Australia’s largest greenhouse gasoline emitters might be required to slash their carbon footprint by as much as 6 per cent a 12 months beneath a key plank of the Albanese authorities’s marketing campaign to fight local weather change.
Federal Vitality Minister Chris Bowen is getting ready to strengthen a coverage often called the “safeguard mechanism”, which might compel the highest 215 industrial polluters that collectively trigger 28 per cent of the nation’s emissions to decarbonise their operations or offset their emissions by buying carbon credit.
Federal Local weather Change and Vitality Minister Chris Bowen.Credit score:Alex Ellinghausen
“A revamped safeguard mechanism will assist Australian trade reduce emissions and stay aggressive in a decarbonising world financial system,” Bowen stated.
The safeguard mechanism, established beneath the previous Coalition authorities in 2016, applies to industrial services that generate greater than 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a 12 months, equivalent to coal mine websites, energy vegetation, aluminium smelters and cement producers. Whereas the government-approved baseline emission limits are meant to be progressively lowered, the boundaries on polluters up to now have been so slight that industrial emissions have truly elevated because the mechanism was launched.
The Albanese authorities will start intensive trade consultations throughout the nation on Thursday to hunt suggestions on how the mechanism needs to be designed.
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Among the many key areas of session might be setting “baselines” for brand spanking new and current services and figuring out indicative charges for baseline reductions.
Whereas the session paper states that remaining decline charges wouldn’t be settled till different coverage settings had been finalised, it stated indicative decline charges have been anticipated to be “between 3.5 and 6 per cent annually”.
It’s going to additionally search to determine “tailor-made remedy” choices to make sure emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries weren’t deprived. One method might be to supply taxpayer-funded grants for trade-exposed companies to shift to low-emissions applied sciences as a substitute of offering concessions throughout the safeguard system, it stated.
