Australia doesn't understand that coal is being phased out globally

In fact, the United Nations' call for a phase out of coal within 20 years, as well as his warnings about zero tolerance for greenwashing could have been directed at Australia specifically because despite being a small country in terms of population, Australia punches above its weight when it comes to causing climate change and we're fast becoming a global leader in greenwashing as well.

Domestically, Australia's emissions are among the highest in the OECD on a per capita basis. But it's Australia's fossil fuel exports that do the most damage. Australia is the largest exporter of gas and coal in the world. and is what some climate scientists referred to as a global "carbon bomb" because when it comes to fossil fuel exports, we're TNT.

Australia has a bigger share of the export coal market than Saudi Arabia or Russia has of the oil market, and we recently overtook Qatar as the biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Australia accounts for 21 per cent of all global exports of LNG - almost double the share of oil exports accounted for by Saudi Arabia. Those figures may leave you thunderstruck, but the truth is Australia's domestic emissions are big and our exported emissions are even bigger. And to ignore the immense climate damage caused by Australia's fossil fuel exports is both dangerous and irresponsible.

Secretary General Antonio Guterres asked countries to agree to phase out the use of coal by 2040 globally. That has obvious and serious implications for Australia, yet we still seem to struggle to grapple with reality.

Greenwashing is a perfect example. This week Chevron suggested that Australia could become Asia's carbon sink, burying other countries' emissions in Australia using carbon capture and storage (CCS). But Chevron's own flagship CCS project, known as Gorgon, has been a massive failure. The Gorgon LNG project was approved on the basis that Chevron bury a fraction of its total C02 emissions each year. It failed to do even this for these first three years of operation and Chevron has been forced to buy carbon offsets to make up for its CCS failure.

There are huge integrity problems with offsets and Australia's system of carbon credits. Not only are up to 75 per cent of Australia's carbon credits questionable, but they are being used to justify new fossil fuels, not to genuinely reduce emissions. Ampol has even announced a "carbon neutral petrol" that's been certified by the federal government! It would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous. Delay, accounting tricks and offsets might save companies money, but they won't save the planet. It's time Australia stopped relying on dodgy credits and started to say no to new gas and coal mines.

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But lest you think it's all bad news, on Thursday the NSW Parliament finally overturned non-sensical restrictions on the Port of Newcastle, the world's largest export coal terminal, that had prevented it from diversifying away from coal without incurring huge financial penalties. The removal of what has been described as "a crippling compensation deal", that has for years hampered the port from expanding its container terminal, is not only good news for the transition away from coal, and good news for Newcastle's economy, it's also good news for NSW farmers, who are expected to save up to $2.8 billion on freight over time (because it's cheaper to ship grain by rail than by road).

It's weird that the owners of a coal terminal have been more ambitious about the transition away from coal than state and federal governments, but not any weirder than the way governments have ignored the fact that the way we tax fossil fuel companies is fundamentally broken.

The Petroleum Resources Rent Tax is so broken even the Coalition - which has never met a corporate tax it didn't want to cut - held an inquiry into why the PRRT collects so little tax. But has the government fixed this budget, the government has not contemplated a windfall profits tax, when the gas industry alone is raking in anywhere between $26 billion and $40 billion in windfall profits thanks to Russia's war on Ukraine. That's Australia's gas they are exporting! Not only is it making climate change worse, but we're not even getting a good deal on it and now we're stuck with high gas prices to boot? Hells bells.

A windfall profits tax is such an economic no-brainer that Boris Johnson introduced one in the UK. It's expected to raise £5 billion - that's pounds, not dollars - in its first year, that's more than the broken PRRT is expected to raise for Australia, the world's biggest LNG exporter.

And thinking back to Ampol and Chevron, it's likely that you, dear reader, almost certainly paid more income tax than these companies paid company tax in 2020-21. Ampol paid no company tax on $20 billion in revenue. Chevron paid a whopping $30 in company tax on $113 million in taxable income and $9.2 billion in revenue. Don't spend that $30 all at once Jim Chalmers! Chevron also paid zero Petroleum Resources Rent Tax. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Talk about dirty deeds done dirt cheap.