PIERS AKERMAN: Climate con
12Jun07
THE pathetic response of Labor and the major voices in the Australian environmental movement to the Federal Government's climate change initiatives gives the lie to the notion environmentalists have the interests of the nation at heart. The policies outlined by the ALP's environment spokesman, the multi-millionaire former rock star Peter Garrett, would saddle Australia with another recession we have to have, the `Garrett recession', and come hard on the heels of the deal between the NSW ALP's Senate candidate Mark Arbib and the Greens for a preference swap at this year's election.
The deal is a true highwater mark of principled politics. If Labor's plans to saddle individuals and businesses with energy taxes don't send the economy backward, the Greens' plans certainly will. Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has long argued Australia should have signed and ratified the flawed Kyoto Protocol despite the fact only 35 of its 170-plus signatories agreed to greenhouse gas reduction targets. China and India, the globe's big developing nations aren't in, even though developing nations account for the majority of global emissions. Without commitments from all major emitters, Kyoto can only deliver a reduction in the growth of greenhouse gases in order of 1 per cent. Rudd's pledge would have been the death of the economy.
A spokesman for the ALP's new political partner, Greens Senator Kerry Nettles, has called for a 30 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and at least 80 per cent by 2050 and echoed Garrett's rock star economics with a call for coal mining to cease. Curiously, neither Nettles nor Garrett have detailed how they envisage the nation would function without the coal-fired power stations currently our sources of reliable energy.
Even the most ardent environmentalist knows alternate energy is no solution for this country at this stage, but not Nettles or Garrett. It would be different if they were throwing their support behind developing a nuclear industry like those which power a number of European nations but unfortunately both Labor and the Greens are still locked out of nuclear power by their antique ideologies. For all their talk about the future, there is a striking lack of new strategy from Labor and the Greens.
The Coalition is looking beyond Kyoto to a new agreement that will effectively involve all the major emitting nations, developed and developing, in a fairer arrangement that will ensure the burdens of meeting the climate change challenge are shared and will not automatically and unnecessarily plunge Australia into Garrett's recession. Rudd's greenhouse gas emission targets of 60 per cent of 2000 levels by 2050, and the 20 per cent reduction by 2020, pledged by Garrett, are truly astounding in their failure to address the reality climate is a global issue and doesn't stop at borders and boundaries.
The consequences of Labor's policy of cutting emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 would be similar to the effect of replacing the nation's entire fossil fuel-fired power system with nuclear energy and simultaneously removing all existing vehicles from the roads. A report from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics last July modelled a 50 per cent decrease in 1990 levels of emissions by 2050 _ not dissimilar to Labor's 60 per cent target on 2000 levels _ and concluded petrol prices would rise by 100 per cent, growth in GDP would be slashed more than 10 per cent, real wages would be cut by more than a fifth, agricultural production would fall nearly 50 per cent and electricity output would be cut more than 20 per cent.
Critically, given the global nature of climate change, the world's greenhouse gas levels would continue to rise because even a 60 per cent cut to Australia's contribution of just 1.5 per cent of the global emissions would have absolutely no material effect. Even if we shut down every power station tomorrow, our contribution to the world's greenhouse gases would be replaced by the developing nations' contributions within just five months.