Greg Hunt promised UN climate envoy Australia's industrial emissions will drop

The environment minister, Greg Hunt, has reassured the United Nations’ top climate negotiator that the Coalition’s existing policies will reduce greenhouse emissions from electricity generation and heavy industry, despite scepticism from local experts that this will occur.

Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, told Guardian Australia she had discussed Australia’s emission reduction policies with Hunt during her current Australian trip. They included the emissions reduction fund through which the government conducts “reverse auctions” to buy greenhouse gas abatement, and the “safeguards mechanism” which is supposed to prevent those reductions from being undone by increases in industrial emissions.

“I met with minister Hunt ... and I learned about the recent successful first reverse auction, and I learned that future reverse auctions will go into industrial sectors and the power sector,” she said.

“... My understanding from speaking to the minister is also that the safeguards mechanism will also reduce industrial and power sector emissions. That is the purpose of it.”

But most submissions on the government’s recent discussion paper setting out how the safeguards mechanism will work said it was unlikely to stop increased emissions from the power and industrial sectors.

A Grattan Institute response published this week said: “The safeguard mechanism described in the consultation paper will not achieve its stated objective of ensuring that emissions reductions purchased through the Emissions Reduction Fund are not displaced by a significant rise in emissions elsewhere in the economy. This is because it is not designed to achieve this goal.

“Instead, the mechanism is designed to allow emissions baselines to be adjusted to accommodate most foreseeable activities that could give rise to an increase in emissions. As a result, its impact on reducing emissions is likely to be zero.”

The Climate Institute said the safeguards mechanism, as described, would not force big emitters to reduce their greenhouse pollution, and could mean high-carbon power stations increased their emissions substantially over the next five years.

In its submission about the safeguards, the Australian Industry Group said that it “meets the government’s objective that the mechanism will not be a driver of abatement towards the 2020 target” and would need “substantial amendment” if it was ever to help reduce greenhouse emissions.

The independent senator Nick Xenophon, who provided one of the six votes the government needed to get its Direct Action policy through the Senate in July last year, told Guardian Australia the proposed safeguards mechanism “neuters the whole purpose of Direct Action”.

“There is no point in the government spending $2.55bn if there is no requirement to cap or reduce emissions from industry,” he said.

Figueres was careful to emphasise that it was entirely up to the Australian government to decide what policies it used to reach its emission reduction target.

In setting Australia’s post-2020 emissions reduction targets, the government has said it will take into account “the scope and nature of other countries’ targets – so that our target represents Australia’s fair share and does not put Australia at a competitive disadvantage to our key trading partners and the major economies”.

Guardian Australia understands it has commissioned modelling from the leading economist Warwick McKibbin to look at the impact of other countries’ emission reduction promises – for example reduction in coal exports – on Australia’s economy.

Figueres said a declining global appetite for coal made it more important for Australia to look for diversified exports.

Hunt has also been publicly talking up the idea that the safeguards mechanism will force emissions reductions in the longer term.

In an interview last week he said “the safeguards mechanism is designed to have its real impact in the post-2020 period – and it’s flexible, it is designed and legislated so as it can be adjusted and it can be tightened in such a way so as to allow for progressive emissions reductions.

“It is a two-part system. An emissions reduction fund … [and] secondly, we have the safeguards mechanism which allows us to work with individual firms on a budget which can be adjusted and progressively tightened throughout the 2020s through to 2030 and 2040 and 2050.”

If the “baselines” over which companies cannot increase their emissions are progressively tightened, as Hunt suggests, the government’s policy allows the offending companies to make up for it by “purchasing credits created by other accredited emissions reduction projects”. This would effectively create a baseline and credit emissions trading scheme.