COP that Well pay for PM to woo global investors to our green future

October 31, 2021 â€" 5.00am

At last Australia has a target to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. It has taken a long time to reach this point and many fraught negotiations. But if ever there was a prime minister suited to understanding the significance of presenting at COP26, it is the man who is disparaged as “Scotty from Marketing”.

He is now winging his way to the Glasgow meeting. He has a plan, which has been denigrated as merely a pamphlet. Even a planphlet by the wits and the wordsmiths. Despite their cynicism, it is the right document for the meeting he is about to attend.

Field of dreams: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest’s Sun Cable flagship project is the Australia-Asia Power Link, which will harness and store solar energy from the Northern Territory for 24/7 transmission to Darwin and Singapore via a high voltage direct current transmission system.

The UN Conference of Parties has never managed to fulfil the original vision of a serious forum in which countries negotiate and commit to achievable emissions-reduction targets to which they are able to hold one another accountable. For many years, renewable technology wasn’t capable of powering a developed economy. It still isn’t and countries remain unwilling to take an economic hit by relying too heavily on it.

As a result, developed countries routinely fall short of their targets. The UN’s 2021 Emissions Gap Report notes, for instance, that “Canada and the United States of America have submitted strengthened NDC [Nationally Determined Contribution] targets, while independent studies suggest that they are not on track to meet their previous NDC targets with currently implemented policies”. Consequently, they will be subjected to the sternest peer pressure. The UN gave up any pretence that there would be sanctions or punishment at the time of the Paris negotiations in 2015.

Instead, the COP has become an enormous annual collaborative marketing campaign at which concerned parties advertise the climate crisis and their heartfelt desire to mitigate climate change by hosting a kind of international reality game show. Governments strive to agree to goals that may or may not be possible, depending on the technology they’re willing to deploy.

“Ambition” â€" the yearning rather than the completion â€" is highly prized. There is theoretically a pot of money to help poorer countries also sign up to ambitions, but most of it has yet to materialise. Part of the game is sledging each other for not being ambitious enough â€" that’s the peer pressure part. When this is done well, it distracts from the fact that the most ambitious of the ambitions remain unfulfilled.

Morrison and his Energy Minister, Angus Taylor, have understood there are no significant barriers or downsides to joining the game. Anybody can have ambition. They have also grasped that the gathering that accompanies the colossal marketing campaign has morphed into a technology trade expo. This makes it very worthwhile attending for a country with the ambition to secure technology investment.

As such, Taylor will attend to “promote Australia as a safe and reliable destination to invest in gas, hydrogen and new energy technologies” and “advance Australia’s low emissions partnerships”.

Some might call this a cynical use of the Conference of Parties. They would be right. It may also be the most realistic way to extract an outcome from COP26 and subsequent meetings â€" courting investment to develop technology that could help countries realise their climate ambitions is at least a tangible step towards transforming ambition into action.

For Australian taxpayers, international investment would represent a welcome reduction to the bill for realising our own ambitions. We are currently on the hook for the new projects that form part of the “technology road map”. Mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest is currently shopping for government co-investment in his plan to create green hydrogen. This should serve as a reminder that, despite the government’s slogan “technology not taxes”, the replacement for the politically toxic carbon tax will be a big wodge of money out of the pooled taxes contributed by Australians, allocated by governments “picking winners”.

It would be nice to have this investment validated by an overseas vote of confidence that our money is going into a technology that others believe will one day pay a return. The large-scale Sun Cable project backed by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Forrest recently received this kind of recognition from the Indonesian government. COP26 will be an opportunity to present to other potential investors.

Perhaps you now see where I’m going with this. The Nationally Determined Contribution documents that countries take to COP26 are hardly worth the hemp they’re printed on as commitments to reducing emissions. But Australia’s is a canny prospectus for wooing investors into taxpayer-supported projects. Scotty from Marketing’s pamphlet full of “technologies which don’t yet exist”, as detractors have derided them, may fudge its way ignobly to 2050, but its value lies in the message it sends to investors that there’s a government willing to contribute significant funds to new technology. And there’s nothing investors like better than state-sponsorship to turbo-charge the value of their shares.

Our national head of marketing will be presenting his prospectus at the biggest green expo in the world. The opportunities created by the sense of urgency that the summit creates around climate are there to be seized and monetised.

You might admire the PM for his savvy or savage him for his lack of climatory zeal, but the fact remains that Scott Morrison and COP are a perfect match for each other.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director strategy and policy at strategic communications firm Agenda C. She has in the past done work for the Australian Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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