Australian Carbon Emissions Will Increase, Wong Says (Update1)

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Aug. 9 (Bloomberg) — Australia’s government said the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions will continue to increase unless its proposed trading system aimed at reducing them is adopted.

By 2020, emissions will grow to 120 percent of the 2000 level without a carbon pollution reduction plan, Minister for Climate Change Penny Wong said on Australian Broadcasting Corp. television, citing a report released today.

Australian lawmakers will this week vote in the upper house on the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants carbon trading to start in 2011 to help reduce greenhouse gases by 5 percent to 15 percent from their 2000 level within 10 years. He plans to increase the goal to 25 percent provided a global agreement is reached.

“Without this scheme, Australia’s contribution to climate change will simply continue to rise and that’s the issue that the Senate will be confronted with,” Wong said. “What you do at home matters and Australia can’t sit on the sidelines and tell the rest of world that we want a global agreement to combat climate change but we don’t want to have to do our share.”

Rudd’s climate legislation faces defeat in the Senate, where the government needs an extra seven votes to pass legislation. The Liberal-National opposition, five Greens, an independent and a Family First Senator oppose the program’s targets and economic modeling.

‘Piece of Rubbish’

“I don’t think people will be happy when they realize it hasn’t changed the temperature of the globe,” National Party lawmaker Barnaby Joyce, who opposes the program, said today on Ten Network Holdings Ltd.’s Meet the Press television program. “It’s just a piece of rubbish.”

Australia’s emission growth slowed over the past year because of the financial crisis, although output of greenhouse gases is still rising, with an average increase of 1.6 percent between September 1998 and March 2009, the Age newspaper said today, citing a report by the Department of Climate Change.

The nation produced the equivalent of 584 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2008, up from 553 million tons in 2000, the newspaper said, citing the report. Without any action, that will rise to 664 million tons by 2020, it said.

“We are only a nation of 20-odd million people, if any country is going to do anything about climate change for the world it has got to be places like the U.S., Europe and China,” said Craig James, an economist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney. “We can do a small part here in Australia, we can pull our weight and provide the contribution, but really when it comes to climate change, this is a global thing.”

By Madelene Pearson
To contact the reporter on this story: Madelene Pearson in Melbourne on [email protected]