Government held back greenhouse gas emission data for months

Australia’s official greenhouse gas data, showing a continued increase in emissions, was quietly published on a government website on Friday, after internal government correspondence showed it had been held back from release for months.

The figures broadly confirm independent analysis done exclusively for Guardian Australia by consultants at NDEVR Environmental, published last month. Those projections proved about 98% accurate, with emissions rising by even more than was projected.

The government also updated all its historical data, showing emissions going back to at least 2001 were higher than previously thought, with most of these revisions due to gas leaks from the mining sector – fugitive emissions.

The data still remains one quarter behind, and the NDEVR-Guardian analysis published in June projected an unseasonal rise in emissions not seen in more than a decade for that quarter – the first three months of this year.

The government release covers emissions up to December 2016 and confirms that they have continued to rise. The new figures for 2016 show emissions rose 1% over the new estimation of 2015 emissions – but that was a rise of 1.7% compared with the government’s previous estimation of 2015 figures.

The rise is in line with government projections, which show that on current policies, emissions will continue to rise to 2030 and beyond.

But they are in stark contrast to to Australia’s international commitments made as part of the Paris agreement, which now state that emissions will fall to at least 26% below 2005 levels by 2030. Australia has also committed to ratchet up that ambition over time, in line with the goal of keeping global warming to “well below 2C”.

Most of the increase in emissions occurred in the “stationary energy” sector – which includes fuels used for heating and energy besides electricity generation – as well as in fugitive emissions. .

The figures were released on the same day the Australian Conservation Foundation published documents it obtained under freedom of information laws showing that the government had been sitting on the release for more than a month.

After the information was released, the federal minister for energy and the environment, Josh Frydenberg, tweeted a link to the report, pointing out that emissions from the electricity sector had dropped in the last quarter covered by the report.

Emissions from the electricity sector almost always fall in the December quarter, but the NDEVR-Guardian projections suggest they rose dramatically in the quarter to March 2017, which is very unusual. Those figures are yet to be released by the government.

The climate scientist Will Steffen, a member of the Climate Council, said Australia’s rising emissions were an embarrassment.

“This is clear evidence that Australia is failing to tackle climate change compared to superpowers like the United States, whose emissions fell last year, and China, which has peaked its emissions more than a decade earlier than it promised in Paris,” he said.

“In contrast, Australia’s lack of an effective climate and energy policy has now led to even higher emission levels while the big global emitters begin to reduce carbon pollution.”

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd