31 May 2025
William Sinclair
Welcome to Episode 2 of Why Can’t They Just looking at politics, policy and getting stuff done.
My name’s William Sinclair. I’m a Labor member, I’m also a member of Labor Environmental Action Network.
Janaline Oh
Hi, I’m Janaline Oh. I’m a former diplomat. I’m also a member of the Labor Party and a member of the Labor Environment Action Network.
Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast on the lands of the Ngunnawal people and pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and to other families and people with close connections to this land, and also to any First Nations listeners that we have.
William Sinclair
We are doing this episode just after the Environment Minister Murray Watt has approved the Northwest Shelf. This huge gas extension. In the press, it says it’ll stretch out to 2070.
Janaline, why can’t they – being the Albanese Labor government – why can’t they just stop approving more gas mines?
Janaline Oh
So firstly, on the Northwest Shelf, there are some boring technical reasons that Murray Watt made the decision that he made. So the first thing is, under the current environment laws, basically because the extension was not an expansion – so there was no new stuff – and because it was an existing project – in fact it’s been going, I think for the last 40 years – the only grounds on which he would have had to deny that project would have been around concerns that it was having a significant impact on one of the matters of national environmental significance outlined in the Act, that was more severe or unanticipated in relation to the past 40 years of operation.
Now there was an issue around rock art. The Murujuga people have an ancient site with rock art there. There has been evidence that there is potential damage to the rock art. There was a very detailed report put together and presented to the West Australian government, which also was obviously sent to the federal government for consideration. And the minister made his determination on the advice of his department to continue the approval. He has said in his press release that he has also proposed a number of (quote) “stringent conditions”…
William Sinclair
Yep.
Janaline Oh
… which I think must be around the local pollution affecting the rock art, because that is the only thing he can make a determination on.
Now we don’t know what those conditions are yet because they first have to be sent to the company. The company I think has 10 working days to consider that and come back to him with any response. And then the final decision will be made and published and at that point we’ll know what the conditions are. As I said, my guess is, it’s going to be around local pollution that may be affecting the rock art.
William Sinclair
Yep.
Janaline Oh
In terms of the kind of carbon bomb argument…
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
I guess… I really want to push back on this premise that no new coal and gas is actually a climate policy. And what I mean by that is that it is not clear to me that banning new coal and gas is actually going to – in Australia in particular – is actually going to do anything to reduce emissions, either in Australia or internationally. So I completely get that it is very attractive. It sounds so simple. If you don’t want to use fossil fuels, just keep them in the ground and then they can’t be burnt.
William Sinclair
So yeah.
Janaline Oh
Now I was also very attracted to this until I actually – in the last term of government – was heavily involved in, I guess you could call it, free advice to the Environment Minister on the reform of the environment laws. And one of the things that I was working on was I was trying to develop a meaningful climate standard. So this is the idea that you can have some sort of trigger in the laws.
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
That will make the minister take climate impacts into account in decision making.
William Sinclair
Yeah, I mean this, this is the, this is ultimate retort if to say that the minister’s just abiding the law, the Minister would have to break the law by denying the gas expansion. Then the ultimate retort is why don’t we just change the law so that the Minister can reject?
Janaline Oh
Exactly. Totally. So we are trying to change the law. I mean the Government has said it’s trying to change the law and has even said it’s a priority for the first part of this term, which is a good thing.
But looking at this climate standard, firstly it was very, very difficult to identify a threshold beyond which a project would have a meaningful impact on the climate, like just any given project is not in itself going to be significant enough in a global sense.
Right, we’re not a huge… I mean, we are a significant exporter. But in global terms, we are not anything like the biggest. The International Energy Agency finds that Australia is the 23rd biggest gas exporter – sorry, the 23rd biggest gas supplier, which is a little bit different because it includes domestic use – accounting for about 1% of global gas supply. And we are the 14th biggest coal supplier, accounting for about 0.9% of global coal supply. Now what does that mean? What it means is if we shut off our supply…
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
… without doing anything about demand, our customers would just buy from one of the other 22 larger suppliers of gas or 13 larger suppliers of coal.
William Sinclair
Isn’t this, but isn’t this going to be ultimately the drug dealer’s defence? Like, if we don’t sell carbon as a carbon drug dealer, they’ll just buy from somewhere else.
Janaline Oh
Yeah, it is. It’s exactly that. And guess what, the drug dealers were right.
So what do I mean by that? I mean, if you look at the Reagan Bush War on drugs, that tried to smash production of drugs, particularly in Latin America, without dealing with any of the social and economic issues that were leading to drug use in the United States; in other words, they did nothing about demand and they tried to smash production, did that stop people from using drugs in the US? Arguably no, I mean I think you know, the world has assessed that the Reagan Bush War on drugs was an abject failure.
So what I’m saying is, you know, when I say that if we cut off supply, it wouldn’t make any difference, I’m not saying we should throw up our hands and say, “oh, well, you know, there’s nothing we can do. We should just keep pumping the stuff. Drill, baby, drill.”
Absolutely not. What I’m saying is we need to find where we can make a meaningful contribution. And if the meaningful contribution is not in cutting off supply, then we need to look at how we can actually change the demand for our fossil fuels so that we reduce the demand and when the demand reduces, then the production will also cease. When the demand for horses and carriages reduced…
William Sinclair
Sure.
Janaline Oh
… the supply dried up.
So this is where I actually see Australia’s potential in reducing global carbon emissions. Our potential is not on necessarily stopping stuff, but it’s on the positive side where we build all of this renewable energy infrastructure, use it to process Australian iron ore, Australian minerals, alumina, bauxite and create these green metals and green hydrogen that we can feed into the global supply chains to decarbonize heavy industry supply chains all over the world.
The Superpower Institute, which is a think tank that focuses on renewable energy and clean energy exports, has done a study which shows that, if Australia meets its potential as a clean energy export powerhouse, it could actually reduce global emissions by about 9.6%. Now that’s a big number, right?
William Sinclair
So that’s global emissions.
Janaline Oh
That is, that’s global emissions. At the moment, Australia’s domestic emissions are about 1.3% of global emissions. If you add – I think people say that burning our fossil fuels is about 3 times that. So if we’re talking about Australia being responsible for, let’s say, 5% of global emissions, including our exports, this is nearly double that. So I guess what I’m saying is, this is the main game. The main game is, if we can’t make a big difference to global emissions through cutting off production, where can we make that meaningful contribution? And I think this is where we can make that meaningful contribution.
William Sinclair
Yeah, and this is all about high value add in economist lingo, this is all about high value add.
Janaline Oh
Yeah. So, basically instead of just digging rocks out of the ground and shipping them overseas, he’s proposing that we dig the rocks out of the ground, process them here using renewable energy…
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
… and ship that product overseas. So obviously much much higher value.
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
And also very low carbon.
So, the government has adopted this. The government has embraced this agenda as proposed in, you know, this sort of superpower… the government talks about being a clean energy superpower. And the main vehicle that it has devised to deliver this is the Future Made in Australia policy.
The Future Made in Australia policy is all about research and development assistance, production credits, … essentially kick starting the industries that will provide this clean energy processing of heavy industry inputs. And that is how the government is proposing to deal with exports.
You know, it is very attractive to adopt the approach that is heavily promoted, for example by the Greens Party, where Adam Bandt, the former Greens leader, liked to say: Why do you have to stop new coal and gas approvals? Because you can’t put out a fire while you’re pouring petrol on it.
I guess my response to that is if you’ve got a fire of this magnitude, you can’t put it out without putting petrol in the fire truck. And I think in this case, the fire truck is renewable electricity principally, but also other renewable energy. And you need to put petrol in that fire truck. You need to make the steel and cement to build that infrastructure. And at that point, you hopefully won’t need the fire truck anymore.
So, basically if you want to stretch the drug dealer analogy to a ridiculous extent, you could say that what we need to do is be taking our clients to rehab.
So what we need to be doing is – and you know the government is doing this. I’d like to see them put a lot more effort into it and put a lot more focus on it, but you know, we have agreements with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and POSCO, which is a giant Korean heavy industry company to co-invest in projects in Australia.
It’s trying to give them a stake in this clean energy export agenda, and I mean look, it’s challenging.
William Sinclair
What can we do to get them to buy into to that agenda? Because we’re a small country relative to the rest of the world, we’re obviously culturally distinct from these Asian neighbours. Why would they listen to us if we want to try and get them off this carbon addiction?
Janaline Oh
So, I would say we have a fantastic, deep and enduring relationship with Japan. Our bilateral relationship with Japan since about the 1980s, when people started getting over the war, has been – and this has been a concerted effort by both Liberal and Labor governments – has been deepening and intensifying for decades. We do have a very, very good, and broad, and trusting relationship with Japan. They are a significant security partner. They are a significant trade partner. They are a big investment partner. We have massive cultural links. You know, we have a lot of people-to-people links. We have a very good relationship with Japan. One of the things that we need to do to secure that relationship is to be a reliable trade partner.
So, the idea that Australia should go to Japan and basically threaten to cut off, you know, a significant source of their gas imports unless they do certain things, I mean that is, if you’ll excuse me for this analogy, that is a very Trumpian approach to bilateral relations, right? Going to Japan … if Australia goes Japan and says if you don’t do these things, we’ll cut off your gas exports, Japan is probably going to say, well, you know, don’t care. We’ll go and buy from Qatar.
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
If Australia says we want to keep being a trusted energy partner and we would like you to co-invest in this clean energy manufacturing industry, in this heavy industry, because you’re really good at it and we need your capital and we need your expertise, and here is a way that you can start making a product to feed into your processing in Japan that will help to decarbonize and help you to meet your net zero goals, because Japan also has a net zero by 2050 commitment – I think that is a much more persuasive way of dealing with it.
And it’s going to be more effective, because you can use a threat once; you can use cooperation forever.
William Sinclair
Right.
Janaline Oh
You just have to be smart about it.
But I will also make the point that, contrary to the generally un-fact-checked claims by people like the Greens, the Albanese Labor government, in its first term, did not approve more than 30 new coal projects. We actually – we as in the Labor Environment Action Network – before the election, because we were trying to draft some talking points for our own volunteers, we asked Tanya Plibersek’s office to tell us what she had approved.
In coal, it was 10 approvals, nine of them were time extensions for existing coal mines. One of them was a small new metallurgical coal mine, so metallurgical coal is the stuff used for steel. I think all the others were actually also metallurgical.
She approved three gas projects, which were all additional a small number of additional wells in existing gas fields.
So, again there were no new fossil fuel projects. There were extensions and, in the gas case, slight expansions of existing projects. Now if you are an adherent of no new coal and gas, that is 13 projects too many…
William Sinclair
32:26
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
32:41
… but it is not at the scale that some of the narrative implies, and it was, you know, again under the existing environment laws. And a time extension or a small expansion of an existing project is not the same as a whole new project, right? Because if you, if you were going to do it, if you were going to damage the environment, the damage has already being done.
William Sinclair
It’s done, yeah.
Janaline Oh
Or it is being done
William Sinclair
Coming around to gas, the Albanese government, under Madeleine King as the minister, released the gas strategy last year, which angered groups like the Australian Conservation Foundation and a bunch of environmental NGOs, because it was seen as the Albanese government going hard on gas, and it almost felt reminiscent of Scott Morrison’s gas-led recovery from COVID.
Do you want to touch on what you thought about that gas strategy?
Janaline Oh
Yeah. So, I would just really – because you know, I’m a policy nerd – I would really recommend people actually read the Future Gas Strategy. I think everybody got really distracted by the Minister’s statements afterwards. So, the Future Gas Strategy has, I think 5 objectives and I think the first one is definitely about decarbonization. I think there are objectives around reliability of supply.
But decarbonisation is a very strong frame throughout the entire Future Gas Strategy. The issue with the Future Gas Strategy was Madeleine King standing up and saying, you know, we are going to need to have gas well into the future. What she didn’t say – and frankly, I think this was, you know, I mean, far be it for me to tell a Cabinet minister how to run her comms, but, in terms of free advice …
William Sinclair
You’re volunteering.
Janaline Oh
… I think that was a really big mistake. I think it would have made a lot more sense for her to actually articulate what was in the Future Gas Strategy, which was we will need gas into the future. But it is a tiny amount compared to the amount that we have used in the past. So, the bit that she didn’t talk about was the scale. So yes, we are probably going to – and the reason we’re probably going to need gas into the future and this is another thing about gas, is that gas is really good for firming renewables. Why is it good? Because it is very flexible. You can fire it up quickly and you can shut it down quickly, so you can use it only during those peak times when you just don’t quite have enough renewable energy or stored renewable energy, to get over a short-term shortfall.
William Sinclair
So, we’re talking maybe in the evenings or in the mornings, just when there’s a huge amount of energy and not that much has been generated at that particular time of the day.
Janaline Oh
Yeah, or if it’s been cloudy and windless for a few days …
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
… and the storage has run out, gas is useful for a few days until the renewables come back on stream.
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
Or in Canberra in the winter – there is a massive spike in gas usage, because a lot of Canberra households still have gas hot water, between 7:00 and 9:00 on winter mornings when everybody has a shower.
So, for those little peaks it’s useful to have gas. For the rest of the time, you can probably – and you know for an average household, if you have solar on the roof, electric hot water and a battery, you can do your own shower peak in the winter – but across a community, obviously you will need something, and gas is very flexible.
Having the gas there means that you can be a lot more ambitious in terms of the amount of renewable energy you rely on. So, if your renewable energy reliance is 80% or 82%, which is what the government’s target is for 2030, and you keep that 18% of gas available, you don’t necessarily have to use it, right? So, if you have a gas peaking plant that is used 2% of the time, it’s not going to be emitting that much.
So I think just honestly the Future Gas Strategy was a massive comms fail on the part of the Government.
William Sinclair
Yeah, yeah.
Janaline Oh
I think they should have talked a lot more, when they were talking about the need for gas into the future, to talk about how much gas they were talking about, and all the measures that they’re taking to reduce demand. Because the other thing that the Government is doing and this comes to, I guess, if no new coal and gas isn’t actually a climate policy, what is a climate policy?
And I would say, what is a climate policy is the massive push on renewable electricity.
William Sinclair
Sure.
Janaline Oh
Because it is the basis of everything. If you have renewable electricity, then electric vehicles become, you know, a climate reducing, greenhouse gas emissions reducing policy. You know, you if you have tonnes of renewable electricity, you can decarbonize heavy industry.
The safeguard mechanism, under which Australia’s 215 biggest emitters are basically forced to either reduce their emissions or pay for any excess emissions.
So basically, each enterprise is given a carbon budget. If they exceed that carbon budget, or if they exceed the emissions cap for the year, then they have to buy credits and they can buy credits from other enterprises or they can buy them from the government and then, anyway…
William Sinclair
I mean, it sounds like a, it sounds like it’s basically an ETS 2.0.
Janaline Oh
SSSHHH! Don’t say that! Not an ETS! – no, it kind of is.
William Sinclair
Maybe that’s not going to end up in the final part.
Janaline Oh
Now look, because we’re not in the government, we can probably say this, it kind of is. I mean, it is basically a way of putting a price on carbon and making emitters pay for their emissions. So to that extent, yes, that’s what it is.
But, the other thing, I mean the fuel efficiency standard for light passenger vehicles will ensure that even if people don’t buy electric vehicles, car companies will have to bring more efficient internal combustion engines into Australia, so that will reduce emissions, and transport emissions were one of the drivers of Australia’s emissions, basically flatlining or even slightly rising in 2024.
But if you don’t have renewable electricity, if you’re using fossil electricity, then your EVs and your industrial emissions are not going to be as kind of low carbon as you would like them to be. So the lower the carbon intensity of your electricity generation, the lower the carbon intensity of your transport and industry.
So, the other thing that that state and federal governments are doing is putting a lot of investment into domestic electrification, both for households and business. Various States and Territories have programmes to help households to improve the energy performance of their home – so encouraging insulation and encouraging fuel switching: taking your gas appliances and changing them for electrical appliances. The ACT government and the Victorian Government have been leading the pack on those issues.
All of that is important: that is domestic climate policy.
But the other thing that I think is worth raising on the export side is, I think IEEFA, which is an energy think tank, put out a report showing that Japan is actually on-selling quite a lot of Australian gas…
William Sinclair
Right, right, right.
Janaline Oh
… into the region. The argument is, well, Japan doesn’t even need it for its own decarbonisation. It’s actually on-selling it now.
William Sinclair
Well, I mean, I think the outrage is that it’s cheaper. It’s so cheap to buy Australian gas in Japan, that it’s almost economically viable to buy the Australian gas in Japan and ship it back to Australia than it is to actually buy the Australian gas in Australia. I think it’s where the outrage comes.
Janaline Oh
Yeah. And look, I think the taxing of Australian resources is a whole other issue and I think successive governments have failed to tax our resources properly. I think we should have a much, much higher resources super profits tax. And you know, obviously, cue the outrage from the Minerals Council which killed it last time,.
William Sinclair
Sure. Yeah.
Janaline Oh
But the issue with Japan again comes back to their energy security issues. So, Japan massively over-buys LNG. It sells it generally at a loss, when it has too much.
William Sinclair
Sure.
Janaline Oh
It is not making a profit on that, but you know, that doesn’t make it a good thing, right? And one of the things that Japan is doing that I think we should be trying to discourage both in Japan and in third countries, is building LNG import infrastructure in third countries to receive this excess gas. Now that is a big investment and that risks locking in emissions and the way in which I think Australia can play a role in discouraging that, is actually working with those third countries on better sources of energy for them. And better sources of energy for them are probably to do with renewable energy rather than use of gas.
William Sinclair
Coming around to international affairs. We are just about to do COP 30 or COP 31.
Janaline Oh
COP 31. We’re putting in a bid for COP 31, which is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties.
William Sinclair
Yeah, I guess I have two questions. What are Australia’s prospects in the international scene moving forward as the host of that COP? And do you think an appetite for a global treaty on carbon is there or is possible?
Janaline Oh
Well, there is a global treaty on carbon. It’s called the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, right?
William Sinclair
A binding treaty.
Janaline Oh
It is binding, but it’s like any international agreement. International agreements are not like domestic laws. There’s no international police force there, you know, that can arrest people. There is an International Criminal Court and an International Court of Justice, but they operate in very different ways…
William Sinclair
OK. Sure.
Janaline Oh
… to normal courts.
So, I would say Australia’s prospects of hosting COP 31 are probably quite good. I’ve talked to a number of people in the government who seem fairly confident that we will get it. I think it is a bit frustrating that we haven’t secured it already because if we had secured it already, we could already be working on our COP 31 agenda and I think that Australia needs to have a very ambitious agenda for COP 31.
I think COP 31 is a pledging COP, so it’s one of those COPs where countries will come with new nationally determined contributions, where there is an expectation for a step change forward in global climate action.
Personally, I think our contribution to that step change forward should be an agreement to eliminate, or at least radically phase down, the use of fossil fuels globally. Now at COP… was it 27? Or 28? I think it was COP 28. We almost got an agreement to – I think it was – phase down the use of fossil fuels, and then it got watered down by various countries at the end. But that was the COP at which – that was in Abu Dhabi – the COP at which Chris Bowen stood up and said Australia, as a fossil fuel exporter wants to see an end to the use of fossil fuels.
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
And I think that is where the Government actually started taking a Future Made in Australia seriously – actually started seriously working on crafting those policies.
William Sinclair
Yeah.
Janaline Oh
And started being a lot more active in its bilateral diplomacy in Japan and Korea with respect to joint venture investments in Australian clean energy.
I think that it would be a pretty good outcome for a global COP to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. Now note the use of fossil fuels. We’re not talking about eliminating the production and the reason for that is, again, if you come back to why we are producing fossil fuels, well it’s because people are using it and if you phase out production without dealing with use, then you actually run real risks for developing countries and particularly, you know, maybe not the poorest of developing countries but the emerging markets. Countries like Vietnam, where if you raise the cost of fossil fuels or make fossil fuels harder for them to get, the chances are they are not just going to invest in tonnes of renewable energy …
William Sinclair
Sure.
Janaline Oh
… because they probably don’t have the capital and the expertise to do that. What it means is that they’re likely to have less development, they’re likely to have less healthcare, less manufacturing, you know, lower incomes.
So, I think it is important to look at fossil fuel use, whereas if we have a kind of global commitment to work with, particularly developing countries, to help them to decarbonise their energy systems so that they can actually have development based on clean energy rather than on fossil energy…
William Sinclair
Sure.
Janaline Oh
… then the production will die.
So, you know, I have to say, Woodside, which is the major gas company that is behind the Northwest Shelf project, if I were a Woodside shareholder, I would be pretty furious because I think they seem to be taking a strategy which they call ”last man standing”. So, all of the global fossil fuel companies can see that the world is on a track to decarbonise. They all want to be the last one to extract the last bit of profit out of the fossil economy. If Woodside thinks it can compete with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the Qatari Gas Company, and the US to be the last man standing, I think they are insane, to be honest.
William Sinclair
What do you think would … what do you think’s going to knock them over in terms of not being the last man standing? If you think they’re not going to be the last man standing, what do you think’s going to knock them over in the end?
Janaline Oh
Well, I think that will just find that their markets, at some point, are going to collapse and they just won’t be able to compete with the really, really big gas producers.
So, the other thing is the Qataris and particularly ADNOC, are investing really, really heavily in renewable energy. They are actually laying their alternative future plans. They are not waiting for the world to decarbonize. Of course they want to keep selling their fossils while they can, but what they are doing, which is more significant, if you like, is they are also building an alternative future for themselves.
William Sinclair
Sure.
Coming back to that COP where they said phase down not phase out, my understanding was that it was actually India that watered down that language.
Janaline Oh
Yeah, it was.
William Sinclair
What do you think our prospects are in terms of convincing India to decarbonize?
Janaline Oh
So, India has made commitment to have 450 gigawatts of new solar energy capacity by 2040 or 2050, I think. That is – so just for comparison, in 2021 the entire Australian national electricity market, which is the whole of the East Coast, plus South Australia, was 51 gigawatts. 450 gigawatts is nine times the 2021 National Electricity Market in Australia. It’s a lot. A big number
William Sinclair
Right. Yeah, yeah.
Janaline Oh
Now I think India is committed to decarbonise. The reason I think they resisted those words is because countries like India and China have always been very reluctant to write into international agreements things that don’t give them wiggle room in case they don’t manage to achieve their goals.
I mean, it’s something that we need to work on, right? And I think India is a country that we also need to be working with to, you know, look at how we can work together to increase the investment in both countries in renewable energy and clean energy industrial inputs.
And you know, India has massive information technology services, right? They have data centres; they are incredibly energy intensive. India has a huge incentive to build up its renewable electricity infrastructure, so I think hence the 450 gigawatts of new solar energy. I think there are opportunities in all of this around the world, and we need to be taking them. But I guess coming back to the original question, I just don’t think “no new coal and gas” is a solution to any of that.
William Sinclair
Given that the Australian Labor Party had such an emphatic victory in ‘25, and given that Albanese now has such a broad range to do what he wants, do you think there’s greater scope for Albanese to be more ambitious than perhaps what he promised at the ‘25 election? And do you think there’s more scope in terms of more things to be done? What is the next thing for us to do on the road towards fighting climate change?
Janaline Oh
Yeah, in Australia I would say that the one big glaring gap is the land sector.
So, I actually think the Government is doing almost everything it can in the energy sector. The land sector is a real black hole.
What do I mean by the land sector? So land sector is very – land sector emissions are hard to quantify because of the way in which we do our greenhouse gas reporting.
Land sector is … the land sector figure is a net figure, so it includes the sinks. It includes the carbon taken out of the atmosphere, as well as emissions from that sector.
But when LEAN was running its forestry campaign in the lead up to the 2023 National Conference, where we were basically trying to get the Government to focus on managing forests for biodiversity and carbon, in other words, managing for conservation rather than managing for timber harvesting which is so damaging, we figured that the combination of agricultural land clearing and forestry was probably around 40% of Australian emissions.
William Sinclair
All right. OK. That’s a huge amount.
Janaline Oh
That, yeah, it’s just that that number then reduces dramatically because if you count all the forestry things.
So, there’s a huge scope in our view, in my view, to improve our performance in that sector and what I think the key to that is actually managing forests not just as a source of timber but for conservation, because the key thing is actually – and we can talk about forests in the context of the environment laws – but the key thing is actually to transfer the existing skills in that sector into productive work that generates an income, and global carbon credits are a terrific way of generating income.
So that’s what I would say about what needs to happen next. And the thing that actually does frustrate me about this focus on gas approvals is that I haven’t heard any NGOs or the Greens Party or anybody other than LEAN talk about the need to deal with land sector emissions.
William Sinclair
Right. Yeah. Well, I think that I think the Greens are starting to talk about ending native forest logging, but that’s…
Janaline Oh
Which is a different thing, but we can talk about that in our next episode.
William Sinclair
OK, that was the end of Episode 2 of Why Can’t They Just, talking about coal and gas.
Thank you very much Janaline for doing Episode 2 with me.
Janaline Oh
Yeah, thank you. Will