Malcolm Turnbull should lift our climate targets

Now, as Paris hosts yet another round of climate-change talks among world leaders, it is Mr Turnbull, as Prime Minister, who will take Mr Abbott’s lazy targets to the world.

“Australia should rightly shoulder its fair portion of the global responsibility in combating climate change, but we cannot support measures that are not well thought-out or that risk Australian businesses and jobs”, she said, calling on Labor to outline how the cuts would be achieved without hurting the economy. He defended Australia’s emissions reduction targets, arguing they were among the most ambitious in the G20 in terms of per-capita emissions. The government had previously announced that Australia was on track to meet the goal.

Ratifying the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol will legalise Australia’s goal of reducing carbon emissions to 5% below 2000 levels by 2020. He urged all countries to take serious actions in tackling climate change. While Australia meet its first Kyoto target, its worth remembering that it allowed its emissions to rise. He said the Liberal Party had no intention of doing anything about climate change because Mr Abbott and his band of conservative supporters fundamentally did not believe the science that showed global warming was caused by human activities.

“Australia is surrounded by countries that are literally drowning from the impacts of climate change”.

“From Australia we come with confidence and optimism”, he said, adding that Australia was confident the conference would “secure our future” because of our “great optimism and faith in humanity’s genius for invention”. “Under Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberals, Australia goes to the Paris Climate Change conference as the only developed nation that has gone backwards on climate action in the past two years”. “Not only is he selling himself out, he’s selling Australia out”, Shorten said.

Mr Turnbull said extremist ideology was “dynamically driven” through online media so it was important to collaborate with other countries and agencies to learn from their experiences and respond quickly to threats.

He accused the government of “playing accounting games” by using existing aid funding for its $1bn climate financing promise. Oxfam climate change leader in Paris, Kelly Dent, also said the commitment was far less than what comparable countries had committed to.

Mr Turnbull told Australian reporters at the sidelines of the event that he had come to the meeting with an “optimistic frame of mine”.

In a day of promises designed, in the words of French President Francois Hollande, to give the conference “a drive and ambition commensurate to the challenge” Turnbull also joined at the last minute a U.S. initiative to double public and private research and development spending on clean energy technology, which in Australia’s case means an additional $100m in government spending over five years.