Latest greenhouse gas emissions data show Australia’s emissions cuts 'too small and too slow'

The greenhouse gas data is one of those rare data sets where you want the figures to go down – less is better. And the problem for any efforts to limit the impact of climate change is that Australia’s emissions have not been going down anywhere near as fast as they need to be.

Every three months around this time two huge data surveys are released. One of them – the national accounts which contain the GDP figures (due out on Wednesday at 11:30am) – get wide coverage and detailed analysis. The other – the quarterly greenhouse gas emissions data – barely gets noted and is released at some random point in the week with no warning. And yet of the two, it is the greenhouse gas figures which have the most import when it comes to our future.

The September 2025 quarter figures released on Wednesday were not great. The annual greenhouse emissions in year to September totaled 444.2mt CO2 – just down on the 444.7mt CO2 in the year to the June.

Safe to say that dropping 0.5mt CO2 a quarter is not enough:

To see just how bad things are going, even if we are kind and take the trend in emissions from the recent peak of September 2024, the drop is not only not fast enough to meet the 2030 or 2035 targets, it won’t even get us close to achieving net zero by 2050:

Overall, Australia’s emissions are 27.4% lower than they were in 2005. Given the 2030 target is for a them to be 57% lower than in 2005, that suggest we have a long way to go and at lot faster rate.

But the problem is greatly compounded when you realise that almost all of the cut since 2005 has come from ‘land use’ which is due to the fact that in 2005 there was massive land clearing in Queensland (especially) and because we no longer clear as must land, it looks like we have ‘reduced emissions’:

To be clear, no other nation includes land clearing in their 2030 and 2035 targets.

Australia got a special deal done back for the Kyoto Agreement to include land clearing in our targets. It meant we could actually increase our emissions and still meet the Kyoto Target. And despite John Howard’s government long being gone, we continue to take advantage of this deal done at the behest of a climate changer denier.

If you exclude land clearing, Australia’s emissions in 2025 are just 3% lower than they were in 2005 – that’s a very long way from a 57% cut, let alone the 70% cut that is the 20235 target:

Is there any good news? Well, transport emissions seem to have stopped rising. But that is small beer when you consider they remain higher than they were prior to the pandemic.

The quarterly emissions data never gets much attention, and as a result the Government can mostly avoid the type of tough questions it gets if GDP fails to meet expectations. But the September quarter figures were bad news for Australia and they should demand much more urgency and importance than they currently receive.