More interesting post-election goings on in Australia. Since April, a Stern-esque Review of climate change has been underway, headed by Professor Ross Garnaut, an economics expert from the Australian National University – and former boss, twenty years ago, of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
While the Review was initially commissioned by Australia’s states and territories, they extended a standing invitation to the national Government to join the Review. Following his landslide election victory and return-of-the-prodigal-son on Kyoto, Rudd has done just that.
Last week, Garnaut delivered a lecture setting out his thinking on international climate policy. He starts by calling for a quantified stabilisation target and a global emissions budget – and then continues:
What sorts of principles might guide the allocation of a global emissions budget across countries? To be widely accepted as being reasonable the principles will need to be simply, transparent and radily applicable. In the end, they will need to give much weight to equal per capita rights of emissions. They will need to allow long periods for adjustment towards such positions – within the over-riding requirements to stay within an environmentally responsible global emissions budget. One possible way of bringing these two elements together would be the “contration and convergence” approach that has been discussed favourably in Germany and India at times in the past.
Now that is interesting. Obviously, I think he’s spot on (his position being exactly the same as the one I called for in my paper on The Post-Kyoto Bidding War, published here a few weeks back). True, Garnaut is (as an op-ed in today’s edition of The Age notes) not the government’s only climate change adviser. But still: who’d have guessed that we’d see the Australians, of all people, flirting with this line of thinking?
