World's
biggest coal exporter Australia dumps Kyoto
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CANBERRA
- Australia, the world's largest coal exporter, will not ratify
the Kyoto climate change treaty aimed at cutting greenhouse
gase emissions, Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday.
Australia's
rejection of the Kyoto treaty come a day after Japan ratified
the treaty and urged nations like Russia and the United States,
the world's biggest polluter, to sign up.
Until
now the Australian government had been undecided about whether
it would join the list of about 50 countries which have endorsed
the 1997 U.N. treaty designed to reduce heat-trapping gases
blamed for rising global temperatures.
"It
is not in Australia's interests to ratify the Kyoto protocol," Howard
told parliament.
"For
us to ratify the protocol would cost us jobs and damage our
industry. That is why the Australian government will continue
to oppose ratification," Howard said.
Under
the pact, industrialised nations must cut emissions by an average
five percent by 2012 from 1990 levels, but 55 nations producing
55 percent of world carbon dioxide emissions - the main greenhouse
gas - must ratify the pact to make it binding.
But
at Kyoto, Australia in fact won the right to increase its emissions
by eight percent above 1990 levels.
Yet
Howard argued the arrangements of the Kyoto pact would not
work while it did not impose reduction targets on developing
nations and excluded countries like the United States.
Howard
said Australia's position in the context of Kyoto was unusual
because Australia was a developed nation that was also a massive
net exporter of energy.
"The
idea that you can sign up to a protocol that would facilitate
the export of dirty industries from this country into developing
countries and therefore facilitate the flight of jobs from
this country...would hurt this country," he said.
Howard
has gradually backed away from the treaty, which Australia
signed but refused to ratify, since Washington abandoned the
pact, saying it would harm its economy, and instead drew up
a voluntary domestic plan.
Howard's
government has come under increasing pressure from carbon-intensive
industries like mining to stay out of the pact.
Australia
signed a partnership with Washington in February to find practical
approaches to dealing with climate change but denied this indicated
Canberra was shunning Kyoto.
Story
Date: 6/6/2002
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