Greens address climate crisis
Greens put greenhouse targets in legislation - Will Labor and Liberal support them?
The Australian Greens today introduced to the Senate a bill to set greenhouse gas reduction targets and increase renewable electricity usage, and called on Prime Minister John Howard and Labor leader Kim Beazley to tell the community whether they will support them.
The Greens' bill is the first federal legislation to set critical targets to reduce greenhouse emissions. The targets are 20 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2020, and 80 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050.
Under the bill, the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target is increased to ensure that renewable electricity contributes at least 15 percent of national demand by 2012 and 25 per cent by 2020.
Greens climate change spokesperson Senator Christine Milne told parliament that the Howard government was failing the community on climate change, the greatest threat facing the world at the beginning of the 21St century.
"Climate change is a moral and ethical question. It goes to the heart of questions of justice, equity and survival of humankind and the ecosystems on which all life depends," Senator Milne told the Senate as she introduced the Climate Change Action Bill 2006.
"These are the values that need to be brought to the question and they are the values not evident in the Australian government's position. Where are Australian values now?
"The Australian government has refused to take action to address global warming because fundamentally it knows it is happening but has decided that corporate profits from the coal, oil and gas sectors feeding into budget surpluses and tax cuts are more important than the long-term interests of the Australian community, the lives of the world's poor or the ultimate survival of the species."
The bill also provides for a greenhouse trigger to be inserted into the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, set at 100,000 tonnes, to ensure that information about the greenhouse gas impact of major developments is adequately considered in relation to national greenhouse reduction targets.
