The media is quoting Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying he has a “mandate” for Labor’s inadequate 2030 emissions reduction target, and Albanese is bringing up the stoush with The Greens over the CPRS in 2009.
From The Age: “‘We have a mandate for our position on climate. We announced it in December last year, we announced 43 per cent by 2030. We announced 82 per cent renewables as part of the national energy market by 2030. It will create 604,000 new jobs,” he said.
“It will result in Australia rejoining the world effort to tackle climate change. If the Greens party haven’t learned from what they did in 2009 – that was something that led to a decade of inaction and delay and denial – then that will be a matter for them.”’
A little while ago someone on Twitter told me the CPRS would not have resulted in any real emissions reductions until after 2030, because in the Treasury modelling the emissions reductions were mostly from imported permits, i.e. Australia would buy carbon offsets from overseas rather than reduce our own emissions.
This was the graph that the person showed me:
I am a big supporter of Kevin Rudd’s Government, but this graph does certainly seem to show that the CPRS would not have made much difference up until 2030.
Labor’s current policy of a 43% reduction in emissions (from 2005 levels) by 2030 is also very inadequate, and won’t achieve much.
It includes 19% of emissions reductions already achieved (and celebrated by the Liberals and Nationals) through land-use and deforestation changes.
That leaves only 24% of emissions reductions for Labor to achieve between now and 2030.
Even if these reductions were entirely from the energy sector, that would mean in the 25 years since 2005 Australia has only cut energy sector emissions by 24%.
That is not doing our fair share under the international agreements which are meant to keep global warming to under 1.5C.
Zoe Emily Mithen 