The NEG is supposed to solve the so-called energy trilemma: how to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and electricity bills while making sure the lights stay on.

Of all the problems with the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) as it currently stands, the biggest one is that the government has arbitrarily decided that it should reduce emissions by 26 per cent.

This NEG target is in line with Australia’s 26 per cent Paris target, an implicit pro-rata approach, where each sector reduces emissions by 26 per cent.

The problem is that by the time the NEG 26 per cent target commences, it has almost completely met its emission reduction goal, like competing in the Sydney to Hobart race but getting to starting in Launceston.

The weak ambition of the current NEG target spells big trouble for Australia’s agriculture sector in particular. A fact which has not, it appears, fully dawned on the Coalition party room.

A sector by sector approach is not necessarily a bad thing. It allows the government to create more targeted policies for different sectors. It has the potential to find projects in niche areas that can cheaply reduce emissions that a broader policy, like a carbon price, might miss.

But this kind of approach requires the government to be clever, innovative and agile – not words anyone would associate with the current government’s track record on energy or climate change. Instead, the Coalition government has moved slowly, often in the wrong direction.

All sectors should contribute to reducing emissions but any sensible policy should take account of the fact that some sectors can more cheaply reduce emissions than others. Different sectors are not homogeneous blobs with the same price for reducing emissions, like a nationwide 26 per cent off sale.

The result of this pro-rata approach is that electricity will quickly and easily reach its 26 per cent target, while the agriculture sector will struggle. Once agriculture has exhausted even the more expensive emissions reduction projects, it will then be forced to meet the target by reducing production.

The Australia Institute has released a paper that for the first time puts solid numbers around what the agriculture sector would need to do to reduce emissions by 26 per cent, using data from Reputex. It found that by 2024 the sector will have exhausted emissions reduction projects and would then need to start reducing output.

The biggest emissions source in agriculture is emissions from animals. The emissions reduction projects identified so far will only get it about halfway to the target. To reach the 26 per cent target would require a reduction of about 11 per cent in herd sizes by 2030.

Using today's herd sizes that would equate to about 3 million beef cattle which is the same as all the beef cattle in Victoria and South Australia. Eight million sheep (double the sheep in Queensland and Tasmania combined), 290,000 dairy cows (or all the dairy cows in NSW), and 270,000 pigs (or all the pigs in Western Australia).

Or to put it another way, the millennial drought 20 years ago was quite severe and forced farmers to reduce their herd sizes. These reduced herd sizes reduced agricultural emissions by 15 per cent. If the agriculture sector is forced to shoulder more of the burden of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a further 11 per cent, then this reduction will be roughly equivalent to the impact of the millennial drought. Only in this case, the cut would be permanent.

Those are some pretty stark numbers. The electricity sector and can and should reduce emissions more cheaply. It is absurd to restrict its ambition to 26 per cent, like benching your best player before a grand final.

This is recognised by the National Farmers Federation (NFF), who support the NEG and have
suggested inadequate cuts in the electricity sector could have unfair consequences for agriculture.

In a submission the Energy Security Board it said the electricity sector represented “the most cost-effective ways to reduce our emissions… Other sectors of the economy, such as farmers and small businesses, are price takers and would not be able to pass on the cost of an imposed emissions reductions scheme.”

The NFF has said that 26 per cent “should be the minimum target”, but stopped short of arguing for an increased electricity target.

You would think the Coalition would think carefully about potential threats to one of its key constituencies. But the fact is the climate debate in Australia within conservative circles has been seriously unhinged for many years now.

Just this week Professor Ian Plimer wrote an article for The Australian titled Repeat after me: carbon dioxide is good for us, arguing that C02 is a trace gas in the atmosphere and therefore couldn’t possibly drive global warming. Plimer may be a Professor, but like Australia’s climate policy over the last decade, he’s a bit lacking in common sense. Just because there are only trace amounts of something doesn’t mean it can’t do any harm, just ask anyone who’s had salmonella-fuelled food poisoning.

But such is the level of the climate policy debate in Australia 2018. It’s obscene. Especially when we can see with our own two eyes the impacts of climate change rampaging all around us. The northern hemisphere is currently burning up. California has a wildfire the size of Los Angeles which firefighters expect to burn until September, Sweden has had an outbreak of 50 wildfires – a dozen of them in the Arctic Circle – and 80 people have died so far in Japan’s heatwave.

Here in Australia, 100 per cent of NSW and 57 per cent of Queensland are in drought. The NSW drought has been described as the ‘worst drought in 100 years’; readers might recall the Millennium drought was supposed to be a ‘once in 1000 years drought’. We’ve now experienced two record-breaking droughts in the past 20 years.

While other countries are getting on with reducing their emissions, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising. And there are those within the Coalition party room who want Australia to walk away from the Paris agreement like Donald Trump did. This is irresponsible in the extreme. There is no science that will convince them to take climate change seriously, no target small enough and no fossil fuel subsidy large enough to satisfy them. It is a fools’ errand to placate them, but one that Turnbull and Frydenberg are forced to perform time and again.

Unless Australia, as a part of a global effort, does its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, bushfires and droughts and extreme weather will become more frequent and more severe. A substantial part of Australia’s emissions come from the electricity sector, mostly from our ageing and unreliable fleet of brown and black coal-fired power stations, belching their greenhouse gas waste into the sky (completely for free since Abbott scrapped the carbon price, you pay more to dump your rubbish at the tip than fossil fuel companies pay to dump pollution into our atmosphere), and which, ironically, fail in the heat when we need them most.

There’s a chance that the NEG will end up in the climate policy graveyard with the CPRS, the ETS, EIS and CET.

But let us hope that COAG Ministers take the time they need to strengthen the NEG, because a properly designed National Energy Guarantee with a strong ambition that unleashes cheaper, cleaner, reliable electricity would be a win for consumers and for farmers.

Ebony Bennett is Deputy Director of The Australia Institute @ebony_bennett.