Page 5678 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 6 December 2011
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necessarily very close to the ACT. It will do nothing to reduce the emissions profile of Australia. Those are the facts, and for all of those reasons the Canberra Liberals will not be supporting the legislation.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (11.39): The Greens welcome the debate on this bill today and believe it is another step towards building the Canberra of tomorrow, a city that will be sustainable, a city with new and emerging employment opportunities, a city that thinks about the long term as well as a city that delivers on the needs for today. The bill is about delivering large-scale renewable energy installations. These are the sorts of installations we need to start investing in now as part of a long-term goal and vision to move to fossil-free energy production in this country.
There is across this country a great deal of enthusiasm for the investment in renewable energy. Groups such as Beyond Zero Emissions have done scenarios where they envisage Australia being able to achieve 100 per cent renewable energy in a time frame of the next 10 to 15 years and with an economic cost that, with political will, is manageable. So they are the sorts of visions that are out there. For the ACT to be embarking on this sort of legislation and this endeavour to get this level of investment in our community in renewable energy, I think, puts us at the forefront of where some of the more innovative thinking is in this country.
This bill and the many other initiatives that sit alongside it are of course part of our response to reducing the ACT’s greenhouse gas emissions and playing our part in tackling global climate change. It certainly reflects the necessity for us as human beings to change how we treat our planet and how we, I guess, power the lifestyle that we choose to lead.
We have of course set ourselves an ambitious target in the ACT to reduce our emissions by 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and to strive for carbon neutrality by 2060. And this is a level of ambition that reflects the science, the science that has been studied meticulously over recent decades and spells out what we need to do to avoid dangerous climate change. That target necessitates fundamental changes to how we derive our energy.
Just yesterday new research came out from the Global Carbon Project on their findings for 2010, which was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. What they found was some very disturbing trends in greenhouse gas emissions. They found that man-made carbon dioxide released in 2010 reached a record 10 billion tonnes. That was an increase of 5.9 per cent over the 2009 emissions, a staggering growth in global greenhouse emissions in that 12-month period.
They also found that global CO2 emissions since 2000 are tracking at the high end of the projections used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which will result in warming exceeding two degrees Celsius by 2100. They also found that the past decade has seen an unprecedented increase in greenhouse gas released from fossil fuels, deforestation and the manufacture of cement, resulting in an average rise of 3.1 per cent per year, which compares with an annual increase of just one per cent per year during the 1990s. There are a series of other findings which are quite disturbing and certainly put us at the higher end of forecast expectations of global temperature increase.
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