Climate change deal: US-China agreement embarrasses Abbott Government, climate policy analyst says

Updated

The emissions deal between China and the United States has left Prime Minister Tony Abbott with egg on his face, a climate change analyst says.

Mr Abbott, speaking at the East Asia Summit in Napyidaw, Myanmar, said while welcome, the US-China deal would not prompt him to put climate change on the agenda for this weekend's G20 Leaders' Summit in Brisbane.

Mr Abbott said the G20's focus will be on economic reform, adding that there were plenty of forums where climate change can be discussed.

"Interestingly, we've just had the APEC conference in Beijing and climate change was hardly mentioned," he said.

"It was mentioned in passing by one leader in Beijing.

"And, look, there are lots of venues to deal with climate change. Climate change is a very significant issue."

Chinese and US leaders negotiated the deal in secret over the last nine months.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said she was not surprised by the announcement and that it would help Australia develop its own targets to reduce emissions beyond 2020.

"I'm not saying I knew the specifics and that it was going to occur [on Wednesday], but I was aware that the US and China have a climate change dialogue," she said.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the deal was a "a very important outcome for the world with the US adopting a reduction in their overall emissions and China setting themselves the target of peaking".

Deal embarrassed Australian Government: analyst

Associate Professor Peter Christoff, a climate policy analyst from the University of Melbourne, said the US-China deal had "embarrassed" the Abbott Government.

"Look, I think the Abbott Government has been severely embarrassed by this announcement and no more so than at a time when it's quite clear that the Government has been trying to keep climate change off the agenda at the G20," he told The World Today.

"It immediately leaves the Abbott Government with a problem, because the Direct Action plan that it's proposing is incapable of meeting targets like the ones that we should be aiming for."

Associate Professor Christoff said the deal was a "game changer", because of the pressure it puts on the leaders of other nations in the lead up to the global climate conference in Paris next November.

"[This is] unlike 2009, in the run-up to the Copenhagen negotiations, and... the meeting there where everything came unstuck because China and the United States hadn't negotiated and collaborated before that meeting," he said.

"This time we have close collaboration between the two – the world's biggest emitters and the world's biggest economies."

He said there was now a real chance for change at the UN meeting in Paris.

"An agreement certainly is possible now. I don't think we're likely to see the sort of catastrophic failure that occurred in Copenhagen in 2009," he said.

"How strong the agreement is going to be, I think is harder to tell."

Associate Professor Christoff also said the promise made in 2009 by then prime minister Kevin Rudd to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change committed Australia to unconditionally cut emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and by 15 or 25 per cent if the major emitters reached agreement.

He said the US-China deal more than satisfied this condition.

"To be honest I think that has been satisfied for some time and Australia should have been aiming for 15 per cent and even more than that," he said.

"[This overnight agreement] certainly convincingly shows that the major emitters now have got a deal and Australia, therefore, should be moving to, at a minimum, its 15 per cent."

Associate Professor Christoff said US and Chinese leaders putting numbers on existing measures was an element of the deal, but said a comment from a US Republican leader that the deal asks nothing of China for 16 years was "quite unfair and quite malicious".

He said, while it was good news that a global climate change deal was more likely, it still may not be good enough to prevent catastrophic warming.

"To be frank, the targets we're looking at the moment still will not deliver a world in which global warming is limited to two degrees," he said.

US-China deal leaves Australia in difficulty: Garnaut

Climate change economist and former ambassador to China Professor Ross Garnaut has told Lateline that the US-China deal leaves Australia's climate policy "in difficulty" and "without a paddle".

"Australia's commitment to the United Nations ... is that our target by 2020 is not minus five [per cent of 2000 levels]; it's minus five, minus 15 or minus 25, depending on what the rest of the world is doing," he said.

"What the rest of the world is doing fully justifies minus 15."

He said if Australia could implement its commitment to the UN by 2020, it would be able to match America's 2025 promises as well, but it would have to start acting now.

"Energy systems take a long time to build and to turn over, so you have to look a long way ahead. That's the nature of energy policy and planning for a future of lower emissions," he said.

He said if Australia did not contribute it's fair share, it would eventually suffer from the effects of unmitigated climate change.

"If we're not doing our fair share, then there will be an international relations cost, but of course the biggest cost is that we would be a drag on the international effort to reach a strong agreement."

"There would be more risk of dangerous climate change and it's been thoroughly demonstrated that Australia would be one of the big losers from unmitigated climate change."

Topics: climate-change, world-politics, foreign-affairs, environment, china, united-states

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