Con-fusion Over Going Green

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Climate change demands new technologies not targets, writes Jennifer Marohasy

Last year was the hottest on record in Australia with the annual mean temperature 1.09C above the average. Globally temperatures have increase by 0.6C over the past three decades and 0.8C when measured over the last 100 years. 

The Kyoto Protocol, an attempt to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, has been promoted as the solution to global warming. 

The Protocol became legally binding on most of the developed world in February last year obliging participants to reduce their emissions by an average of 5.2 percent above 1990 levels by 2012. 

The Australian and US governments have refused to ratify the Protocol.
 
But even if Kyoto was fully implemented, with Australia and the USA joining up, it would at most deliver a temperature reduction of 0.15C by 2100. 

Kyoto is limited because about 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions are from countries not subject to Kyoto restrictions. These countries are exempt because they are considered part of the developing world.  

Indeed, Kyoto divides the world into two groups – the developed nations and the developing.  This is a discriminatory approach based on the idea that rich countries have historically emitted more greenhouse gases per person.

Last year, the “Kyoto dissidents” Australia and the US, formed a Partnership with the governments of the two most populous nations on Earth, China and India, as well as South Korea and Japan, to form the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. 

Together these countries account for about half of the world's GDP, population, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.     

The partnership was announced in Laos in July as a solution to global warming with a key aim the development, sharing and promotion of new and improved technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.     

The coming together of these 6 nations is a fascinating development. 

Japan and South Korea are already members of an international alliance committed to building a $16 billion nuclear fusion reactor in the south of France.   Fusion is what powers the sun.

While the Partnership was announced last July, and various policy documents are available on the internet, ministers from the six countries formally meet for the very first time in Sydney today.  

Some environmental groups have questioned their commitment to curbing emissions as the partnership documents state that arbitrary targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions will not be on the agenda and economic growth will not be compromised.  

Emission reduction targets are central to Kyoto, but many countries are not going to meet their Kyoto targets. 

Canada has increased its emissions by 24.2 percent from the base 1990 level, far from its 2012 target of a 6 percent reduction. 

Because there are corrective payments for countries that fail to meet their targets Ireland is facing a potential bill of £400 million pounds ($A815million). 

Britain is one of the few countries on-track to meet its Kyoto emissions target. 

Britain has 14 nuclear power stations and Prime Minister Tony Blair is considering the possibility of a new generation of nuclear power stations because nuclear is greenhouse neutral.

China and Japan have already committed to new generation nuclear power plants as part of existing strategies to reduce emissions.  

Australia and India are the only countries in the new Partnership without a significant current nuclear energy capability. 

Australia has been left behind in what some describe as a global renaissance in nuclear energy use, perhaps reflecting the power of environmental groups – which have an aversion to nuclear energy – in this country. 

However, an increasing number of prominent environmentalists including James Lovelock – who developed the Gaia theory – and Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, are speaking out in favor of the technology. 

The new partnership is also likely to support and promote research into solar, clean coal, hydrogen and fusion as future sources of energy.  

There is a clear belief in science and technology though some have remarked that it is not a lack of technology but rather effective mechanisms for technology transfer that will prove the greater challenge. 

The Partnership has the potential to achieve much more than Kyoto. 

Then again, with just Kyoto, global emissions will be some 40 percent higher in 2010 than in 1990.

When the Australian Bureau of Meteorology recently reported that last year was the hottest on record, it cautioned against assuming next year would be hotter again.

The bureau emphasized that annual temperatures are influenced by many factors.  

Who knows what the temperature will be next year and who knows which of the new technologies will prove winners?  

Some say fusion is just a pipe dream.

But we can perhaps agree that there is need for a new approach and, given the mix of nations at the meeting today in Sydney, reason for optimism. 

As Sheikh Yamani, a founding architect of OPEC, pointed out some years ago, “the stone age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil.” 

There will be a day when we stop using oil and coal, and it will be when new energy technologies provide superior benefits.

Published in The Courier-Mail

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