The juxtaposition of Labor's climate policies is staggering – so absurd it almost defies belief

On a Friday afternoon, the Albanese Government gave its approval to a 40-year extension of Woodside’s North West Shelf gas export hub – greenlighting a giant carbon bomb that could generate emissions equivalent to 12 new coal mines.

On the Monday morning, the same Government released a National Climate Risk Assessment that details how climate change caused by burning fossil fuels is set to catastrophically alter our lives, our health, our environment, and our economy.

On the current trajectory, Australia is headed for a 3° Celsius rise in temperatures. Forecast impacts include a quadrupling of severe and extreme heatwaves. Death from extreme heat is projected to soar by 444% in Sydney, 259% in Melbourne, 335% in Townsville, 312% in Perth, 146% in Launceston and 423% in Darwin.

By mid-century, communities currently home to more than 1.5 million people will be at high to very high risk of flooding, and those home to 3 million by the end of the century.

Marine heatwaves will create acid oceans. Algal outbreaks like the one that’s devastated marine life in South Australia will blossom.

Property prices in areas affected by increased risk of floods and other extreme weather events will collapse, and homes and commercial buildings will become uninsurable.

Remember all the talk at the Treasurer’s Economic Summit about the need to boost productivity? In key industries it could fail under the strain.

Cumulative wealth loss in Australia from reduced agricultural and labour productivity from climate change could exceed $19 billion by 2030, $211 billion by 2050, and $4.2 trillion by century’s end, according to data cited in the report.

Critical and essential services, including health, aged care, water supply, energy and transportation, face immediate risks from climate change.

These are just the highlights, for want of a better word, of the multilayered misery that climate change will bring on the Government’s own reckoning.

How do you square this with its approval of new coal mines, and a gas development that could create six billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in coming decades?

According to climate scientist Bill Hare, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, total emissions from Woodside’s full Burrup Hub project will consume 6% of the remaining global carbon budget for keeping global temperature rises to 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels.

Crossing that 1.5°C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall. That is why the world signed up to the goal of keeping global temperature rises as close to 1.5˚C under the legally-binding Paris Agreement ten years ago. Approving new fossil fuel projects and extending the life of existing ones is incompatible with that goal. Four years have passed since the deadline for stopping all new coal, oil and gas development identified by the International Energy Agency.

But the gas industry wants to gaslight you into thinking otherwise – aided and abetted by politicians from both sides of the aisle at federal and state level.

“Natural gas” (doesn’t that sound so much nicer than methane?) is a “transition fuel”, we are constantly told.

Never mind that the energy intensive process of liquifying the gas for export creates enormous quantities of greenhouse gas emissions in its own right, or the impact of fugitive emissions.  The industry and politicians captive to it, claim that Australia is doing the climate a favour by letting Woodside and other gas behemoths liquefy gas then ship it off to be burned overseas.

This is pure nonsense. There is no credible evidence that Australia’s gas exports are encouraging a global transition to renewable energy or combating climate. A few years ago, Woodside Energy commissioned research from the CSIRO, Australia’s peak scientific agency, that it hoped would back its “transition fuel” claims. Australia’s largest gas exporter buried the CSIRO report when it found the opposite – that in the absence of a high global carbon price, gas exports would undermine and delay the shift to renewables.

When resources minister Madeleine King launched the Federal Government’s Future Gas Strategy last year,  she claimed it was based on “facts and data, not ideology.”

But the facts and data in it are at odds with the Government’s claims about our gas exports helping the “energy transition” and combating global warming.

They show that in a scenario where the world took the steps needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C, our LNG exports would collapse by mid-century. Only on a scenario consistent with catastrophic global warming would they continue near current levels. That’s a world with 2.6°C global temperature rise, which would equate to about 3 °C in Australia: the world of pain set out in the government’s National Climate Risk Assessment.

To add insult to injury, Woodside Energy’s North West Shelf project pays no royalties and, on Treasury’s estimates, will likely never pay Petroleum Resources Rent Tax. We’re giving away the gas free – and paying an existential price – for the profit of Woodside.

Think about this when climate change minister Chris Bowen announces Labor’s “ambitious” targets for reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions soon. The enormous quantities of fossil fuel we export are contributing to the climate nightmare looming for Australia and the world.