Today’s issue once again shows how international the climate issue is: For instance, Australia wants to polish up its reputation as a major fossil fuel exporter by spending billions on climate action. Bernhard Pötter has analyzed what is behind “A Future Made in Australia.”
Meanwhile, India is holding parliamentary elections – until June 4. The steel sector plays a major role in the election campaign and future climate policy. Urmi Goswami has looked into how this (does not) fit in with India’s climate targets.
In addition, MEPs from Germany and France want to improve cooperation with Poland and have plans for an “Energy Transition Platform Weimar Triangle,” for example, on hydrogen. However, as Table.Briefings has exclusively learned, the application deadline for a German hydrogen network will be postponed. And there are also problems with the Climate Change Act and Germany’s economic experts.
Australia now wants to promote the expansion of green technologies through an extensive package of subsidies and tax breaks. With about 23 billion Australian dollars (14 billion euros), Anthony Albanese’s Labor government wants to promote investment in future markets over the next ten years. This is the aim of the “A Future Made in Australia” (FMIA) program, presented on Wednesday as part of the Australian government’s national budget.
According to the government, the plan will be passed into law to incentivize investment, strengthen economic security, promote the added value of domestic resources and ideas, and “make Australia a renewable energy superpower.” With a “national interest framework” for decision-making, a portal for foreign investment and shorter approval processes, the government aims to:
The planned program borrows elements from the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the EU’s Net Zero Industrial Act and Chinese models: It uses direct subsidies, tax breaks and a reduced bureaucracy. It remains unclear how much fresh money the government has earmarked for this – so far, many programs and funds that have already been launched have been included in FMIA.
The Albanese government’s initiative could also improve the country’s poor reputation when it comes to international climate action. In the past, Australia has pursued a stop-and-go climate policy, depending on the respective government. For decades, society has failed to reach a consensus on global warming between the political camps. And Australia’s economy is still largely based on the massive export of coal and gas.
While Labor governments took climate policy seriously, conservative cabinets kept turning back the clock to the applause of the Murdoch media. In 2010, Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd failed to introduce emissions trading. From 2000 to 2007, Australia was the only developed country besides the US that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
Yet the Australian continent is particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming. In 2019/2020, devastating forest fires raged across large areas of the southeast coast, claiming the lives of at least 34 people and displacing and killing billions of animals. At the Great Barrier Reef on the country’s east coast, the fifth severe coral bleaching event in eight years occurred in early 2024.
The Labour government under Albanese has submitted a bid to host COP31 in 2026. It is supported by Germany. However, the Germans expect progress on important issues: Australia’s ambition and climate financing.
Even though Australia has enormous potential for renewables, the country is the world’s third-largest exporter of coal and one of the largest exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The Albanese government is currently planning over 100 new fossil fuel projects, which would generate a total of almost five billion tons of CO2. To this end, Australia grants around eleven billion Australian dollars in fossil fuel subsidies. In parallel, the country is massively expanding its export hydrogen infrastructure with the help of Germany (HySupply).
However, Australia is holding back on climate finance. A study shows that the country has so far only paid 16 percent of its fair share of international climate finance. The Climate Action Tracker ranks Australia’s financial policy as “critically insufficient,” the worst score. The overall rating is “Insufficient.”
Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong (who had already been Australia’s climate minister at the failed COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009) declared during a visit by her German counterpart Annalena Baerbock in early May that her country was already on the path to decarbonization: “We were elected with a very clear mandate to try and seek to transform our economy, to take advantage of the opportunities that net zero by mid-century creates (…) this transformation is a challenging one, but it’s one we’re committed to.”
One week after Baerbock’s visit, the Australian government announced plans to develop new gas reserves and to continue exporting fossil fuels beyond 2050 to achieve net zero at home.
According to Resources Minister Madeleine King, gas exports alone account for 14 percent of export earnings. And fossil fuels enable the operation of industry, the processing of food and the extraction of critical minerals that “help Australia and the world reduce emissions.” That is why gas is crucial for the government’s new ambitious greentech program, the details of which have now been presented: “A Future Made in Australia.”
India is halfway through its general elections. Although the elections have been overshadowed by severe heatwaves in most parts of the country, climate change and its impacts have not made it a key electoral issue. Even though the two main pan-India political parties – the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress have both dedicated some space to climate change in their election manifestos. The promise of economic development, however, does figure high in the poll rhetoric, including the goal of the incumbent National Democratic Alliance government, led by the BJP, to put India on the path of becoming a developed country by 2047.
Integral to delivering on this promise is the rapid growth of sectors that are the cornerstone of modern industrial societies such as steel. Its emissions and the switch to “green steel” will shape the development of growth and emissions in India.
The rapid growth of key sectors, such as the steel industry, is an essential prerequisite for India’s path to becoming a “developed country.” The Indian steel sector is growing rapidly: between 2020-21 and 2022-23, crude steel production grew at an average annual rate of 6 percent to 127 million tons. It contributes around 2 percent to the national GDP.
With an operating capacity of 161 million tonnes, India is the second-largest producer and consumer of steel. The Indian steel industry’s growth is propelled by rising demands for urban infrastructure, public and private housing, and the automotive sector. Indispensable to India’s growth aspirations, the government has set a target of increasing steel production capacity to 300 million tons a year by 2030, which is almost double the current capacity.
With growing steel production comes the concern of rising emissions. The Indian steel sector has a large emission footprint – around 240 million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually, accounting for roughly 12 percent of India’s emissions. At 2.55 tons of CO2 per ton of crude steel, the emissions intensity of Indian steel is far higher than the global average of 1.85 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of crude steel.
Higher steel production will therefore lead to a sharp increase in emissions. “Controlling emissions while increasing steel production will be central to India meeting the target of reducing the emissions intensity of its GDP by 45 percent by 2030,” said Agomoni Ghosh, Managing Editor of the Global Compliance Carbon markets at S&P Global
Reducing the emission footprint of Indian steel is imperative not only to meet NDC targets but also to corner the growing export opportunities arising from the clean energy transition, including the target of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2023. However, in order to reduce emissions, the sector’s emissions intensity would have to fall, and “green steel” would have to be produced competitively.
Exports accounted for 10 percent of India’s steel production, and given policy measures like the carbon border adjustment mechanism of the European Union and similar interventions being considered by several other countries, India’s steel sector needs to decarbonize to retain existing export markets. India has a 2070 net zero target, but its steel sector (and other steel-consuming industrial sectors with export markets) must align for all practical purposes their decarbonization efforts to the 2050 net zero target.
Recognizing this, in April last year India’s Ministry of Steel set up 13 task forces to define a roadmap for green steel. “We believe that the adoption of green steel production practices will not only benefit the environment but also lead to the creation of new jobs and economic growth,” said Jyotoraditya Scindia, India’s Minister for Steel Jyotiraditya Scindia. In April, a 14th task force was set up to explore the use of biochar to reduce carbon emissions in steel production. Several experts in know of these developments told Climate Table that the progress in these task forces was slow.
Many of the major steel producers have set a target of net zero by 2050. These plans rely on using technology options like carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS). “It is remarkable that most of them propose CCUS, even though it is expensive and unproven. Besides, India has little experience of carbon management and enhanced recovery, and several Indian steel companies have abandoned the CCUS route,” said a German industry expert. The other decarbonization route proposed is green hydrogen, which is still a nascent option.
There is a reason for these choices. India’s steel sector is heavily reliant on coal and uses more primary iron. The bulk of steel production is through the Blast Furnace-Basic Oxygen Furnace (BF-BOF) mode, where there aren’t really many alternatives to coal. Another option is through sponge iron (Direct Reduced Iron) and through the Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) or Induction Furnace (IF). These processes can reduce emissions through the use of scrap steel. Given that most of the steel infrastructure is relatively new making, scrap availability is an issue, and imports are difficult given rising demand for scrap in China. To improve scrap availability, the government announced a policy in 2019.
The Indian government is betting on green hydrogen to decarbonize steel. High cost is a challenge. To address this, the government launched the National Green Hydrogen Mission to encourage the domestic production of the fuel. But even with the government’s active support, experts forecast that green hydrogen will dethrone coal as the primary steelmaking route only by 2050, with its use increasing from 2030. Most of India’s steel-producing infrastructure is relatively young-having been built since 2000. This will mean stranded assets for the industry.
Vibhuti Garg, Director for South Asia at the analyst institute IEEFA, says the steel industry’s decarbonization requires “a vision by policymakers whereby they can encourage the production of green steel.” First, a definition of what is considered green steel is needed. “India needs to clarify that green steel will mean eliminating the use of fossil fuels in the production process,” says Garg.
Garg and other experts suggest a slew of measures, including:
All eyes are now on June 4, when election results will be announced. Experts hope that some decisions on mandates, carbon price, and incentives can be expected once the next government takes office. What is clear is that India may have set a target of becoming net zero by 2070, but if it is to deliver on the goal of economic development by 2047, it must begin to put its industrial sector on the clear path of decarbonization in this decade.
After a long political dispute, the amended German Climate Change Act is expected to be finally passed by the German Bundesrat this Friday. However, it is not clear whether this will actually happen. On the one hand, the environmental associations Greenpeace, Environmental Action Germany and the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union have appealed to the minister-presidents of several federal states not to approve the law in the Bundesrat, but to call on the mediation committee instead. In the letter, which is available to Table.Briefings, they refer to the criticism of CDU/CSU politicians such as Andreas Jung: During the debate on the draft in the Bundestag, the CDU/CSU had criticized that by removing the binding sector targets, “the heart of the law would be torn away.” If these words are “more than just opposition rhetoric,” action must now follow, the managing directors of the three associations demand. They demand that the law must be stopped.
Because the Climate Change Act does not require approval, the Bundesrat cannot stop it; it can only delay it by appealing to the mediation committee. But that would have an effect. Because if the old law is still in force by July 15, Transport Minister Volker Wissing will be forced to present an emergency program because of the excessive emissions in the transport sector – something Wissing wanted to avoid at all costs. The chances of the Bundesrat actually stopping the law were initially extremely slim, as the federal states would have actively to vote against it. However, this would only be possible with the agreement of the respective coalition partners.
However, the chances of a postponement increased on Thursday. The reason for this is an error in the bill: The version passed by the Bundestag refers to an ordinance at a point where it actually refers to the law itself. This emerges from a letter from State Secretary of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs Stefan Wenzel, which Table.Briefings published on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the CDU/CSU rejected his proposal to correct the error retrospectively without a new referral to the Bundestag because it was not an “obvious inaccuracy,” for which such a procedure is necessary according to the Bundestag’s rules of procedure. The President of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, subsequently rejected the retrospective amendment.
The incorrect version of the law is now to be passed by the Bundestag on Friday and enter into force. The Bundestag and Bundesrat will then correct the error in a regular procedure. Andreas Jung, Deputy Chairman and climate expert of the CDU/CSU, sharply criticizes this procedure. “In order to quickly get rid of its legal obligations, the German government coalition rushed the Climate Change Act through parliament,” he told Table.Briefings. “Now they are surprised about mistakes and want to correct them retrospectively.” Jung is counting on the government parties to also vote in favor of a conciliation procedure. “The government coalition in the Bundesrat will surely not wave through a law they have recognized as wrong,” he says. mkr
Today’s issue once again shows how international the climate issue is: For instance, Australia wants to polish up its reputation as a major fossil fuel exporter by spending billions on climate action. Bernhard Pötter has analyzed what is behind “A Future Made in Australia.”
Meanwhile, India is holding parliamentary elections – until June 4. The steel sector plays a major role in the election campaign and future climate policy. Urmi Goswami has looked into how this (does not) fit in with India’s climate targets.
In addition, MEPs from Germany and France want to improve cooperation with Poland and have plans for an “Energy Transition Platform Weimar Triangle,” for example, on hydrogen. However, as Table.Briefings has exclusively learned, the application deadline for a German hydrogen network will be postponed. And there are also problems with the Climate Change Act and Germany’s economic experts.
Australia now wants to promote the expansion of green technologies through an extensive package of subsidies and tax breaks. With about 23 billion Australian dollars (14 billion euros), Anthony Albanese’s Labor government wants to promote investment in future markets over the next ten years. This is the aim of the “A Future Made in Australia” (FMIA) program, presented on Wednesday as part of the Australian government’s national budget.
According to the government, the plan will be passed into law to incentivize investment, strengthen economic security, promote the added value of domestic resources and ideas, and “make Australia a renewable energy superpower.” With a “national interest framework” for decision-making, a portal for foreign investment and shorter approval processes, the government aims to:
The planned program borrows elements from the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the EU’s Net Zero Industrial Act and Chinese models: It uses direct subsidies, tax breaks and a reduced bureaucracy. It remains unclear how much fresh money the government has earmarked for this – so far, many programs and funds that have already been launched have been included in FMIA.
The Albanese government’s initiative could also improve the country’s poor reputation when it comes to international climate action. In the past, Australia has pursued a stop-and-go climate policy, depending on the respective government. For decades, society has failed to reach a consensus on global warming between the political camps. And Australia’s economy is still largely based on the massive export of coal and gas.
While Labor governments took climate policy seriously, conservative cabinets kept turning back the clock to the applause of the Murdoch media. In 2010, Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd failed to introduce emissions trading. From 2000 to 2007, Australia was the only developed country besides the US that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
Yet the Australian continent is particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming. In 2019/2020, devastating forest fires raged across large areas of the southeast coast, claiming the lives of at least 34 people and displacing and killing billions of animals. At the Great Barrier Reef on the country’s east coast, the fifth severe coral bleaching event in eight years occurred in early 2024.
The Labour government under Albanese has submitted a bid to host COP31 in 2026. It is supported by Germany. However, the Germans expect progress on important issues: Australia’s ambition and climate financing.
Even though Australia has enormous potential for renewables, the country is the world’s third-largest exporter of coal and one of the largest exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The Albanese government is currently planning over 100 new fossil fuel projects, which would generate a total of almost five billion tons of CO2. To this end, Australia grants around eleven billion Australian dollars in fossil fuel subsidies. In parallel, the country is massively expanding its export hydrogen infrastructure with the help of Germany (HySupply).
However, Australia is holding back on climate finance. A study shows that the country has so far only paid 16 percent of its fair share of international climate finance. The Climate Action Tracker ranks Australia’s financial policy as “critically insufficient,” the worst score. The overall rating is “Insufficient.”
Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong (who had already been Australia’s climate minister at the failed COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009) declared during a visit by her German counterpart Annalena Baerbock in early May that her country was already on the path to decarbonization: “We were elected with a very clear mandate to try and seek to transform our economy, to take advantage of the opportunities that net zero by mid-century creates (…) this transformation is a challenging one, but it’s one we’re committed to.”
One week after Baerbock’s visit, the Australian government announced plans to develop new gas reserves and to continue exporting fossil fuels beyond 2050 to achieve net zero at home.
According to Resources Minister Madeleine King, gas exports alone account for 14 percent of export earnings. And fossil fuels enable the operation of industry, the processing of food and the extraction of critical minerals that “help Australia and the world reduce emissions.” That is why gas is crucial for the government’s new ambitious greentech program, the details of which have now been presented: “A Future Made in Australia.”
India is halfway through its general elections. Although the elections have been overshadowed by severe heatwaves in most parts of the country, climate change and its impacts have not made it a key electoral issue. Even though the two main pan-India political parties – the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress have both dedicated some space to climate change in their election manifestos. The promise of economic development, however, does figure high in the poll rhetoric, including the goal of the incumbent National Democratic Alliance government, led by the BJP, to put India on the path of becoming a developed country by 2047.
Integral to delivering on this promise is the rapid growth of sectors that are the cornerstone of modern industrial societies such as steel. Its emissions and the switch to “green steel” will shape the development of growth and emissions in India.
The rapid growth of key sectors, such as the steel industry, is an essential prerequisite for India’s path to becoming a “developed country.” The Indian steel sector is growing rapidly: between 2020-21 and 2022-23, crude steel production grew at an average annual rate of 6 percent to 127 million tons. It contributes around 2 percent to the national GDP.
With an operating capacity of 161 million tonnes, India is the second-largest producer and consumer of steel. The Indian steel industry’s growth is propelled by rising demands for urban infrastructure, public and private housing, and the automotive sector. Indispensable to India’s growth aspirations, the government has set a target of increasing steel production capacity to 300 million tons a year by 2030, which is almost double the current capacity.
With growing steel production comes the concern of rising emissions. The Indian steel sector has a large emission footprint – around 240 million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually, accounting for roughly 12 percent of India’s emissions. At 2.55 tons of CO2 per ton of crude steel, the emissions intensity of Indian steel is far higher than the global average of 1.85 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of crude steel.
Higher steel production will therefore lead to a sharp increase in emissions. “Controlling emissions while increasing steel production will be central to India meeting the target of reducing the emissions intensity of its GDP by 45 percent by 2030,” said Agomoni Ghosh, Managing Editor of the Global Compliance Carbon markets at S&P Global
Reducing the emission footprint of Indian steel is imperative not only to meet NDC targets but also to corner the growing export opportunities arising from the clean energy transition, including the target of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2023. However, in order to reduce emissions, the sector’s emissions intensity would have to fall, and “green steel” would have to be produced competitively.
Exports accounted for 10 percent of India’s steel production, and given policy measures like the carbon border adjustment mechanism of the European Union and similar interventions being considered by several other countries, India’s steel sector needs to decarbonize to retain existing export markets. India has a 2070 net zero target, but its steel sector (and other steel-consuming industrial sectors with export markets) must align for all practical purposes their decarbonization efforts to the 2050 net zero target.
Recognizing this, in April last year India’s Ministry of Steel set up 13 task forces to define a roadmap for green steel. “We believe that the adoption of green steel production practices will not only benefit the environment but also lead to the creation of new jobs and economic growth,” said Jyotoraditya Scindia, India’s Minister for Steel Jyotiraditya Scindia. In April, a 14th task force was set up to explore the use of biochar to reduce carbon emissions in steel production. Several experts in know of these developments told Climate Table that the progress in these task forces was slow.
Many of the major steel producers have set a target of net zero by 2050. These plans rely on using technology options like carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS). “It is remarkable that most of them propose CCUS, even though it is expensive and unproven. Besides, India has little experience of carbon management and enhanced recovery, and several Indian steel companies have abandoned the CCUS route,” said a German industry expert. The other decarbonization route proposed is green hydrogen, which is still a nascent option.
There is a reason for these choices. India’s steel sector is heavily reliant on coal and uses more primary iron. The bulk of steel production is through the Blast Furnace-Basic Oxygen Furnace (BF-BOF) mode, where there aren’t really many alternatives to coal. Another option is through sponge iron (Direct Reduced Iron) and through the Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) or Induction Furnace (IF). These processes can reduce emissions through the use of scrap steel. Given that most of the steel infrastructure is relatively new making, scrap availability is an issue, and imports are difficult given rising demand for scrap in China. To improve scrap availability, the government announced a policy in 2019.
The Indian government is betting on green hydrogen to decarbonize steel. High cost is a challenge. To address this, the government launched the National Green Hydrogen Mission to encourage the domestic production of the fuel. But even with the government’s active support, experts forecast that green hydrogen will dethrone coal as the primary steelmaking route only by 2050, with its use increasing from 2030. Most of India’s steel-producing infrastructure is relatively young-having been built since 2000. This will mean stranded assets for the industry.
Vibhuti Garg, Director for South Asia at the analyst institute IEEFA, says the steel industry’s decarbonization requires “a vision by policymakers whereby they can encourage the production of green steel.” First, a definition of what is considered green steel is needed. “India needs to clarify that green steel will mean eliminating the use of fossil fuels in the production process,” says Garg.
Garg and other experts suggest a slew of measures, including:
All eyes are now on June 4, when election results will be announced. Experts hope that some decisions on mandates, carbon price, and incentives can be expected once the next government takes office. What is clear is that India may have set a target of becoming net zero by 2070, but if it is to deliver on the goal of economic development by 2047, it must begin to put its industrial sector on the clear path of decarbonization in this decade.
After a long political dispute, the amended German Climate Change Act is expected to be finally passed by the German Bundesrat this Friday. However, it is not clear whether this will actually happen. On the one hand, the environmental associations Greenpeace, Environmental Action Germany and the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union have appealed to the minister-presidents of several federal states not to approve the law in the Bundesrat, but to call on the mediation committee instead. In the letter, which is available to Table.Briefings, they refer to the criticism of CDU/CSU politicians such as Andreas Jung: During the debate on the draft in the Bundestag, the CDU/CSU had criticized that by removing the binding sector targets, “the heart of the law would be torn away.” If these words are “more than just opposition rhetoric,” action must now follow, the managing directors of the three associations demand. They demand that the law must be stopped.
Because the Climate Change Act does not require approval, the Bundesrat cannot stop it; it can only delay it by appealing to the mediation committee. But that would have an effect. Because if the old law is still in force by July 15, Transport Minister Volker Wissing will be forced to present an emergency program because of the excessive emissions in the transport sector – something Wissing wanted to avoid at all costs. The chances of the Bundesrat actually stopping the law were initially extremely slim, as the federal states would have actively to vote against it. However, this would only be possible with the agreement of the respective coalition partners.
However, the chances of a postponement increased on Thursday. The reason for this is an error in the bill: The version passed by the Bundestag refers to an ordinance at a point where it actually refers to the law itself. This emerges from a letter from State Secretary of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs Stefan Wenzel, which Table.Briefings published on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the CDU/CSU rejected his proposal to correct the error retrospectively without a new referral to the Bundestag because it was not an “obvious inaccuracy,” for which such a procedure is necessary according to the Bundestag’s rules of procedure. The President of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, subsequently rejected the retrospective amendment.
The incorrect version of the law is now to be passed by the Bundestag on Friday and enter into force. The Bundestag and Bundesrat will then correct the error in a regular procedure. Andreas Jung, Deputy Chairman and climate expert of the CDU/CSU, sharply criticizes this procedure. “In order to quickly get rid of its legal obligations, the German government coalition rushed the Climate Change Act through parliament,” he told Table.Briefings. “Now they are surprised about mistakes and want to correct them retrospectively.” Jung is counting on the government parties to also vote in favor of a conciliation procedure. “The government coalition in the Bundesrat will surely not wave through a law they have recognized as wrong,” he says. mkr
