Antinuclear

The important distinction here is not so much what Mr Abbott said (an opinion that is essentially unchanged), but when. Early last year, and as leader of the alternative government, his view on climate change was hardly surprising and was, indeed, more contained – he was responding to a question about the possibility of restoring the flood levy in Queensland. But this week’s repetition is a different matter entirely. Tony Abbott is Prime Minister, and he was responding to a far more serious concern that goes beyond state and national borders.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, representing years of work by 309 leading global researchers, confirms that the effects of climate change are being felt across the world, and are likely to increase. The nub of the report is that these impacts are already being felt. To deal with them, therefore, requires strong commitment rather than prevarication. In other words, decisive leadership.

The Prime Minister, however, dogmatically prefers the past tense to the present indicative. He still indulges in sterile and pointless debate in the face of sustained and perhaps irreversible damage to our planet. In the process, Mr Abbott prevails against the judgment of science and the force of popular opinion. This is not true leadership: that happens when governments, sometimes taking risks for the greater good of community and country, look beyond ideological and political differences. True leadership, which emerges in times of cataclysmic disaster and times of war, should also be deployed in gauging and attempting to control the most critical environmental challenge of our time……. http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-age-editorial/changing-climate-from-debate-to-leadership-20140403-361lq.html

Australia plays an important role as a leading economy within the international community, and host of this year’s summit of the G20 countries.

How it tackles the threat of climate change is of global importance as developing countries look to rich countries to set an example because of their better technologies and history of high emissions of greenhouse gases.

Australia’s current policy settings and institutions hold out prospects for doing its fair share in a global effort that has to increase over time. Repeal of these policies would be a setback for the Australian and international effort.

I hope that Western Australians will be mindful of their contribution to a global effort when they choose between candidates in Saturday’s Senate election.

Other countries are making big efforts……..

Australia still has the highest emissions of greenhouse gases per person in the developed world, but the government has retained the weak commitment to reduce Australia’s annual emissions only by 5 per cent target by 2020 compared with 2000.

It wants these cuts to be achieved through the ‘Direct Action’ of giving subsidies to polluters to encourage them to reduce their emissions, rather than through requiring them to pay for their pollution.

This combination of an unambitious emissions reduction target with subsidies to polluters does not constitute a credible way of promoting the transition to a low-carbon economy.

The international community is now gearing up for new agreement on climate change to be signed in Paris in 2015, after all countries, including Australia, agreed in 2010 that global emissions of greenhouse gases need to be cut sharply by 2050 in order to avoid the huge risks that would be associated with a rise in global average temperature of more than 2 C.

Although many countries are cutting their emissions, there needs to be an acceleration of action to avoid breaching the 2 C threshold.

If the world heads towards warming of 4 C or more, as it risks on its current track, it would be deeply dangerous for Australia and every other nation that is vulnerable and exposed to the impacts of climate change.

What really matters now is the credibility and ambition of action to tackle climate change, and Australia seems to be showing neither.

Australia could and should do much more, while also ushering in a new era of clean, efficient and sustainable economic growth.

Professor Lord Nicholas Stern is I.G. Patel Professor of Economics and Government at London School of Economics and Political Science and President of the British Academy. http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/unambitious-australia-needs-to-do-more-to-tackle-climate-change-20140403-zqq7d.html

And it all came about because the country got lazy. Australia still has vast coal reserves, but the cost of delivery has soared to the point that consumer electricity prices have virtually doubled in the last five years. And now it is about to deal with a doubling, or even trebling, of gas prices.

This is clearly having an impact on Australia’s competitiveness, but the nation’s energy productivity hardly figures in any of the major economic reforms that are currently under consideration.

This is the major theme of a two-day conference in Sydney dubbed 2XEP, which stands for double energy productivity, a target that the energy efficiency industry says should be adopted in Australia (double the productivity by 2030), because all other major economies are doing the same thing.

Australia, though, has hopelessly inadequate rules and regulations on efficiency – be it for buildings, transport or electricity generation. Alan Pears, a professor from RMIT, noted that building regulations in Australia are at a point where they would not be legal in most other countries.

But Australia’s attitude to efficiency is long dated.

Robert Hill, a former environment minister in the Howard government and now at the US Studies Centre, made a few interesting points at the conference.

One was that his efforts to introduce stricter emissions targets on vehicles in Australia would destroy the Australian car industry. Now, the irony is, the country’s inability to produce energy fficiency vehicles was a likely contributor to downfall of the industry. The US car industry, meanwhile, is booming, particularly around low emission vehicles from the big 3 carmakers, and Tesla.

(He noted that he was also responsible for helping to introduce the first renewable energy target. He said that  he was told at the time that even a 1.5 per cent renewable target would “destroy” the Australian economy. Now, he noted, the target was for a minimum 20 per cent and his home state was over 30 per cent. Still, the alarmism continues)……….

As part of its roadmap, the alliance to save energy proposes:

Changes to National Electricity Rules to support utilities undertaking Demand Management instead of new infrastructure investment

– A national investment incentive scheme for business in all sectors to improve energy productivity, including facilitating greater private sector finance.

– Streamlining, harmonising and extending existing energy efficiency schemes such as the NSW Energy Efficiency Scheme and the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target.

– Minimum fuel economy standards for passenger and light freight vehicles, consistent with other developed nations.

– Greater development and use of public transport and urban planning to reduce traffic congestion, including through innovative financing and road charging.

All of which shouldn’t be, but could be, a major challenge for the government under its current policy directions. The Direct Action policy is likely to absorb the various state based energy efficiency targets, raising questions about whether any such savings would be “additional” to what would have happened.

And it seems the Abbott government is determined to focus its infrastructure on the building of yet more roads – even to the point of pushing state governments to sell energy infrastructure to provide the funds for more tarmac. http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/australias-lousy-energy-productivity-why-it-lags-the-world-52780