Last Friday, the Australian government finally released the latest greenhouse gas emissions report, showing emissions have risen in the past year. When excluding emissions from land use, 2016 saw Australia release a record level of CO2 into the atmosphere. It confirms the failure of the government’s environmental policy at a time when electricity prices – despite the absence of a carbon price – continue to rise at levels above inflation.

The government has a history of being scared to release the greenhouse gas reports. Last year it released the March 2016 and June 2016 reports on the Thursday before Christmas – not exactly peak viewing time. It also meant the March report was released nine months after the March quarter had actually finished.

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And once again the government held off releasing the latest report. But in a level of coincidence equal to that of Bill Heslop running into Deirdre Chambers in the Porpoise Split Chinese restaurant, on the day that the Australian Conservation Foundation released FOI documents showing that the government had been sitting on the report for more than a month, the government released the latest report.

And in an effort that rather stretches the meaning of “quarterly”, the government “incorporated” the September quarter figures into the December report.

It says something about how poorly this government values the issue of climate change that over a month ago we had the figures on the entire production that occurred in Australia during the first three months of this year, and yet here we are in July and we still only know the level of greenhouse gas emissions up to December last year.

The figures in the report quickly made it obvious why the government has held off releasing them. They stink. And as every report since June 2014 has shown, the end of the carbon price has led to an increase in emissions.

The poor departmental officials try to paint a happy picture.

The release leads with the line that “total emissions for Australia for the year to December 2016 (including Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry) are estimated to be 543.3 Mt CO 2 -e.” They note that this is 2.0% below emissions in 2000, and 10.2% below emissions in 2005. Oddly, they don’t note that is it 1.0% above the emissions in 2015.

The inclusion of land use, land use change and forestry is a fairly dodgy measure.

As Lenore Taylor and Graham Readfern have reported, the inclusion of that measure in the Kyoto protocol in 1997 was essentially an “Australia clause” – because then environment minister Senator Robert Hill pushed for it to be counted as it allowed us to take advantage of changes to land clearing after 1990.

But the benefits from those changes have finished (though pointedly the Paris agreement from 2005 still includes them):

Excluding the “LULUCF” means focusing on actual greenhouse gas emissions rather than including the reductions in emissions from planting trees or in agreeing not to clear land.

But the news on emissions excluding LULUCF is less able to be painted in a positive light. In December, they increased 0.4% relative to September and were up 1.4% compared to December 2015.

While looking at individual quarters is interesting, a better picture is gained by looking at the sum of emissions over a 12-month period. And here we see that 2016 recorded a record level of emissions:

The biggest contributor to our emissions is the electricity sector – around 35% of all emissions:

But in 2016 the biggest increase to emissions came from “stationary energy” – that is emissions that come via combustion fuels used in industry – and fugitive emissions which occur during the production, processing, transport, storage, transmission and distribution of fossil fuels:

The electricity sector however is the most important, not only because it is the biggest, but also because it is the sector for which renewable energy is most viable. In this sector, the impact of the carbon price and its removal is particularly stark:

Whatever else you want to say about the Direct Action plan of the government, it has utterly failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s a problem for the government because even on its “business as usual” projections, it expects electricity emissions to fall sharply in the next few years:

And those business as usual projections would see total emissions by 2030 at just 0.5% below 2005 levels, rather than the 26%-28% lower level we are aiming to achieve under the Paris agreement:

And this is where the problem for the government really hits.

The Finkel Review recommends implementing a clean energy target that would lead to a 28% reduction in emissions from electricity by 2030. But that alone would not get Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions down to the 26% target.

Were electricity emissions to fall 28% and the rest of the economy continue on a business as usual cases, our total emissions would only fall by around 8% below 2005 levels – and the biggest contributor would be counting the falls in land use and land use change that occurred from 2005-2013.

If you excluded the LULUCF category, our emissions would have actually risen by 3%:

Clearly a 28% cut to electricity emissions alone is not enough. But to achieve cuts in other sectors of the economy there would need to be not just a clean energy target or an emissions intensity scheme which targets the electricity sector, but an economy-wide carbon price.

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Right now the government won’t even commit to a clean energy target, even though the Finkel Review found that it would lead to lower electricity prices as well as lower emissions compared to business as usual.

A report by energy analysis firm RepuTex this week also showed that that a more ambitious target of 45% below 2005 levels would see even lower electricity prices by 2030 due to the increase in renewable energy production and a lower reliance on gas – which is the main cause of a 10% rise in electricity prices in Sydney over the past year and a 7.7% rise in Melbourne.

At some point, this government will have to realise that if it wants lower electricity prices the best way to go about is to also lower greenhouse gas emissions. Because its currently policy is doing neither.