Australia expects ambitious climate treaty in Paris in 2015

Climate change minister Mark Butler says he is convinced the world will reach an ambitious climate treaty by 2015. That would require a lot of Direct Action.

Climate change has barely figured in the election campaign to date – apart from the Greens, a few brief references about a “clean energy future” by Kevin Rudd, and some cheers for Tony Abbott when he promised to ditch the country’s primary clean energy fund.

But in what seems to be an otherwise unreported speech last week, Australia’s Climate Change minister Mark Butler highlighted to what extent the different policy approaches of Labor and the conservative Coalition could matter to Australia in coming years.

Butler may only be in the job for another few days, but he told a Grattan Institute function in Sydney last week that given recent developments in the world’s two biggest emitters, China and the US – he was convinced there would be meaningful global agreement on climate changed agreed by the next deadline in Paris in 2015.

“I’m not usually a glaring optimist, but I am utterly convinced, that particularly the shift in China but also the shift in American attitudes means that the next phase of negotiations …. are going to be very, very ambitious,” Butler said in his speech.

“We’ve had the low point a few years ago and I think we are now moving to a phase were China and the US will lead a very ambitious agenda into this round of negotiations.”

Of course, such predictions have serious consequences for Australia. The world is now looking to conclude a treaty by late 2015 – when the UNFCCC negotiations are held in Paris – that will come into force from 2020 and map out a path to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 450 parts per million, and hopefully retrain rises in average global temperatures to 2C.

Given the implications such an agreement would have on Australia – the world’s biggest emitter per capita among developed countries – Butler noted that it was critical that Australia had a pathway to actually achieve those emission reductions.

This is the central difference between Labor and the Coalition over their climate policies. They both have unconditional targets of a 5% reduction by 2020, but the crucial issue how any more ambitious targets are met has had little or no air play in this campaign, despite the upcoming reports from the IPCC and confirmation that Australia has experiencee its hottest 12 month period on record.

Labor intends to keep the carbon price intact, and to be guided on its caps and interim targets by the Climate Change Authority, which will deliver an interim report next month on appropriate targets for Australia out to 2020 and beyond.

The Coalition has said only that it will scrap the CCA, along with the carbon price and a host of other initiatives and institutions, and has not made any mention of more ambitious targets. It has never given any indication of how it might tackle a more ambitious target than a 5 per cent reduction, even though a 25 per cent reduction remains part of its policy depending on the level of international ambition.

Some research has questioned whether Direct Action, the Coalition climate policy, can even meet the 5% target with the allocated budget. The Climate Institute says it faces a cost over-run of between $4 and $15 billion, and Reputex says it could be as high as $35 billion

Because of this, Butler said it is “absolutely critical that Australia take to the negotiating table, as a very big emitter of carbon pollution, a very big economy in the world that we take a credible policy to those negotiations.” And he did not think that Direct Action was credible.

“We have a global responsibility as a rich country that emits a lot of carbon pollution to make a serious change in the way we do things in this country, much more than planting some trees or hanging the towel up on the back of the hotel room door when we’re staying interstate,” he said.

“This is going to be a tough change; this is going to be a serious change to the way in which we do business, if we are going to grapple with the challenge of climate change in a responsible and sensible way.

Quite why Labor has not made a bigger deal out of the climate change issue has never been made clear. Part of it might be the determination of Labor headquarters to differentiate itself from the Greens, the only party making a bid deal out of climate and renewable energy in this election.

Butler showed that Labor has good some lines to sell about the Coalition policy. He noted Direct Action was conceived at the height of denial against climate science, and still rests on a “body of opinion” within the Coalition that climate change science just isn’t convincing.

Butler noted that much of this had been fed by journalists such as Andrew Bolt, and “flat-earth society organizations” around the world who started fundraising and undertaking significant advertising against climate change action.

Its current leader Tony Abbott replaced Malcolm Turnbull in a coup orchestrated by ultra-conservatives keen to kill an agreement on carbon pricing. Killing a carbon price is still the intention of Abbott. He argued on Monday at the National Press Club that it was an “act of self harm”.

But Butler said the substitute policy appeared a nonsense: “Greg Hunt … (has) been loaded with a policy that’s a dud. Sort of like giving Bill Shorten work choices to go out and advocate. Hunt does it bravely but at the end of the day this is a policy driven by people in the Coalition that don’t actually think this is a real challenge whatsoever.”