Australia yesterday ruled out promising to cut methane emissions by 30 percent by the end of the decade.
Australian Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor announced his government’s decision before he was to fly with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to a UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
The US and the EU last month pledged to 30 percent methane reduction targets.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Taylor said that the only way Australia could achieve such a target would be to reduce numbers of cattle and sheep.
“At present, almost half of Australia’s annual methane emissions come from the agriculture sector, where no affordable, practical and large-scale way exists to reduce it other than by culling herd sizes,” Taylor wrote in The Australian newspaper. “What activists in Australia and elsewhere want is an end to the beef industry.”
Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of coal and liquefied natural gas. The gas and mining sector account for almost one-third of Australia’s methane emissions.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said that his Nationals party, the conservative government’s junior coalition partner, had insisted Morrison not commit to reducing methane at the COP26 summit.
Inaction on methane emissions was a conditions the rural-based Nationals had placed on support for Morrison’s Liberal Party’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
“The only way you can get your 30 percent by 2030 reduction in methane on 2020 levels would be to go and grab a rifle, go out and start shooting your cattle because it’s just not possible,” Joyce said.
However, Meat and Livestock Australia — a producer-owned company based in Sydney that provides marketing, research and development services to more than 50,000 cattle, sheep and goat farmers — said that the Australian red meat industry was pursuing its own net-zero target for 2030.
“This target means that by 2030, Australian beef, lamb and goat production, including lot feeding and meat processing, will make no net release of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere,” the company said on its Web site.
Morrison’s net zero deal with the Nationals means that he cannot budge from Australia’s six-year-old target of reducing emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Critics say that Morrison’s plan to achieve net-zero without imposing costs on households or businesses would not achieve the target and contains no measures to wean the Australian economy off fossil fuels.
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