According to a leading climate professor Australia’s new conservative Liberal-National coalition government will be forced to replace the climate agencies it is scrapping with similar organisations of its own.
The Liberal-National government has abolished the Climate Commission, which was tasked with providing independent public information on the science of climate change.
The government is also expected to ado away the Climate Change Authority and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), but any action against those two bodies required legislation in parliament.
The Climate Change Authority was created to advise the government on emissions-reduction targets, caps and prices, while the Clean Energy Finance Corporation has $10 billion in funding to finance renewable energy projects.
Professor Kevin Parton, from Charles Sturt University, told ABC Radio News the coalition government’s cuts in the public sector were a short-term measure.
“By the time we get to 2020, which will be where things really change in terms of the impact of climate, we’ll end up with the policy that we would’ve had no matter who is in government, because we’ll be forced into a circumstance where we’ve got to cut back on our emissions in a big and aggressive way,” he said.
“Especially as we move into an international agreements on carbon emissions.”
Professor Parton says the CEFC has been the most successful climate agency initiative.
“Small businesses that have been set up in areas from solar panels to wind generation to generation of electricity through collecting methane in landfill probably would not have gone ahead without the finance that is available through the CEFC,” he said.
“And it’s those initiatives that are going to bring us eventually to the technology we need where we are limiting our greenhouse gas emissions,” Professor Parton added.
