Australia under pressure to announce deeper emissions cuts at UN summit

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/16/australia-pressure-emissions-cuts-un-summit

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Australia is under pressure to commit to a “bold” new post-2020 greenhouse emissions reduction target at next week’s special UN summit, even though it has not yet legislated a policy to meet a minimum pre-2020 target, judged by its own independent adviser to be inadequate.

The foreign minister, Julie Bishop, will represent Australia at the New York summit, where the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has called for announcements of “bold actions and bold commitments” to build momentum towards a successful post-2020 international climate deal at a conference in Paris next year.

“We absolutely need Australia to use the UN summit to commit to bringing forward a post 2020 target well in advance of Paris,” said the deputy director of the Climate Institute, Erwin Jackson.

The Abbott government has pledged to review its target to reduce emissions by 5% of 2000 levels by 2020 early next year, and Bishop’s office referred to this commitment when asked what Australia might say at the summit. The government has not said whether this review would extend to considering what deeper emission reduction targets Australia might commit to after 2020.

The government has repealed Labor’s emissions trading scheme but not yet legislated its own policy to try to meet the 2020 target – an emission reduction fund – and without substantial amendment the plan is unlikely to pass the Senate.

Modelling has found that cutting emissions further than 5% under the Coalition’s proposed Direct Action plan would be prohibitively expensive – even if the policy is legislated.

This was the same charge levelled by Malcolm Turnbull when he explained in 2011 that continuing to use a big government taxpayer-funded scheme to reduce emissions in the long term would “become a very expensive charge on the budget in the years ahead”.

And the independent Climate Change Authority, which the government has not yet succeeded in abolishing, recommended in February that the pre-2020 target should be trebled to at least 15% and that Australia look to a longer term target of between 40% and 60% reductions in emissions by 2030.

Tony Abbott has insisted the government will not commit to anything beyond the minimum 5% target “in the absence of very serious like-binding commitments in other countries and there’s no evidence of that”.

More than 120 heads of state are planning to attend the summit. Abbott has always made it clear he would not be among them, even though he will be in New York the next day to attend the special UN security council meeting convened by the US president, Barack Obama.

On Wednesday Abbott said he could not get to New York a day earlier for the climate summit because parliament was sitting.

“My first duty in a sense is to the Australian parliament and that’s where I’ll be early in the week,” he told ABC radio. “There are quite a lot of things happening in the Australian parliament in the next week or so.”

Obama and the UK prime minister, David Cameron, are attending the climate summit, but the leaders of China and India are not.

Some countries are expected to use the summit to make pledges to a global climate fund, designed to help poor countries deal with climate change – as Germany did in July with a promise of $1bn.

But soon after taking office last year, Abbott confirmed Australia would be making no further commitments to that fund. The previous Labor government deposited $500,000 last year to help the new fund get established, as well as committing almost $600m to a “fast-start” fund.

A spokesperson for Bishop told the Guardian at the time, “the Green Climate Fund is currently in the design phase and Australia will consider its longer term involvement in the fund once its design has been further progressed.”

The summit is the first time since the failed 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations that so many world leaders have gathered to discuss global warming. It is not designed to do deals but rather to build momentum to the UN conference to be held in Paris in December 2015.