Bad Climate for the Wong Answer…

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd insists his government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) strikes the right balance, evidenced by the fact both environmental and business lobbyists are unhappy with it.

But with draft legislation released in March, this logic lays the foundations for both political and scientific failure. The scheme is now facing the same clear challenge from both the Senate crossbench and the latest scientific data: change or fail.

Politically, climate change minister Penny Wong must herd cats. The Coalition is opposed to any action on climate change that might impose costs on business, so Mr Rudd and Minister Wong need to win the support of the Greens and Independents.

Unless South Australia’s interests are directly threatened, Senator Nick Xenophon has indicated an unwillingness to be obstructionist, while Family First’s Steven Fielding craves the spotlight but not the responsibility that comes with having the deciding vote to block major legislation.

But Greens deputy leader Senator Christine Milne is attacking the 489-page CPRS proposal for being “as thick as the phone book, but full of wrong numbers”.

According to Milne, while it makes repeated reference to carbon targets of 450 parts per million (ppm), if the world adopted the government’s proposed reduction target of 5-15 per cent – numbers “enshrined in the bill”- atmospheric carbon would reach at least 650ppm. This would nearly double the planet’s natural 350ppm load of atmospheric carbon.

Milne is now deputy chair of a two-month Senate inquiry on climate policy that will examine all options for mitigating and responding to climate change, before reporting to Parliament on May 14.

As for their 5-vote block on the crossbenches, Milne has given the government cause for guarded optimism, saying that “the Greens look forward to detailed Senate scrutiny of this draft bill and lengthy negotiations with the Government to green it up”.

But she has signalled support will not be automatic saying, “you cannot negotiate with the laws of physics and chemistry”.

The consequences of these laws were being made clear in Denmark as the raft of six bills within the CPRS was released. At the University of Copenhagen, 2500 scientists and delegates met to consider more than 1600 scientific papers from nearly 80 countries as a prelude to the December Copenhagen conference of the parties to Kyoto.

The synthesis of their findings will be compiled in a report due for release in June, but of the six key messages already sent to world governments, the first is the most telling:

“Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.”