The Albanese Authorities has lastly introduced Australia’s 2035 local weather goal. And we’re furious.
This new goal is much wanting what’s required to maintain communities in Australia and the Pacific protected. It dangers a way forward for lethal heatwaves, worsening floods, and catastrophic sea degree rise. It’s an affront to weak communities all through our area.
Australia, with among the many highest per particular person emissions on this planet, might want to make far deeper cuts if we’re to fulfil our duty to assist restrict warming to 1.5°C – a lifeline for the Pacific. The Albanese Authorities’s local weather credibility is now hanging by a thread.
With its thumping electoral majority, and with the Australian public, unions, and progressive companies all voicing assist for a stronger goal, the Authorities had all the things it wanted to satisfy the second and lay out a powerful goal and plan of motion for this crucial decade.
As a substitute – and following fixed stress from the fossil gasoline business to drive down ambition, together with a harmful report from the Enterprise Council of Australia primarily based on junkyard modelling – the Prime Minister succumbed to timidity. It’s a goal that solely serves the pursuits of huge coal and fuel, and one that’s far wanting what we all know Australia can obtain.
The Albanese authorities’s new local weather plan is an affront to communities throughout the Pacific and Australia going through the escalating impacts of harmful local weather change. It prioritises fossil gasoline income and enterprise pursuits over folks
Shiva Gounden, Head of Pacific
The goal announcement comes on the finish of a monumental fortnight that noticed the Authorities maintain again the discharge of a chilling evaluation of our local weather future whereas it greenlit the extension of Australia’s largest fossil gasoline venture to 2070.
Tomorrow the Prime Minister will head to New York for the UN Basic Meeting, the place he’ll proceed to try to safe Australia’s bid to host subsequent 12 months’s worldwide local weather negotiations (COP31) in partnership with the Pacific.
If Australia is to be a worthy co-host of COP31, it wants to point out actual management. Proper now, it’s failing that take a look at. 4 months into its second time period, our Authorities appears prepared to place the income of fossil gasoline companies forward of the protection of the communities and locations we love.
The Authorities is proving too timid to steer us by the local weather disaster and we should demand higher. This implies an actual plan to chop local weather air pollution this decade and part out fossil fuels. The combat goes on.
