Page 4852 - Week 11 - Thursday, 21 October 2010
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to make this work. But the private sector is avoiding such investment because they are concerned about the future of it.
There was a recently released report on Australia, Beyond zero emissions, dealing with the totally sustainable energy, that said to go to totally renewable energy in Australia would cost about $370 billion. That is not going to come from governments. If you want to follow that approach, it will come from private sector investment. The article on climate change said:
The research found that 90 per cent of investment managers were deterred from investing in low carbon projects by the lack of long-term policies and by retrospective changes to member states’ climate change guidelines, while grid access and grid infrastructure issues were seen as a deterrent by 45 per cent.
One of the deterrents is the lack of long-term policies. How are we going to achieve this? If you want investors in the ACT, based on the European experience, they need to know how the government is going to do this. The government cannot tell us. If you want real change, you have got to have a plan to achieve it. It is well and good to pat yourself on the back and beat your chest and say, “We have set a target.” Tell me how. Tell me when. Tell me how much it will cost. Tell me how much it will affect families. Tell me what the effect of this is.
This article from the Climate Spectator goes on to say:
Nearly two thirds of the funds managers said setting tougher targets and sending the carbon price higher would incentivise low-carbon investments, while 50 per cent saw a long-term and detailed roadmap out to 2030, even in the absence of international action, as one of the most important drivers for incentivising a shift in investment sentiment.
Where is the road map? We know where we want to go but nobody can tell us how we are going to get there. I have not heard anything in this debate about how we will get there. With due respect to my father, who picks me up every time I use this line in this place, it is like that old Irish act: “If I was going there I wouldn’t be starting from here.” Where are we starting from, how are we going and when will we know that we have got there? This is the problem with this proposal. As we have said, we are not against what is being proposed. We do have some concerns about how we will get there and how much it will cost.
There is no denying the changes but, as I have said, you do have to temper them with the fact that the climate changes over every time period. I saw a chart on the Greenland ice cores for the last 1,000 years. It plotted the average mean temperature. Europe was this hot back in about 1350, then it got colder, then it got hotter. Indeed, there is some evidence that we cooled off in the 1970s and got a bit warmer in the 1980s. So we need to know what it is that we are talking about.
Mr Rattenbury talked about a long-term view. A long-term view should be just that—a view developed after appropriate decisions, research and analysis—not a short-term review, not a reactive approach that ignores the realities of the long term, that seeks short-term outcomes which may appear easy to achieve but are not appropriate for the long term.
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