Ex-Labor climate advisor Ross Garnaut makes incredible net zero admission as renewables push falters yet again

Sky News AU

3 days ago

Ross Garnaut was once Labor's go-to expert on climate change.
His landmark reviews under the Rudd and Gillard governments framed emissions reduction as a moral imperative.
Now he's warning that the Albanese government's plans are not just off track but wildly detached from reality.
Speaking to the Clean Energy Council this week, Mr Garnaut declared that Australia will miss its target of 82 per cent carbon-free electricity by 2030 'not by a little, but by a big margin'.
It was a sober, data-driven indictment that few in the energy sector would seriously contest.
The scale of the shortfall is hard to ignore.
The rapid deployment of wind and solar the target demands has simply not materialised.
Hundreds of renewable projects remain 'in the pipeline,' as Energy Minister Chris Bowen likes to point out.
But very few are crossing the line into financial commitment.
Most of those that do are now propped up by taxpayers via the Capacity Investment Scheme or other forms of implicit subsidy.
It's a long way from the rosy optimism of December 2021, when Mr Bowen and Anthony Albanese unveiled their plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent by the end of the decade.
Mr Bowen described it as 'ambitious but achievable,', insisting it wasn't a vague aspiration but 'a target with teeth.'
Yet the numbers tell another story.
According to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, Australia's emissions were 24.7 per cent below 2005 levels in December 2022.
By December last year, they'd improved only marginally, sitting at 27 per cent.
To hit the 2030 target, emissions would need to fall by another 16 percentage points, more than three points per year.
That would require a pace of change Australia has never achieved, particularly given the backlog of delays in generation, transmission, and storage.
Flagship projects like Snowy Hydro are years behind schedule and blowing out budgets.
Transmission infrastructure is not keeping up.
Mr Bowen's hopes were pinned partly on green hydrogen, which almost no serious analyst considers technologically or economically viable at scale in this decade.
He could have done without the reminder this week from the UN's climate tsar, Simon Stiell, that Australia's 2035 targets are due by September under the Paris timetable.
In a rational policy environment, such headwinds would prompt a reassessment.
Realistically, that would mean recalibrating the 2030 target and attaching heavy caveats to any post-2030 pledges.
But climate politics rarely allows for realism.
For a party of the progressive left, targets are not tools, they are moral declarations.
Practical obstacles are downplayed, achieving them is merely a matter of political will.
Those who dominate the climate debate rarely come from sectors responsible for delivering emissions cuts - energy, agriculture, transport, industry.
Instead, they are diplomats, bureaucrats, or climate advocates like Mr Stiell, whose job is to rally nations around the IPCC's global ambitions.
He called on Australia this week to 'demonstrate what ambition looks like' and to accelerate its departure from fossil fuels.
'The science is calling for a ­collective effort for all countries to cut emissions by 60 per cent by 2035,' he said.
Mr Bowen's response carried a hint of irritation: 'Targets are easier set than met,' he noted.
'We will set a target informed by expert advice in the national interest.'
Mr Stiell's authority as a scientific voice is undermined by the apocalyptic tone of his rhetoric.
In London last year, he warned that humanity had just two years left to 'save the world.'
This week in Sydney, he predicted 'mega-droughts' that would make 'fresh fruit and veg a once-a-year treat.'
Such claims are not supported by the IPCC's own findings, which express 'low confidence' in any global trend in drought since the mid-20th century.
The evidence for widespread climate-driven crop failures is similarly thin.
Agricultural yields have surged globally despite warming.
In 2022, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported record global grain output.
The uncertainty is no surprise.
As physicist and former Obama science adviser Steven Koonin notes in ' Unsettled' , precipitation data is highly variable and difficult to synthesise.
'There is no easy way to combine precipitation data from scattered weather stations to get at the bigger picture,' he writes.
Mr Koonin's verdict?
Predictions of climate-induced food collapse are 'yet another apocalypse that ain't.'
Mr Stiell also warned that Australia could suffer an $8 trillion GDP loss by 2050 - another figure divorced from mainstream analysis.
The IPCC's own modelling projects average global economic growth of two per cent annually through the century, with climate impacts reducing this to 1.96 per cent - a barely perceptible change.
In a functional policy process, those numbers would matter.
They would be weighed soberly, and targets set accordingly - with engineering, economics, and institutional capacity in mind.
Instead, they are shouting from the sidelines - while the government clings to a plan that increasingly looks like a triumph of political symbolism over practical delivery.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre and a regular contributor to Sky News Australia
Originally published as Ex-Labor climate advisor Ross Garnaut makes incredible net zero admission as renewables push falters yet again