Well in Australia we have a new government swept in by a desire for climate change and unions whipping up fear of the recent changes in industrial relations. I always scrutineer – that is witness the vote count at my local polling booth. It was really interesting to see how many people had voted green, indicating their concern about climate change.

Now the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his team need to meet our expectations. He has confirmed Australia will almost certainly fail to meet the modest greenhouse gas emissions target set for it under the Kyoto protocol.

The first thing he did after taking office was to sign the Kyoto protocol. He then released government forecasts showing that Australia is likely to “overshoot” by 1% its target of keeping emissions to no more than 8% above 1990 levels which means Australia could have to agree to make even bigger cuts to emissions in the post-Kyoto framework which is currently in the very early stages of negotiation at the UN conference on climate change in Bali.

Environment Business Australia chief executive Fiona Wain, says “The Kyoto targets as they stand are very low compared to the scale of the challenge ahead of us. What we’ll be discussing over the next two weeks is how the very deep cuts required can be achieved in a workable way”.

The plus side for business is that technology and finance sectors can begin to take part in Kyoto’s clean development mechanisms and move towards participation in the multi-billion dollar European emissions trading scheme.

But the real test is in demonstrating how an energy intensive country can retain its prosperity by being smarter and more efficient in industry, in energy efficiency, cleaner fuels and renewable energy, all of which we have to fast track in a big way.

How this will affect small business is unknown at this stage but it makes sense to get started on proactively improving your environmental footprint now.

Technorati Tags: Bali conference, Kyoto, emissions trading, Kyoto targets, Climate change

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Global Warming, Climate Change & Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.