A leading climate change adviser to Britain’s Conservative government has said the Australian government was insulting the sovereignty of other countries with plans to dismantle its climate change laws.
Lord Deben, head of the United Kingdom Committee on Climate Change said the conservative Liberal-National Australian government’s attitude to reducing its carbon emissions was “very sad” and “something I feel very personally about.”
“It lets down the whole British tradition that a country should have become so selfish about this issue that it’s prepared to spoil the efforts of others and to foil what very much less rich countries are doing,” he told environmental news website RTCC.
“All that pollution which Australia is pushing into the atmosphere is of course changing my climate.
“It’s a real insult to the sovereignty of other countries.”
RTCC reports the election of Liberal leader Tony Abbott as Australian Prime Minister, who had once described climate change as “absolute crap”, last September was a setback to environmentalists.
The website reports that while the conservative leader now says he believes in climate change, his policies have been criticised for undermining Australia’s commitment to reducing its emissions.
The Australian government’s climate advisory body was immediately scrapped after Mr Abbott was elected, with further plans currently in place to also abolish the government’s Climate Change Authority.
As RTCC reports, in July Mr Abbott plans to fulfil his election pledge to repeal the country’s fixed price Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), a price on emissions pushed through by the previous Labor government, and replace it with his ‘Direct Action Plan’.
Campaigners and analysts have said that this is unlikely to achieve Australia’s emissions reduction targets with current levels of funding allocated to the scheme.
Australia’s position was “nonsense” considering action being taken across the world to curb greenhouse gas emissions and the use of fossil fuels, said Lord Deben, who cited progressive action being taken in less economically developed countries, including Mexico.
He said: “It’s wholly contrary to the science, it’s wholly contradictory to the interests of Australia and I hope that many people in Australia will see when the rest of the world is going in the right direction what nonsense it is for them to be going backwards.”
Under the Kyoto Protocol, Australia is committed to achieving a five per cent reduction in emissions on 2000 levels in 2020.
This is a relatively small commitment compared to the United States’ domestically set target of a 17 per cent reduction on 2005 levels, or the UK’s pledge of a 50 per cent reduction by 2027 on 1990 levels.
Lord Deben’s comments came as Australia’s Climate Change Authority released its report, “Reducing Australia’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions”, a study recommending future emissions targets to the government, something it is legislated to do under the Clean Energy Act.
The report recommended an overall 19 per cent reduction target by 2020, following by a 40-50 per cent target by 2030.
It also put a recommended cap of 10 billion tonnes on the amount of carbon Australia should be able to burn by 2050 if the world is to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming, the level deemed manageable by world governments.
“The report looks at whether the Australian economy can achieve this, and it concludes that the Australian economy can. Indeed, the cost of inaction is far more than the cost of action,” said Amanda McKenzie, CEO of the Climate Council, in an interview with RTCC.
The Council is the reincarnation of the body that the government scrapped last year, now funded by crowd-sourced donations.
“We’ve argued for a long time that we need higher targets in line with the science, so we definitely welcome the Authority’s advice of the 19 per cent target,” she said.
Australia’s environment minister, Greg Hunt, said in a statement: “We will consider the Authority’s work respectfully and carefully.”
