COP21 comes, ready or not

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The Paris Climate Change Conference, COP21, is underway. Martin Wolf has a nice backgrounder:

Couldn’t have out that better myself. Meanwhile, Dumb and Dumber are thrashing it out at home, from The Australian:

Malcolm Turnbull will hold open the prospect of increasing Aus­tralia’s carbon target as he joins other world leaders at today’s clim­ate change conference in Paris to ­generate momentum to limit ­global warming to 2C.

The Prime Minister’s message at the UN summit will be that the government is prepared to consider more ambitious targets to ­reduce greenhouse gas emissions in rolling five-year reviews, if there is a comprehensive global agreement.

While Mr Turnbull has made it clear that Australia’s 26-28 per cent reduction target by 2030 will not be changed at the conference, he will tell world ­leaders there is scope for change when the goal is first reviewed in two years.

There won’t be a “comprehensive global agreement”, as we know, so this is political jibber jabber. I’m not quite as pessimistic as Martin Wolf, however, because non-binding agreements can still place a lot of pressure upon individual nations as international relations normatives shift. As well, universal laws can backfire by empowering loon ponds everywhere again international interference. Freedom to act domestically ought still mean for Australia that increasing targets is inevitable even without some formalised “grand bargain”.

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Meanwhile, at the AFR:

Labor’s Bill Shorten was out of the blocks early this year, announcing Labor would stick to its policy of introducing an emissions trading scheme: a move that knowingly left Labor open to a scare campaign on a new carbon tax.

In the past few days, he has gone a step further, announcing that Labor would be seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels, though not saying exactly how this would occur.

…Labor believes Turnbull’s credibility on climate change is vulnerable because he has gone to Paris with a policy inherited from Tony Abbott, which he has previously described as “an environmental fig leaf to cover a a determination to do nothing”.

The Opposition is also clearly seeking to position itself aggressively on the issue at a time when it faces as big a threat from the Greens as it does from the Coalition. With a collapsing base in the polls, it is not hard to see Shorten’s announcement on greenhouse gas emissions as anything other than a little desperate.

But the Opposition Leader argues his numbers are based on the recommendations of the Climate Change Authority and therefore reflect what needs to be done if we are to properly address the issue.

It is hard to see the Kingslayer’s commitment in any other light, even if I agree with it.

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At this stage, with PM Turnbull still trying to see off the 30% of MPs that constitute his loon pond, I think it unlikely that we’ll see any greater commitment to mitigation for some time. It will take him several elections to drain the pond and push forward with decent policy.

Labor, on the other hand, is so unlikely to win power in its current formation that its targets are nothing more than symbolism that the Government can safely ignore.

Thus Australia will very likely continue to drag the COP21 chain, perhaps all the way to global sanctions.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.