Australia’s Emissions Explained 2 – Rewiring Australia

Graph and article from rewiringaustralia.org

We have represented Australia’s domestic emissions data in a way that enables us to think about domestic economy decarbonization separately from export economy decarbonization. We separate out 2 categories, (1) the domestic emissions that support our domestic economy from (2) the trade emissions that count on Australia’s emissions budget, but are in fact emissions that are associated with creating our exports.

The emissions associated with creating our export economy have a smaller number of larger stakeholders, namely the government and corporations.  These emissions come from a small number of high-capital, large “machines”— things like smelters, freight rail systems,  mining equipment and export terminals. These are also critical to decarbonize and find zero-emission substitutions for, but are not yet ready to go to scale nor as close to economic parity solutions for our households.