(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

The Business Council (BCA) supports net zero by 2050? And a 50% emissions reduction target by 2030? Enough to upset Barnaby Joyce and Angus Taylor?

Alas, no. The BCA executive is worried that its membership has worked out just how denialist it is and is desperate to convince them otherwise. That’s the real audience for its weekend announcement.

The Business Council is one of Australia’s worst climate criminals. It has a long, long record of supporting climate action “in principle” but then working to sabotage any genuinely effective policy to deliver it. The BCA has attacked, cheered on the abolition of or demanded the removal of every single effective climate action policy of the last decade, including the Renewable Energy Target and the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme, the repeal of which the BCA “welcomed“. Two years ago it attacked Labor’s emissions target of 45% by 2030 as “economy wrecking“. Now it urges a 46-50% target itself.

You won’t see any mention of the BCA’s sordid climate history in its puff pieces today.

What you will see if you examine the BCA’s glossy brochure on its new climate policy is the same argument as that pushed by fossil fuel giants like Woodside, Origin, Shell and BP — all of whom happen to be BCA members. It’s all about carbon capture and storage (CCS), which is mentioned over and over again. The fact that CCS demonstrably doesn’t work doesn’t even feature as one of the “Challenges to Overcome” identified by the BCA.

The BCA also wants to see a greater role for gas, which “will have a critical ‘enabling’ role to play in the transition to net zero by 2050”.

So far, so fossil.

The BCA also supports the Energy Security Board’s (ESB) recommendations for “maintaining resource adequacy” and “backing up power system security” — code for the ESB’s “CoalKeeper” tax recommendation being championed by Taylor. That’s unsurprising as well, given big coal-fired power generators AGL and EnergyAustralia are BCA members. And the paper backs a great reliance on carbon offsets rather than actual emissions reductions, although at least it admits the need for a “more robust” offset market.

The one positive put forward in the paper, and the one closest to the carbon price that the BCA once campaigned against, is a call for a stronger safeguard mechanism — the hopelessly weak mechanism put in place by the Abbott government to prevent large emitters from egregiously ripping off its Emissions Reduction Fund.

It wants the mechanism threshold lowered significantly to include far more polluters and it wants the emissions baselines that form the core of the mechanism to reduce over time to meet an emissions “budget”, with tradeable credits generated by the mechanism. Or, as it’s otherwise known, a carbon trading scheme. Trade-exposed industries would be protected under the mechanism with government handouts.

Why is the BCA engaged in the theatre of championing emissions reduction ambitions? Because its membership of large, multinational companies is increasingly embarrassed that the BCA has worked to sabotage climate action in Australia at the behest of its fossil fuel members and other members like News Corp. For two years now, some prominent members have been querying why, given the rest of the world is moving on climate, the body that touts itself as Australia’s peak business lobby group is among the dinosaurs.

Now the BCA can point to its very own plan to achieve the emissions reductions it once savaged — hoping, of course, that members don’t look beneath the hood and see the array of fossil fuel industry distractions that form the bulk of the plan.

And one more thing — a kind of cherry on top of the whole delicious package. The BCA wants to see the Climate Change Authority elevated to dominant status in policymaking: “The Climate Change Authority must be further empowered and resourced to become Australia’s trusted, independent climate advisory body responsible for advising all governments on all aspects of the national overarching climate policy framework in pursuit of the net zero emissions policy goal.”

Who now heads the Climate Change Authority? The man who paved the way for the government to fund carbon capture and storage as “emissions reduction”, gas industry CEO Grant King. Who just so happens to be the most recent ex-chair of the Business Council of Australia.