Aussie PM urges parliament to approve carbon cuts

AFP

CANBERRA: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd urged parliament Tuesday to approve legislation aiming to slash carbon pollution by up to 25 percent by 2020 ahead of next month's global talks on climate change.

Rudd said Australia had to get "real" about climate change by introducing the cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, as the opposition Coalition held crunch talks aimed at thrashing out a deal.

"Climate change and our action on it will go way beyond any of our lives... it's a fundamental existential question for the future," he told reporters.

"It's time the country got real about it."

The scheme would allow Australia to cut carbon emissions by between five and 25 percent from 2000 levels by 2020, with the higher levels dependent on an ambitious global agreement at the United Nations talks in Copenhagen next month.

Rudd, who won office in 2007 on an environmentally friendly platform, has described climate change as "the greatest moral challenge of our generation" in Australia, which is in the grip of the worst drought in a century.

He said the outcome in Copenhagen, where some 190 countries have been invited to hammer out a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012, would shape elements of the scheme.

"But we are consolidating an Australian position to give our business community certainty for the future," he said.

"National action is one thing but frankly global action is fundamental to our long-term survival as a country."

Australia is the developed world's biggest per capita carbon polluter, various studies have shown, although it accounts for just a small fraction of global emissions.

Scientists say emissions by industrialised nations must fall by 25-40 percent by 2020 over 1990 levels to limit warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a threshold widely adopted as safe.

The EU has already vowed to reduce its emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels before 2020, raising the target to 30 percent in the event of an international agreement on the issue, while Japan has offered 25 percent.

The world's biggest polluters, China and the United States, have yet to set limits but Washington is expected to announce a target for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions before the UN climate conference.