A fossil fuel free world should be front and centre in 2015

cop14The Lima climate talks did not go far enough to engender confidence for an ambitious global pact in Paris, but it has pulled negotiations back from the brink of collapse.
If this UN process is to change for the better, we must accept that two realities are being lived by rich and poor nations, and Australia must stop being miserly and obstructive.
Developed countries want to focus on mitigation. The developing world, like our Pacific Island neighbours, are struggling with the impacts of ever worsening extreme weather events, as well as sea level rise, and want more focus on climate finance, adaptation, loss and damage.
It is these poorest and least developed countries that did nothing historically to cause the problem, which have the least capacity to cope now. The issues of climate finance and loss and damage will not go away. Failure to address them will jeopardise a good agreement in Paris. It is proof that failure to act on climate costs more.
One disappointment for me was that the rest of the world allowed Australia to get away with rorting the accounting rules yet again on land use (LULUCF). It was bad enough that it happened with the Kyoto Protocol first commitment period, but allowing it to carry over into the second means Australia will have to do very little to achieve its 5% emissions reduction target to 2020.
As to the overall negotiations, it is time to rethink the Presidential, top down, style of negotiating, where in the face of bogged down negotiations the COP President develops his or her own agreement and tries to deliver it to the rest of the world. This isn’t the way it was pre-Copenhagen and the method has proven itself a failure. We need to go back to putting a representative of all blocs in a room and letting them work it out.
There will be sadness and frustration that these talks have again prioritised short term national economic self-interest over the global commons or common interest, but what Lima has done is reinforce the power of civil society to bring about change in spite of governments, not because of them.
As with other COPs, the Peoples Climate March was fantastic with 15,000 people taking part. I enjoyed being there with people from all over South America, but particularly people from Peru who were protesting the loss of glaciers and highlighting water and food security.
Whether governments like it or not, the divestment movement is gaining momentum. With a phase out of fossil fuels in the mix for Paris it will be part of the global conversation in 2015, and this is where the Australian Greens will bring pressure to bear on the Coalition government. Australia will try to have the phase out of fossil fuel use removed from the text, so it’s critical that people over the world influence their governments not to give in to the fossil fuel nations like Australia and Canada.
A fossil fuel free world by 2050 should be front and centre for us all in 2015. Without it we have no hope of constraining global warming to two degrees.
Christine Milne is leader of the Australian Greens.

Comments

3 responses to “A fossil fuel free world should be front and centre in 2015”

  1. GregX Avatar
    GregX

    Could not have said it better myself. Keep up the good work on climate change. Looking forward to 2015 being the year we get whole world taking climate change seriously especially Australia.

  2. Miles Harding Avatar
    Miles Harding

    Well said!

    The myopic Abbott government is doing its best to derail any notion of climate change and the necessity to stop burning their beloved coal! We have both near term availability of, particularly oil, and long term climate effects to be concerned with, unfortunately both are outside the current electoral cycle.

    I am concerned that following the Abbott-Hockey ‘plan’ is likely to lead to the worst possible outcome. At the Hockey end, it does not appear that real growth may be possible for very much longer, leading to contortions of the measure as the failings become more evident. And at the Abbot end, climate change denial is equally a denial of resource depletion with the most likely medium term outcome being total unpreparedness for changes in the availability of fossil energy resources, or the necessity to forgo their consumption.

    Most of the discussions I see are focused on electricity and coal consumption, while this is very important in the long term with action needed immediately, there is a far more acute calamity near by. Australia is exposed to the world energy markets in the worst possible way because of high oil dependence and virtually no reserves. This leads me to believe that we must de-carbonise transportation urgently.

    With a total failure to lead by the current LNP government, I feel that it is incumbent on all of us that have some capacity and can see the complexion of the future to act ourselves and inspire others to also act. Our available time is very short and it is vitally important to not wait for others to lead.

    [This sounds like the nucleus of a new year resolution]

  3. SunGod Avatar
    SunGod

    Yep, very well said Christine.

    There is absolutely no logic in the position of either Labor or the Coalition on this issue, as they continue to pump billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money into padding the bank balances of mining and other fossil fuel companies at our expense (as a guy I know has often said, $17.6 billion/year in subsidies now), and hinder the establishment of new solar and wind power projects in this country.

    The role Julia Gillard and Federal Labor played in preventing a baseload solar power plant in SA three years ago will go down in infamy, just the same as NSW Labor’s actions in stymieing a massive wind power project in that state when last they were in govt.

    As with all political issues in this country, corruption is the only real obstacle to renewable energy proliferation in Australia. Specifically, the corrupt Lib-Lab political edifice, and the perverted mass media which sustain their existence at the expense of all of us.

    The Greens are the best hope we have.

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