Scientist sets high target for emissions

By SIMON COLLINS

Australia's Chief Scientist wants his country to halve its emissions of global warming gases by 2050 - a far bolder target than the Howard Government has adopted.

Dr Robin Batterham, who serves two days a week as Chief Scientist and three days a week as chief technologist for mining giant Rio Tinto, says he would have been happier if the Government had set such a target in an energy white paper which it issued last month.

But he told an international conference on sustainability engineering and science in Auckland on Wednesday that progress towards sustainability should be pragmatic rather than heroic.

He says western societies could not cope with a sudden swing away from the coal, oil and natural gas that fuel their industries and transport.

Instead, he advocates transitional measures such as gradually requiring power stations to separate their carbon dioxide emissions and pipe them into sealed underground reservoirs.

Dr Batterham, 63, has always cycled to work, even when he lived 17km from the laboratory, and he says the easiest way for most people to cut carbon dioxide emissions would be to cut out unnecessary trips to the shops.

Australia and the United States have refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which would force developed countries to cut their emissions of global warming gases to stave off rises in world temperatures.

But the Howard Government has adopted the target Kyoto would have given it of cutting emissions to 8 per cent above 1990 levels by between 2008 and 2012.


However, Dr Batterham said the Kyoto targets were too small to motivate people.

"I'm talking about enormous reductions - 80 per cent by the end of the century. Fifty per cent by 2050 I think is realistic," he said.

He said Britain aimed to cut its emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 and several other countries were considering following suit.

Such targets were so huge that countries such as Australia would have to look "every which way" to cut emissions - not just subsidising research on renewable energy such as wind, solar and wave power, but also driving more efficient use of fossil fuels and underground burial of carbon dioxide.

On the hot potato of genetic modification, Dr Batterham scoffed at moratoriums on GM canola imposed in all Australian states except Queensland.

"GM cotton is being grown all over and it has driven large reductions in pesticide spraying," he said.

"There are years of experience on whether you get superweeds or superspiders. The answer is no, you don't."

He told a Royal Society seminar in Wellington yesterday that Australian and New Zealand science funds should be opened to researchers in both countries to make best use of increasingly costly equipment and specialised expertise.

The New Zealand Government has created the first transtasman fund, $12 million for biotechnology. It is waiting for Australian state and federal governments to join it.