Australia gets greenhouse gong
By Jim Green
The Australian government has been gonged for its performance in derailing climate change negotiations at the international climate change conference in Bonn, Germany, held from October 25 to November 5.
Non-governmental organisations awarded briquettes to countries "making the greatest political contribution to the destruction of the planet". Australia came equal third in the tally of briquettes, beaten only by Saudi Arabia and the US.
The Australian delegation in Bonn sought to stifle international scrutiny of Australia's reported emissions from land clearing — thus increasing opportunities to manipulate figures to artificially increase emissions targets. Australia was one of only three developed nations at the conference not to endorse a pledge to ratify the Kyoto treaty by 2002.
Australia also helped to reduce the issue of compliance to a farce. Instead of legally binding targets with non-compliance leading to strong sanctions, the Australian delegation argued that non-compliant nations should be able to choose from a list of "facilitative measures". Those measures could include "flexibility mechanisms" such as the "clean development mechanism", which could involve flogging nuclear power plants to Third World countries that have no use for them.
Don Henry, executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, attacked environment minister Robert Hill for telling the Bonn conference that developing nations would need to do more to reduce emissions before the Australian government would ratify the treaty.
"Australia is one of the largest per capita emitters in the world — we emit seven times more than the average Chinese person and 16 times more than the average Indian person. It would be a very poor excuse if this really became a reason for Australia not ratifying the treaty", Henry said.
The greenhouse gong in Bonn comes on top of a study by the Australia Institute which found that Australia is now the biggest greenhouse gas emitting nation on the planet on a per capita basis.
In late October, federal cabinet deferred making a decision on whether to implement the government's policy of forcing electricity suppliers to increase their usage of renewable energy sources by 2%.
A report in the November 12 Australian Financial Review says that the policy might be watered down by making the 2% target voluntary, by broadening the definition of renewable energy sources (to include non-renewable sources, presumably), or by setting an upper limit on the costs to industry of meeting the target.