$1.4 billion for climate incentives

Adelaide Advertiser
Monday 15/12/2008 Page: 8

SMALL businesses and community organisations will get subsidies to convert to environmentally friendly technologies as part of the Rudd Government's response to climate change to be announced today. A fund established for solar and other renewable energies also will be spent quickly rather than spread over six years. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today will unveil Labor's long-awaited climate-change white paper outlining critical details of its planned carbon pollution reduction (CPR) scheme due to begin in mid-2010.

The Advertiser understands that as well as setting emissions reduction targets for 2020, the white paper will contain details of a $1.4 billion Climate Change Action Fund designed "to provide incentives to businesses and community organisations to invest in energy-efficiency projects and low-emissions technologies, processes and products". The money has been allocated for spending over five years. Interest is at fever-pitch around the main aspects of the CPR scheme, including the level of interim targets for emissions reductions.

Informed speculation centres on 2020 targets for carbon-dioxide emissions of a minimum of 5 per cent, and up to 15 per cent of year 2000 levels, depending on whatever agreement can be reached at next year's climate change conference in Copenhagen. An aspirational figure of 25 per cent, recommended by the Government's climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, may also be stipulated subject to corresponding commitments from other developed nations.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong was expected to announce the interim targets at a climate-change conference in Poland last week. However, in a sign of the importance the Government attaches to the announcement, it will now be made by Mr Rudd, who has taken Senator Wong's pre-arranged address time at the National Press Club today.