What kind of a hollow suit is this bloke?
Malcolm Turnbull has slapped down Tony Abbott, declaring the former prime minister was wrong in saying the emissions targets signed in Paris Agreement were aspirational.
The Prime Minister said his predecessor was being disingenuous in arguing Australia could scrap plans to cut emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2030 because it was only an aspiration rather than a commitment.
Mr Abbott agreed to the emissions reduction target when he was prime minister in 2015 as part of an international effort to take action on climate change.
“That is not in fact the case. It was a real commitment and as Tony said at the time, Australia is one of those nations that when it makes commitments, it keeps them,” Mr Turnbull told Sky News.
“It is a serious and genuine commitment and one which we made knowing that Australians and other people around the world would expect us to keep it.
“We have a commitment under the Paris Agreement to cut our emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2030. That commitment was entered into by the government while Tony Abbott was prime minister.”
Yesterday the AEMO made clear what was necessary to meet these targets:
AEMO’s network development plan released last December said that for Australia to meet the pledge the Turnbull government made at the Paris climate talks in December 2015, 15.5 gigawatts of coal-fired generation would have to close between now and 2036.
That is equal to more than 10 times the effective output of Liddell, a 45-year-old power station in the Hunter Valley in NSW that AGL Energy, its owner, wants to close in 2022 in order to build more flexible wind, solar, gas peaking and demand response capacity.
The government pledged at Paris to reduce Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions by 28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, to review the targets every five years and to work towards zero net carbon emissions – the level scientists say is needed from rich countries to limit temperature increases to 2 degree Celsius – by 2050.
…A more aggressive scenario – such as Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target – or slower than expected growth in electricity demand would require an additional 3.3 GW of coal capacity or two or three Liddells to be shuttered.
Ipso facto Do-nothing Malcolm is committed to theses closures, right? Wrong:
The Turnbull government is working on a major redesign of the clean energy target that will likely fall short of the plan for almost half of Australia’s electricity to be generated by renewables by 2030.
Internal discussions have commenced about a revised target that would set a higher emissions baseline than the 0.6 tonnes of carbon per megawatt hour suggested by the Finkel review. The revised scheme would allow high-efficiency, low-emission coal-fired power plants that emit about 0.7 tonnes of carbon to receive partial certificates, or credits.
Promises to everybody, delivery to nobody, classic Do-nothing Malcolm.
The Coalition’s and the nation’s problem is not Tony Abbott, it is his charming cod piece.
