Can farming be excluded and still reach 2050 net zero?

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The Morrison Government’s absurd position on climate change is slowly evolving. Gone are the denials about climate change replaced by a motley crew of rent-seekers. We’ve shifted from the coal fixation to a “gas-led recovery” which is twenty years too late and won’t work anyway given the gas supply cartel on the east coast. Now it’s about 2050 net-zero and carving up the pie among the mates accordingly. The media reports today that any net-zero acceptance will carve out trade-exposed emissions-intensive industries, including agriculture, a policy-driven by the Nats. Is such a thing possible?

The first observation we can make is that Labor’s carbon price did precisely the same thing. It wasn’t a great idea, doing serious harm to the efficiency of the mechanism, but that was the political reality.

Second, Climate Action Tracker is a good reference point:

Key findings

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.