Small sacrifice can save the planet

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AUSTRALIANS will be driving clean electric cars, giving up their lamb roast and rump steaks for chicken and pork, living in higher-density cities and swapping cheap air flights for interstate trains. In the outback, millions of beef cattle and sheep will disappear from the marginal rangelands, farmers will grow grasses and eucalypts for carbon trading and kangaroos will dominate the bush, potentially becoming one of the nation's biggest export meats.

AUSTRALIANS will be driving clean electric cars, giving up their lamb roast and rump steaks for chicken and pork, living in higher-density cities and swapping cheap air flights for interstate trains.

In the outback, millions of beef cattle and sheep will disappear from the marginal rangelands, farmers will grow grasses and eucalypts for carbon trading and kangaroos will dominate the bush, potentially becoming one of the nation's biggest export meats.

This image of a sustainable future for Australia has now become a mainstream view with the release of Professor Ross Garnaut's final sweeping report on how the nation can take up the fight against climate change. It can be achieved for a modest increase in our electricity bills - but the overall cost will be less than the impact of the GST.

Delivering his 652-page study on the cost of climate change to the Federal Government, Professor Garnaut said the effort required by Australians to get a global climate agreement that could save the Great Barrier Reef, the food bowl of the Murray-Darling Basin and the wetlands of Kakadu would be far less than the sacrifices of earlier generations.

"This problem is very small compared to the resources we mobilised for the Second World War," Professor Garnaut said. At most, the nation would need to invest 2 per cent of its gross domestic product per year in 2020 to meet the report's most ambitious target.

Even so, Australia will need to undergo huge change by mid-century if it wants to cut its emissions deeply enough to help achieve a global agreement that will avoid dangerous climate change and keep greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere from rising above 450 parts per million. And the success of this will depend on achieving a convincing global agreement at next year's UN climate talks.

Professor Garnaut warns that the profitable coal industry that also provides cheap electricity must clean up its act or disappear. "If the coal industry is to have a long-term future in a low-emissions economy then it will have to be transformed into near-zero emissions, from source to end use, by mid-century," he finds.

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