Jockying on Australia's emission trading.
With both the Garnault report and the government's outline of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) now out, the jockying has begun.
At one end of the spectrum you've got the former government, who are arguing its too quick, and shouldn't in include petrol (as if excluding the biggest emitters will allow us to make a dent) and then they want all kinds of thing allowed into the minimum renewable energy targets e.g. gas and so-called "Clean Coal". For a while - over the Solar Rebate - it looked like the Australian Liberals could follow the lead of the UK Conservatives in challenging the government on environmental issues, but it looks now like they are back to their old stances.
Then somewhere in the middle - you've got the government, with a so far fairly week response - we don't get the full scheme at the start date of 2010 just a kindler-gentler version (though it doesn't mean the climate will be kind to us in response). I haven't seen any numbers on the targets, especially the short terms ones. The dumbist flaw in the scheme is to compensate the coal industry, who got us into this mess in the first place, wouldn't the money be better spent in creating jobs in renewables (especially distributed renewables and energy efficiency) rather than trying to shore up a failing industry through pursuing the unattainable (Clean Coal). And they will cut the petrol taxes, so that prices don't rise - which is exactly what they need to do.
At the other end, this week saw the launch of "Code Red", by David Spratt and Philip Sutton. They rightly arue that the 60% target for 2050 is political rather than scientific and that we need to move to a zero-emission economy. Here's an article in the Age.
He said the Government's 60% reduction target for 2050 is purely a political target and has "nothing" to do with scientific recommendations. It concedes atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will rise to a level — about 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide — that will cause at least a 3-degree rise in global temperatures. A 2-degree rise is predicted to trigger feedback effects leading to much more rapid melting of ice too difficult to model, he said. "What the Government doesn't understand is that when it comes to climate you are not dealing with social or economic policy, but you're actually dealing with the laws of physics and chemistry, and trying to negotiate with the laws of physics is a really dumb idea," Spratt said.
Al Gore came out with a similar call this week - for a ten year transition to a US economy based on carbon-less fuels. You can read the speech.
The Herald picked up on the move of investments into the field, as the schemes make it inevitable that we'll need a lot of new technologies and tools to take us to whatever target finally is adopted.
Posted by mitra at July 20, 2008 11:08 PM
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