A leading environmental activist has warned the Greens not to sink Labor’s 43 per cent emissions cut target. 

The Greens are meeting this week to consider their position on Labor’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target and other climate legislation. They will also work on possible responses if the government rejects their demands.

Greens leader Adam Bandt is also addressing the Clean Energy Council this week, where he is expected to make a speech outlining his party's desire for a ban on new fossil fuel projects, saying; “The climate wars are not quite over yet”. 

The Greens have criticised Labor’s current climate policies for their potential to unlock the “carbon bombs” of the Beetaloo Basin and the Scarborough gas fields, and have labelled the government’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030 as “10 years too late”.

The fossil fuel ban and demands for a higher emissions reduction target are expected to be key points of negotiation on the government’s proposed climate bill.

But former Wilderness Society campaigner and head of the Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) Felicity Wade warns that the consensus for climate action in Australia is fragile. 

Ms Wade says the current positioning of the parties is reminiscent of the dysfunctional dynamic after Kevin Rudd claimed an emphatic electoral mandate for climate action in 2007.

“We’ve all got the PTSD experience, we’ve been here before,” Ms Wade has told reporters.

“This [2022] election did give a rousing endorsement for climate action, but we were in this place in 2007 and we watched it all go wrong.

“We saw partisan bickering destroy that consensus in the community and we saw ourselves lose the 10 or 15 years it’s been since the consensus [was last] held.

“We are sitting here with lived experience, and [the Greens] can blow it up … they can destroy our pathway.

“I come from the Wilderness Society, that’s where I started. I have been in an organisation where wilderness, no compromise, is the slogan, and yet why I’ve ended up in the Labor party is because consensus is the only way we do these things.

“Climate change is so hard [and] 43 per cent is going to take huge changes in our economy. There’s going to be a huge fight to work out how to get that safeguard mechanism in place.

“There’s going to be huge amounts of investment and pain and transmission lines through people’s backyards and all sorts of stuff to deliver that 43 per cent – and to belittle that around a symbolic argument about a higher target is crazy.”

The Greens also want a climate trigger in environmental regulations to ensure the climate impact of developments was properly assessed.

Federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek has not ruled out the call for a “climate trigger”, but has suggested that climate impacts could be addressed in other ways.