Antinuclear

Tony Abbott shamed Australia at Lima climate summit, but will continue to sabotage climate action anyway

Abbott’s ‘mean and tricky’ Australia: Lima’s Colossal Fossil, Independent Australia 18 December 2014, The Abbott Government has managed to turn Australia into an international climate pariah and laughing stock in the course of just one year, writes deputy editor Sandi Keane. The Abbott Government’s abject failure to address climate change copped a deserved hammering at Lima. ‘Fossil of the Day’ awards from the international Climate Action Network rained down on Foreign Minister Julie Bishop — the only person there who didn’t see global warming as a threat to the Great Barrier Reef. It all culminated in the final humiliation for the nation, with the ‘Colossal Fossil’ award being bestowed on Australia as the worst performer on climate change action for the entire year.

Having failed to sabotage any new global agreement by demanding legally binding emissions, Julie Bishop is now trying a different tack: as the planet cooks, she wants to cook the books. This could see Australia’s emissions skyrocket to a massive 49-57% above its original 1990 Kyoto pledge.

This latest attempt to protect vested mining interests – the Coalition’s major paymasters – hedges around the success of Bishop’s threat to scuttle any agreement on the second stage of the Kyoto Protocol unless she can use the same favourable rules around land clearing agreed to in Kyoto in 1997. This would involve changing an amendment made at the Doha talks two years ago on how Australia’s target is to be calculated.

The current Protocol is due to expire in 2020 and will be replaced by a new agreement signed up to in Paris next year. It also requires the dumping of Australia’s 2009 Copenhagen Accordcommitment to cut overall emissions by 5% on 2000 levels by 2020.

So, as the rest of the world acts, Australia wants to do sod all.

It was inevitable. The Abbott Government’s Direct Action Plan is a fizzer — especially now that the Queensland Government has overturned the ban on broad-scale land clearing.

What has gone unreported by mainstream media is a reminder of the land clearing con trick played by John Howard on the rest of the world back in 1997 at Kyoto.

Kyoto 1997: How rat cunning Howard conned the world

Not for nothing did current Attorney General George Brandis call John Howard the ‘lying rodent’, or Shane Stone, his party’s federal president, describe his government as ‘mean and tricky’…………

By insisting land use emissions be included in the calculation of the total greenhouse gas emissions, Australia’s emissions could be dramatically reduced paving the way for the big polluters to increase theirs.

It was the lowest point in the sorry history of the Coalition’s shirking of its responsibility to act on global warming. Howard would do sod all and there was nothing the rest of the world could do about it.

Fearing a lack of consensus would wreck any hope of an agreement at Kyoto, a reluctant deal was struck — henceforth known as the ‘Australia clause’. Only three countries were permitted to increase their emissions: Greenland 110%, Australia 108% and Norway 101%. Other industrialised nations had to cut emissions from between 6 to 8%.

Australia’s diplomatic reputation suffered serious damage as a result. Two years later, Japan would use the ‘Australia clause’ to undermine Australia’s claimed environmental credentials during negotiations over a whale sanctuary in the Pacific………

Newman Gov’t on collision course with Kyoto and Copenhagen

But could Campbell Newman sabotage Bishop’s plans, not to mention rout Abbott’s Green Army before it even plants its first tree?

After promising not to lift the bans on broad-scale land clearing (contributing to about 12% of Australia’s total emissions in 1998), the ‘let-‘er-rip’ Newman government has now overturned the ban introduced by Labor’s Beattie Government in 2006.

This ‘here we Joh again’ environmental vandalism threatens to take Australia back to the dark old days when land clearing in Queensland ranked alongside some of the most disastrous regions in the world, such as the Amazon, the Congo and Borneo …….

The overturning of land clearing bans will surely throw a spanner in Bishop’s machinations, putting at risk both Australia’s Copenhagen Accord commitment and any gains in GHG reduction resulting from the introduction of permits in 1991 and the bans in 2006.

Next year is shaping up as the year from hell for the Abbott government. ……https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/mean-and-tricky-at-lima,7202

December 22, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, climate change - global warming