Still Waiting for Garnaut
Professor Garnaut must tomorrow recommend stringent 2020 greenhouse gas reductions targets to avoid catastrophic climate change, Australian Greens climate change spokesperson, Senator Christine Milne, said today.
Senator Milne said “The globe is poised on the edge of a number of climate change tipping points any one of which could send us into runaway heating.
“The time for hard decisions is now. There is no more time for excuses and delays.
“The latest science demonstrates that the worst case scenarios presented in the IPCC report last year have already been exceeded. Climate change is proceeding faster than scientists anticipated, and there is increasing evidence that, on top of the Arctic being an island for the first time in human history, the ability of the oceans and forests to take up the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere is weakening.
“Last year the IPCC recommended that industrialised nations reduce emissions by 25-40% by 2020. Since that time the science has worsened and emissions have risen even faster.
“Australia, as one of the world’s most recalcitrant polluters, has a clear obligation to cut emissions further and faster than those who have already started down this path. We have the advantage that, because we have done nothing for the last decades, Australia has a huge amount of low hanging fruit still to be picked. By rolling out energy efficiency, stopping logging native forests and driving a renewable energy revolution, Australia can reduce emissions faster than similar
industrialised nations around the world.
“The global community is looking to Australia to act in good faith for the first time ever in the global climate negotiations, and will be unimpressed if we continue to be an apologist for the polluting “umbrella group” countries and try to fudge our own figures on the basis of population growth.
“The minimum environmentally credible and geopolitically acceptable target is a reduction of 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, as the first major step towards making Australia net carbon neutral by the middle of the century at the latest.”
