Australia’s Scott Morrison doesn’t deny pressuring UK to drop climate asks from trade deal

The UK government, which is chairing November’s COP26 international climate talks, as well as Australia’s have come under pressure CNN has not been able to verify the contents of the leaked email and UK officials have declined to confirm its authenticity, but when journalists in Canberra asked Morrison why Australia had asked for the temperature reference to be excluded, Morrison — without confirming the Sky News story — said Australia wanted to keep climate and trade issues separate.”Well, it was about trade. It wasn’t a climate agreement, it was a trade agreement. And … in trade agreements, I deal with trade issues. In climate agreements, I deal with climate issues,” he told a press conference Thursday,The comments will be a new headache for COP26 President Alok Sharma, a British MP who is traveling the world trying to firm up commitments to 1.5°C ahead November’s talks in Glasgow. He just finished a trip to China, during which he stressed the importance of signing up to the more ambitious limit. His office would not comment on the trade deal to CNN.A source told CNN during a recent G20 ministerial meeting that several fossil fuel producing countries were opposing the more ambitious limit to global warming. China has openly accused the West of trying to move the goal posts on the 2-degree target.Australia is the world’s second-biggest exporter of coal and its resources minister, Keith Pitt, said last week it would continue to extract and export the fossil fuel well beyond 2030, in response to a senior UN climate official, Selwin Hart, warning that the climate crisis would “wreak havoc” on the Australian economy.Sharma is also trying to get developed nations to end the use of unabated coal, which is coal burned without capturing the carbon emitted, by the end of the decade. A member of the UK’s main opposition Labour Party — Ed Miliband, who oversees trade in the political shadow opposition — criticized the UK government for bowing to Australia’s pressure on climate. “Australia is one of the world’s biggest polluters and key to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. But rather than piling pressure on them, the Government has simply rolled over,” he wrote on Twitter.Morrison made his comments after the Australian Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment Dan Tehan said that the country had “remained consistent” in ensuring all of its trade agreements met “existing multilateral environment commitments.”The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which sent the statement including Tehan’s comments, did not respond to CNN’s question of whether “1.5°C,” would be mentioned in the trade agreement.The UK-Australia trade deal was agreed in principle in June. It was touted as a success by both sides and particularly by the UK government, which had sold the freedom to strike up bilateral trade deals as a key benefit for leaving the European Union. Australia is coming under increasing pressure to boost its climate commitments ahead of the talks in Glasgow. The country is among dozens that missed a July 31 deadline to improve its pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement were obliged to do. The country has agreed to reduce emissions by between 26% and 28% by 2030, from 2005 levels, well below the renewed commitments by the United States, European Union and United Kingdom, among other developed nations. The Australian government has said it will increase its pledge before talks in Glasgow.Australia has a population of around 25 million people, and it accounts for just over 1% of the world’s carbon emissions. But per capita, Australians emit more than 15 metric tons of carbon, World Bank data shows, around the same as people in the United States, which is the world’s second-biggest carbon emitter and responsible for more than 14% of emissions.