Nearly all the “climate action” we’ve paid for in Australia has only reduced emissions by 3.9% in 20 years
Anthony Albanese is proud that Australia has reduced emissions by 28% since 2005, but doesn’t tell Australians that 24% of that was in land use, mostly because we let scrub and forests grow back. And now he’s talking of reducing emissions by 62% by 2035?
See: The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory: March 2025 Update
The elephant in the emissions kitchen is that only one kind of “carbon reduction” has achieved anything meaningful in Australia — and it’s not wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, fugitive emissions, EVs, batteries, pink batts, LED globes, cloth shopping bags, FOGO bins, paper straws, insulation, carbon taxes, carbon capture schemes, bug burgers, or feeding seaweed to cows to reduce their farts. The only thing that has reduced our emissions in any meaningful way is land use and forestry change (which officially goes by the delightfully-bureaucratic name, “land use, land-use change and forestry,” LULUCF).
We can see why they don’t want to talk about LULUCF!
Compare these two graphs below. Not only has all the money poured into emissions reduction been trivially effective, the second graph shows why all our efforts in reducing emissions in agriculture, industry, transport and electricity are like climbing Mount Impossible.
This first graph makes it look like our obsession with solar panels and windmills has achieved something because emissions from electricity are falling. But note the net effect of emissions-cuts across seven major areas is barely 3.9%. It’s an illusion.
Australia has reduced emissions since 2005 by 28.1%, but almost all of it comes through LULUCF. Below, we see just how many billions of dollars have been “invested” into achieving nothing, but making President Xi very happy. All the flat lines on the graph are where we spent most of the money. Thus and verily, every dollar spent reducing emissions in every other area outside land use change is almost irrelevant.
Like squeezing blood from an iPhone — our cars, heaters, food and electricity systems are already efficient, finely-tuned ecosystems. It takes massive spending to eke out every tiny further reduction. But biology evolved to “reduce carbon emissions,” and removing a few bottlenecks lets the natural carbon-reduction-bio-machine rip. Five hundred million years of evolution has made chloroplast motors that can suck carbon out of the sky. If only we have 7 million square kilometers of space to suck with — oh, we do. But most of those millions of square kilometers need water and fertilizer.
Dr David Evans was the leading carbon modeler for The Australian Greenhouse Office / Dept of the Environment 1999 – 2005 and also did some contract work for them in 2007-2009 (and I happen to be married to him, both then and now). He explains that Australia leads the world in using satellite data to estimate carbon in trees, shrubs, crops, bark, mulch, roots, and soil — because it matters more to us than nearly any other nation. The FullCAM model he created takes Landsat data down to the very small resolution of 25m2 plots across our 7.7 million square kilometer continent. It’s so detailed we can identify when a large tree grows or is cut down anywhere in Australia. We can see when a firebreak is carved through forest, and when the forest reclaims the firebreak.
From Dr David Evans, Australia’s former Kyoto carbon modeler at the Australian Greenhouse Office:
Australia had to fight to get LULUCF included in the national accounts. It was important to our accounts, but it was not useful for Europe, where forests were long since cut down.
LULUCF is responsible for almost all our reductions in carbon emissions, mostly just by ending land clearing. Between 1990 and 2008, land clearing almost completely stopped in all the Australian states except Queensland and northern NSW. It has since mostly stopped everywhere. Just ending land clearing allowed Australia’s emissions in other sectors to grow as the Australian economy grew, while still allowing Australia to meet its Kyoto Protocol commitment of less than an 8% increase in net carbon emissions between 1990 and 2008. The LULUCF contribution over this period was about -23%, as I recall (as calculated by FullCAM).
But the LULUCF emission reduction graph flattens out after 2020. There is a natural limit to carbon emission reduction in the LULUCF sector. There is only so much land not-to-clear, forest to plant, and soil whose carbon we can increase by optimal management. There probably isn’t much more arable land that isn’t already farmed or used for housing, that we can reclaim. We have millions of square kilometers of arid land, but it won’t hold much carbon in vegetation or the soil without extra rainfall and fertilizer.
Once a forest has fully matured, the carbon content per square kilometer reaches doesn’t change, because the forest is in equilibrium. Old growth forests aren’t removing much carbon from the atmosphere, just storing it where it can’t interfere with infrared radiation leaving the planet. It’s only a growing forest that acts as a carbon sink. By the way, about 96% of carbon exchanges to and from the atmosphere are not anthropogenic, and are mostly not well understood. Does global warming (by any cause, e.g. space weather) increase bacterial decay, releasing more carbon dioxide as mulch etc. is broken down quicker? How much is this raising the atmospheric carbon dioxide level?
If a bushfire destroys a forest, in the world of international carbon accounting that’s considered “an act of God” and the emissions released are not counted on our national accounts. The national accounts are only for man-made (anthropogenic) carbon emissions. (Amusing side note: when a forest burns down, about 1% of its carbon is converted to charcoal and becomes chemically inert, thereby removing it from the carbon cycle and rendering it unable to find its way back to the atmosphere. So, in the long run, to reduce atmospheric carbon via forestry, we should be burning down forests and replanting them! Which is sort of what happens anyway in Australia — which has a remarkably high charcoal content in the soil. By the way, burning the wood in low oxygen conditions creates “char,” which is a potent fertilizer for crops. But burning down all our forests and letting them regrow just to add 1% of the emissions to the soil layer seems a bit extreme, even for today’s Greens.)
— David Evans: PhD, M.S. (E.E.), M.S. (Stats) [Stanford Uni], B.Eng, M.A., B.Sc., University Medal, [Syd Uni]
We are only a tenth of the way to our 2035 target
The Albanese government rides for free silently and deceptively on the regrowth of previously cleared land, but that has probably run out. We’ve spent billions of dollars on wind, solar and batteries, and LED globes, and insulation, and all we’ve done is reduce our emissions by 4% or so. Nothing.
The LULUCF graph plateaus at 2020. Let’s assume LULUCF has done most of what it can, and remove it from the picture. Effectively then we are aiming for 43% reduction minus the 24% already achieved by LULUCF, which we’ll assume will probably stay constant from now on. That leaves a 19% reduction left to achieve from everything else. The devastating maths is that we have barely made 3.9% of the 19% we still need to achieve by 2030, and now fatuously, we’re aiming for a 38% reduction in emissions from ever sector apart from land use and forestry by 2035.
These people are so bad with numbers, we have to ask if they are innumerate dupes or lying hacks (or both)? The 2035 target is effectively twice as high as the 2030 target, which we are already failing to achieve. We are at the point of surreal absurdity in national energy policy, and yet the suits are still smiling solemnly, as if it is not a trillion dollar fairy tale.
The Labor Government is being deceptive in hiding how brutal and expensive it is going to be to meet any of these targets. Every time they mention the 28% figure, they are lying by omission, because they won’t say that most of that reduction has nothing to do with all their renewable, recycling, battery storage, or Snowy 2.0 schemes, or school indoctrination programs and therapy sessions for climate angst.
What’s the aim of fantasy targets?
Obviously, the Labor-Green Blob doesn’t really care about carbon dioxide, or they’d be acting differently. The aim here is not to reduce carbon emissions as cheaply and realistically as possible, or they’d be honest about what works and what doesn’t.
The immediate goal of obscenely impossible targets may be as petty as impressing the UN and WEF, and winning the game to host the next COP super-junket in Adelaide in 2026 (with inevitable failure cynically hidden 4 to 9 years further down the track, when this government is long gone). But we can’t overlook the true big winners in this deal — the Blob, the Bankers, the Bureaucrats, and China, China, China.
To all intents and purposes, ridiculous targets feed dependent corporate interests who farm the subsidies, while crushing any industries that don’t need government help. It converts once-independent industries like aluminum smelting to ones dependent on big government, who have to beg for handouts just to survive, and now have a driving need to grovel before politicians, or at least, not say something that might offend them. This cripples the free market and free speech. It slowly converts the country to a communist or globalist paradise, by taking the strength away from independent industry and converting all the players into vassals dependent on government rules and decrees.
This is an existential battle for The West. Without cheap energy, we become voiceless slaves to the Blob.
REFERENCE: Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions: March 2025 quarterly update, Department of Climate Change Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW)
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*UPDATE: Sky News is quoting a 27% reduction and 3%, but those figures are from the December 2024 Quarter. My figures above are the latest from March 2025.