Australia's global fossil fuel carbon footprint

AUTHORS
Hannah Grant, Bill Hare

CONTRIBUTORS OR REVIEWERS
Editing: Cindy Baxter

ABOUT CLIMATE ANALYTICS
Climate Analytics is a global climate science and policy institute. Our mission is to deliver cutting-edge science, analysis and support to accelerate climate action and keep warming below 1.5°C.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This report was funded by the Australian Human Rights Institute UNSW through its Australian Climate Accountability Project, and we thank them for their support. The research for the report was undertaken at the request of the Institute, as part of its multidisciplinary collaboration on climate and human rights.

In this report we set out the full carbon footprint of Australia's fossil fuels: the global impact of its domestic emissions and its exported fossil fuels, both historical and projected.

While Australians regard their country as one of the world's smaller greenhouse gas emitters, this is not the case. Our findings show that Australia's fossil fuels have a very large global impact.

We find the emissions that would arise from the government’s projected fossil fuel exports, in terms of both domestic production and end-use emissions, are clearly not consistent with a global 1.5C compatible trajectory.

Australia has a responsibility not just to its own consumers of energy, but to the world. Global fossil fuel carbon emissions footprint

• In 2022 Australia's total fossil fuel carbon dioxide footprint was around 4.5% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions. Only 1.0% was emitted within the country.

• Close to 80% of Australia's total fossil fuel CO2 footprint in 2022 was due to exported carbon.

  Per capita emissions

• Australia has one of the world's highest per capita emissions for all greenhouse gases, double that of China, and nine times bigger than India.

• In terms of fossil fuel emissions, in 2022 it was the eighth largest emitter of fossil fuel CO2 per capita. This is purely on a domestic basis, without factoring in Australia's exports.

  Third largest fossil fuel exporter

• Australia was the world's third largest fossil fuel exporter in 2021, trailing only Russia and the United States. But in terms of the total greenhouse gas footprint arising from those exports, specifically due to the large proportion of emissions- intensive coal, Australia ranked second in 2021.

• In 2022, Australia accounted for just over half of global metallurgical coal exports at 52%, and 17% of global thermal coal exports.

Australia’s global fossil fuel carbon footprint

• Australia more than doubled its Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export capacity in just five years prior to 2020, adding 62 million tonnes per annum of capacity compared with the 25.5 million tonnes added in the two decades prior to 2012.

• Equally of note is that, of the fossil gas used domestically in Australia, a significant share is used within the oil & gas industry itself, most notably to power the liquefaction process required to create LNG for export. When excluding the oil &gas industry’s own use of fossil gas, domestic consumption is just 19% of the gas Australia produces.

• Australia is now doubling down on fossil gas production and LNG exports, sanctioning several large-scale projects in 2021 and 2022.

• Against this gas-fuelled future for Australia, it's worth noting that the latest IEA Net Zero roadmap indicates total global use of fossil gas declines by 18-22% by 2030, 47-53% by 2035 and 78-91% by 2050 below 2022 levels.

  Exported emissions: current and projected

• In 2023, Australia exported 1.15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. (430 million tonnes from metallurgical coal, 443 million tonnes from thermal coal, 231 million tonnes from LNG and 48 million tonnes from oil)

• An additional 46 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted domestically in the process of extracting, processing and distributing those fossil fuels purely for export, taking the total to 1.2 billion tonnes.

  Cumulative emissions

• Cumulatively, from 1961 to 2023 Australia's fossil fuel exports have been responsible for emitting 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (including the export share of domestic emissions, i.e. 584 million tonnes)

• By 2035 we project Australia's fossil fuel exports will add another 15 billion tonnes to that cumulative total, bringing it to 45 billion tonnes.

  Total emissions footprint

• Australia’s total footprint can also be quantified by considering domestic emissions in addition to exported emissions embedded in its exported fossil fuels. Against this metric, Australia’s total CO2 footprint totalled 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2023, and 47 billion tonnes cumulatively from 1961 to 2023.

• When considering all greenhouse gases, i.e. not just CO2, then Australia’s total GHG emissions footprint rises to 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023, and 57 billion tonnes cumulatively from 1961 to 2023.

https://ca1-clm.edcdn.com/publications/Aust_fossilcarbon_footprint.pdf

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MEANWHILE:

Australia’s Cop31 chief negotiator plans to lobby petrostates on fossil fuel phaseout
Exclusive: Chris Bowen says key to next UN climate summit will be ‘engagement, engagement, engagement’ with countries such as Saudi Arabia....

Chris Bowen wants to use his stint as the world’s chief climate negotiator to lobby Saudi Arabia and others to stop resisting progress at UN summits, heeding calls for a “hard-nosed” approach in dealing with big emitters obstructing the transition.

Appointed “president of negotiations” for Cop31 under the deal that handed Turkey hosting rights for the conference, Australia’s climate change and energy minister has told Guardian Australia a focus ahead of the summit would be talking to countries “with whom we don’t traditionally agree”.

Bowen mentioned Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Gulf state accused of repeatedly obstructing efforts at UN summits to accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels.

“We won’t get anywhere if we just have a jamboree of the willing,” Bowen said.

“We need to have a Cop which really tries to cross some of those bridges that have been very difficult to cross in recent Cops.”

Asked how that would be achieved, Bowen said: “engagement, engagement, engagement”.

Bowen’s comments follow a direct appeal from the former US secretary of state John Kerry for Australia to actively push the world’s big emitters – including China, Russia, the US and India – to develop a roadmap to end the era of fossil fuels.

The Trump administration this week pulled out of the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis and has effectively abandoned the UN climate arena, meaning Bowen has little capacity to influence the US via the Cop negotiations.

The Labor minister said the fact Australia was itself a major exporter of fossil fuels meant it had “credibility” when it came to lobbying petrostates to do more.

The Cop30 summit in Brazil ended with a deal that omitted direct mention of fossil fuels after opposition from Saudi Arabia and its allies.

However, more than 80 countries – including Australia – signed a separate “Belém declaration” that committed nations to working towards a “just, orderly and equitable” phasing out of fuel fuels.

Bowen wants to achieve a more successful outcome at Cop31, targeting a “meaningful step forward” from the 2023 summit in Dubai, when nations agreed for the first time to start phasing out fossil fuels.

Under the deal Australia agreed with Turkey, a pre-conference event will be hosted in the Pacific with the aim of drawing global attention to small island nations under existential threat from the climate crisis.

Despite the disappointment of missing out on full hosting rights after a years-long bidding process, Bowen said Cop31 was a “remarkable opportunity for Australia”.

Bowen has asked the Pacific Islands Forum to choose a host for the event, which will be used, in part, to encourage countries to contribute to the region’s climate resilience fund.

The Labor frontbencher made the comments in an interview outlining his priorities for 2026, where he will balance his international duties with managing the domestic energy transition.

Bowen described progress in cutting pollution as “good, a lot done, but a lot more to do”, after the government’s latest projections showed it was tracking well to achieve its 2030 target but would need to substantially ramp uppolicies to meet its new 2035 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 62% to 70% below 2005 levels.

Upcoming reviews of the safeguard mechanism, which is designed to reduce pollution at major industrial facilities, and the national vehicle efficiency standard, introduced to drive uptake of electric cars, present two early opportunities to move faster.

The productivity commission last month recommended expanding the safeguard mechanism to capture more polluters, building on the changes Labor made to the scheme in 2023.

The scheme captures facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of Co2 equivalent each year, which applies to 219 sites.

Bowen would not pre-empt the review – which is a legislated requirement – but cautioned that including more businesses was not necessarily the answer.

“When we’re looking at the threshold, there will be a balancing act. You don’t want to expand it so much that you’re bringing in a whole bunch of new companies without much bang for buck in terms of emissions,” he said.

“It’s not a sort of slam dunk to say, well, obviously, covering a lot more businesses is the obvious thing to do.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/11/australia-cop31-chris-bowen-fossil-fuel-phaseout

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

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About this report
Strong growth in electricity demand is raising the curtain on a new Age of Electricity, with consumption set to soar through 2027. Electrification of buildings, transportation and industry combined with a growing demand for air conditioners and data centres is ushering a shift toward a global economy with electricity at its foundations.

The International Energy Agency’s Electricity 2025 provides a deep and comprehensive analysis of all these trends as well as recent policy developments. For the period 2025 through 2027, it forecasts electricity demand, supply and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for select countries, by region and worldwide. The report explores emerging trends such as growing electrification, expanding power systems and an increasing share of weather-dependent energy sources in the generation mix. Through this lens, it assesses resource adequacy and the methods needed to ensure the security, resilience and reliability of power systems and electricity supply. This year’s report, now in its sixth year, includes a special feature on China’s evolving power demand as well as a section on the phenomenon of negative wholesale electricity prices in some markets.

https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2025

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951