Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to note the statement by the Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change, the Hon. Greg Combet. This statement was tabled in the Senate earlier this afternoon at the same time as the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee was meeting with a New Zealand delegation. The statement was passed over very quickly and, as I was not able to be in the chamber, I am now seeking leave to note the minister’s statement.

Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How long?

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How much time do you require?

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

With the agreement of the Senate, I would like five minutes.

Leave granted.

Today, in the House of Representatives, the Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change, the Hon. Greg Combet, made a ministerial statement entitled The scientific imperative for action on climate change. In that statement the minister cited the scientific evidence that demonstrates, in my view, exactly what the Greens have been saying for some time, what the government has been saying and what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists have been saying, and that is that global warming is real, the science is saying that global warming is accelerating and human activities are responsible for that warming.

Where I have to differ with the minister is where he gets to his final conclusions. Up until that point he was going well; he was actually citing the science of climate change and the imperative to act on it. In his conclusion he made a giant leap of faith by suggesting that, given that there is a scientific imperative to act on climate change, the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme actually deals with that imperative. That is why this statement is so dishonest. It is a sleight of hand because it implies that a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme national target aimed at 550 parts per million meets in any way the scientific imperative. He said in the statement that the government is aiming for 450 parts per million at a global level and he acknowledges that that is in Australia’s national interest. The point is that the science has moved well on from that. At 450 parts per million it was thought we had a 50 per cent chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. Now, the scientists do not believe that and they are saying that 350 parts per million is what we should be aiming at in order to give ourselves a good change of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

The minister talked about 450 parts per million as if it were a safe level, when the scientists have been saying that 450 parts per million is the tipping point for ocean acidification. At that point the microscopic creatures at the bottom of the ocean food chain will not be able to form shells, and once you have the collapse of the ocean food chain you get a major collapse of protein sources for millions of people around the world.

Yesterday we had here in the Senate the Sherpa who has three times held the world record for climbing Mount Everest. He said that the reason people are climbing Mount Everest faster is that they are losing ice and snow from the mountain because climate change is not uniform; it is twice to four times the temperatures rises elsewhere on the planet. The upshot of this is that there are glacial lakes forming and when they burst their banks they cause massive mud slides that will wipe out villages downstream. People are dying because of the current big melt in the Himalayas. He went on to say more particularly that, because one billion people in Asia rely on the melt from the Himalayas during the dry season, we are now going to find that the basins of the Yellow River, the Yangtze and so on are not going to have water in the dry season. There will not be a melt and a billion people will be without fresh water.

This is on top of the Pacific Islands Forum, which came here recently. The Pacific Island countries were saying that they are already drowning in their own backyards, and here we have the minister trying to suggest that Australia’s targets will in some way avert that. The government knows that is not true because the minister here yesterday acknowledged that Australia bullied the Pacific Island countries to stop them putting a higher target in the Pacific Island Forum communique. If they thought their targets were so great what was their problem with increasing them to what the Pacific Island nations wanted. It is because they know full well that their targets will not achieve it.

But the 25 per cent is really the dishonesty. The 25 per cent is nowhere near the 40 per cent needed to get even 450 parts per million stabilisation. If Australia is only prepared to do 25 per cent they should name which other countries they expect to do more than 40 per cent so that Australia will be able to do less. Which other countries do they suggest should bear a bigger burden because we refuse to? While the government says ‘We care about the science,’ let us see the targets get changed to reflect the science; don’t just have a sleight of hand saying that the science says that climate change is happening and therefore accept our scheme. Their scheme locks in failure to address the scientific imperative of climate change, and the scientists around Australia and the world would agree with that position. (Time expired)