The climate policies of both of Australia’s main political parties are based on bulls–t.

It’s part of a general malaise in policymaking where caution has replaced boldness, but climate change is the pinnacle of modern policy challenge because the stakes are the highest and the solutions the hardest.

Labor’s emission reduction plan is at heart an offsets, or carbon credits scheme, since the actual reduction of emissions is too difficult and too expensive, especially with more coal and gas projects bring approved.

What’s more the emissions reduction targets are both inadequate and unlikely to be met.

The 219 facilities in Australia that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year are required to reduce their emissions by 34.3 per cent by 2030, which is at the heart of the government’s plan to reduce emissions to 43 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero by 2050.

Most of them simply can’t do it, so they’ll be buying carbon credits generated by farmers and to offset their emissions instead.

Offsets under fire

But this month scientists at ANU and University of NSW published a devastating critique of the system designed to manage this.

The paper published in CSIRO’s Rangeland journal was about human-induced regeneration, which represents the largest source of carbon credits.

It found there were “major administrative and governance failings in Australia’s carbon credit scheme”, and that projects receiving offset certificates “have had minimal impact on woody vegetation cover in credited areas”.

Come to think of it, none of Labor’s three main policy targets – emissions, housing and immigration – will be achieved. Housing approvals are way behind what’s needed to meet the 1.2 million Housing Accord target and with 101.000 net permanent and long-term arrivals in July and August, the immigration run rate is way ahead of the 260,000 forecast for this financial year.

No real alternatives

Meanwhile, the Coalition’s sole climate change policy is to build seven nuclear reactors to supply about 12 per cent of Australia’s electricity needs at some point in the future, which Peter Dutton falsely asserts will lower power prices, and will require the propping up of coal generators that would otherwise close.

Of course Australia should have nuclear reactors generating electricity, or at least allow them to be built if they stack up commercially, and should have had this decades ago – the ban is absurd, and looking more absurd by the day as Google and now Amazon put in orders for small modular reactors (SMRs) to power their data centres.

But the Coalition’s plan is unserious, uncosted, detail-lite and full of holes, and in the unlikely event the Dutton reactors receive planning permits from local councils and/or state governments, and get built, they will cause power prices to go up, not down unless the capital cost is fully paid for by the state.

How do we know this? Because the CSIRO’s 2023-24 GenCost report published in May told us that nuclear would cost more than renewables and take 15 years to build.

Naturally, Peter Dutton played the man, or rather the organisation, not the ball. “It’s not a genuine piece of work,” he said, which of course it was.

Why the bulls–t policies?

So the first question is: Why is this so? How come Australia’s political leaders all have bulls–t climate change policies?

It’s partly because Tony Abbott, Peta Credlin and Rupert Murdoch electrified this fence in 2010 and everyone is still frightened to touch it, but there’s more to it than that.

The truth is that most politicians don’t behave as if they think, deep down, that global warming is anything but a political issue. If they saw it as the genuine threat to civilisation that it is, they would behave very differently.

The Prime Minister’s decision to spend $4.3 million on a house on the Central Coast overlooking the ocean is a small sign of that. It is pretty high up on a cliff, admittedly, but erosion from rising sea levels will be unpredictable, and I’d say the prospect of that Copacabana house toppling into the sea was the furthest thing from his and his fiancée’s mind. (What was actually on their minds is hard to say).

The planet has not yet heated enough, and the weather has not yet become dire enough, for this issue to have progressed from a political threat to existential threat, so both Labor and the Coalition are solving for domestic politics rather than for global warming.

In a way that’s understandable: Nothing Australia does will have more than a negligible impact on the global temperature.

Minimal impact

Our only impact is on global politics, which is not nothing, but Climate Minister Chris Bowen knows that if Australia reduces emissions to 53 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the 43 per cent legislated, it will make for a run of uncomfortable headlines sometime in 2030, if he’s still around, which he won’t be, but it will make near enough to zero actual difference to the planet.

The planet’s fate is in the hands of China, India and the US.

For that reason, as I’ve argued a few times, Australia’s real climate change challenge is to prepare for a hotter world, while playing our part in global climate politics.

There should be a government insurer of last resort, to step in as normal private insurance either becomes prohibitively expensive or the industry collapses, or both.

And while there is some work being done to move people in flood plains to higher ground and build levees, as well as the usual fuel reduction programs in wooded areas, there should be a full national project directed at moving or protecting communities at risk.

The global temperature is going to rise by more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels.

When it does, and Australia is unprepared, the governments of the present will not be remembered well by the citizens of the future.

Alan Kohler writes weekly for The New Daily. He is finance presenter on the ABC News and also writes for Intelligent Investor