Aus. Climate Meet - No Targets, No Dates, No Carrots, No Sticks

[hatrack]

NO TARGETS, no timetables, no carrots, no stick. There was little on offer yesterday to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the world: climate change.

The strategy outlined in the communique contained no targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, no timetable to deploy so-called clean technologies, no carrots to encourage business and industry to cut emissions, no stick to penalise them if they failed to reduce, or worse, increased their emissions, and only a small amount of new government money to research and develop clean power.

Over the past 30 years developed nations have passed tough laws to regulate water, land and air pollution, forcing industry to cut back on, and better dispose of, waste and penalising those who failed to do so. Those regulations have helped to protect human health and the environment. They have not killed business. In fact, new businesses and technologies have emerged to tackle pollution problems.

But when it comes to human-induced climate change - characterised by extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina and melting ice caps - Australia and the US say regulation has no role to play. Instead, in the first year of the strategy Australia will spend $20 million to pursue clean energy technologies, less than half of what it has spent so far promoting industrial relations changes.

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http://www.ecoearth.info/articles/reader.asp?linkid=50679