Labor, the government of ‘gas-led recovery’. Sound familiar?

To be clear about what’s necessary to meet a goal of net zero emissions by 2050 — let alone the more urgent emissions reductions we need to prevent disastrous global warming — let’s return to last year’s International Energy Agency (IEA)’s roadmap for getting there.

As we’ve repeatedly noted, the IEA is the traditional international lobby group for fossil fuel interests.

In order to reach the unambitious 2050 net zero target, the IEA says that from 2021 there should be “no new oil and gas fields approved for development; no new coal mines or mine extensions”. It’s true that the IEA report was completed well before the global spike in energy prices caused by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and is predicated on pre-war demand assumptions. But so rapid did the IEA see the fall in demand for gas that it went so far as to say “also not needed are many of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) liquefaction facilities currently under construction or at the planning stage”.