Paris Climate Change Deal First Step On Long Road

Australian Financial Review - Editorial

United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres with French Foreign Minister and COP21 president Laurent Fabius as he uses a hammer to mark the adoption of the agreement at Paris. Francois Mori

The United Nations climate change conference that concluded in Paris at the weekend marks a welcome contrast from the debacle of the 2009 Copenhagen summit in that the 195 countries involved could agree on a broad framework for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. That is a massive relief given the need for the world's nations to collectively guard against potentially catastrophic global warming.  
The Copenhagen failure proved to be a fatal setback for the Rudd government, which did not anticipate the hostile position of the Chinese government six years ago. With China being more co-operative, the Turnbull government has emerged with credit from Paris.
Australia successively pushed for regular reviews of voluntary targets with the final agreement requiring "stocktaking" meetings that would require all countries to report on their progress within a common reporting system.
While that amounts to a big first step towards a global effort to limit emissions, it replaces the one-size-fits-all approach that delivered the Copenhagen debacle. In its place, individual countries will be permitted to nominate their own targets, so-called "nationally determined contributions".  And only some sections of the final agreement are legally binding.
The all-important emissions targets remain voluntary to avoid the deal being classified as an international treaty which would then have to be ratified by the US Senate.
This means that much still depends the naming and shaming power of the treaty and just how far individual countries are prepared to go, particularly when times are tough. Australia can claim some credit for its target settled on when Tony Abbott was prime minister: to cut emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
While these have been criticised, Mr Turnbull and Environment Minister Greg Hunt can claim that, in per capita terms, this pledge is second in terms of ambition only to Brazil among G20 nations.
Whether the many pledges made at the Paris meeting, assuming they are adhered to, are enough to keep the earth warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels (1 degree from now) or the more aspirational 1.5 degrees, remains to be seen.

Policy jumble
Although this newspaper has always said that scientific advice should be heeded in this area, if only as a precaution against worst-case scenarios, climate science is not exact enough to precisely link carbon dioxide concentrations with specific atmospheric temperatures.
After bungling climate change policy so badly under both the Rudd and Gillard governments, Labor would be wise to pull back from its calls for Australia to commit to even deeper cuts to carbon emissions.
Similarly, Malcolm Turnbull should work on reducing the costs of Australia's haphazard jumble of climate change policies before getting out ahead of the rest of the world again.
As we report elsewhere today, the mandated growth of renewable energy, for instance, is injecting considerable volatility and cost into Australia's electricity networks.
The lesson of the past decade or more of climate change politics is that Australian governments need to recognise that global frameworks struggle to recognise the particular structure of the Australian economy.
As an efficient producer and exporter of fossil fuels, Australia would probably retain a significant fossil fuel industry under any relatively low cost reduction in global emissions, such as through a global carbon price.
Global emissions may actually have fallen slightly this year due to a slowdown in economic growth, and hence coal consumption in China, which accounts for 28 per cent of global emissions.
Yet China also has 100 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity under construction or approved and intends to curtail emissions through measures such as coal washing plants, retrofitting coal-fired power plants and coal chemical operations and by controlling residential use.
With hundreds of millions of people yet to be connected electricity, India inevitably will increase its coal-fired generation, which will include the use of Australian coal. Australia should seek to aid such noble economic development while minimising the overall risk to humankind.