KEY POINTS:
CANBERRA - Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has insisted Australia could reach ambitious emissions reductions targets without resorting to nuclear power.
Rudd said the key was to establish an emissions trading market, not to adopt nuclear power.
"The science of this is pretty basic. All the scientists around the world agree that we have got to reach a point whereby we actually bring total emissions down. That is the carbon target," he told the Ten Network.
Rudd said once the target was set, the emissions trading scheme and the market could establish the most cost-effective means of achieving that target.
"Then you would see a huge investment in alternative clean energies like solar, like wind, like geothermal and the rest. You'd set the right price signals for clean coal technologies and carbon sequestration and also for gas.
"On the question of nuclear ... our position on that is for Australia, with this rich array of other alternative energy options available, we can achieve our overall carbon target without taking on the extra safety and environmental risks which the nuclear option for Australia would represent."
Rudd said Prime Minister John Howard's commitment to a policy of pledging and reviewing climate change targets sounded like pledging before the election then reviewing afterwards.
"Howard has just got to get fair dinkum about climate change. One of the risks to Australia's economic future is us not acting on climate change and water," he said.
"Howard has in fact fiddled while Rome has burned on this question."
Rudd said that dated back to the late 1990s when advice started to emerge on the need to act on climate change and continued right through until the lead-up to the election.
He said Howard had been a climate change sceptic now trying to convince people he was a climate change convert.
"If you are fair dinkum, seriously fair dinkum about climate change there is one benchmark -- you would have established a carbon target a long time ago and you'd be setting up an emission trading scheme and doing something about it," he said.
- AAP
