Bill Shorten lays out bold climate aims as Malcolm Turnbull heads to Paris

Extract from The Guardian

Labor suggests tough 45% cuts to emissions – compared with Coalition’s 26% to 28% pledge – in bid to pressure prime minister at Paris climate talks

Wind generators near Warrnambool in Victoria. Images) ozstock Photograph: Mark Dadswell/Getty Images

Lenore Taylor Political editor

@lenoretaylor

Friday 27 November 2015 00.01 AEDT

Bill Shorten has suggested he will adopt a far tougher greenhouse target – a 45% cut in emissions by 2030 – compared with the Coalition’s promised cut of 26% to 28%.

The Labor leader is seeking to pressure Malcolm Turnbull, who is en route to the United Nations climate summit, saying the prime minister “is flying to Paris carrying Tony Abbott’s climate-sceptic baggage”.

“Malcolm Turnbull won the leadership vote in the party room, but Tony Abbott has won the climate policy debate in the Liberal party,” Shorten will say in an address to the Lowy Institute on Friday.

Turnbull has adopted the same emissions reduction target announced by the former prime minister, a cut of between 26% and 28% compared with 2005 levels by 2030.

However, Shorten’s own promised target is not yet locked in.

He will announce that Labor will use the Climate Change Authority’s recommendations for a cut of 45% by 2030, based on 2005 levels, “as the basis for our consultations with industry, employers, unions and the community”.

“We will undertake this process mindful of the consequences for jobs, for regions and for any impacts on households,” Shorten will say. The Labor leader is also attending the climate summit next week.

Labor’s environment spokesman, Mark Butler, will undertake the consultations and report back in March next year.

Shorten will say Turnbull’s position is worse than climate scepticism, because the new prime minister understands that his Direct Action policy can’t work.

“No one has delivered a more incisive critique of Direct Action than the current prime minister ... he had the courage to tell the truth when he was a backbencher, with nothing to lose. Yet now, when power is in his grasp and the evidence is in front of his eyes, he cannot admit what he knows in his heart and head to be true,” he will say.

“To my mind, this is actually far worse than scepticism. This is selling out the future of the people of Australia, to placate the right wing of the Liberal party.”

Shorten will also announce the longer-term goal of zero net emissions by 2050. Addressing the national press club this week, the environment minister, Greg Hunt, said he expected zero net emissions would be possible “over the course of the century”.

Modelling done for the government by leading economist Warwick McKibbin compared a 26%, 35% and 45% reduction target with the costs of doing nothing more after achieving Australia’s 2020 emissions reduction target.

It showed the 26% target would shave between 0.2% and 0.4% from Australia’s gross domestic product in 2030, but the same modelling found that based on similar assumptions, a 35% target would cut only 0.3% to 0.5% and a 45% target would cut between 0.5% and 0.7%.

Before leaving on Thursday, Turnbull said he was “optimistic” the Paris meeting would achieve a good outcome.

The summit aims to enshrine the 2030 emission reduction promises now made by 173 nations, and agree on monitoring and verification rules and regular reviews to try to increase them over time to a level that would contain global warming to 2C. At the moment the pledges, if implemented, would still see warming of about 2.7C or higher.

The government this week announced that Australia was already on track to meet its minimum 2020 target of a 5% reduction in emissions – the target agreed by both major parties if the rest of the world did nothing. Neither the Coalition nor the Labor party has said they would agree to the higher 2020 goals they originally promised, under conditions the independent climate change authority says have now been met.

In his speech Shorten will say that within the first year of a Labor government he would announce a new target for 2025. Labor has said it will reintroduce an emissions trading scheme to meet its targets, but has announced no detail.