As someone acknowledged this morning, its contribution to climate finance is critically insufficient. It’s not good. And part of the Paris deal is that developed countries need to take action, but they also must provide resources to the poorer countries in the world in order for us to solve this problem. Australia has not stacked up there and instead seems to be focused on subsidising its friends in the fossil fuel industry.

The climate action tracker agenda for Australia, looking at our most recent report is that we need to decrease reliance on offsetting and land exchange and forestry in this country. Bit more details in that in a minute. We need to stop supporting the fossil fuel industry, accelerate the phase out of fossil fuel power generation. That is beginning to happen, but it is a bit slow for what we need to be doing to get onto one and a half degrees and a bunch of other policies, which I’m sure you all know about here in the transport sector and so on.

Now, land use emissions in Australia, the so-called LULU CF sector for the nerds here, land use change, land use change and forestry, is a big thing.

Not because it does anything, but because it seems to be a real cottage industry in government to recalculate the land use change in forestry sequestration every year. And what this figure, it’s a bit complicated, shows is that every year since about 2018, the government has recalculated how much carbon is being sequestered in our forests.

The actual basis for this is not very clear to anyone, if it is to the government they’ve never explained it, but the result is that the actual amount of emission reductions Australia needs to get to a target in 2030 keeps reducing year after year. So that means that less and less action is needed year after year, not because any action has been undertaken, but because the estimation of the land use sink has changed.

Yep.

Now Australian emission trends, if you look at the national figures, the government likes to talk to them, look good. The top red line on the left, you can see emissions going down – great. Well actually it’s not so great. The reason why is the land use change issue I just mentioned below, which is the bottom curve on the left-hand side, which shows an increasing sink. Now, if you take out the land use change and forestry sector, look at the left-hand side, the right-hand side, I mean, and you see the top curve is Australia’s emissions excluding land use change and forestry roughly flat if not in the last year, slight of a twitch up. If you take out the other sector that’s actually reducing emissions, the only other sector which is the power sector, then the trend continues slightly upwards, and it has for several years.

So the underlying trend there is not good because we’re not tackling stationary emissions from the mining sector and so on. We’re not tackling transport or agriculture. So, we see an underlying increase in emissions for which there are no real policies in place.

Now the industrial emissions in Australia, that is mining, mineral processing, manufacturing are really significant, but the government is focused on offsets, which does not support a phase out of fossil fuels or emissions.

Now, last year we published a report on why offsets don’t work, and I just wanted to step through some of the reasoning there. The majority of land sector offsets actually fail to deliver real genuine additional emission reductions. There’s been numerous papers published in Australia on this, including by Andrew Macintosh and others, which show this.

Much of the sequestered carbon claimed in these crediting systems, the Australian carbon credit system, would’ve happened without the money provided by the offsetting system.

In other words, it’s not additional.

And there are a range of issues that I’m sure you’re familiar with that point to the fact that basically this system does not work to actually offset a tonne of fossil CO2 emissions. Another factor to bear in mind is that most land sector sequestered carbon will ultimately end up back in the atmosphere.

There’s no free lunch in the carbon cycle. Terrestrial carbon storage is there only for a finite period of time. So in the end, if you do the numbers properly, I think Miko Kirschbaum from the ANU was the first to show this over 20 years ago that if you’re offsetting a tonne of fossil CO2 emissions with a temporary land sector offset unit, you’ll end up worse off in the atmosphere than if you’d done nothing in the first place. So it loads the system up for a lot more change in the future.

Within the Australian context, there’s a very special thing going on here that the safeguard mechanism system and its use of offsets enables more fossil CO2 emissions. And you can calculate this.

You can say what if the LNG industry buys an ACCU, one tonne of ACCU, what is the consequential allowed emissions? It’s about 8.4 tonnes. There’s a range, but it shows that actually it’s levering more fossil fuel emissions.

Australia has no policies to phase out oil and gas production.

This is a figure from the Climate Action Tracker update on how countries are tracking on the fossil fuel phase out. Australia registers pretty solidly on the wrong side of the balance sheet. I won’t go through all the elements there. There’s simply not a good message here.

Now, climate integrity actually matters a lot for getting to 1.5°C. As noted earlier, there is a very big number of countries now that have put forward net zero targets, but what we’re increasingly seeing is that buyers of our commodities want to see real zero emission supply chains. So a battery manufacturer making lithium batteries wants to see ultimately real zero lithium and so on. So that is a big pressure on our manufacturing and mining sector here.

Now, our offset system at present to me seems to design to undermine real action rather than contribute to actually limiting warming to one and a half degrees.

And I would contend that the offsets appear likely to undermine ambition to be a renewable energy superpower, then support it, because they’re a distraction from companies actually taking enough action to reduce emissions.

Phasing out offsetting, to me, then becomes a critical agenda item for climate integrity in Australia. If we continue to use offsets, then it looks to me like we will be continuing to enable more fossil fuel production and we will be avoiding the investments in the renewable systems we need to create in order to make ourselves into a superpower.

Final point here is it just occurs to me that our offsetting system looks like the world’s first state sponsored greenwashing system.

I think it’s a really serious issue.

So anyway, I just wanted to clear with this slide because I had all my old friends here, in Neil and so on, from Tuvalu, who helped to get this one-and-a-half-degree target into the Paris Agreement in order to give their countries the best possible chance.

Thanks.