosophers, this is fundamentally where morality comes from — it is a set of pro-social emotions and dispositions favoured by evolution because it helps groups to cooperate and thereby solve those problems. However, as groups get larger, those solutions tend to stop working. To solve large-scale collective action problems, we need effective regulation: a set of rules spelling out how many fish you're allowed to catch, together with effective penalties for breaking the rules.
The problem of global climate change is especially difficult for two main reasons. First, it is truly global in scale, deeply implicated in the way the global economy works, and diffused: the effects of climate change are spread across the world. But we have no effective global regulator to enforce a set of global climate rules and penalties.
The second reason comes from the way in which climate change is different from collective action problems, in a crucial respect. Is it really true that if we took the action that is necessary to prevent climate change from worsening, that would be better for everyone ? Not so. If you're old and rich, you're better off taking all the advantages of lavish resource use, and leaving the problems to be dealt with later, by someone else.
Ordinary collective action problems can get solved when there's a powerful enough regulator available to impose effective rules, and it's in everyone's interest to agree to this. But with global climate change, neither of those things is true. There's a powerful incentive for each generation to take the benefits of unrestricted resource use and pass the buck to the next one.
From Kyoto to Paris
What, then, can we do? The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was adopted in 1992 and came into effect in 1994, formulated a set of principles for international climate action and a schedule of annual meetings — the Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings that happen each November. Since then, two main strategies have been attempted. The first one failed, and we're now trying another one.
The first legally binding international climate treaty was agreed at Kyoto in 1997. There, the idea was to negotiate national emissions reduction targets with agreed penalties for non-performance. This suffered from two fatal flaws: a lack of ambition and a lack of buy-in. The Kyoto Protocol was signed by 37 countries plus the European Union; the United States signed but later pulled out. The other signatories did meet their targets, which averaged a 5 per cent reduction in emissions levels below 1990 levels, to be achieved by 2012. (Australia was a signatory, and we continue to boast about having met our target. We're quieter about the fact that what we negotiated was an 8 per cent increase in emissions between 1990 and 2012.) The signatories did not, however, include China and India — and overall global emissions rose by 44 per cent in that period.
So clearly, negotiating binding targets with penalties attached has not been a success. This was tried again at the 2009 COP 15 in Copenhagen and the process broke down altogether. Since then, the world has taken a different tack, which was formalised at the 2015 COP 21 as the Paris Agreement. The idea behind the Paris Agreement has been to get as much participation as possible, with each of the 193 parties to the agreement publishing its own 'nationally determined contribution' (NDC), with a self-imposed emissions reduction target, an accompanying action plan, and a reporting schedule, carrying a commitment to update the NDC every five years, but no liability for non-compliance penalties.
The aim, in other words, is to start from a baseline of widespread participation, secure initial commitments that can be politically delivered, and then ratchet up the level of ambition gradually through a timetable of regular reporting and target-resetting.
In the period leading up to 2015, there was another significant development in climate science and policy. Starting in 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the UN body with the task of summarising climate science to inform policy — shifted away from talking simply about emissions reductions and began saying instead that net emissions must be reduced to zero in order to stabilise global temperatures.
National net zero targets have consequently become a prominent part of the NDCs made under the Paris Agreement: more than 100 countries now have them. Generally, the target date is 2050 (though China's is 2060 and India's 2070). At the same time, net zero targets have been adopted by 20 per cent of the world's cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, and over half of the world's 2,000 largest companies.
How much credence should we give to critics?
Against this historical background, let's return to the critics. The left-wing critics smell a rat when they see how enthusiastically the talk of net zero has been taken up by government and big business. In their minds the IPCC, having realised that our current emissions trajectories give us no hope of containing emissions to tolerable levels, has fallen back on the idea that somehow we can address climate change by investing in 'negative emissions technologies' for removing greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. The big emitters have eagerly seized on this as a way of creating the illusion of action. And one has to admit, when you find Clive Palmer's Waratah Coal proposing a new 'carbon-neutral' coal-fired power station, alarm bells ring.
On the other hand, the right-wing critics — which include, of course, Clive Palmer — complain that we are being played for mugs by China, and that pursuing net zero will simply rip jobs out of the regions, blight the landscape with wind turbines and drive up power prices, for the sake of making urban teal voters feel good. Similar voices are currently being raised across the world, as Greg Sheridan approvingly notes.
Are these criticisms themselves realistic? Climate change is a global problem; it requires a global solution; and currently there is one available vehicle for working towards it: the UNFCC process, with its national targets. We might prefer that the process or the problem itself were different, but it's not. Given the chequered history of international climate action, we're entitled to reserve judgement about whether this will work. But given the scale and complexity of the problem we are faced with, there's something risible in the idea that Australia should walk away now, concluding that the global attempt to solve it has failed.
It's especially ridiculous in a country that dragged itself reluctantly to a net zero commitment as late as 2021 then to turn around four years later when faced with the discipline of setting an interim target, declare this to be too hard and to be the fault of the country that burns our exported coal, and to walk away while complaining that other countries are not acting in good faith.
All countries now face three options regarding national net zero targets:
rejection — abandon the targets altogether;
— abandon the targets altogether; lip service — declare a net zero target for the sake of international decorum, but take no serious action to implement it;
— declare a net zero target for the sake of international decorum, but take no serious action to implement it; provisional commitment — set the target, make a plan for implementing it, but give yourself the option of bailing out if there's a danger of being suckered by your international partner-competitors.
Currently, Australia has worked its faltering way to provisional commitment, with its target of reducing net emissions by 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. From here, we could still fall back on lip service if necessary, to avoid being done over by ruthless competitors. But it's hard to see how it could really be in the national interest to go all the way to rejection. It is true that lip service, unlike rejection, would carry the inconvenience of encouraging your electorate to demand that you actually take action to meet your target. So it would require some degree of political skill, of a rather unattractive kind, to execute. But there are no evident ways in which the national interest would be better served by rejection than by lip service, which retains freedom of manoeuvre and makes you less of a pariah.
Moreover, without being too naïve, there are some grounds for thinking that international climate action could ultimately succeed. We did control the damage that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were doing to the ozone layer. And the increasingly obvious badness of what lies in store if we don't solve the climate problem actually supplies some reasons for believing we will eventually do so. Most people aren't as selfish as a pure Hobbesian model of human motivation would have it. People everywhere tend to care about the future of their children, grandchildren and communities. No nation — China or any other — is populated by people who will be happy to consign their descendants to a climate apocalypse.
If that's true, then there are three powerful reasons for staying engaged in the current UNFCC process, and adopting a strategy of provisional commitment to a net zero target:
it can help create momentum towards actually solving the problem;
it can help create momentum towards actually solving the problem; it creates goodwill in international alliances, which are useful outside the context of climate discussions as well as within them;
it creates goodwill in international alliances, which are useful outside the context of climate discussions as well as within them; and if the world community does go in the direction of a green economic transition — and there are some signs that it will — it's smarter for us to do so earlier rather than later.
Why climate change is a political problem
Once you've noticed the structure of collective action problems, you tend to spot them all over the place — they really are part of the human condition. One place you find them is in Coalition party rooms. There, the battle being fought is over which of the first two options to retreat to: lip service or rejection. As we've seen for decades, there are Coalition politicians whose power bases give them incentives to advance their own individual political interests in ways that are worse for the Coalition as a whole, because they tend to pull it apart.
We should be used to this by now, and there's little point in lamenting it. After all, this is going to be part of our political landscape for the foreseeable future. In a democracy, there will always be a place for climate contrarianism, for as long as there is such a thing as climate policy.
We also need political leaders who are tested in the proving-ground of intra-party politics to develop political skills of a high order. The hardest part of the global climate problem is not technical or economic: engineers have produced low-emissions technologies, and economists have plenty of advice on how to create incentives for us to use them. The hardest part of the problem is political . It requires somehow pulling 200 countries in the same direction, while they are antagonists over other issues.
Succeeding in doing this will require political virtuosity and statecraft of the highest order. Those are skills that don't come around very often. However, at least there's this crumb of consolation. When the great politicians we need do arrive, the problem will still be there for them to solve.
Garrett Cullity is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory at the Australian National University.
Christian Barry is Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.