Kevin Rudd:Global leader in Climate Change, sounds familiar!
Dennis Shanahan writes in the Australian on Kevin Rudd’s approach to the ETS and Rudd’s desire to be a leader in this area. Sound familiar.
The Australian Government has set itself an ambitious target of implementing its own emissions trading scheme by 2010 that will cut emissions by raising the cost of carbon, electricity and fuel and a whole raft of other things with it.
So, Australia is not just part of the process to find ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions with a global system next year, it is leading the way.
Yet as here people are becoming more wary, as noted here:
Details of the Government’s ETS and the drastic measures called for in the Garnaut report on greenhouse gases are making people warier of the issue.
So now:-
What’s more, Rudd is trying to play down the view that Australia is going it alone on climate change and “ahead of everybody else”.
Once, only too happy to be seen leading the way on climate change, in contrast to the tardy John Howard, Rudd is increasingly referring to the existing emissions systems in the European Union, some states of the US and the consideration being given an ETS in both Japan and New Zealand.
Yet none of these schemes go to the extent being envisaged in Australia.
Again this sounds familiar. Now the comment on the reach and range of the Australian scheme is interesting. How familiar is NZ business with the Garnaut proposals? Has anyone in NZ yet taken a hard look at what a Garnaut like scheme might mean in NZ? Let us not forget the significant differences between the economic drivers in the two economies?
The article concludes:-
The G8 summit, to which Australia was invited as an observer with the right to speak briefly to the gathered leaders of the world’s richest economies, was designated to help further the cause of supporting African nations in need but then grew into a much wider conference looking at soaring oil prices, rising food prices and food security and the challenge of climate change.
In the end it achieved little in any of those spheres and was accused of actually going backwards by some of the developing nations.
Rudd gave one of the bluntest assessments of any of the leaders there, simply saying there was no great breakthrough and that there had to be more political will and momentum if the Copenhagen talks were to succeed.
Indeed, Rudd has repeatedly referred to the “grave danger” a lack of action in the international forums poses to the Copenhagen target for a global scheme.
He’s right. He will also be aware that if the architecture of global forums fails to deliver a global response to climate change that includes binding economic targets on the developed and developing world, he will be left as the architect of one of the world’s few truly comprehensive trading systems and bearing the burden himself.
Adam suspects that both Rudd and Clark will have an incentive to thus work together on this issue, as both need to avoid being seen as isolated from their electorates and striking out on their own. Though Adam suspects that in the end, it will probably be Rudd of the two who is likely to be the more pragmatic.
It is interesting that both Clark and Rudd seem to have such faith in multi-lateral forums such as G8, UN etc.
