Let's consider the economics of the situation. That's important because there are many people who think climate change is not real. Or maybe it's real but not significant. Or maybe it's significant but the economy is more important. Or Australia is a small country and bigger countries should do more.
Even if you don't believe we should reduce carbon emissions for the sake of the environment, there are still very good economic reasons for reducing carbon emissions.
You might think we could just keep our fossil fuel power stations going and forget about renewables. The inconvenient truth is that in Australia, ageing coal-fired power stations are being retired and not replaced. The organisation Energy Networks Australia has an article called The Demise of Coal on the topic. This is not some sort of organisation of greenies and lefties but the national industry association representing Australian electricity networks and gas distribution businesses.
Coal is in decline even though since 2013, we have had a Coalition government in Australia which is disparaging if not hostile towards renewables, which speaks glowingly of coal and which places great importance on reducing electricity prices. Here are some examples to illustrate this.
Yet electricity prices are higher than ever, hurting not only households but also businesses.
How can this be? Unsurprisingly, investment in renewables reduced. But why is there no investment in new coal power despite a favourable political environment? Here is my view: Power stations are big investments that need time to amortise. The electricity sector is mostly privatised in Australia and evidently private sector investors do not think that climate change is a hoax that will be exposed soon. Clearly, they see new investments as being exposed to the risk of a less favourable future political environment. They may fund a small gas power station occasionally but they will not fund coal power.
It also helps to look at construction costs. See the Australian Power Generation Technology report. Gas power stations are still cheaper to construct than solar and wind power but coal is more expensive. Gas power also has the advantage of being able to quickly ramp up down, unlike coal, making it better suited to supplement renewables than coal power (looking at it purely from an economic point of view. From an environment point of view, all use of fossil fuel power stations needs to eventually stop).
If we want electricity prices to fall and reduce carbon emissions, we need to our government to outlaw new fossil fuel power stations. Then investors will have the certainty they need to dramatically increase investment in renewable energy.
There is another economic problem that we may need to worry about: Economic sanctions. Here is an example of the sort of thing that can happen. When some EU countries concluded that Brazil did not take forest fires in the Amazon area seriously enough, they threatened to block the trade deal between the EU and Brazil.. The Brazilian government relented and ordered in the army to battle the fires.
Something similar could happen to Australia. Imagine that the government decided to overcome the lack of investment in new fossil fuel power by funding fossil fuel power itself. And then we are threatened with sanctions. We could end up in a situation where we have wasted years and billions of dollars on a solution which we are then forced to abandon.