Australia, Indonesia investigate climate change options
Updated
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has returned from Washington to find his proposed climate change legislation in tatters. Mr Rudd will be going to the UN Copenhagen summit empty-handed, after the opposition blocked his proposed emissions trading legislation in the Senate. Mr Rudd says he'll reintroduce the legislation when parliament resumes in February, and today played down suggestions of calling early elections. Today the Australian debate on cutting emissions turned to nuclear power.
Meantime in Indonesia, hope is being pinned on exploiting geothermal energy, with a new paper out on how to achieve President Yudhoyono's plan to slow emissions growth by just over 40 per cent by the year 2020 without jeopardising development.
Presenter: Linda Mottram, Canberra Correspondent.
Speakers: Tony Abbott, Australian Liberal Party leader; Dr Ziggy Switkowski, chair, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation; Dr Stephen Howes, Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University; Dr Frank Jotzo, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University
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MOTTRAM: The Australian opposition's dramatic leadership upheaval this week has had just as dramatic an impact on the country's debate about how best to respond to climate change.
ABBOTT: We won't have an ETS as part of our policy going to the next election and we won't be having a tax as part of our policy going to the next election.
MOTTRAM: The new opposition leader, Tony Abbott, he ditched the very idea of an emissions trading scheme - an ETS - as an option for his side of politics, at least until the United States gets one. And he had his newly disciplined Senators vote down the government's emissions tradig scheme within hours of his election. And he shifted the debate on another front too.
ABBOTT: I'm quite happy to have a debate about the nuclear option.
MOTTRAM: Joining Tony Abbott, the head of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Dr Ziggy Switkowski.
SWITKOWSKI: What other countries have found that if you're not going to use fossil fuels, coal gas and oil, and if you don't have abundant hydroelectric power which we don't unfortunatey then the only other alternative is nuclear power, and it's a good alternative because the technology's been around. We know it works, we're competent in Australia in project managing those sorts of things and we have so much of the world's uranium.
MOTTRAM: It is not though the Rudd government's preferred option. It remains determined to get its emissions trading scheme into law and will reintroduce the legislation early in the new year. Dr Stephen Howes is an expert in international climate change policy. He says the failure of the ETS ahead of the Copenhagen climate change meeting undermines Australia's position internationally.
HOWES: To establish credibility promises are not enough because we've made promises before. Now to establish credibility we actually need action. And so ETS is a type of action and by showing that we haven't been able to put that in place, well then we're not demonstrating action on climate change.
MOTTRAM: And ETS design expert, Dr Frank Jotzo, also from the ANU, questions the viability of the Australian opposition's new idea that emissions can be cut without an ETS or a tax.
JOTZO: You can either do that through an economically efficient mechanism, such as emissions trading, call it a tax, a price on emissions is what we need, or you can do it by regulation -- a law here, a subsidy there, another thing somewhere else and that will be very messy and it will be very, very costly. So yes it can be done but its not a good way of doing it.
MOTTRAM: Dr Jotzo also says start-up costs are too expensive to make nuclear power viable in a non-nuclear power country like Australia which also has abundant energy alternatives like solar, wind, gas and geothermal. And it's to geothermal in particular that Indonesia is keen to turn. Dr Jotzo worked with Indonesia's Ministry of Finance on its new Green Paper, a policy paper, on the economics of responding to climate change. And he says there's reason to take great heart from Indonesia's approach.
JOTZO: They're aiming for a cut of a quarter or more relative to where they would have been otherwise. Now, Indonesia's now busy working out just how that can be done and how it can be done economically efficiently because what you cannot do is jeopardise development through climate change mitigation.
MOTTRAM: And he says there are plenty of options, including reducing deforestation, improvement land management after logging and reducing the incidence of fires in peat lands, a huge source of carbon emissions and air pollution. But its in power generation that Dr Jotzo says Indonesia is doing critical work.
JOTZO: Indonesia is in fact embarking on a policy reform in the power sector with the express objective of fostering geothermal power over coal-based power which is a very, very positive thing, which the Ministry of Finance in particular is strongly involved at this point to get the policy settings right.
MOTTRAM: Indonesia is interested in international financing for its policy choices, one of the many difficult issues facing world leaders at Copenhagen. But Dr Jotzo says Indonesia has made it clear it's not waiting for global financing to turn up before it takes action.
