In a keynote address to the jobs and skills summit in Canberra,Professor Garnaut said Australia’s economic funk was much worse than generally understood,but so was its potential for economic rejuvenation.
The global energy transition was a transformative economic opportunity for Australia and a potential boost to global decarbonisation,he said.
“Australian export of zero emissions goods and services could reduce global emissions directly by about 7 per cent.
“This would cover much of the hardest and costliest decarbonisation in the rest of the world. This is in addition to the one and a quarter per cent of global emissions removed by Australia itself going to net zero.”
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Australia has five “crucial advantages” in achieving the post-carbon economy,said the economic adviser to then-prime minister Bob Hawke at the time of the 1983 economic summit,and the author of the Garnaut climate review for the Rudd government.
It has the best combinations of solar and wind resources in the developed world,he said,which should generate the world’s cheapest energy;it is the world’s biggest exporter of ores that need energy-intensive smelting;it has an abundance of the critical minerals for the machinery of the zero carbon world;the largest endowments per person of land suitable for making biomass and sequestering carbon;and key knowledge that could be translated from the mining and farming sectors.