Why Are Australia’s Carbon Emissions Rising?

An alarming new report commissioned by the Wilderness Society has shown that Australia’s carbon emissions may have risen in the past year, despite the government’s claim that they peaked back in 2005. Even more worryingly, it has drawn attention to a huge discrepancy in the figures declared by the government and those provided by Queensland authorities in terms of emissions from land clearing.

The most recent governmental report says that land clearing and the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions it entails have fallen to record lows in the run-up to September 2015. However, figures compiled by the Wilderness Society show that the state of Queensland alone appears to have emitted more than double the total figure cited by the government for the entire nation.

A Huge Discrepancy

According to Tony Abbott’s government, land clearing in 2013-14 fell to under 170,000 hectares across all of Australia. However, figures released by local authorities and reported upon by the Wilderness Society and the Guardian Australia have found that as much as 300,000 hectares were cleared in the state of Queensland alone.

This has a huge knock-on effect on the emissions themselves. While the official party line is that 2014 and 2015 saw emissions of roughly 10.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) across the country, the Queensland data paints a very different pictures. Instead, it alleges that 25m tonnes of the toxic substance were emitted in that state by itself in 2013, which soared to 38m in 2015.

Clearly, there is some explaining to do on the part of the Australian government. At a time when all the nations of the world should be working together to meet the targets imposed at the COP21 climate change talks, Australia’s apparent obfuscation of its own emissions is incredibly counterproductive.

Widespread Indignation

The Department of Environment has attempted to explain away the vast differences in their figures with those raised by Queensland authorities by claiming that there were seven crucial variations in the manner that each party quantified land clearing. As such, the Department alleged that “it is not appropriate to compare the two data sets directly without adjusting the data for these differences.”

That explanation didn’t wash with critics of the establishment, however. Glenn Walker, climate campaign manager at the Wilderness Society, condemned what he saw as obvious muddying of the waters.

“It defies logic. This is a major discrepancy that can’t be brushed off with the same inadequate explanations used so far,” he remarked. “The government is either using very creative arithmetic or expects us to believe that the rest of Australia has planted enough trees to suck up the equivalent of about 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”

The boss of environmental consultancy firm RepuTech was equally critical of the government’s attitude and echoed calls from years past for Australia to increase its climate change targets.

“We continue to see emissions steadily growing all the way to 2030, despite current policy,” he said. “That’s cause for concern, in that current policy – even the [Emissions Reduction Fund] – is not curbing our national emissions growth. If the argument is about how much emissions are growing, we’re a long way from seeing emissions reductions.”

While Australia continues to support coal, oil and gas, neglect renewables and simultaneously bury its head in the sand, we can expect its emissions to keep on rising.