In this article, Adam Creighton contextualises and disseminates the IPA’s research on Net Zero.
Every few days that famous cartoon meme of Homer Simpson slowly retreating into a hedge crosses my mind.
The 1994 Simpsons episode is an amusing analogy of the embarrassing approach our nation’s policy and corporate elites have taken by enthusiastically backing net zero.
The release this week of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s fantasy forecast, which supposedly lays out Australia’s path to becoming a “renewable energy superpower”, is the latest example of rhetorical retreat before the fall. The last Integrated System Plan from 2024 mentioned the government’s net-zero plan 31 times in the 94-page document. The latest 2026 draft includes it only once across 115 pages.
Meanwhile, the Australian resource giants have realised the big banks were on to something in crab-walking away from financial and rhetorical commitments to net zero. Rio Tinto this week cut the sum it planned to waste on socalled decarbonisation projects from $US7.5bn ($11.3bn) to less than $US2bn.
In October the global Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which had been a flagship initiative for finance types to pontificate about net zero, collapsed. Governments around the world are rapidly losing interest. COP30 in Brazil was a fizzer; there was no binding commitment on how to eradicate fossil fuels. Few nations have bothered to live up to their promised Paris emissions reductions.
Climate Action Tracker, an online monitor of global progress to net zero, rates the US as “critically insufficient”, joining Russia, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and six others. Even Canada, China, India, Argentina and three others are “highly insufficient”.
Even academics are walking away from net zero. Just this week the journal Nature had to retract a major paper published in April 2024 that projected that climate change could cause $US38 trillion a year in economic damage by 2049 and a 62 per cent reduction in global GDP by 2100.
“The study had so many errors that Nature has now retracted it, but what an embarrassment,” he Wall Street Journal opined. “The economic harm from climate change no longer exceeded the costs of the government interventions to do something to arrest warming temperatures.”
We should expect a few more Homer Simpsons to fade into the bushes over the coming months. AEMO’s latest ISP must be sobering reading for anyone with a grip on reality who’d invested their credibility in the government’s net-zero targets.
As energy market expert Aidan Morrison at the Centre for Independent Studies pointed out of the plan, the supposed increase in solar and wind capacity from 23 gigawatts today to 58 gigawatts by 2030 – in just five years – verges on impossible, absent World War II levels of resource and administrative redirection. “That’s all we’ve ever built, over say 15 or 20 years, but in four more years we’ll somehow build 35GW more,” he noted on Wednesday.
Never in Australian history has the gap between political rhetoric and economic and scientific reality been so great (perhaps this is a function of the vast bulk of politicians having studied law or arts degrees).
Victoria’s Labor government has regulated to shut down the Yallourn coal-power station in 2028, which supplies about 16 per cent of the state’s electricity, and the even bigger Loy Yang A (around 30 per cent) by 2035.
I’m not a betting man, but I’m happy to forecast that won’t happen, just as NSW and Queensland have had to extend the lives of theirs.
The latest quarterly emissions figures show the federal government’s plans to cut emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 simply can’t happen, especially if it keeps importing 300,000 net migrants a year. No wonder transport emissions are up almost 21 per cent since 2005, and overall emissions down only 4.5 per cent.
As the wheels start coming off the net-zero pipe dream, at least the government can claim to be leading the world in something. Australia has cancelled more green hydrogen capacity (almost 1.5 megatons) since 2020 than the US and China combined, according to the Financial Times this week, and more than any other nation in the world.
“Low-carbon hydrogen – made with either renewable energy and water or gas and carbon capture and storage – has struggled to secure upfront contracts from buyers, with so-called green and blue hydrogen more expensive than the ‘grey’ version derived from fossil fuels without its emissions being captured,” the paper reported.
The government’s precious green hydrogen revolution that has already cost taxpayers billions in subsidies, and which is meant to replace Australia’s coal and gas exports, is a figment of the netzero fundamentalist imagination. Even the government is aware voters are far less keen on climate change zealotry than the Labor faithful. Its 2025 budget mentioned net zero 92 times, among 18 references to Australia’s becoming a “renewable energy superpower”. Mentions collapsed to 20 and zero respectively in this year’s pre-election budget, according to IPA research published in June.
Expect even fewer mentions next year if the Coalition can get its act together and link power price increase to unrealistic energy policies, especially after Jim Chalmers said he would cease the partial nationalisation of the household electricity bills to hide the true cost of energy fantasies. Labor has dodged a bullet in not hosting next year’s COP31summit in Adelaide, by which time more of the corporate, political and academic world will have woken up to reality.
Few people these days say they supported the disastrous Covid lockdowns. We should expect the same forgetfulness about net zero.
“Even the government is aware voters are far less keen on climate change zealotry than the Labor faithful … As the wheels start coming off the net-zero pipe dream, at least the government can claim to be leading the world in something …”
