Australian Prime Minister John Howard and US President George W. Bush have adopted a go-it-alone approach to combating global warming. They argue that the developed world's solution, the Kyoto Protocol, will hurt their nations' industrial growth and fails to put limits on emissions by fast-developing countries such as China and India. Instead, they consider the answer lies in searching for technological solutions and voluntary schemes to cut the gases blamed for causing temperatures to rise.
Kyoto calls for countries that have ratified the agreement to reduce emissions of so-called greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to an average of 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Whether this is enough to have an effect on ever-rising temperatures is uncertain. But there is even more uncertainty over the impact of the policies put in place by Mr Howard and Mr Bush.
What is clear, is that public pressure is building for governments the world over to tackle the problem and whether for or against Kyoto, leaders are increasingly being forced to make gestures that go beyond rhetoric. Such would seem to be the case with Mr Howard's announcement yesterday of a US$379 million package to combat greenhouse gas emissions. About 45 per cent will be allocated to developing renewable energy technologies.
With Australia the world's second-biggest producer of greenhouse gases per capita, behind the US, this is a welcome move. However, it does not go far enough in correcting the country's poor record, nor offer a foreseeable solution to its dependence on coal, the most polluting of all energy sources.
About 80 per cent of Australia's electricity is generated by coal-fired power stations. Additionally, coal is the country's number one export, with 30 per cent of the world's total - last year, 233 million tonnes valued at US$18 billion - being shipped to global markets.
As yet, Australia has no viable alternative to coal and the amount promised yesterday does not guarantee there will be one anytime soon. Technology to clean up the emissions from power plants is costly. And the country's big hope, liquefying carbon dioxide before it is released into the environment and pumping it underground in a process known as carbon capture, is still being developed and is also likely to be expensive.
