Australia’s climate “debate” screamed itself out nine months ago and fell over in exhaustion, having smashed a workable policy and failed to produce an alternative.

People who care about the subject, which you’d think would be most people considering what is at stake, struggled to maintain a rational conversation, given that the former government’s policy had been taken down by rhetorical nonsense – Whyalla wipeouts and $100 lamb roasts and the like – and the Abbott government’s still sketchy policy was propped up by the same.

But eventually facts challenge nonsense rhetoric, and the past nine months have made it clear just how untenable Australia’s position is. Here are seven sadly ridiculous things about our current situation.

Emission reduction businesses that used to sell greenhouse gas abatement to polluters will start selling the same abatement to the government next week, for about the same price the polluters would be paying for it if we still had an emissions trading scheme. The first auction under the Abbott government Direct Action policy’s $2.55bn emissions reduction fund will be held on 15 and 16 April. Experts say the most likely winners are companies like Greencollar, that gather up land-clearing permits from farmers who promise not to clear the land, so the farmer and the company get paid for the emission reduction from avoided deforestation, and companies that capture methane from places like garbage dumps.



Those same companies were selling their abatement to polluters under the old ETS and its carbon farming scheme. By now the old carbon price would have been floating close to the European price of about $10 a tonne. Norton Rose Fulbright partner Elisa de Wit said she expected next week’s auction price to be between $10 and $20 a tonne. Same abatement – as far as it goes – similar price, except we pay instead of the companies doing the polluting.



Manufacturers, miners and electricity generators (that together produce more than 60% of Australia’s emissions) won’t have to reduce their emissions under Direct Action and may in fact be able to increase them, which could cancel out the emissions reductions the government is spending billions trying to achieve. Direct Action included something called a “safeguards mechanism” that was supposed to stop this from happening. In fact, if the emission “baselines” under the “safeguards mechanism” were tough, it could have potentially forced industrial emissions down and turned the policy into something halfway workable.



But a recent discussion paper revealed the safeguards mechanism had been designed not to safeguard that emissions were reduced, but to effectively safeguard against industry having to do anything. The Carbon and Environment Daily newsletter has calculated that the system described could allow Bluescope steel to double its emissions without suffering a penalty. The exceptions and out clauses mean it is unlikely to force any change in any company’s behaviour. The South Australian senator Nick Xenophon, who provided one of the six votes that got Direct Action through the Senate on the understanding that the safeguards would be rigorous, feels dudded, and is protesting. It’s probably too late for that, although the discussion paper is seeking feedback.



Successive governments have negotiated special emission reduction deals for Australia and, together with reduced electricity use – mostly because of the decline in manufacturing – this might take us close to our pretty easy emission reduction targets. But that does not mean we are pulling our weight, as we seem to be claiming. In 1997 in Kyoto, having threatened not to sign, Australia managed to get a special deal to increase our emissions by 8% in the first period – ending in 2012 – and to count changes in land use.



Almost every other country had to reduce emissions over the same period. Effectively this meant we knew we had already almost achieved the target when we signed up to it because of land-clearing restrictions already in place. In fact we overshot that super-easy target, which meant we got to “carry over” the excess to the second commitment period – ending in 2020. Both major parties promised a 5% reduction by 2020 (actually that was supposed to be a bare minimum but the pledges to do more seem to have slipped by the wayside while we were all arguing about the future of lamb roasts) but if you take away the “carry over” from the first target then the 5% becomes 1%, according to calculations by the Climate Change Authority.



And if that 1% is achieved it will be mostly because of declining electricity use. We wouldn’t be the only country claiming credit for emission changes that happened for other reasons – European countries looked good when their coal industries closed for reasons that had nothing to do with climate change – but it doesn’t mean we can claim to be model global citizens and it doesn’t mean we should be deluded into thinking we have made any of the necessary changes to reduce the emissions-intensity of our economy, because we haven’t.



The government appears to be working out Australia’s post-2020 emissions reduction target based on figures that assume global warming of almost four degrees, when the whole point of global negotiations is to try to limit global warming to two degrees. Its recent discussion paper does not mention the 2C goal, but does mention a scenario that could result in almost 4C global warming. Discussing Australia’s special “national circumstances”, the discussion paper says that “for the foreseeable future, Australia will continue to be a major supplier of crucial energy and raw materials to the rest of the world ... At present, around 80% of the world’s primary energy needs are met through carbon-based fuels. By 2040, it is estimated that 74% will still be met by carbon-based sources.”



A footnote confirms that estimate comes from the “new policies scenario” of the International Energy Agency’s world energy outlook 2014, which was a baseline calculation of what would happen if countries implemented only the policies announced at that time, a scenario seen as unacceptable because it would pave the way for at least 3.6C of global warming. All governments try to wrangle themselves a good deal in these kind of global negotiations, and the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop ,and her team are taking an active role in the negotiations. But Australia will have to agree to something like a fair share of the globally-accepted starting point.



The government will set a post-2020 emissions reduction target without a policy to get there. The discussion paper also asks what policies might be implemented to achieve a new target that were “complementary” to Direct Action. Independent modelling has suggested Direct Action might not have enough money to meet even the 5% target, and all analysis suggests it would be extremely difficult to “scale up” to a higher target. Modelling has also found that cutting emissions further than 5% would be prohibitively expensive, the same charge levelled by the Coalition minister Malcolm Turnbull when he explained in 2011 that continuing to use a big government taxpayer-funded scheme to reduce emissions in the long term would “become a very expensive charge on the budget in the years ahead”.



The government is not including climate change in long-term planning exercises that really should be planning for climate change. The recent intergenerational report – supposedly an economic planning document for the next 40 years – claimed that some economic effects of climate change “may be beneficial – where regions become warmer or wetter this may allow for increased agricultural output, while others may be harmful”. It was otherwise largely silent on the economic consequences of climate change, saying its focus was “primarily on government expenses that are affected by demographic change”.



Previous intergenerational reports didn’t see it that way. Global warming changes rainfall patterns, drought frequency and the frequency of extreme weather events, but the recent agriculture green paper didn’t really mention it either. “We’ve put billions of dollars on the table to try to address the issue of climate variability ... In fact, I would love to have some the money that’s been invested by previous governments in so-called ‘changing the temperature back’. If we’d had that invested in agriculture, we’d be an agricultural superpower,” the agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, said at the time. And this week’s energy white paper – the long-term planning document on Australia’s energy supply – didn’t mention it as a policy driver either, even though electricity generation and transport fuels are major sources of emissions.



The government is refusing to accept a political compromise on the renewable energy target (backed by Labor, the renewables industry and big business) because it thinks the industry won’t be able to reach the target, but the only reason industry wouldn’t reach the target is the absence of a political compromise. This fight has been going on ever since the government accepted that it wasn’t going to be able to ram through the findings of the review by self-professed climate sceptic and businessman Dick Warburton, to gut the RET –which was supposed to ensure 41,000 gigawatt hours of renewable energy by 2020.



Negotiations with Labor have been dragging on. Now Labor, the renewables industry, big business and energy users have all agreed on a compromise plan for 33,500 gigawatt hours. The industry minister, Ian Macfarlane, says he won’t budge from 32,000 gigawatt hours because the industry can’t build any more. The industry says it certainly can, but the biggest risk is the investment drought during this endless wait for some kind of political compromise.



Climate policy is complicated, but it’s also really simple. We have to find a way to gradually reduce emissions, including from industry, transport and electricity generation. Most experts think some kind of carbon price is the most cost-effective way. There are other ways – direct government regulation, for example. But trying to hide this basic goal behind a smokescreen of rhetoric or the creative manipulation of complicated concepts and numbers cannot avoid the inevitable.