While British Prime Minister Tony Blair was in Australia earlier this week he apparently talked with our PM about Britain joining the recently formed Asia- Pacific Partnership on Clean Development, know as the AP6 because there are currently six participating countries.
According to the The Australian Tony Blair was interesting in forging a post-Kyoto accord to cut carbon emissions that had a “real dose of realism” and John Howard suggested a possible climate strategy involving the world’s 20 biggest carbon emitters, including China, India, Australia, the US and Britain.
Sounds like progress to me?
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Apologies this post was written on 29th, but not uploaded until 30th March at 9.30am.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Lateline transcript this week:
Something for everyone. Campbell quite lucid.
Multiple tracks is the new buzz phrase !
New technologies for coal; nuclear options, focus on renewables (yay from Ender, boo from Joe), a new Kyoto deal ? Logical comments about the perverse effects of sending intensive energy off-shore.
But if AGW isn’t happening – a waste of money?
Can we afford a Kyoto Mark II??
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1603163.htm
Won’t a new Kyoto deal send u broke too ??
Does the Senator have you confidence on this issue??
Something for everyone – SENATOR IAN CAMPBELL: Well, I think Tony Blair deserves a lot of credit for the leadership he showed through 2005, focusing the G8 nations on climate change, recognising, to use his word, that Kyoto will simply not solve the problem – in fact, emissions will massively increase under Kyoto – that we have to find a new framework, that it has to include China. China and India and many of the big and growing emitters are not covered by commitments under Kyoto. In fact, only 35 countries out of 160 have commitments. So we’ve been working very constructively with Great Britain for over a year now. I attended a meeting that Mr Blair convened in London in March last year, another one in November after the G8. We are as a world building, as Mr Blair calls it, a new framework. It will include Kyoto and negotiations on new commitments post 2012. It will include a new round of, I guess you would call it, round tables to try and bring in the developing countries. It will include the Asia-Pacific forum that has for the first time brought together America, Australia, China and India in practical programs to not only look at fossil fuels, but to fast-track renewable technologies. I called it a multiple-track approach. That’s what the world is now taking out of the Montreal conference. What Mr Blair is saying, and we agree wholeheartedly with him, is that you need to bring those multiple tracks together as quickly as possible if you’re going to get the outcomes you need. The outcomes are, in fact, Tony, the world is going to need twice as much energy within the next 30 years and we’re going to need to produce that energy with roughly half the emissions. So it’s a massive challenge and I guess the statistic you referred to – and sorry about the long answer – was, I put it to Mr Blair, who says you can’t do anything without having China in, if you closed down every power station in Australia tonight, after your program is concluded of course, that the growth in emissions in the Chinese power generation sector – they are building one new power house every fortnight – will entirely replicate Australia’s entire greenhouse gas emissions within 10 or 11 months. So it shows that we could do everything in Australia and still make very little difference. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be doing everything we can be doing, but it underscores Prime Minister Blair’s view, and our Prime Minister’s view, that you have got to have a comprehensive framework if we’re going to solve this incredibly important problem.
TONY JONES: That incredible growth in Chinese carbon emissions is largely fuelled by Australian coal that we sell to them. Does that give us a greater responsibility?
SENATOR IAN CAMPBELL: I think that Australia has a responsibility. I think we’re actually doing more than we get a lot of credit for in a whole range of areas. I think it also puts a big focus on a whole range of measures that need to be taken. My view is that we have to get renewables far more efficient and far more, I guess, economically viable, so we need to work there and to deploy Australia’s great renewable technologies into places like China. We need to get some breakthroughs on carbon capture and storage, stopping the carbon that gets created from burning coal, from going into the atmosphere in the first place and again, Australia is working at the forefront of international technological efforts to make that happen. We also have to ensure that as countries like China, America either replace and existing and ageing nuclear facilities or develop new phase nuclear programs that Australian uranium is available to them. And as Premier Rann said in the introduction, the Labor policy is something that’s anachronistic. It’s something that was put together –
TONY JONES: I’ll come on to talk about uranium in a moment. Let’s talk about this new global climate deal that we appear now to be working on with Britain. Is it going to replace Kyoto? Is it going to be a similar sort of thing as Kyoto with a set of protocols and targets for different countries and so on?
SENATOR IAN CAMPBELL: I think the consensus out of Montreal, if you can ever call a meeting of 160 countries a consensus, it’s very, very hard to get something out of 160 countries that will be effective. But I don’t think that it’s likely that you’ll see a Kyoto-style framework. I think that you will see the Kyoto parties, the Europeans, for example, that do have a trading regime in place that relies on the Kyoto mechanisms, they will need to create a set of timetables and targets. I think a lot of countries that have timetables and targets, for example New Zealand, are unlikely to be part of that. What you have to do is recognise that what applies to Europe and what might be effective in Europe may not be, and probably won’t be, effective in Asia, may not be effective in Africa and that there’s going to be some different solutions. But the challenge, and it is going to be particularly hard, is to try to bring all of those different solutions together under some form of new framework.
TONY JONES: A new framework like a kind of treaty?
SENATOR IAN CAMPBELL: I don’t think even Prime Minister Blair has contemplated what it would look like but what I said today – and I’ve said it previously but people are paying attention today because obviously Mr Blair is in town and he is as passionate about this as I am – but the sort of framework he put together under the G8, where you got the 20 biggest emitters together and really started talking in practical terms, I think that sort of forum is the most likely place where you’ll build this future framework. It’s not to push aside Kyoto or underestimate the importance of it. It was an important achievement for the world. The UN framework convention is important as well and Australia is an active player there. But I think what you’ve got to do is there’s no use having a situation where one set of policies, for example, the European trading market, where you’ve got a price of carbon at around 25 pounds per tonne driving greenhouse gas emissions to jurisdictions where there are no limits and potentially lower levels of environmental protection overall. There’s no use having a situation in Australia where you drive the price of energy-intensive industry into South-East Asia across our borders because the greenhouse gas emissions will still get made but you will drive them out of Australia and into Asia. The planet still suffers. So you need a framework that faces up to that practical reality and Mr Blair has been an incredibly important champion for that reality check.
Having been to China many times loking at energy needs, I can say that China’s coal mining is at least 8 times that of Australia and is increasing rapidly. This places a global imperative on China adopting other fuels. Anyone for windmills?
Tony Jones made a comment that was hopelessly wrong in the interview above. Whatever Australia does in coal exports to China is dwarfed.
I look forward to the tangible outcomes of AP(n) – in 17 years or so.