At last Australia has a target to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. It has taken a long time to reach this point and many fraught negotiations. But if ever there was a prime minister suited to understanding the significance of presenting at COP26, it is the man who is disparaged as “Scotty from Marketing”.

He is now winging his way to the Glasgow meeting. He has a plan, which has been denigrated as merely a pamphlet. Even a planphlet by the wits and the wordsmiths. Despite their cynicism, it is the right document for the meeting he is about to attend.

The UN Conference of Parties has never managed to fulfil the original vision of a serious forum in which countries negotiate and commit to achievable emissions-reduction targets to which they are able to hold one another accountable. For many years, renewable technology wasn’t capable of powering a developed economy. It still isn’t and countries remain unwilling to take an economic hit by relying too heavily on it.

As a result, developed countries routinely fall short of their targets. The UN’s 2021 Emissions Gap Report notes, for instance, that “Canada and the United States of America have submitted strengthened NDC [Nationally Determined Contribution] targets, while independent studies suggest that they are not on track to meet their previous NDC targets with currently implemented policies”. Consequently, they will be subjected to the sternest peer pressure. The UN gave up any pretence that there would be sanctions or punishment at the time of the Paris negotiations in 2015.

Instead, the COP has become an enormous annual collaborative marketing campaign at which concerned parties advertise the climate crisis and their heartfelt desire to mitigate climate change by hosting a kind of international reality game show. Governments strive to agree to goals that may or may not be possible, depending on the technology they’re willing to deploy.

Loading

“Ambition” – the yearning rather than the completion – is highly prized. There is theoretically a pot of money to help poorer countries also sign up to ambitions, but most of it has yet to materialise. Part of the game is sledging each other for not being ambitious enough – that’s the peer pressure part. When this is done well, it distracts from the fact that the most ambitious of the ambitions remain unfulfilled.

Morrison and his Energy Minister, Angus Taylor, have understood there are no significant barriers or downsides to joining the game. Anybody can have ambition. They have also grasped that the gathering that accompanies the colossal marketing campaign has morphed into a technology trade expo. This makes it very worthwhile attending for a country with the ambition to secure technology investment.

As such, Taylor will attend to “promote Australia as a safe and reliable destination to invest in gas, hydrogen and new energy technologies” and “advance Australia’s low emissions partnerships”.