While the great and the good are converging on Poznan for the global climate change talks, over 50 environmental groups today sent an open letter to Kevin Rudd, calling on him to adopt a high 2020 emission reduction target. It is an impressive list of groups including the big NGO’s like World Wide Fund for Nature, The Australian Conservation Foundation, and Greenpeace, as well as smaller community groups like Rising Tide in Newcastle.
It’s a crucial time and a crucial issue. The science is becoming more disturbing by the month as evidence grows of climatic changes happening sooner than predicted. It is clear that we need to be cutting emissions faster than we had previously thought. The big polluters have been lobbying hard for a low target of around 5-10% – which, if adopted globally, would pretty much result in us living on a different planet – which may or may not be habitable for humans (not sure which planet they will be able to hold their corporate sustainability conferences on?).
While the environment groups have different aspirations for the emissions reduction target, they all agree that anything less than 25% is madness.
The big concern at this point is that, with the economy on the slide, Rudd is leaning towards appeasing the big polluters by implementing a low target. The Government probably decided to delay the target announcement until after the Poznan meeting because they didn’t want to be laughed out of the meeting. But the reality is that if Australia is going to play a positive role in forging an international agreement, we need a strong and credible emission reduction target at home – which means a target somewhere in the 25-40% range. This is unlikely to be enough to prevent catastrophic climate change, but at least it would be a meaningul step in the right direction.
As Garnaut said, “On a balance of probabilities, the failure of our generation would lead to consequences that would haunt humanity until the end of time.”
I used that quote in my last post too. Maybe I’ll say it again. “On a balance of probabilities, the failure of our generation would lead to consequences that would haunt humanity until the end of time.”
Anything less than 25% cuts by 2020 would represent a profound failure. Mr Rudd?
