Australia has power to lead world to zero carbon prosperity by Fergus Green and Reuben Finighan

Australia, along with the rest of the world’s nations, has formally adopted the objective of restraining global average temperatures to no more than two degrees Celsius (2°C) above pre-industrial levels. The 2°C goal is a proxy for avoiding dangerous and irreversible changes to the world’s climate — an outcome that the vast majority of Australians support.

Even a 2°C average temperature rise would worsen climate change impacts that are already being felt across Australia. Yet the world’s breakneck growth in fossil fuel supply and consumption is causing greenhouse gas emissions to rise at such a rate that, as the International Energy Agency warned this year, “the door to a 2°C trajectory is about to close”.

To keep the door open, global emissions must peak and begin to decline by 2020 at the absolute latest and then keep declining to zero by between 2040 and 2050. We are in “the critical decade." Decisions we make today will largely determine the state of the climate system within which all subsequent generations must live.

The world’s nations gathered in Durban in late 2011 to continue long-standing negotiations towards a comprehensive international treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The best they could agree was that they would aim to negotiate by 2015 an agreement requiring some countries to start reducing emissions beginning in 2020. These negotiations cannot be relied upon to secure the emissions cuts that are required. “It is clear”, argue the editors of the world’s preeminent scientific journal, Nature, “that the science of climate change and the politics of climate change ... now inhabit parallel worlds”.