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Posted: 2023-03-27 04:55:02

Anyone seeking to champion the end of Australia's climate wars would do well to recall Mark Twain's oft-misquoted words.

"Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," he's alleged to have told a journalist inquiring into rumours he was dying. 

Real or not, it's a quote that goes to the heart of this next phase of Australia's climate wars.

The deal between Labor and the Greens on the safeguard mechanism is undoubtedly a major moment in the nation's sordid last 15 years.

It will enshrine into legislation Labor's central policy to cut carbon emissions by 43 per cent by 2030.

But you just had to hear Greens leader Adam Bandt announcing the deal he had reached with Labor to get a sense of what's to come.

"Negotiating with Labor is like negotiating with the political wing of the coal and gas corporations," he said.

"Labor seems more afraid of the coal and gas corporations than the climate collapse."

So much for peaceful times.

Adam Bandt speaks at a press conference with Dorinda Cox behind him
Adam Bandt has vowed to be a pragmatic leader of the Greens.(ABC News: Adam Kennedy)

The new laws, which will come into force in July, will force the nation's top 215 largest-polluting facilities to cut or pay offsets to reduce their emissions by 4.9 per cent each year to 2030.

The Greens have spent months saying their electoral success last year delivered a mandate to demand the government ban any new coal or gas developments.

For Labor, it was a line it was unwilling to cross, fearing it would be accused of going back on what it took to the election. 

The compromise they reached centres around a hard cap on emissions, which the Greens say will wipe out half of the coal and gas projects in the pipelines, arguing they will be unable to keep emissions under the cap, which will decrease with time.

Anthony Albanese listens as Chris Bowen speaks at a press conference
Chris Bowen has led negotiations with Adam Bandt on the safeguard mechanism.(ABC News: Adam Kennedy)

The Greens are the first to dub the safeguard mechanism a flawed policy. It's why it wanted such a high ask from the government (a ban on new coal and gas projects) in return.

The party regularly derided the safeguard mechanism as having the ability to push pollution up. 

Now that it's secured a hard cap on overall emissions, the party will now champion that its policy will make it close to impossible for half of the proposed projects to open. 

"The Greens have stopped about half of them [in the pipeline], but Labor still wants to open the rest," Bandt said.

"And so, now there is going to be a fight for every new project that the government wants to open."

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, meanwhile, left his criticism for the Liberal and National parties, which excluded themselves from the negotiations.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.
Anthony Albanese thanks crossbenchers who worked with the government to support the bill.

That Labor and the Greens reached a deal offers a clear signal of just how far the parties have come from the dark days of the carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) in 2009.

Each side has its own telling of what happened back then when the Greens joined with the Coalition to vote down Kevin Rudd's climate policy, but the scars all these years later remain raw for many.

Labor, for its part, lost two prime ministers in the climate wars. The Greens, too, were brandished as a party that had made perfect the enemy of the good and made few inroads into shaping government policy.

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