Emissions Targets

Matthew Lambourne, Mullumbimby

Meat and beat – sounds like yet another new diet, doesn’t it?

But no, apparently ‘meet and beat’ is the latest three word slogan from the criminally incompetent, or fossil-fuel-corrupted clowns in Canberra.

It’s Scott Morrison’s boast about how well we are doing at meeting and beating our greenhouse gas emission targets, but notice that he never mentions what these targets actually are.

At the 1997 climate conference in Kyoto, when most developed countries were committing to reducing their emissions, Australia somehow got away with being allowed to increase emissions by eight per cent over the 1990 level, by 2012.

In fact, emissions in 2012 were down by 1.5 per cent, largely thanks to reduced land clearing.

So the PM is claiming that we are ‘over achieving’ by reducing emissions by 1.5 per cent in 22 years.

Our next and final Kyoto target was a reduction of 4.2 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 (1990 is the internationally recognised base-year for measuring emission reductions). On current figures it looks like the real figure will be about a 2.4  per cent reduction.

The PM will claim this, and the rules allow it, because we didn’t increase our emissions in the first Kyoto period as much as we were allowed to, the credits so created can be applied to the second Kyoto period, so that on the figures it looks like we’ve achieved that target, even though we haven’t. So Australia has reduced its emissions by 2.4 per cent  over 30 years, and Scott Morrison claims we are ‘over achieving’.