Thu, 8th May 2008

Budget 2008 challenge: Set a clean energy target

The Hon Greg Hunt MP
Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Environment and Urban Water

I am today setting a new challenge for the Rudd Government for Budget 2008:

Expand the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target’s base to become a Clean Energy Target which includes clean energy sources such as clean coal and clean gas.

There is no point in supporting the development of clean energy technologies if you don’t have incentives in place for their practical adoption.

Any Clean Energy Target should be focused on emissions and not simply the source of the energy.

So I call on the ALP to embrace a Clean Energy Target as part of Budget 2008.

Anything less than an expansion of the current MRET to include clean coal and clean gas will be both a Budget failure and a climate change failure.

The ALP is wrong on rejecting incentives to clean up our power stations. The oil and gas industries know it and even the CFMEU knows it.

I predict that under pressure from the CFMEU, business, the bureaucracy and the Coalition, the ALP will ultimately abandon its current position. But they should do it now.

Being confined to a renewables-only target will be a failure of our obligation to future generations.

It would work to indefinitely defer the work and incentives needed to bring clean coal and gas on stream.

The Coalition announced a clean energy target in 2007. Under the target, Australia would generate an additional 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of low-emissions electricity annually, to take total clean electricity to around 45,000 GWH (of a projected total 300,000 GWH) per annum by 2020.