Malcolm Turnbull On Climate Change  

I don't imagine that this would have gone down all that well at The Sydney Institute, but the likely next leader of the Liberal Party made quite a good speech (barring his misguided enthusiasm for carbon sequestration and nuclear power, presumably a result of ignorance about low cost solar thermal power) about Climate Change and Economics there last week.

This brings me to the topic of climate change.

Let us restate the challenge.

The world’s governments have now accepted that our growing emissions of CO2 and similar greenhouse gases has caused the earth’s climate to warm and that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change we must dramatically reduce our emissions of those gases.

This global objective which is both consistent with the science and growing in acceptance is a reduction of emissions by 2050 to a level equal to 50 per cent of global emissions in 1990. Note that this is much, much larger than cutting 2050 emissions to half their business as usual level. The Stern Review estimated this would amount to a reduction to 23 per cent of the business as usual level.

This will be a costly exercise. We will all be faced with consequences of climate change whatever reduced levels of emissions are achieved. That can be described as the cost of adaptation, some of it certainly unavoidable. In addition we will be faced with the costs of reducing emissions. That can be described as the costs of mitigation.

For Australia, an example of the cost of adaptation is the many desalination plants being built around our coast line, or the National Plan for Water Security – $10 billion to secure the future of irrigated agriculture in a hotter, drier future.

An example of the cost of mitigation will be the extra we will all pay for low emission energy. Gas is dearer than coal. Wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear are presently dearer than gas. ...

During my time as Environment Minister three points about climate change became very clear to me and you will have heard me making them often. They bear repeating today.

The first is obvious: climate change is a fact, not a theory. By that I mean that whatever reservations people might have about the science, policymakers must, as Rupert Murdoch once observed, “give the planet the benefit of the doubt.”

The second point is less obvious. Given that so much of our emissions are from sources that are likely to be very hard to abate either at all or at realistic cost, the emission reduction goals we are setting ourselves for 2050 will mean in practical terms that we will need in 42 years to have a world where all or almost all of our energy comes from zero emission sources and where deforestation, currently the source of 20 per cent of global emissions, is replaced by a global programme of reforestation – an initiative I was proud to have pioneered while Environment Minister in the Howard Government last year.

This would mean that there would be no coal fired power stations unless the CO2 was captured and stored safely under the ground. Automobiles would be electric – a whole energy hungry world would have to undergo an industrial and technological transformation of a kind never seen before in its global scope and scale.

The third point is that there is no prospect of achieving the massive global reductions in emissions that science demands unless all of the major emitting nations both in the developed and developing world play a part. Until a few years ago that was a controversial statement, but as always the relentless logic of arithmetic has won the day. Indeed, as we saw at the US President’s first Major Economies Meeting on climate last September even if the developed world cut its emissions by 100 per cent by 2050, to achieve a global reduction to 50 per cent of 2005 levels, the developing world would need to cut its emissions by 47 per cent. ...

It is important to remember that apart from the essentially symbolic issue of ratifying Kyoto the differences between the climate change policies of the Coalition and the Labor Party were not great at the time of the last election. And that was in large measure because in so many respects the Coalition was the agenda setter in climate change responses which the Labor Party then endorsed. The National Plan for Water Security, the Global Initiative on Forests and Climate being two obvious and recent examples.

Given the Coalition’s failure to ratify Kyoto it was inevitable that the political debate in Australia would be a fairly arid affair between the “believers” against the supposed non-believers or sceptics.

That political debate is over. The question now is how are we going to respond?