My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda bunjelung Caalcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os. It's Thursday, the ninth of November. I'm Sam, I'm Zara. The Treasurer Jim Chalmers has indicated we need to be doing more to ensure we have enough renewable energy to meet our targets. When we talk about the climate, we often talk about how Australia is tracking in reaching net zero, but what does net zero even mean? How do we get there? And how well is Australia tracking towards that goal.
We're not on track. We've seen some positive steps in the last year, but goodness we've got a lot more to do.
Simon Bradshaw, head of Research at the Climate Council, is going to help us answer some of those questions in today's deep dive, but first, I couldn't use my phone yesterday you couldn't.
We all went a bit back in time, or at least those of us who are Optus customers. There was a major Optis outage for a number of hours, but in the afternoon yesterday the company did confirm it had begun restoring services. For the whole morning, mobile coverage, data, phone and internet services were disrupted across the country. It's not yet clear what caused the outage, though a fault deep in the core of the Optus network is said to have caused it.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi has arrived in the Cook Islands for the Pacific Islands Forum. This will be Albanesi's first visit to the region as Prime Minister and his second Pacific Islands Forum. Climate change and security matters are expected to be discussed amongst leaders from eighteen different Pacific countries.
META and the Australian Federal Police will pun on a program to raise awareness about online sex stortion among younger people familiar with the term sextortion is a word to describe when a person is tricked into sending sexual images online and then blackmailed or threatened by whoever they sent the image to a social media awareness campaign will promote educational quizzes and videos about sextortion.
And today's good news. A rare lizard in northeast Queensland has been spotted by scientists for the first time in forty two years. All three species of the grassland stripped skink were spotted three hundred kilometers south of Cans. It's been hailed as an amazing discovery that will support further research into the species. Okay, Zara, it's been a little while on the podcast since we've given you an update on how we're tracking in terms of our renewable energy targets.
In some of that, I think that we've ever spoken about it.
I think we talked about it in the context of the federal election and the new Albanzi government. That's how far back it was.
Yeah, But I think that we often talk about commitments and time and i'd say very rarely actually stand back to look at you know. I think people have short memories and we're told something and it's committed to, but very rarely, i'd say, do we as the media actually follow up on seeing how we're tracking as a country against those.
Targets, especially outside of the context of an election. We know they're going to be talked about at election time, but we're not near an election now. And last week the Treasurer Jim Chalmers gave a speech where he said we need to be doing more to ensure we have enough renewable energy to meet our targets.
So you're speaking there about emissions reductions target. So the government has set one of those targets, and I'll say it's the longer term target. We're in twenty twenty three. Now this is a twenty fifty target, but it's to reach net zero by twenty fifty. Can you just talk me through what that commitment looks like.
First, Yeah, so net zero means the amount of carbon that we're pumping into the atmosphere through the ways that we burn energy is equal to the amount of carbon taken out of the atmosphere, and it is a really fine balancing act. We release carbon emissions through things like trains, planes, cars, even things like cooking up a meal, heating something up in the microwave, and they would all need to be canceled out by the amount of carbon that we take out of the atmosphere.
We always used to speak about it as a bath tub.
Yeah, where the sinkhole is letting water out of the bath as quickly as water is being poured into the bath. So then the question becomes, well, how do you take carbon out of the atmosphere? And that can be done through things like planting trees, but also through technology like carbon capturing. And if you want to know more about how that kind of technology could work, I'm going to throw a link into they's show notes to an episode we've done called Dumping Carbon at the Bottom of the Ocean.
But a net zero world, which is essentially what we're all working towards, is ultimately where there's no carbon going into the atmosphere at.
All, all right, And that is aspirationally what we are looking at for the future, a world in which that is happening. The government has said that that could be happening by twenty fifty.
Yeah. And the way that I always think about those types of timelines is my own age. So I'm twenty six. I was thinking about your age. So I'm twenty eight and you're twenty six, And in twenty fifty, when this goal is meant to be hit, I'll be fifty four and you'll be fifty two. Now, in order to get to a point where you and I are in our mid fifties and there's net zero, there's some key targets the government says we need to meet along the way.
So what they've done is they've also set some targets for twenty thirty, and an important target there is that eighty two percent of energy generation will come from renewable sources. And the aim is that we would have reduced our missions by forty three percent below the two thousand and five levels by that twenty thirty point.
All right, So it's almost this game of incrementalism, as it were, because we've got this twenty thirty target that we actually need to be very close to meetings soon. We're already in twenty twenty three, six and a half years. How is the government saying we're going on meeting that target? The target that they set at the last election.
Well, let's zone in on the eighty two percent number. So they wanted eighty two percent of energy generation to come from renewables by twenty thirty.
Twenty thirty.
Yeah, So currently government data shows renewables like wind and solar are making up about thirty three percent of Australia's energy generation. That's a long way off that eighty two percent number.
I can't do maths, but that seems really far.
We'd need to more than double and there's only six and a half years or six and a bit years to go until that goal. So I guess the question then is can we even do that? Can we more than double how much renewable energy we're using by twenty thirty? And the news isn't great. So Clean Energy Advisory Group NESA has found its quote extremely unlikely that Australia will
achieve that twenty thirty target. Similarly, a report from Riistad Energy has estimated that this rate, we're going to get to sixty four percent renewable generation by the end of the decade. So basically, based on how things are going now, the energy experts aren't confident we're going to get there.
If they're not confident we'll get to twenty thirty, presumably that would have a knock on effect to our chances of reaching net zero by twenty fifty.
Right, it's a really good question. So one of our journalists, Harry Seklic, reached out to an expert, doctor Simon Bradshaw, and he's the head of research at the Climate Council.
We've got a lot of work to do.
We're not on track, Doctor Bradshaw said. Some progress has been made, there are more renewables in the energy grid, but he did say that we're not going to get to net zero unless things speed up rapidly.
It means moving from what has been some small steps so far to a real step change, a quantum leap if you like, when it comes to the pace that we really need to be rolling out these solutions. All right.
So that's an expert point of view on how Australia is going. Of course, we know that when it comes to climate it's not an Australia unique problem, that it's one that the whole world needs to fight together. How are we going compared to the rest of the world.
Well, overall, Australia is ranking fairly low in our emissions targets and progress.
Just full of good news today.
I know it's not a bright episode, but it's important and worth talking about. So the latest Climate Change Performance Index has Australia ranked in the bottom ten for emissions. The index ranked Australia is having higher emissions than places like India, the UK, and China, and it was critical of Australia's continued colon gas mining and subsidies that are
offered to fossil fuel companies. And Australia was additionally called out as part of the G twenty countries responsible for three quarters of global emissions.
So against that context, we've heard Australia might not be on track to meet it's emissions targets.
Is the world more generally on track?
Well, pretty much every government is tackling their own net zero challenges, and ultimately, in order for everyone to reach their goals by twenty fifty, UN scientists have called for what they describe as a complete transformation of the industries to reach net zero, and most of that is going to have to come from reducing reliance on fossil fuels
for heating and cooling. And the reason why that's so important, why that kind of holds the key to all of this, is because three quarters of the world's emissions come from energy generation. So overall, the UN doesn't have good news. They say that the world won't reach net zero by twenty fifty because most governments haven't made commitments significant enough to reduce screenhouse gas emissions and.
I guess even if they do have those targets, it appears that even if you have them, you might not be getting there.
Yeah, definitely, and I think some of the discussions around the twenty thirty targets really drive that point home.
I mean, we started a steep dive based on a quote by Jim Chalmers, our Federal treasure about the fact that more needs to be done in order for Australia to meet its emissions reductions targets. I do think that there is an element of irony in those comments though, that we are hearing this from the Federal Treasurer, whose government. You know, while they've only been in power for what is a year and a half, they are responsible for getting the country to a place where we are meeting
those emissions reductions targets and implementing the right policies. And I mean, we've spoken a number of times on this podcast about the fact that the government is still approving oil and gas projects and that that perhaps is slowing down our country's progress against these milestones. I'm curious to see whether the government will have any kind of major departure from the policy it has now If it gets closer and closer to twenty thirty and it's clear or not on track.
And that's a question we should continue to put to them as we get closer to twenty thirty, is are we going to reach those goals? And if we get to a point where they answer with no, we're not going to reach them. There needs to be a meaningful discussion about what happens next. Thanks for joining us for this episode of The Daily OS. If you learn something from the episode, there's one super small task you can do in five seconds that will mean the world to us.
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