Gore forms Safe Climate Australia group

MELBOURNE, July 13 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Sunday launched Safe Climate Australia, a think tank aimed at limiting Australia's dependence on coal and helping it to become a zero-carbon economy while also addressing warming global temperatures.

Australia ranks eighth in the world for its coal consumption.

The organization is composed of scientists and corporate and civic leaders.

Safe Climate Australia foundation board member Ian Dunlop, former chairman of the Australian Coal Association, said the new organization's initiatives would draw on the most promising policies worldwide to cut emissions and find ways to suck greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, The Age reported.

Australia has committed to a 60 percent reduction in emissions by 2050, with interim 2020 targets of between 5 percent and 25 percent. Some Australian environmental groups are critical of the government, saying those targets are too weak.

When asked by reporters following the launch if the government's emission-reduction targets went far enough, Gore said he likened it to U.S. targets.

"It's not what I would have written. I would have written it as a stronger bill, but I'm realistic about what can be accomplished within the political system as it is," Gore told the New Zealand Herald.

"I am sincerely convinced that the right way forward is to get to the maximum that the political system will allow us to accomplish and begin the change, and then, as we gain experience with it, toughen it, strengthen it, make it better based on experience as business and industry learn how to adjust."

Gore said the G8 agreement last Wednesday that developed nations should cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050 was a positive step.

According to the Safe Climate Australia Web site, the organization "will model the economic, social and environmental costs and benefits of the most promising strategies for transitioning the Australian economy to zero carbon and for implementing large-scale sequestration of existing atmospheric carbon."

For its part, Australia's total energy use has increased by 15 percent over the last six years, according to a recent report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Manufacturing and the electricity, gas and water industries were the largest domestic energy users, while households accounted for 12 percent of the country's energy usage.

As part of one of its first initiatives, Safe Climate Australia plans to train 300 people from 19 countries, including India and Indonesia, on encouraging leaders to address climate change.

Origin Energy General Manager Peter Israel, who attended the launch, told the Australian daily that although climate change was an issue largely met with resistance in his industry, he believes that the energy sector could have a green and profitable future.

Gore's initiative comes ahead of international climate-change talks in Denmark later this year in which governments will seek to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which expires in 2012.