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Premier Anna Bligh’s brave new world may already have been dismissed as pure spin by the Opposition and some commentators.

The detail of how she will achieve the targets she set out on Monday as part of her Q2 vision statement, and the detail of the targets themselves, will be the test of that judgement.

Most interesting is her target of a 33% reduction in Queensland’s household carbon footprint by 2020.

Some of the nation’s top climate experts have already dismissed federal government greenhouse adviser Ross Garnaut’s passive approach which accepts the loss of the Great Barrier Reef and Murray River communities, calling for more aggressive short-term emission reduction.

Dr Bill Hare, who has tenure at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, believes the consequences of Garnaut’s 10% emissions target by 2020 falls well short of the 25 to 40% reduction needed to avert a devastating three-degree rise in temperatures.

He is backed by Melbourne University’s professor David Karoly who says the target should be at least 20% or Australia would effectively abandon any claim to leadership on greenhouse emissions.

Anna Bligh’s target looks impressive. It is not.

Targeted are the 13.77 tonnes of household carbon emissions produced by each household each year which, while significant, represent only a small proportion of total emissions.

A Sunshine Coast Council report on the federal government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, presented to councilors on Monday, points out stationary energy emissions from the electricity generation sector contribute 50% of Australia’s greenhouse gases.

While individual emission reduction is essential, so too is a reduction in our reliance on fossil-fueled electricity generation.

Powerline Action Group Eumundi took that argument to state mines and energy minister Geoff Wilson recently in a submission opposing the roll out of high voltage lines.

The lobby group says the massive capital investment involved in the powerline roll-out ties Queensland into the future to a polluting non-renewable resource.

The minister has promised to look at the argument but has previously made it clear that the government was not letting go of its dependence on coal as both the font of the state’s wealth and a source of power.

He says that coal emissions can and will be cleaned up.

“That’s why we’re injecting $10 million into an oxy-fuel project being developed by CS Energy near Biloela in Central Queensland,” Mr Wilson said in a statement earlier this year.

“The project involves using a conventional power station and burning the coal in pure oxygen – which makes it easier to capture the carbon dioxide. It’s expected to demonstrate that coal-fired power stations can be retro-fitted with this technology to achieve deep cuts to carbon emissions. That’s important in a state with more than 32 billion tonnes of high-quality, low-cost, easily-accessible, black coal.”

No timetable has been given for the roll out of this new technology, if it actually works, nor does it appear that there is a fall back position.

Sunshine Coast Council was elected on a platform of making the region an Australian model for sustainability. That aspiration is unachievable without the support of all levels of government.

Unless both the federal and state governments accept the need for fundamental change, and unless leaders emerge with the capacity to take the nation down a path to a sustainable future, whatever the short-term pain, then the future looks bleak indeed.

It’s a lesson that young rev heads learn every day of the week. You can get away with driving a car with reckless abandon for only so long.

Eventually comes the tearing sound of metal on metal and by then it is way past too late to wish you had listened.

Scientists have been warning about the impacts of climate change for at least the past 40 years.

The world as we know it has been imperiled by our refusal to listen. In a very real sense we are still not listening and our politicians are still not leading.

The consequences of that will escape many. The price will be worn by the young and those not yet born, a wonderful legacy for us to have left.

Anna Bligh’s plan to increase the quality of access to early childhood education for the state’s pre-schoolers is a noble ambition.

Perhaps that will better equip them to deal with the mess of our own stupidity’s making.

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Source: Sunshine Coast Daily – Bill Hoffman (10 September 2008)