Climate change: Coalition accused of politicising greenhouse gas target
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Version 0 of 1. The Abbott government has been accused of politicising the release of official greenhouse gas projections that confirm Australia’s international climate change pledge for 2020 is becoming easier to reach, but which will also increase pressure for Australia to adopt a more ambitious post-2020 target. The official figures have shown that the total greenhouse gas reduction required to meet Australia’s bipartisan minimum target of a 5% cut by 2020 is now 236m tonnes, a decrease on previous estimates. The environment minister, Greg Hunt, said the previous projections had been “Labor’s numbers” and that the lower projections were “because Labor’s numbers exaggerated the abatement task by more than a billion tonnes of emissions”. “Labor used these figures in an attempt to justify the world’s largest carbon tax that hurt families and businesses by pushing up electricity prices,” Hunt said. The former Liberal leader John Hewson said the official projections were, and always had been, produced by the environment department based on the best available evidence at the time. “Both parties have always based their policies on these projections. To try to politicise them in this way is enormously counterproductive and damaging to the national interest,” Hewson said. Professor Ross Garnaut, Labor’s former climate change adviser, said there was “nothing at all political in the change in trajectory … these figures have been produced in the same way since the Howard years”. The official figures attributed the decrease to “lower electricity demand … due to the uptake of household solar, energy efficiency and increased retail prices; worse-than-expected agricultural conditions due to drought; lower manufacturing output due to industrial closures and weaker growth expectations for local coal production due to a fall in international coal prices”. The latest forecasts are very close to private estimates, including those from Frontier Economics, published by Guardian Australia in September 2014, which calculated Australia’s task to 2020 would be about 225m tonnes. The revised figures mean the task of reducing emissions by 5% requires less than a third of the effort envisaged when both major parties signed up to the 2020 target. In 2012 the promise to reduce emissions by 5% of 2000 levels by 2020 was calculated to require the cumulative reduction of 755m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In 2014 new government calculations reduced that figure to 421m tonnes. The new figures were based on the assumption that the renewable energy target is reduced to a “real 20%” – something the government has yet to agree with Labor. If it is unable to achieve this reduction and the existing RET remains, additional renewable energy is likely to take greenhouse emissions even lower. The figures explain why the government remains confident it can meet the target even though it has repealed the carbon tax and has not yet begun auctions under its $2.55bn “Direct Action” scheme. The first auction will be held in April. Hunt said the new figures meant the Coalition would “easily meet our commitment to reduce Australia’s emissions by 5% from 2000 levels by 2020”. But modelling by Sinclair Knight Merz, released during the 2013 election campaign, which found the Coalition would need to find at least another $4bn to meet its target, was based on broadly similar projections. Energy market analyst RepuTex said it still believed the $2.55bn Emissions Reduction Fund, on its own, would fail to meet the 2020 target – even taking the new projections into account. “We forecast that the ERF will purchase between 80m and 120m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions abatement. This is equivalent to around half of Australia’s new 2020 abatement task,” RepuTex said. RepuTex said that to meet the target the government would have to establish a “baseline and credit” emissions trading scheme, using so-called safeguards mechanisms that have been legislated but not yet explained in detail. The government is soon to release a discussion paper on how it will set its post-2020 emissions reduction target. It will announce this target mid-year, ahead of the United Nations conference in Paris in December. The Climate Institute thinktank said the new figures did not explain how the government would meet its 2020 emissions reduction targets, let alone deeper cuts after 2020. Its chief executive, John Connor, said: “It’s not much use to say that the job has got easier when you still don’t have the tools to do it properly.” “Without a plan to modernise and decarbonise our economy, Australia’s ballooning pollution through 2020 and beyond will require massive dollops of taxpayer funds if the primary policy tool remains the Emissions Reduction Fund.” “These new projections are consistent with independent modelling that shows the government’s policies still aren’t up to the task of cutting Australian emissions even by the minimum amount we’ve committed to, let alone match comparable countries’ efforts or drive the deeper decarbonisation we will need over coming decades. The government has provided no modelling to argue otherwise.” Garnaut said the government’s optimism was also based on a continuation of recent reductions in electricity emissions, which “were helped by a carbon price and have been hindered by recent policy developments”. The total task of reducing emissions by 236m tonnes takes into account a “carryover” because Australia exceeded its 2012 reduction target, which actually allowed a small increase in emissions and was easily achieved through calculating the impact of reduced land clearing. |