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Assistant climate change minister asked whether Australia ‘can be taken seriously’ without fossil fuel phase-out promise
The assistant minister for climate change and energy, Jenny McAllister, was also making the rounds this morning amid the Cop28 summit.
We, of course, are working towards transforming our national electricity system to incorporate 82% renewables by 2030. This is a really ambitious transformation, but one that we believe will lay the foundations for a cleaner and more affordable energy system for Australians.
If you think about what it means to take our energy system from 33% renewables to 82%, that does mean that our fossil fuel use within our own energy system at home is changing very dramatically over the course of a decade.
We know that globally, we need to see similar changes and similar investments in the new technologies to drive low emissions power, not just here in Australia, but actually, right across the world.
… or any electorate around the country where it is proven to be technologically feasible, has a social licence and it is going to get prices down.
We have to be humble enough at these conferences at Cop to say what are other countries doing? What peer countries are doing is they are saying we are looking at nuclear energy as part of the balanced mix.
We must in Australia be driven not by ideology, but by economics and engineering and learn from those countries and that includes consideration for zero emissions nuclear energy, and people may be arguing all they like, but we will be very open and transparent as we always have been.
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