Antinuclear

Angus Taylor spotted fiddling more figures, New Daily, 15 Dec 19

The Minister for the Environment and Energy, Angus Taylor, seems to have a problem with numbers, whether it’s the Sydney City Council’s travel budget or what year Naomi Wolf was at Oxford.

His latest figure fiddling though is much bigger and more serious than either of those embarrassments.

And it’s possibly more absurd.

At the COP25 climate summit in Madrid last week, Mr Taylor was pushing the government line that Australia would meet and exceed its Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 – “in a canter”, according to Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

But all the while, Mr Taylor had a graph from his department showing the claim was, shall we politely say, “false”.

Without much fanfare, the Department of Environment and Energy earlier this month published its annual emissions projections.

At the core of the report is the accompanying graph of Australia’s emissions of millions of tonnes of CO2-equivalent from 1990 projected out to 2030.

Blind Freddy can see the government’s forecast reduction from nearly 600Mt in 2005 to 511Mt in 2030 does not represent 26 per cent.

It’s actually less than 15 per cent.

But with Mr Taylor’s talent for figure fiddling, the sun rises in the west, bears no longer defecate in the woods, and somehow less than 15 per cent is turned into more than 26 per cent.

Because he says so.

Blind Freddy can see the government’s forecast reduction from nearly 600Mt in 2005 to 511Mt in 2030 does not represent 26 per cent.

It’s actually less than 15 per cent.

But with Mr Taylor’s talent for figure fiddling, the sun rises in the west, bears no longer defecate in the woods, and somehow less than 15 per cent is turned into more than 26 per cent.

Because he says so.\The government attempts this particular distortion of reality by claiming “carry-over credits” from overachieving in the previous Kyoto agreement reached in 1997.

(That ‘overachievement’ was totted up primarily in LULUCF – “land use, land use change and forestry” – an area particularly prone to creative accounting as it involves such things as promising not to clear bush at some stage in the future.)

How inconvenient that the government’s graph, including buying some for LULUCF, goes back to 1990 and shows our emissions reduction from then, or from the 611Mt peak in 2006, is still less than 15 per cent. [graph on original]

The government’s claim is an international joke.

What’s worse is that the Madrid meeting was supposed to be about moving the needle on from the Paris agreement.

Salient nations were supposed to be able to feel the heat, smell the smoke, see the glaciers melt and therefore work to achieve more than Paris.

Instead, Mr Taylor led Australia as one of the recalcitrant countries sabotaging that reasonable aim.

And claiming black was white, or at least that coal isn’t a problem, wasn’t the Environment Minister’s only fiddle.

He also declared that Australia is backing an unprecedented wave of clean energy investment.

Well, yes – and no.

Australia is enjoying a surge in clean energy generation investment this year, but then it falls away quite rapidly, as shown in another graph, this time by the construction industry analysts at Macromonitor. [graph on original]

Macromonitor reckons the next clean energy investment boom doesn’t kick in until the middle of the decade when the need for storage – pumped hydro, batteries – is more acute. … https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2019/12/16/angus-taylor-emmissions-numbers/