Australian Financial Review - Opinon
Lord Adair Turner, the Energy Transitions Commission.
We are seeing continued technological and cost-reduction progress. But alongside that, recent public policy developments have been strongly positive in two very important countries.
The first is the United States, where climate-related measures in the Inflation Reduction Act are huge and, until three years ago, were unexpected... This is a major game changer and provides massive financial support for the key technology developments and deployments which will bring the US, I think, very close to meeting its target of a 50 per cent emissions reduction by 2030. The second major country was, of course, Australia, where the climate change bill seeks to embed in law its commitment to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, with emissions down 43 per cent by 2030.
Those objectives are clearly attainable, and I hope that they might be strengthened still further in the coming years as Australia seizes its huge opportunity to be a leader in low-cost renewable power and green hydrogen.
Lord Adair Turner delivered an unabridged version of this speech remotely to the Better Futures Forum at UNSW Canberra on Tuesday, September 6.