Analysis: Australia changes tack on climate change

By Sid Astbury Nov 14, 2006, 2:46 GMT

Sydney - Australia's worst drought on record and the prospect of the green vote losing him next year's general election has shifted Prime Minister John Howard on climate change.

Within a couple of months he has gone from denying the science of global warming and rubbishing green advocates like former United State vice president Al Gore to accepting the need for quickfire action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and putting himself forward as a leader on climate change issues.

'I think the weight of scientific evidence suggests that there are significant levels of damaging growths in the levels of greenhouse gas emission,' the 66-year-old prime minister said. 'Unless we lay the foundation over the years immediately ahead of us to deal with the problem, future generations will face significant penalties and will have cause to criticise our failure to do something substantial in response.'

This from a man who refused to meet Gore when he visited Australia to promote his film on the perils of rising temperatures and whose industry minister just a few weeks ago dismissed the box-office hit An Inconvenient Truth as 'just entertainment.'

Earlier this year Howard was pledging an endless reliance on coal for power generation. Now, he's praising nuclear energy as a clean, green alternative. From outright rejection of a global carbon-trading regime, the winner of four consecutive elections is ready to sign Australia up to an emissions-trading system.

The conversion is so sudden, so seemingly complete, that the opposition Labour Party fears that it will be upstaged on green issues by the ruling coalition when Australians go to the polls in around 12 months' time.

Labour's Anthony Albanese, the opposition environment spokesman in Parliament, is flabbergasted by the back-flips. 'It's just a week ago that the prime minister and the Howard government were contemptuous of Labour's plan for a national emissions-trading scheme to drive down our carbon emissions, yet now he's establishing a taskforce to do just that,' an alarmed Albanese said.

Jeff Angel, head of green lobby group the Total Environment Centre worries that Howard is simply out to undercut Labour in the run up to the election.

'We want to know that the prime minister is genuine,' Angel said. 'He can do that by involving all the stakeholders at the highest levels.'

It's true: the Howard government has previously spent more energy in undermining initiatives on global warming than embracing them.

Australia is one of only two developed countries - the other is the United States - refusing to sign the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol on reducing the emissions that cause climate change. Kyoto, negotiated in Japan by 140 countries in 1997, took effect this year.

Kyoto places legally binding requirements on 35 rich countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Big developing country polluters like China and India would join at a later date.

Howard argues that the Australian economy would be pummelled by the higher energy prices that dipping under the Kyoto targets would entail. The country has an energy-intensive economy because of its big mining industry and its reliance of coal for almost 90 per cent of power generation.

Howard now trumpets a 'New Kyoto' - one that would set targets for developed and developing countries alike. He has dropped his opposition to carbon trading, and to a shift away from coal as the increased cost of dealing with the gasses from burning it make the nuclear option more economic.

Sceptics say Howard is only talking up his green credentials. The failure to sign Kyoto, and the fact that Australians on a per capita basis are the world's biggest polluters, suggest a lack of political will to share the pain that tackling climate change entails.

Some allege that by championing global initiatives that don't set binding targets, Howard is intent on wrecking those like Kyoto which do.

In January, officials from Australia, Japan, the US, China, Korea and India met in Sydney. They talked up technologies that could slow climate change but rejected emissions targets. The first meeting of the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6) wound up with pledges to develop low-emission technologies for industry, but no obligation or incentives for industrialists to use them.

Howard closed the two-day gathering with a pie-in-the-sky hope that companies would do the right thing and put the planet ahead of profits. Critics now suggest nothing has changed since January - except the rhetoric.