A couple of days on from Federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s announcement of the coalition’s official climate change policies and the Emissions Reduction Fund, the dust has settled somewhat and verdicts from various corners are in.
The Rudd Government has labelled it a climate con job, saying “It won’t work. It puts no price on carbon pollution. What he does through this plan is leave the big polluters alone and he slugs the taxpayer instead.”
Greens Leader, Bob Brown said “Planting 20 million seedlings while cutting millions of trees in mature forests is an Abbott absurdity”.
WWF welcomed Mr Abbott’s attempt to address climate change, but said the Coalition proposal represented a risk both the planet and economy can no longer bear. “The Coalition’s proposal does not go far enough, and is extremely risky – with no hope of transforming Australia into a competitive, low carbon economy” said WWF-Australia CEO Greg Bourne.
However, many trade groups have indicated support, including the Minerals Council, the Retailers Association and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The Clean Energy Council also welcomed the Coalition’s announcement, but warned that specific measures in the climate change policy to assist some clean energy technologies will not work unless the national Renewable Energy Target is fixed.
“One of the fundamental structural problems with the current design of the RET is that a range of support measures for small scale technologies are unintentionally crowding out investment in industrial scale clean energy plants.” said Clean Energy Council chief executive Matthew Warren.
“We need to find a way of continuing to roll out household scale clean energy technologies like solar panels and solar hot water while at the same time building multi-million dollar clean energy projects.”
As part of Mr. Abbott’s proposed Emissions Reduction Fund, an additional $1,000 on top of existing solar rebates for either solar panels or solar hot water systems would be provided and $100 million be given to a Solar Towns and Solar Schools Initiative in grants for towns, non-capital cities and schools for grid connected solar electric systems.
