All isn't lost: a small sacrifice can save the planet

Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday 1/10/2008 Page: 1

AUSTRALIANS will be driving clean electric cars, giving up their lamb roast and rump steaks for chicken and pork, living in higher-density cities and swapping cheap air flights for interstate trains. In the outback, millions of beef cattle and sheep will disappear from the marginal rangelands, farmers will grow grasses and eucalypts for carbon trading and kangaroos will dominate the bush, potentially becoming one of the nation's biggest export meats.

This image of a sustainable future for Australia has now become a mainstream view with the release of Professor Ross Garnaut's final sweeping report on how the nation can take up the fight against climate change. It can be achieved for a modest increase in our electricity bills - but the overall cost will be less than the impact of the GST.

Delivering his 652-page study on the cost of climate change to the Federal Government, Professor Garnaut said the effort required by Australians to get a global climate agreement that could save the Great Barrier Reef, the food bowl of the Murray-Darling Basin and the wetlands of Kakadu National Park would be far less than the sacrifices of earlier generations. "This problem is very small compared to the resources we mobilised for the Second World War," Professor Garnaut said. At most, the nation would need to invest 2 per cent of its gross domestic product per year in 2020 to meet the report's most ambitious target.

Even so, Australia will need to undergo huge change by mid century if it wants to cut its emissions deeply enough to help achieve a global agreement that will avoid dangerous climate change and keep greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere from rising above 450 parts per million. And the success of this will depend on achieving a convincing global agreement at next year's UN climate talks.

Professor Garnaut warns that the profitable coal industry that also provides cheap electricity must clean up its act or disappear. "If the coal industry is to have a long-term future in a lowemissions economy then it will have to be transformed into near zero emissions, from source to end use, by mid-century," he finds. "Priority should be given to the resolution of whether a near zero coal future is even feasible, either partially or in total. If it is not, then Australia needs to know as soon as possible so that all who depend on the coal industry can begin the process of adjustment, and so that adequate and timely investments are made in other industries."

By as early as 2010, Australia should be paying $20 a tonne for carbon emissions which will lift electricity prices by a few dollars a week. New power stations are unlikely to burn coal and Australia will rely at first on more gas and diesel to power homes and cars. But by 2050, solar, geothermal, solar thermal and wind energy will challenge the cost of coal and gas power unless "clean coal" technology becomes a reality.

"If carbon capture and storage and commercial-scale biosequestration of carbon wastes fail, so that fossil fuels become unimportant in the global energy equation, Australia may still be a country of relatively low energy costs," Professor Garnaut writes. "We seem to have exceptionally low-cost resources, in abundance compared with population, for most renewable energy: deep hot rocks (geothermal), solar, wind, wave, biomass and second-generation biofuels." If the power generation sector can be transformed by phasing out reliance on coal, other sectors will quickly follow.

Four decades from now, half the adult population will be driving electric cars, the report predicts. The first glimpse of the appeal of electric vehicles can already be seen, with sales of hybrids rising from 0.2 to 0.78 per cent just between January and July. In the years leading up to 2050, car trips are likely to be shorter because more people will live within walking distance of public transport. Blocks of flats clustered around almost every Sydney railway station, the scenario despised by some advocates of the traditional Australian backyard, is implied by the report.

Private cars and motorbikes account for just over half of all the greenhouse emissions from the transport sector, and the combined impact of putting a price on carbon and rising petrol prices will make electric vehicles more attractive. biofuels and diesel will become more popular over the next two to three decades, before declining as plug-in electric vehicles take over.

By 2050, Australia's heavily emitting cattle and sheep farms will likely be brought into an emissions trading scheme. As farmers pay for the methane their animals produce, beef and lamb prices will rise and Australians are expected to turn to far more greenhouse-friendly chicken and pork.

One study cited by Professor Garnaut finds that "by 2020 beef cattle and sheep numbers in the rangelands could be reduced by 7 million and 36 million respectively and that this would create the opportunity for an increase in kangaroo numbers from 34 million today to 240 million by 2020". With kangaroos producing almost zero emissions, kangaroo meat could compete with beef exports as the carbon price rises.