2016-03-24
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — For the information of members, Australia's current pledge in relation to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 per cent, not including land use change and forestry, has been described as inadequate by climateactiontracker.org. The site also notes that when including land use change and forestry, our actual reduction by 2030 will be approximately nil. If other countries adopted the same pathway as Australia, we would expect that global warming would exceed 3 to 4 degrees. The same group put us in the same category with basically our only friends in the world being Canada and Russia.
Then of course there is a major gap between the target we are putting forward and the policies that have been implemented. In fact on current policies we would be expecting to increase our emissions by 27 per cent. Victoria, as a high-emitting state, certainly cannot avoid doing its bit, but in fact we have no target at the current time for Victoria to reduce its emissions. In terms of policies, there is the change your light bulb scheme, which is a good one, but the rest of the decisions that have been made by this government so far have been only to increase fossil fuel use.
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