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Pass the climate parcel

By Tim Wilson - posted Monday, 28 September 2009


In a speech delivered at New York University's School of Law, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong flagged negotiating text for "national schedules" that would require countries to report their emissions targets and efforts to achieve them.

According to Wong, one of the benefits is to "deliver the environmental certainty of knowing that there is consensus on a vision for our global future". Considering this is the objective of establishing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that oversees negotiations, it is hardly a step forward. Instead Wong's proposal is designed to keep the music playing a little longer.

At the G8 summit in Italy earlier this year, leaders agreed to a long-term goal of reducing global emissions by 50 per cent by 2050, and 80 per cent by developed countries.

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Japan's announced aspiration to reduce emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 is consistent. But like the hot air being expelled at the New York summit, G8 leaders' statements are non-binding and are primarily used for political positioning.

This week climate change negotiations resume in Bangkok to iron out details for a Copenhagen agreement.

Present negotiating texts include radically different and mutually exclusive visions for emissions targets and how to secure them through instruments, including international financing and undermining intellectual property on low-carbon technology.

Expect another round of media savvy statements to ensure no attending minister looks like they are holding back a deal. But the music will stop by the end of the December Copenhagen meeting and if ministers are smart, they won't be passing the parcel, they will be dropping it.

And while Rudd and Wong seek to pass their emissions trading scheme they will be committing Australia to unilateral action to harm our economy while the rest of the world points fingers for Copenhagen's failure.

So even if Australia isn't left with the parcel in Copenhagen, Rudd and Wong will come home to start a new game: ETS hot potato.

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First published in The Australian on September 24, 2009.



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About the Author

Tim Wilson is the federal Liberal member for Goldstein and a former human rights commissioner.

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