Second thoughts on Australia's Kyoto boycott

Nov 27, 2007, 8:31 GMT

Sydney - Australia's wealthiest suburb is Mosman. Its swish harbourside streets have Sydney's highest concentration of four- wheel-drives, and its households the city's biggest environmental footprint.

'What can Mosman do about global warming and climate change?' asks local accountant John Nelson, who is leading a campaign to stop Mosman Council from charging parking fees.

Nelson is typical of the majority of the 21 million Australians who see curbing greenhouse gas emissions as someone else's problem.

Like many in the United States, which is the only other industrialized country that refused to sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Australians generally display a frontier mentality.

They often see themselves as custodians of a big new land with superabundant resources that goes by different rules from the rest of humanity.

Australia's per capita emissions in 2004 were 4.5 times the global average, a little below the figure for the US. It has 0.3 per cent of the world's population, yet pumps out 1.4 per cent of all fossil fuels emissions.

The US has the highest level of car-ownership, Australia the second-highest. Greenies often cite the US and Australia as environmental vandals.

By a margin of 70 per cent, Australians tell opinion pollsters they want their government to sign Kyoto, but three times since the treaty was thrashed out in Japan, they have voted in a government that pledged not to do so.

But last weekend was different. In parliamentary elections Kevin Rudd's Labor Party defeated John Howard's Liberal-led coalition partly on a promise to sign Kyoto and get more serious in tackling climate change. The US will soon become the last Kyoto recalcitrant.

Prime Minister-elect Rudd will fly to Indonesia next week to attend the December 3 to 14 UN conference in Bali, where negotiations will begin on forging a new agreement to take over when the Kyoto accord expires in 2012.

'Both major parties have credibility problems on climate change because of their failure to commit to the sort of deep cuts to greenhouse emissions in the next decade that are necessary to help prevent dangerous climate change,' Wilderness Society national campaign director Alex Marr said.

Both Labor and the Liberals oppose any successor to Kyoto that doesn't set binding targets for developing countries as well as developed ones. Like the US, Australia thinks its time that India, China and other large emitters give up the exemptions they were accorded in Kyoto because of their status as developing economies.

Labor has joined European countries and committed to a 60-per-cent cut in its emissions by 2050 but it has fought shy of the more painful task of setting a 2020 goal.

It is electoral suicide in the world's top coal-exporting country to condemn exports or even advocate the phasing out of coal-powered electricity generating stations at home. Labor is placing its faith in the development of clean-coal alternatives, though the technologies to take the carbon dioxide out of coal and store it deep underground are at least 20 years away.

The Liberals set a target that had renewable energy representing 15 per cent of power generation by 2020 - coincidentally, the same target China has set. Labor raised the stakes by promising 20 per cent.

Greenpeace Australia climate change campaigner Steven Campbell notes that even with a target of 20 per cent, there will be no overall reduction in the amount of electricity generated by burning coal.

'If we have a renewables sector growing alongside an ever- expanding coal sector, we won't stop climate change,' Campbell said.

The Liberals proposed building 25 nuclear power stations as a partial solution to cutting emissions. Despite having 40 per cent of the world's known uranium reserves, Australia doesn't have a nuclear power plant. Labor is committed to keeping things that way.

Even with the parties offering very similar climate-change formulas, it's unlikely to become the cross-party issue that Australian National University lecturer Warwick McKibbin says would be the big spur to action.

'Any time you have a difference of opinion on both sides of politics, the long-term credibility of the policy is undermined - and that means that you don't end up with an effective outcome,' Professor McKibbin said. 'It has to be bipartisan.'

Along with many others, on both sides of politics, he regrets that a cross-party agreement wasn't forged back in 1997 to sign Kyoto. Ten years have been lost, McKibbin says.