As Trump abandons climate action, we must accept net zero won’t happen

While markets and media were chasing Donald Trump’s tariff fiasco last week, something far more important happened in East Palestine, Ohio. 

The new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, chose the fire station in that tiny village between Pittsburgh and Cleveland to announce that he was “driving a dagger through the heart of climate change religion”, as he put it.

Zeldin is rolling back 31 environmental rules (Make America Dirty Again?) including the EPA’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, which has been the legal basis for all US action against climate change.

In short, Trump’s America is abandoning climate action.

Meanwhile in Brazil, the government is clearing a swathe of the Amazon rainforest for a road to get 50,000 delegates to the next UN climate change conference – COP30 – to held, weirdly, in the remote city of Belem in November.

Bulldozing the Amazon rainforest is a fitting way to mark 30 years of failure, of annual gabfests that have released colossal amounts of carbon dioxide from the mouths of the well-meaning, and burned tonnes of aviation fuel to get them there, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions not one bit.

In those three decades, human use of fossil fuels has increased 54 per cent.

The withdrawal of America, and the influence that will have on other countries and companies, means the COP30 delegates might as well stay home this year.

The global effort to prevent climate change which began with COP1 in Berlin in 1995 and peaked two years later with a burst of optimism in Kyoto, is pretty much over; it’s dead.

There are two other reasons for this:

• China talks, and does, a big game about renewable energy, but is frantically building coal-fired power stations. Last year it added 100GW of coal capacity, five times Australia’s entire coal-fired capacity, another 94.5GW is under construction and 66.7GW more has been approved.
• To reach net zero, at least 2 billion tonnes of carbon, and possibly as much as 5 billion, will have to be sequestered in new trees because carbon emissions definitely won’t be zero in 25 years. Yet there simply won’t be enough new trees planted. Many of those supplying emitting companies with offset certificates are getting away with saying that a tree not cut down is the same as a tree planted. 

The cost of success

Energy scientist, Vaclav Smil puts the total cost of achieving net zero by 2050 at $US444 trillion, or $US17 trillion a year for 25 years, “requiring affluent economies to spend 20 to 25 per cent of their annual GDP on the transition”. 

Only once before in history has that much money been spent – in World War 2. This time the spending would have to last three decades, not five years, and no country is contemplating anything like that.

So net zero by 2050 won’t happen and the increase in global temperature will not be limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels that was agreed as preferred at Paris in 2015 – nowhere near it.

Current policies and pledges put the world on track for around 2.5–3°C of warming, but if emissions remain high and predicted tipping points are reached, 4°C is likely later this century.

At that point, scientists tell us, large parts of the planet be will uninhabitable, and the parts that aren’t uninhabitable will be more unpleasant and dangerous.

Why have we failed to limit warming?

Before we get on to what 3–4°C of warming means for Australia, it’s worth reflecting on why this has happened. Why has 30 years of talking and earnest good intentions failed to prevent global warming?

Obviously, a big part of it is the fossil fuel industry’s success in turning climate change into a political issue instead of a scientific one, persuading the right side of politics that it’s all part of a left woke conspiracy, even a “religion”, with the right-wing media facilitating that project, led by Rupert Murdoch.

But I think the more fundamental reason is the scientific community’s failure to tell the truth.

There has been systemic reticence on the part of scientists to spell out what’s actually going on, first because science is inherently uncertain, so they are always reluctant to be definitive, and second because they worry that if the true nightmare was revealed, politicians and everybody else would either refuse to believe it or just give up.

So science says 1.5°C of warming and avoiding the extremes of climate change are achievable, and the way politics and media work, that is taken to mean it will be achieved, no problem.

In fact it is now very unlikely, and Australia should do what France is doing and refocus on adapting to reality. 

The reality of a 3-4°C temperature rise

On the same day that Lee Zeldin was stabbing climate change religion to death with his dagger, the French minister for “ecological transition”, Agnes Pannier-Runacher released a 377-page report titled Le Plan National d’Adaptation, designed to prepare France for 4°C of warming. Four degrees!

My French is limited, but the plan looks quite inadequate for the catastrophe that sort of rise in global temperature would bring. At least they are thinking about it.

For Australia, warming of 3-4°C would see the complete destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, constant flooding of south-east Queensland and northern NSW, cyclones as far south as Coffs Harbour, frequent bushfires everywhere else, and a massive refugee flood as Bangladesh and Pacific Islands are inundated.

Apart from the refugees, preparing for that risk is largely a matter of infrastructure and insurance – in other words, money.

About 25 per cent of Queensland households are currently uninsured, according to the Actuaries Institute. As premiums rise, that number will increase.

In south-east Queensland, 70 per cent of houses were built before the 1970s. All of them are in Region B of the National Construction Code (NCC), which means they are not built to withstand a category 2 cyclone.

If Cyclone Alfred had not become a tropical low before hitting the Queensland coast, and had stayed Category 2, many thousands of families would have been financially ruined. Their uninsured houses would have lost their roofs or collapsed.

The next cyclone, or the one after that, will likely remain as Category 2.

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Insurance reality bites

Separately, almost all households in Australia are underinsured because of the roughly 40-50 per cent rise in building costs since the pandemic, which is reflected in very few replacement sums in insurance policies.

As Cyclone Alfred was peaking in the Coral Sea in late February, the Insurance Council of Australia released a new report titled Advancing Australia’s Resilience, directed at influencing policies for the coming federal election and reducing the cost of insurance.

It recommended $30 billion of spending on infrastructure, as follows:

• Deliver new critical flood defence infrastructure ($15 billion)
• Strengthen properties in harm’s way ($5 billion)
• Managed relocation (buy-backs) ($10 billion)
• Future-proof existing flood mitigation infrastructure ($150 million)

The ICA is talking mainly about floods, which it says is the second biggest component of insurance premiums (tax is the biggest – GST and stamp duty).

The $30 billion would be spent building levies along river banks and around towns, raising houses onto stilts and simply helping families move out of flood plains by buying their unsaleable properties – that is, reducing risk and thereby lowering premiums and get more houses insured.

Needless to say, the government has filed the report under ‘M’ for maybe later, with a copy under ‘V’ for vested interest.

But the reality is that without that kind of spending, and probably much more, it will be impossible to live in much of regional Australia, and the cities are already over-crowded.

That is, of course, unless it’s all a new green woke scam religion. 

Let’s hope so.

Alan Kohler is finance presenter and columnist on ABC News and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.