AIE Sydney - The Climate Change Challenge

Much of the discussion about climate change and energy in Australia is focused on the technologies, which offer lower greenhouse gas intensities compared to traditional fossil fuel use. However, there are strategic issues of equal or perhaps even greater importance in meeting the enormous challenge of turning a world, which has developed using fossil fuels, around to a more sustainable future. These issues are global, political and diplomatic in nature.

In this presentation Andrew Perry, a consultant chemical engineer, will address a number of these strategic issues and challenges, including:

• How Australia easily beat its first round Kyoto Protocol target with reductions in only one emissions sector and has had to take no action on fossil fuel emissions over the past 29 years of the Kyoto Protocol.
• The need to ensure that a national emissions reduction strategy does not simply transfer or “outsource” emissions from one country to another.
• The need to ensure that the non-Western world, which now accounts for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions, is part of any global solution on emissions.
• The practicality of Western democracies implementing a carbon reduction taxation scheme on the embedded emissions content of goods and energy supplies traded across national boundaries.
• Why the push for lower emissions raises such a political dilemma for Australia and we never get closer to a clear policy on the issue.

The presentation will be followed by Q&A.

Biography

Andrew Perry (CEng MIChemE RPEQ, aj_perry@ihug.com.au) is a chartered chemical engineer with extensive experience in the energy and petroleum production and refining industries in the UK and Australia. He recently published ‘The Carbon Collision Course: Australia’s Emissions and Energy Policy Crisis’. The book explains the facts about global energy consumption, industrial activity and emissions, and provides a perspective on the global emissions debate. He also published a paper on emissions in this year’s The Chemical Engineer’ magazine (UK), available at:

https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/features/the-carbon-collision-course/?