Rod Sims, The University of Melbourne

Australia’s new emission reduction target of 62–70% by 2035 is meant to demonstrate we are doing our part to hold climate change well below 2°C.

The new target can just about do this if we hit the upper end of the range.

To get there, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen today outlined new funding to help industry go clean and boost clean energy financing and clean fuels.

On top of our existing policies, these don’t look to be enough to trigger the step change needed. But there is a deeper problem. At present, the government’s approach is one of command and control. Canberra is deciding what goes ahead and what doesn’t. This approach is not only inefficient but has a very real limit – how far the public purse will stretch.

Far and away the best option to rapidly cut emissions is to once again price carbon. When it costs money to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, markets start shifting huge amounts of money into clean alternatives. The funds raised can help strengthen the budget – and compensate consumers, who are currently not being compensated for current policy costs.

The question now is whether the government can shake off their memory of the political turmoil around the introduction of the last carbon price introduced in 2012 – especially given this turmoil had much to do with constant leadership changes.

Is this range the “sweet spot”?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the long-anticipated 2035 target range as a “sweet spot”, while Minister Bowen said anything more ambitious than 70% was not achievable.

While this focus on achievability is commendable, it’s also unfortunately true that Australia’s remaining carbon budget is shrinking rapidly.

Globally, this budget represents the emissions that can still be emitted with a good chance of keeping warming under 2°C. Australia’s share is about 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2013 and 2050, when we have pledged to hit net zero.

At present, our emissions are about 440 million tonnes a year, which would mean using up our budget by 2036 – well short of 2050. So we must accelerate emission reduction.

Some experts argue a lower target than just announced is appropriate, given policies aren’t in place to achieve more. But this is self-defeating – the focus must be on having the appropriate policies.

Reaching this target requires better policies

Australia’s current suite of policies are leading to slow declines in emissions.

Unfortunately, the government’s new and existing policies don’t seem up to the task of meeting the 43% by 2030 target, let alone the new 62–70% cuts five years later.

To date, the government has heavily relied on two policies to bring emissions down. Both have flaws.

The first is the Capacity Investment Scheme, which underwrites renewable energy generation and storage projects. In the absence of a carbon price, the government needs to underwrite projects as there is no green premium to create incentives for market-led investment. The government, not the market, is deciding which clean energy projects proceed.

Underwriting new projects comes with a large contingent liability, as the Commonwealth budget is partly underwriting these projects. The scheme is proceeding more slowly than the government hoped.

The second is the Safeguard Mechanism, which requires major industrial emitters to progressively lower their emissions. The scheme covers less than 30% of the economy and applies to emissions intensity rather than overall emissions, meaning higher production can lead to higher emissions.

Today, the government announced A$5 billion to support large industrial facilities to make major investments in decarbonisation and energy efficiency, $1 billion for a clean fuel fund, $2 billion to accelerate renewable project rollout and additional funding for household decarbonisation and kerbside EV charging. As it stands, these don’t seem sufficient.

Outside the land use sector, Australia’s emissions have remained broadly flat since 2005. They haven’t risen sharply, but they have not declined. If the government restricts itself to small adjustments to existing policies, this is unlikely to change.

Time to look at a carbon price

It would be far simpler to reintroduce a carbon price.

For two years from June 2012, Australia had a carbon price. It worked. Markets funded lower-emission power sources over higher-emission ones. But the scheme became politically fraught and was repealed. Since then, pricing carbon has been seen as politically unviable.

This paralysis is unfortunate. We need to judge what is politically possible today, not what happened a decade ago. Notably, in 2021, the Morrison Coalition government released modelling showing a carbon price would be necessary to reach net zero.

With a carbon price off the table, the government is left with expensive and slow policies. Worse, it faces significant political risks if it fails to meet its own targets while increasing costs to consumers – without the revenue a carbon price could provide as compensation.

Much of the debate over carbon pricing is between supporters of climate action and those who oppose any action to reduce emissions. Those wanting climate action have been forced to fight on weaker ground defending inefficient measures. It’s counterproductive not to use the most efficient mechanism to reduce emissions.

Unlock the private sector – by pricing carbon

To make real headway towards cutting emissions, Australia needs to energise the private sector.

Here, too, the best way is to price carbon. This would mean fossil fuel producers and users would have to pay for the damage their products do. Without this incentive to reduce emissions, companies will not take action.

The fault lies with government. Having identified greenhouse emissions as a major and growing problem, successive governments have refused to take the obvious step to fix it: make pollution cost money.

In 2025, it’s very unlikely any private investor will build new fossil fuel generation, other than gas peaking plants to firm renewables. No investor will build extremely expensive and slow nuclear plants.

That means the electricity grid can only meet rising demand – particularly from the enormous growth in data centres – if we add much more renewable energy, firmed by storage or gas.

Over time, the budget would improve from the proceeds of the carbon price, and productivity would grow as Australia’s expensive and somewhat arbitrary methods of cutting emissions would no longer be needed.

A carbon price is needed now to underpin our electricity market, and so our economy, improve our budget position and productivity – and to meet or surpass new emission reduction targets.

2035 is just ten years away. If the government prices carbon, Australia could achieve very rapid reductions – potentially as high as 75%.

Rod Sims, Enterprise Professor, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese put the best face on the situation after his plan to sign a major defence treaty with Papua New Guinea while in Port Moresby fell through.

Albanese said he expected the signing of the treaty – of which the wording was approved – to be finalised “in coming weeks”.

The government hopes the coming regular annual ministerial meeting between the two countries, on a date to be fixed, would provide the opportunity to finally land the treaty. Australia is hosting the meeting this year.

Instead of the treaty signing, Albanese and PNG Prime Minister James Marape issued a joint communique saying the two countries had agreed on a text of a Mutual Defence Treaty “which will be signed following Cabinet processes in both countries”.

The treaty would “elevate the defence relationship between Papua New Guinea and Austrlia. to an Alliance”, it said.

This is the second time within weeks Albanese’s plans for finalising a treaty with a regional country have been dashed. Last week he was unable to land a $500 million agreement with Vanuatu.

Albanese has been in PNG this week for the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence. Earlier in the week, he said the signing had been delayed because a PNG cabinet quorum could not be summoned after cabinet members had returned to their home areas for the celebrations.

Albanese told a joint Wednesday news conference with Marape: “We respect the processes of the Papua New Guinea government. What this is about is the processes of their cabinet.”

Both leaders made the point that the treaty had been sought by PNG.

Asked whether the signing delay could open a window for China to try to scuttle the deal, Marape said there was “no way, shape or form” that China could have any hand in telling PNG not to have the treaty.

While it had been a friend of PNG for the last 50 years, China knew that PNG had “security partners of choice,” Marape said.

But he said that in the next couple of days he would send the PNG defence minister first to China and then to other countries, including the United States, France, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines “to inform them all exactly what this is all about”.

The joint communique said the proposed Pukpuk treaty would include “a mutual defence Alliance which recognises that an armed attack on Australia or Papua New Guinea would be a danger to the peace and security of both countries”.

In other provisions the treaty also covers the recruitment of PNG citizens into the Australian Defence Force.

It would also ensure “any activities, agreements or arrangements with third parties would not compromise the ability” of PNG or Australia to implement the treaty.

Albanese said the treaty would “be Australia’s first new alliance in more than 70 years and only the third in our entire history, along with the ANZUS treaty with New Zealand and the United States”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man suspected of having fatally shot right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, is reportedly not cooperating with authorities.

Robinson was apprehended after a more than two-day manhunt and is being held without bail at the Utah County Jail.

While a motive for the shooting has yet to be established, Utah Governor Spencer Cox has highlighted Robinson’s links to gaming and the “dark internet”.

Bullet casings found at the scene were inscribed with various messages evoking gaming subcultures. One of the quotes – “Notices bulges, OwO what’s this” – can be linked to the furry community, known for role-playing using animal avatars.

Another message – “Hey, fascist! Catch! ↑ → ↓↓↓” – features arrow symbols associated with an action that allows players to drop bombs on their foes in Helldiver 2, a game in which players play as fascists fighting enemy forces.

One casing reads “O Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Ciao, ciao!”, words from an Italian anti-Mussolini protest song, which also appears in the shooter game Far Cry 6. Yet another is a homophobic jibe: “if you read this you are gay LMAO”.

If Robinson does turn out to be a shooter radicalised through online gaming spaces, he would not be the first. Previous terrorist shootings at Christchurch (New Zealand), Halle (Germany), Bærum (Norway), and the US cities of Buffalo, El Paso and Poway were all carried out by radicalised young men who embraced online conspiracies and violent video games.

In each of these cases, the shooter attempted (and in all but the Poway shooting, succeeded) to live stream the atrocities, as though emulating a first-person shooter game.

A growing online threat

The global video game market is enormous, with an estimated value of almost US$300 billion (about A$450 billion) in 2024. Of the more than three billion gamers, the largest percentage is made up of young adults aged 18–34.

Many of these are vulnerable young men. And extremist activists have long recognised this group as a demographic ripe for radicalisation.

As early as 2002, American neo-Nazi leader Matt Hale advised his followers “if we can influence video games and entertainment, it will make people understand we are their friends and neighbours”.

Since then, far-right groups have produced ethnonationalist-themed games, such as “Ethnic Cleansing” and “ZOG’s Nightmare”, in which players defend the “white race” against Islamists, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, Jews and more.

Studying radicalisation in gamer circles

For many, the Kirk shooting has resurfaced the perennial question about the link (or lack thereof) between playing violent video games and real-world violence.

But while this is an important line of inquiry, the evidence suggests most radicalisation takes place not through playing video games themselves, but through gaming platform communication channels.

In 2020, my colleagues and I studied an extraordinary data dump of more than nine million posts from the gaming platform Steam to understand this process.

We found evidence of radicalisation occurring through communication channels, such as team voice channels. Here, players establish connections with one another, and can leverage these connections for political recruitment.

The radicalisation of vulnerable users is not instantaneous. Once extremists have connected with potential targets, they invite them into platforms such as Discord or private chat rooms. These spaces allow for meme and image sharing, as well as ongoing voice and video conversations.

Skilful recruiters will play to a target’s specific grievances. These may be personal, psycho-sexual (such as being unable to gain love or approval), or related to divisive issues such as employment, housing or gender roles.

The recruit is initiated into a fast-changing set of cynical in-jokes and in-group terms. These may include mocking self-designations, such as the Pepe the Frog meme, used by the far-right to ironically embrace their ugly “political incorrectness”. They also use derogatory terms for “enemies”, such as “woke”, “social justice warriors”, “soyboys”, “fascists” and “cultural Marxists”.

Gradually, the new recruit becomes accustomed to the casual denigration and dehumanisation of the “enemies”.

Dark and sarcastic humour allow for plausible deniability while still spreading hate. As such, humour acts an on-ramp to slowly introduce new recruits to the conspiratorial and violent ideologies that lie at the heart of terrorist shootings.

Generally, these ideologies claim the world is run by nefarious and super-powerful plutocrats/Jews/liberals/communists/elites, who can only be stopped through extreme measures.

It then becomes a question of resolve. Who among the group is willing to do what the ideology suggests is necessary?

What can be done?

The Australian Federal Police, as well as the Australian parliament, has recognised the threat of violence as a result of radicalisation through online gaming. Clearly, it’s something we can’t be complacent about.

Social isolation and mental illness, which are sadly as widespread in Australia as they are elsewhere, are some of the factors online extremists try to exploit when luring vulnerable individuals.

At the same time, social media algorithms function to shunt users into ever more sensational content. This is something online extremists have benefited from, and learned to exploit.

There is a growing number of organisations devoted to trying to prevent online radicalisation through gaming platforms. Many of these have resources for concerned parents, teachers and care givers.

Ultimately, in an increasingly online world, the best way to keep young people safe from online radicalisation is to keep having constructive offline conversations about their virtual experiences, and the people they might meet in the process.

Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.