Thread by @pollyjhemming

1/7 This week in parliament Scott Morrison told
@AdamBandt that Australia’s emissions have fallen by 20% since 2005 (theoretically getting us three quarters of the way to meeting our Paris target). Here's why this claim is super misleading.... 🧵

2/7 Australia’s overall emissions did decline between 2005 and 2020. But looking at this graph it can be seen that this is not distributed evenly across the economy, but confined to two sectors: Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (we'll call it the land sector) & agriculture.

3/7 The land sector is different from other sectors (which emit carbon) in that it can store carbon through trees and soil. What happened from 2005 is that we stopped clearing trees & we had a drought from 2017-19. Basically trees grew, there was less methane from livestock.

4/7 These drops had nothing to do with climate policy. The easiest way to test whether Australia is reducing emissions in a meaningful way is to exclude the land sector & the impacts of the drought from our inventory. Let’s see what that looks like...oh it doesn’t look very good.

5/7 If we put aside one-off historical (ie not indicative of structural decarbonisation) drops in emissions then we can see that Australia’s emissions are actually going up. They’ve increased by 7% since 2005 and we're doing a lot worse than other countries.

6/7 Technically the govt *can* say Australia’s emissions have dropped. It’s within the rules of UNFCCC accounting. But other countries don’t really do it. It's generally accepted that land sector reductions are variable and hard to measure. The Norwegian ambassador sums it up:

7/7 My colleagues at @TheAusInstitute @RichieMerzian & @RDNS_TAI have already pointed this dodgy accounting out several times this week, but the govt is not going to stop so neither are we. …

#auspol #climate