The new climate target will be difficult to meet
The Coalition announced it will cut emissions by between 26 and 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
How to assess this? Climate targets are notoriously difficult to interpret and compare, but here are some things worth considering:
     Australia's existing short-term target is a 5 per cent cut by 2020. This is less than the US, Canada and the European Union are doing in the same period.   If moving from 5 to 26 per cent in a decade seems a significant leap, it's not as big as it appears. It is really a case of apples and oranges: where Australia used to measure what it was doing against emissions levels in 2000, it is now measuring them against 2005 levels - when emissions were notably higher. It makes the target sound bigger through a simple keystroke. If we had stuck with the 2000 baseline, the target for 2030 is actually a 19-22 per cent cut.   If that still sounds a significant step on, consider this: Australia's formal bipartisan target submitted to the United Nations for 2020 is actually a range of 5-25 per cent compared with 2000 levels. The promise was always that it would do more than 5 per cent if other countries did more. Several analyses have found other countries have met the necessary criteria. In the eyes of the Climate Change Authority, chaired by former Reserve Bank chief Bernie Fraser, Australia is now promising to do by 2030 only what it had committed to by 2020.     
While there was plenty of commentary last week suggesting meeting Australia's 2030 target would be exacting, recent evidence suggests it will be much easier than most people appreciate.
Why? For a start, Australia's emissions have stopped increasing the way experts expected, independent of policy intervention. Manufacturing has declined, and the pace at which people have embraced solar panels and other clean and efficient technology has had some impact. It means we may hit the 5 per cent target by 2020 even if the government did nothing.
Secondly, and most significantly, there is plenty of work by serious people that suggests the cost of reducing emission is routinely overstated. Detailed analysis by Monash University-affiliated research body ClimateWorks, with ANU's Crawford School, found Australia could cut emissions by more than 50 per cent by 2030 using existing technology while the economy continued to grow rapidly.
It would involve significant change to power generation, buildings, transport, agriculture and how we manage forests - but not damage the economy.
Australia is cutting per capita emissions faster than anyone else
The government made this point repeatedly last week - that Australia's new target would cut its emissions per person roughly in half by 2030. By this measure, it says, it is the deepest cut offered by any developed country.
There is a serious argument to be had over whether this would be enough: it would still leave Australia with the highest per capita emissions among industrialised nations by 2030.
But an analysis by the Climate Institute suggests the government's statement is not correct in any case. Britain is doing more, and the US is doing as much. Depending on which base year you look at, the case can also be made that Canada, Germany, Norway and Switzerland are all doing more than Australia. Together, that's a fair chunk of the developed world.
If you look at outright cuts, a table released by the Climate Change Authority late on Friday suggests that Australia sits at the back of the pack among developed countries - ahead of only Japan, which has been dealing with the fairly extraordinary circumstance of the Fukushima disaster shutting down its fleet of nuclear power plants, forcing it to turn back to coal.
Announced and extrapolated emissions targets for 2030. Source: Climate Change Authority.
Australia is doing more than China
According to the Prime Minister, Canberra is doing "unimaginably better" than Beijing, which he said would increase its emissions by 150 per cent by 2030. Some experts say this overstates China's expected rise, though other estimates agree it will be huge - the Climate Change Authority puts it at between 72 and 96 per cent compared with 2005 levels.
But Mr Abbott's direct comparison moves the goalposts on what is expected of China. Jake Schmidt, international program director for the US Natural Resources Defence Council, says comparing Australia's target to China is "ridiculous" given the latter has 85 million people living on $1.25 a day.
As a developing economy, it has set a target to cut its emissions intensity significantly, and to start to turn around its total emissions by 2030. It has been cutting its emissions per unit of GDP by an unprecedented 4 per cent a year for about a decade, and is promising to continue this.
The world needs China  to move faster, and there are suggestions its emissions may stop increasing long before then. But no one involved in tackling the problem is suggesting it makes a cut to rival developed countries at this point.
Electricity prices won't go up
In   February 2007, looking ahead to an election he would ultimately lose, John Howard talked on Lateline about his plans for an emissions trading scheme. Asked by host Tony Jones if it was inevitable that electricity prices had to go up to tackle climate change, the then PM said: "I think everybody should accept that, over time, things like electricity will become more expensive ??? and there's not much point anybody saying otherwise."
Of course, history showed there was a point: accusing opponents of raising electricity prices has proven a highly effective political weapon.
But Howard's statement remains true: if you're serious about tackling climate change to the extent scientists say is required, at some point it will happen. This can be offset by reshaping tax and welfare payments - rises under the repealed scheme were more than offset by compensation for most households. Better yet, they can be wiped out through an aggressive energy savings program aimed at eliminating our wasteful usage. But you can't replace an electricity supply without introducing some costs - and, whatever the merits of the government's taxpayer-funded direct action policy focusing on cutting emissions from trees and landfill sites (paid for through taxes), you ultimately can't deal with the problem without changing the electricity supply.
Solar and wind farms in Germany. Photo: Getty.
Arguing against having a climate policy purely on the grounds prices will rise is really saying: "I don't think this is a problem Australia needs to deal with."
Coal plants have a healthy future
Much of Australia's coal stock is closer to the end of its life than the start. Analysts from energy company AGL last year estimated 75 per cent of coal plants have already lived beyond what would be expected to be their useful life.
Among Victoria's four large brown coal generators, the Hazelwood plant is approaching 50 years old, Yallourn is 35 and Loy Yang A nearly 30. By international coal standards, they are old and running on dated technology. They are among the most greenhouse-intensive plants in the world and they are inefficient - more than two-thirds of the energy is lost before it is converted to electricity.
Several analyses have found Australia has at least four large coal plants more than it needs to keep the lights on across the national grid. All things being equal, some of Australia's oldest stock would have an end date in sight. But closures are unlikely to come quickly. As EnergyAustralia has noted, owners will face a bill in the hundreds of millions of dollars to cover redundancies for workers and frankly extraordinary mine rehabilitation costs if they were to shut. It gives them a significant incentive to just cut costs and hang in, hoping others will go first.
Hazelwood power plant. Photo: Joe Armao.
Perversely, if anything is to shut in the near-term it is likely to be black coal plants in the northern states. Though they have lower emissions, black coal costs more than brown coal, and the government's abolition of the carbon price has given the latter a new lease of life.
Unless carbon capture to lower emissions comes on quickly, no one believes more coal-fired power plants  will be built once many of the plants have closed. Neither energy companies nor banks think new coal plants will be viable.
The question is only if governments will intervene to forcibly shut coal - and shoulder responsibility for those who lose their jobs - or just leave power plants to close haphazardly and workers to fend for themselves.
Australian coal can lift 100 million poor Indians out of poverty
This is another line that the Prime Minister, among others, has used to support the troubled proposed Adani project in Queensland. It has been noted elsewhere that it is borrowed from a campaign by a global industry campaign to brand fossil fuels a solution for poverty, not a problem for the planet.
It has been rejected by the World Bank, which said it does not factor in the health and social costs of coal, particularly from air pollution. The World Bank has stopped funding coal plants in developing countries.
The likelihood of Australia having a long-term coal market in India is under question after Indian Energy Minister Piyush Goyal??? said the country plans to end coal imports as it favours domestic coal and ramps up renewable energy programs.
An Indian labourer carries a basket of coal at a depot near the city of Bhubaneswar. Source: AP
Lowest cost is always the answer
It is the case made by economists, industry groups and commentators (including this newspaper) again and again: that greenhouse gas emissions should be cut where it is cheapest.
Usually, that means an emissions trading scheme linked to international markets, particularly Europe, where the carbon price is low. It would allow companies to buy credits created through cuts in developing countries and use them to meet local targets. The logic is the atmosphere doesn't care where emissions are cut.
Incidentally, this is what Australia would be doing now if the carbon price hadn't been repealed - from   July 1 this year the "carbon tax" would have graduated to being an emissions trading scheme linked to Europe. This, presumably, remains Labor's position, though it is yet to release details. For the first time, the government last week also left open the possibility of using international credits at some point.
Those making the case about the need to find cheap emissions cuts are right - but only to a point.
What it ignores is that if Australia is paying for the cheapest cuts only, there will be nothing to transform the economy. If the country is to play its part in limiting warming to less than 2 degrees, it must include replacing energy infrastructure and changing practice in transport and agriculture. It won't happen with a low international carbon price alone.
There is a plan to meet Australia's target
While the evidence suggests reaching it shouldn't be difficult, the chosen path is not yet clear. The Coalition is yet to release the modelling behind its choice of targets, but it did release a graph that showed how much of the cut it expected to come from different policies. Only one policy has been released - the emissions reduction fund, the centrepiece of its direct action plan, under which it buys emissions cuts. Several analyses have questioned whether this will do what the government says it will.
Of the others - including a "safeguard mechanism" to stop big polluters from wiping out cuts elsewhere by just increasing emissions, an energy productivity plan and a push to cut emissions from vehicles - it is impossible to assess the extent to they might help meet the target as they don't exist in any detail yet.
Labor is also yet to announce a plan to meet its goal of 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030 - or to reveal how much it would propose to cut emissions by that year.
amorton@fairfaxmedia.com.au
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