Print

Mail

wiki links

China needs commitment on emissions: Garnaut

China, India and Indonesia must become involved with emissions trading to counter climate change, Ross Garnaut, the Australian government’s adviser on global warming, said yesterday.

“The arithmetic of solving the global problem doesn’t work unless China plays a substantial role from an early date,” Garnaut said on the Australian Broadcasting Corp’s (ABC) Inside Business.

“Eighty percent of the emissions growth over the next couple of decades is going to be in the developing countries,” especially China, India and Indonesia, he said.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose first act in office was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, wants to show Australia can provide leadership on the environment without jeopardizing 17 years of economic growth. China was the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2004 after the US, the 2007-2008 Human Development Report from the UN Development Program showed.

China plans to use hydropower, nuclear energy, biomass fuels and gas to help reduce 860 million tonnes of greenhouse-gas output by 2010, a National Climate Change Program announced in Beijing in June last year said. China can’t be forced into an emissions trading plan, Garnaut said yesterday. It will only act to join such a program if it sees the developed world doing so, he said.

Australia should “urgently” introduce an emissions trading system to address climate change, Garnaut said on Friday in a draft report on carbon trading plans.

Trading should start with a two-year “transition period” in 2010 to address impacts on the economy, and the government needs to “go further” to cut greenhouse gases 60 percent by 2050, it said.

“Time for Australia is running out,” Rudd told the ABC’s The Insiders yesterday. “We will be very mindful of what business says to us in terms of implementation arrangements. We don’t believe there is a case for delay.”

“What we’re asking this generation of Australians to do is to recognize the costs that have accrued to all of us from the greenhouse gases, the greenhouse pollution we’ve put into the atmosphere over hundreds of years,” Penny Wong, Australian minister for climate change and water, told Channel 10’s Meet the Press yesterday. “We’re asking this generation to take responsibility for at least part of that.”
This story has been viewed 1000 times.