The Abbott government will ask for advice about how far Australia should cut its greenhouse gas emissions after 2020, and what policies it should use to make the long-term cuts.
A discussion paper to be released this week asks how deep Australia’s emissions cuts should be, what domestic policy should be used to make the cuts and how Australia should compare its greenhouse gas reduction targets with other countries.
The paper will inform a special ministerial taskforce, chaired by the prime minister Tony Abbott, which must decide on Australia’s post-2020 target by mid year, ahead of a United Nations meeting in Paris in December where it is hoped a post-2020 emissions reduction deal can be struck.
Many observers, including the communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, and all available modelling, have concluded the government’s existing “Direct Action” policy of competitive grants is unlikely to be able to deliver deeper emissions reduction costs at an affordable price.
The chair of the bureaucratic team working on the policy told an Australian National University seminar last week his job was to advise on the target and to give the government a “plausible menu” of policies to meet it.
“Along with the post-2020 target it will be important to think about how Australia will reach the target,” deputy secretary of the department of prime minister and cabinet, David Gruen, said.
He said the taskforce was “looking at a broad range of policies with a fresh perspective and is not ruling anything out at this stage”.
Decisions were up to the government, but his taskforce would be looking at “policies across the broad range of relevant sectors of the economy that could achieve abatement in a cost-effective manner ... for example measures to improve energy productivity”.
The European Union has announced it will reduce emissions by 40% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels and officially submitted this target to the UN. The United States has said it will reduce emissions by 26%-28% below its 2005 levels in 2025, and is expected to lodge this pledge soon. China has announced plans to achieve the peaking of CO2 emissions around 2030 and “to make best efforts to peak early”.
The discussion paper will emphasise Australia’s “unique national circumstances” including its reliance on resource exports, geography and population growth.
The ministerial taskforce that must decide on a target by mid year includes Abbott, foreign minister Julie Bishop, environment minister Greg Hunt, trade minister Andrew Robb and industry minister Ian Macfarlane.
Successive governments have established taskforces to examine climate policy, including the 2006 taskforce headed by the then head of the prime minister’s department Peter Shergold, which recommended the Howard government introduce an emissions trading scheme and two reports by professor Ross Garnaut to the former Labor government to inform its emissions trading scheme, which the Abbott government repealed.
The Abbott government would never introduce a new economy-wide emissions trading scheme, but its existing policy contains a provision which, if activated, could create a baseline and credit emissions trading scheme for heavy industry and electricity generators and make longer-term emission reductions more affordable. The government is about to issue another discussion paper about this so-called “safeguards mechanism”.
