Minister for Hot Air

The federal government is obliged by Senate order to report national emissions data each quarter.

This data was supposed to be released to the public last Friday by the office of the energy minister, Angus Taylor. It was instead leaked to The Australian on Wednesday, when the news cycle was swamped with reports of the recent AFP raids on the media. (Some leaks from government to journalists are still okay, apparently.)

Graham Lloyd, The Australian’s “fearless” environment reporter (their words), spun [$] the news accordingly.

Here’s the first paragraph, published in yesterday’s paper: “Australia is not given sufficient credit internationally for the carbon dioxide savings it helps other nations achieve, Energy Minister Angus Taylor says.”

Only in the fifth paragraph did Lloyd mention that Australia’s emissions were “0.8 per cent higher than the previous quarter and 0.7 per cent higher than last year”.

Taylor was pushing the line that the rapid growth in LNG exports, whose production is raising local emissions, is actually helping reduce emissions globally, because the gas will be replacing coal in Asian energy markets. This spurious argument – repeated verbatim by Lloyd – ignores the fact that the Coalition government is also supporting increased coal exports, not to mention that fugitive emissions of LNG derived from coal seam gas mean in this form it is little better than brown coal.

Lloyd didn’t mention, either, that the Coalition still has no credible economy-wide plan to reduce local emissions (let alone global ones). Or that this is the fourth year in a row that Australia’s emissions have risen.

But why are Lloyd and Taylor talking about LNG production and export, anyway? The report was about total national emissions – to measure the effectiveness (or lack thereof, in this case) of the government’s climate change mitigation policies – not whether we have a successful resources sector.

This was a lesson in how the government uses compliant media sources to shape the news.

The emissions report was eventually released to the general public yesterday, and Taylor appeared on RN Breakfast this morning to continue making the case that up was down and down was up when it comes to Australia’s emissions. Furthermore, what was important, he said, was that the LNG and coal industries were creating jobs and investment opportunities.

Taylor, like his Coalition colleagues, is happy to count the earnings from resource companies, but refuses to calculate the cost of rising emissions and the effects of climate change on every other sector of the economy. The minister for energy and emissions reduction has a long history of promoting fossil-fuel industries and opposing support for renewables. He also has an ongoing scepticism of emissions reduction schemes generally, which, to be blunt, is probably why he was appointed to his current role.

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