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Aust on track to meet Kyoto targets: Turnbull


Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull says new figures show Australia is on track to meet its Kyoto targets.

Malcolm Turnbull has released the national greenhouse accounts for 2005, which show a 2.2 per cent increase on emission levels from the 1990s.

He says the figures are far more accurate than those recently produced by the Climate Institute, which found Australia was not on track to meet its Kyoto targets.

"Our figures are reliable, they're produced by the Australian Greenhouse Office," he said.

"Australia's carbon accounting system is regarded as the best in the world.

"This so-called Climate Institute [figures] were a series of guesstimates based on partial data which we think is wrong in any event and doesn't take into account any offsets.

"You have to understand that carbon emissions can come from industry or a motor car and that they're absorbed somewhere else perhaps by forestry or land use.

"So you have to take the whole carbon balance into the picture and you simply can't do that for 2007 because we don't have enough data, the year isn't over."

Greenhouse gas permits

Meanwhile a group of prominent business economists has appealed to all levels of government in Australia to support a system of greenhouse gas permits.

They have published a full-page open letter in The Australian Financial Review arguing the merits of tradeable emission permits as a way of tackling climate change.

ANZ chief economist Saul Eslake is one of five economists who signed the letter in a personal capacity.

Mr Eslake says the system would need to be underpinned by government targets on greenhouse gas emissions.

"With a view to inducing industry to undertake the kind of investments that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

"And the cost of doing that in turn gets reflected in the value of the permits that are tradeable between those who emit a lot and those who don't."

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