The Government’s promise to reduce emissions by 5% by 2020 has just become that little bit more difficult to achieve. Not that many people thought that Direct Action was going to be an effective policy in reducing carbon emissions.
Power sector emissions rebound as renewable energy wilts
“If this rate of increase were to continue for a year …NEM electricity generation emissions would by themselves increase Australia’s total emissions by 1.4 per cent,” energy consultants Pitt & Sherry, authors of the latest Cedex report said.
The problem is that the removal of the carbon tax appears to have led to an increase in coal-fired power generation.
In addition, the move to reduce Renewable Energy Targets has led to a decline in confidence in the sector and a slowdown of capital investment.
All this in the face of recently released information that 2014 was Australias’s third hottest year and that the world was heading for its hottest year ever and that 14 of the Earth’s hottest 15 years have occurred in this century.
History will record that the tenure of the Abbot government was a three year period that Australia wasted in its effort to make a contribution to the global war against climate change