Australia will burn through its "fair share" of carbon within six years if the more-ambitious end of the global warming goals agreed to at the Paris climate summit is to be achieved, a respected European think-tank says.
Restricting warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times implies a global carbon budget of less than 250 billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent from 2015, the Stockholm Environment Institute said in a new study. The planet has warmed about 1 degree in the past century alone.
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Taking Australia's share of this budget to be 1 per cent – arguably a generous measure as the nation makes up just 0.3 per cent of the world's population – the country will emit that 2.5 billion-tonne portion within six years at present polluting rates.
"[Australia's] transformation to a post-carbon era must be rapid and comprehensive, and include diversification away from fossil extraction for energy and export," Sivan Kartha, the author of the report, said.
Among the world's largest polluters on a per-capita basis, Australia had "a high level of responsibility for the greenhouse gases that have caused the climate problem". Its wealth and technical capabilities, though, also gave Australia "a level of capacity to help solve it", the report says.
Geoffrey Cousins, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the Turnbull government "had made new commitments in Paris, talked them up when they came back but not a single policy has changed since then".
"There is no great urgency, things will just roll nicely on, and we continue to approve new coal mines," Mr Cousins said, adding the Stockholm report revealed how little time was left to take serious steps to cut emissions.
Two developments on Thursday offered conflicting signals of government action on climate.
![A new study finds Australia's ''fair share'' of carbon emissions will be exhausted within a few years.](/web/20160910142307im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/1/8/5/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grbql4.png/1473320756002.jpg)
As revealed by Fairfax Media, $92 million in grant funding by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency had sparked almost as much as $1 billion in private funding that will triple the size of large-scale solar in the country.
The government also announced $30.05 million to fund a new ARC Centre for Excellence for Climate Extremes. The seven-year funding will mean the existing centre, based at the University of NSW, can morph into a group study on why rising temperatures are triggering a disproportionate increase in extremes such as heatwaves.
![Australia is the second-biggest coal exporter in the world.](/web/20160910142307im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/1/h/l/p/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grbql4.png/1473320756002.jpg)
According to the Stockholm report, a large fraction of the world's proved fossil fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground for any "plausible budget" to keep global warming the "well-below 2 degrees" goal agreed in Paris.
That means the market for Australia's fossil fuel exports will need to "rapidly reduce and ultimately disappear".
"Action taken to increase Australia's capacity for fossil fuel production – such as increasing export capacity or commissioning new coal mines – is difficult to reconcile with the goals of the Paris Agreement," the report says.
Australia is the world's second-biggest coal exporter and also the second-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.