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Australia should aim to reach "near-zero" carbon emissions by 2040 as the country's contribution to global efforts to limit dangerous climate change, Greens leader Christine Milne said.
The goal is among targets outlined by Senator Milne as part of the Greens' policy to lower carbon pollution to ensure there is at least a 75 per cent chance of keeping global temperature increases to less than 2 degrees of pre-industrial levels.
"The Greens targets are ambitious, 40-50 per cent by 2025, 60-80 per cent by 2030, and net-zero pollution by 2040, but they are achievable and more importantly, they are essential," Senator Milne told a conference at Sydney University on Monday evening, according to her speech notes.
"We spend billions on foreign wars allegedly to keep Australia safe when the greatest challenge to our security and well-being is runaway global warming," she said.
Australia's current goal is to cut 2000 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. The Abbott government has sought public consultation on what the post-2020 targets should be and will announce its goals by the middle of the year, about six months before a major climate summit takes place in Paris.
The Greens goals come after recommendations announced last week by the independent Climate Change Authority – which the Abbott government has sought to scrap – that called for a 30 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2025 after shooting for a 19 per cent reduction on 2000 levels by 2020.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt rejected the authority's targets, saying it would require Australia to undertake the largest reduction on emissions intensity in the world and was "a third more onerous than any other country".
Industry groups and think tanks have offered varying targets for after 2020, with the Grattan Institute, for example, recommending "a straight line from our current 5 per cent target for 2020".
Senator Milne said aiming for zero carbon pollution by 2040 "is not the tale of woe, laden with costs, lost-jobs and heartache as the Abbott government and mining industry would have us all believe," but rather an opportunity to transform the economy.
"Rapidly decarbonising our society is an opportunity to address what we don't like about the way we live and replace it with what we want, with the jobs to go with it," she said. "It is the greatest enabling wake-up call I can imagine."
The science, meanwhile, continues to point to the need for urgent and ambitious response, with major changes to the planet all ready under way for a temperature rise of 0.8-1 degree so far, she said.
Signs of accelerating global warming include the Totten Glacier in east Antarctica melting from underneath, the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, record low winter extent of Arctic ice this year and increase in extreme weather events from heat waves to floods.
"We are on a path to four to six degrees of warming," Senator Milne said. "Tipping points are being reached and they are irreversible."