It is the writer Oscar Wilde who is credited with the quote: “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Although I do have to admit the first time I came across it was in a Doonesbury cartoon in the 1980s.

But how apt it is. The Business Council of Australia last week underlined its own deep cynicism — to a breathtaking level — when it stepped into the climate debate with a report that highlighted what it inferred was the shocking price of doing something to cut emissions, but said absolutely nothing about the value and the benefits of doing so.

Here is a powerful body, with deep access to state and federal governments, representing most of the biggest boardrooms and the biggest corporates in the country, stomping all over climate science and community angst with a Trumpian declaration that pretty much amounts to: “Stuff you all.”

It’s not the cost of the transition they cite — some $530 billion for an emissions reduction target of 70% or more — that is in dispute. That’s probably the cost of investment for replacing coal, ageing gas and other public infrastructure that needs to be spent anyway, regardless of the climate science.

It’s the complete disregard of the benefits that grates; benefits cited recently by a group of 350 other corporations, led by the likes of Fortescue, and in any other credible analysis going back to the Stern and Garnaut reviews of more than a decade ago.

This is — as it has ever been — about greed, self-interest and ideology. It’s that heady mix of denial, delay and deflection that has landed the world where it finds itself, face to face with an existential climate crisis and yet more shrill complaints about the cost, and nothing about the benefits.

Elon Musk  recently stated that empathy was the “fundamental weakness of Western society”. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have declared their own “war on empathy”, and arrogance, stupidity, cruelty and greed runs thick through too many of our boardrooms. Money is the only the thing that counts, and platitudes are the principal KPI.

Trough of self-interest

So, what happens when you do look beyond the trough of self-interested returns and contemplate the benefits of strong climate action?

According to a Deloitte report commissioned by that group of 350 companies, led by Fortescue and software giant Atlassian, Volvo, Unilever and Bank Australia, a 75% emissions reduction target by 2035 will lift the country’s GDP by $370 billion on current projections.

• Even compared to a 65% target, a 75% target would unlock an additional $20 billion per year to 2035, increase the competitiveness of exports in a decarbonising world, and raise export revenues by $190 billion over the period to 2050.

Oh, and it’s about more than money. It will also help Australia do its part in the global effort to minimise global warming, hopefully close to 1.5°C, but importantly below 2°C. Ask a climate scientist, your children and their children, about the value of that.

Ask an economist, or a scientist. They might tell you that unabated climate change will knock 10% to 15% off GDP.

So, which way will Labor go? It has to submit its 2035 climate target to the UN by the end of September, and could announce it within the next week, according to some projections.

It is waiting for a report from the Climate Change Authority, which has openly canvassed a range of between 65% and 75%, but which is now thought to narrowed that down at the lower end – say 65% to 70%.

It is not yet clear if this is because it fears making Australian an outlier of the MAGA movement, or because of the real problems in Australia’s own electricity transition, and the challenges of cutting emissions elsewhere in the economy.

Here are some of the competing claims: the Monash University-based ClimateWorks reckons that existing policies will likely take Australia to a 66% to 71% reduction on 2005 levels by 2035. The BCA argues that business-as-usual takes Australia to just 50% by 2030.

One of the main problems, acknowledged by many, is the slower than expected energy transition. Even assuming AEMO’s step change scenario is delivered — and that would require a doubling of current rates of installation — that barely gets the country to a 60% cut in emissions.

Professor Frank Jotzo, the head of the NSW Net Zero Commission, and not a climate denier, appeared to be laying the groundwork for disappointment when he wrote recently that any emissions reduction target of 60% or more for 2035 will be highly ambitious.

“A 65% target, at the low end of the (CCA discussed) range, would mean  halving Australia’s current emissions,” he wrote, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Yes, we get it, but nothing was meant to be easy and climate change is going to be really, really hard.

Missing the renewables target

It would seem to many that if the federal government does shoot for the lower end, it would be an admission that the renewables target will be missed.

That, in itself, is a sad reflection on the state of the market, the scare tactics of conservatives and vested interests, the refusal of big utilities and industrials to build or contract new wind and solar, even as they “promise” early closures of their toxic coal-fired generators, and the failure of the states and the feds to streamline the planning process.

The federal Coalition hasn’t a clue what it’s supposed to think about this, but the LNP and the Nats clearly do. They are all in with Trump, MAGA and the eradication of “woke” science and cultural norms. Scrap the 2050 net zero target, they say, climate change is not actually a thing. Their future board seats with BCA members are an absolute lock.

New Greens leader Larissa Waters reiterated this week that the party’s position was to aim for real “net zero” by 2035. “We’re going to follow the climate science,” she said. Does that sound too obvious? Bizarrely, and tragically, it doesn’t even appear to be a mainstream thought in Australia right now.

Environmental groups such as the Climate Council, the Australian Conservation Foundation and others argue the same position. The Climate Council recently suggested that net zero by 2035 is the only target available to Australia with a strong chance of contributing to holding global warming below 2°C.

The Climate Council says that that even a 2035 target of minus 75% is aligned with more than 2°C of global heating, and a 65% target is aligned with 2.4°C. It notes that each fraction of a degree of global heating is associated with more catastrophic impacts to communities and ecosystems.

“Those advocating for targets that would see global heating well beyond 2°C should articulate clearly their costed plans to support, relocate and/or protect the Australian community through unprecedented socio-economic dislocation,” it says. Perhaps that is something that the BCA could discuss over cocktails at the club.

What’s it to be?

So what’s it to be? There are conflicting signals coming from Labor. Some ministers are all in for ambitious targets. The Labor machine, and its leader Anthony Albanese, not so much, which seems about as big a waste of a thumping electoral mandate as you could possibly imagine.

There is talk that the long-buried “impacts” report will be released before the climate targets. That might be good, given the horror show that some assume it suggests, and it might be helpful in underlying the value of action, rather than just the cost.

Others fear the worst, and a narrow target range that doesn’t even make it to 70%.

We actually deserve a lot better. It’s too much, sadly, to wish for a government that really does act on the science, and would push for the targets they actually signed up for at Paris, which incidentally always required a net zero target by the early 2040s, at the latest.

Which brings us back to Doonesbury, and another of its famous strips, when a reporter responds to another lengthy and feckless explanation from the then senator Ted Kennedy. “We need a verb, Senator,” he said.

Next week, we are likely to get lots of verbs, and lots of excuses. What we really need is an emissions reduction target that starts with an 8. We should at the very least get one that starts with a 7, but we may have to settle for one that begins with a 6.

And then we can ask ourselves this: Why we couldn’t and we can’t we do better than that. We’ll need a verb, and much more.

Republished from Renew Economy, 11 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.