Australian
Greens Minority Report
The Greens will withhold substantive comment on the
CPRS legislation until we have had the opportunity to consider evidence
presented to the ongoing Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy inquiry. Nonetheless,
we flag five significant concerns.
-
The
2020 emission targets of 5-15 per cent below 2000 levels are much too weak to fairly
contribute to the global task of preventing dangerous climate change – the only
reason to adopt an emissions trading scheme in the first place.
-
The
high level of compensation to the emission intensive trade exposed industries
and coal-fired generators, which is largely based on maintaining their
profitability, is unjustified and counter-productive.
-
Given
the obvious inadequacies of both the emission targets and the industry compensation
regime, and the urgency of the climate challenge, the length of time before
these errors can be corrected is too long.
-
The
weakness of the target, the compensation to industry and the widely-perceived
problem of lack of additionality for voluntary action would dramatically undermine
public support and action for emissions reduction efforts.
-
The
absence of any restriction on the extent to which emission reduction
obligations can be met through the purchase of foreign permits diminishes the
incentive to restructure domestically.
Taken together, the Greens view is that the CPRS as
currently proposed is not designed to drive the transition to a zero carbon
economy, but rather is intended to maintain the profitability of existing
fossil fuel based industries. As it stands, the legislation would actively
prevent the kind of emissions reductions Australia needs to achieve in order to
play an equitable role in the global effort to prevent climate catastrophe.
In passing we also offer the following observation. The
most fundamental questions for Australian climate policy are:
-
By
how much does the world need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid
dangerous climate change, and;
-
To
contribute fairly to that goal, by how much does Australia need to reduce its
greenhouse gas emissions?
This inquiry did not investigate this first key
question at all, but instead took the science as presented in the CPRS White
Paper as final. The Greens do not accept this because a substantial body of
scientific evidence has accumulated since the last report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which suggests that the Government's
most ambitious goal of stabilising atmospheric greenhouse gases at 450 parts
per million is dangerously weak.
On
the second key question, the Committee report is biased. While it repeats the
Government's argument that emission cuts of between 5-15 per cent below 2000 are
fair because Australia has a high population growth rate (so our per capita
percentage cuts would be comparable to other wealthy nations), there is no
discussion of alternative methods to determine fair burden sharing between
nations. For example, the evidence presented to the Committee by Dr Paul
Twomey from the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets, University of New
South Wales should have been discussed in the report. Dr Twomey comments
included:
"...a
couple of months ago the European Commission’s major document as we approach
Copenhagen, called Towards a Comprehensive Climate Change Agreement in
Copenhagen, analysed four metrics: GDP per capita, the emissions per GDP,
early actions and population growth. They applied these to all developed
countries across the world. So for the overall 30 per cent reductions of
developed countries which is the global deal that Europe is aiming for, the
reductions of Australia—which was combined with New Zealand in the statistics
and calculations—by these four indicators that I mentioned would have been 34
per cent, 37 per cent, 48 per cent and six per cent—the last being the
population growth adjustment. Evenly weighted on these four metrics, Australia
and New Zealand would come out at minus 38. This is compared to the minus 15
which is the maximum that we would be going for."
and;
"..
there is no obvious best choice of what is right. It clearly involves the
difficult task of weighing up values and ethical principles. In practice, what
we are likely to find and do find is that countries tend to focus on those
indicators that favour them requiring less reductions. For this reason, it may
be expected that some sort of averaging of these many measures would be used in
the negotiation process, like in the EU paper."
Senator Christine Milne
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