"Three Big Greenhouse Lies" - The Guardian Eviscerates John Howard & His Government

Last week, in an attempt to discredit new information which showed that our emissions of greenhouse gases have increased significantly, the Government stated that it had virtually met its Kyoto Protocol requirements for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO) has released figures which showed that Australia has increased its net emissions of greenhouse gases since 1990. Ten years ago at the Kyoto international conference on climate change, Australia forced the UN to accept the proposition that it could actually increase its emissions, even though other developed nations committed themselves to substantially reducing their emission levels.

Australia also signed the Kyoto Protocol, but refused to ratify it, because to do so would have obliged the government to try to reach emission targets indicated as appropriate for signatories. Since then, as the AGO figures show, our rate of emissions has soared, and we now produce nine percent more than we did in 1990, the datum year.

However, not only did we exceed our formal emissions target, which allowed for an increase rather than a reduction, but our real emission level is due to increase even more dramatically. The estimate for "carbon equivalent" emissions makes a deduction for increased forestation, and an increase for land clearing. A few years ago the NSW and Queensland governments began to restrict the rate of land clearance in their states, and this improved our estimated post-1990 emission level. However, this improvement in performance will dissipate over the next few years. Tony Moore, a spokesman for the Australian Conservation Foundation, commented: "Europe is committed to a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020. Our national emissions remain forecast by the government to increase by 27 percent by 2020. That’s the real deal." Despite this, the Howard Government’s Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull has simply declared smugly that our emission rate was only one percent higher than our allocated level.

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It could therefore be argued that in order to achieve an equitable level of emission reductions, nations which have a high per capita level of emissions should accept correspondingly high targets for emission reductions. According to these criteria, since Australia has the second highest emission rate, it should have most stringent emission rate. However, under the Howard Government, which has striven to defend the interests of the big coal mining corporations, we have achieved the exact opposite. With the second highest per capita emission rate, we now have the least ambitious targets for emission reductions; in fact we are rapidly increasing our level of emissions.


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http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve07/1318greenhouse.html