The former Wilderness Society campaigner and head of the Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) Felicity Wade has warned the Greens will fracture the consensus for climate action in the community if the party sinks Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target.
The stark warning comes as the Greens meet on Wednesday to consider their position on Labor’s climate legislation, including their response if the government rejects their demands.
The party’s leader, Adam Bandt, will also tell a clean energy conference in Sydney that while 2022 was the climate election, “the climate wars are not quite over yet”.
LEAN is a grassroots ginger group in the ALP that pressures the party’s leadership to adopt ambitious climate and environmental action.
Wade told Guardian Australia the current positioning ahead of the opening of the 47th parliament was reminiscent of the dysfunctional dynamic that began with Kevin Rudd’s securing of an emphatic electoral mandate for climate action in 2007, which ended with the climate wars.
“We’ve all got the PTSD experience, we’ve been here before,” Wade said.
“This [2022] election did give a rousing endorsement for climate action, but we were in this place in 2007 and we watched it all go wrong.
“We saw partisan bickering destroy that consensus in the community and we saw ourselves lose the 10 or 15 years it’s been since the consensus [was last] held.”
Wade said Joe Biden won a presidential election in the US promising more ambitious action, but rancorous politics had subsequently destroyed much of the president’s agenda.
“We are sitting here with lived experience, and [the Greens] can blow it up … they can destroy our pathway,” she said. “I come from the Wilderness Society, that’s where I started. I have been in an organisation where wilderness, no compromise, is the slogan, and yet why I’ve ended up in the Labor party is because consensus is the only way we do these things.
“Climate change is so hard [and] 43% is going to take huge changes in our economy. There’s going to be a huge fight to work out how to get that safeguard mechanism in place.
“There’s going to be huge amounts of investment and pain and transmission lines through people’s backyards and all sorts of stuff to deliver that 43% – and to belittle that around a symbolic argument about a higher target is crazy.”
Wade said Labor could look at strengthening its language to make it clear the promised 43% reduction by 2030 was a floor, not a ceiling.
But she said Labor had “promised 43%, they got elected on 43%, there is nowhere to go for Labor on that”.
Wade’s intervention comes ahead of Bandt using a speech to the Clean Energy Council to emphasise the party’s position on wanting a ban on new fossil fuel projects, which the Greens leader has indicated will be a key point of negotiation on the government’s proposed climate bill.
Following briefings with the climate and energy minister, Chris Bowen, late last week, independents have also outlined a list of measures they want included as part of a beefed-up climate change bill, including a “Dutton insurance” policy that would make it more difficult for future governments to shy away from climate action.
Bowen has signalled the government will consider amendments as long as they align with Labor’s electoral mandate. Labor has the numbers to pass the legislation enshrining its 2030 and 2050 targets in the House of Representatives.
But the Greens could sink the bill in the Senate because Peter Dutton has signalled the Liberal party will oppose Labor’s legislation.
Bandt will tell Wednesday’s clean energy conference that “you don’t tackle a crisis by pouring more fuel on the fire, you tackle a crisis by addressing the cause, by powering past coal and gas”.
“The only way to end the climate wars is to keep people safe (and) to cut pollution consistent with the Paris goal of keeping the world below 1.5C of warming.”
He said Labor’s current climate policies would unlock the “carbon bombs” of the Beetaloo Basin and the Scarborough gas fields, saying the government’s 43% emissions reduction target by 2030 is “10 years too late”.
“We need the biggest public investment this country has ever seen. That’s our big idea. It’s called survival,” he said. “It’s about ensuring the climate debt we leave for future generations doesn’t drown us all.
“We need government-led action, in partnership with industry and business, to empower people, create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and deliver a safe, fair and prosperous future for all.”
On Tuesday, the Greens’ environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said she wanted to talk to Labor about inserting a climate trigger into environmental regulations to ensure the climate impact of developments was properly assessed.
Hanson-Young told the ABC “opposition for opposition’s sake isn’t going to get us there” – what was required was concrete action commensurate with the scale of the climate crisis.
At the National Press Club on Tuesday, the federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, did not rule out calls for a “climate trigger” in new laws on fossil fuel project assessments, but pointed to a major review of laws last year that said climate impacts could be addressed in other ways.
• The headline on this article was amended on 20 July 2022 to make clear that Felicity Wade is a Labor member.
