Sydney, Nov 11 (DPA) Australians environment activists Sunday held a rally to press their demand for tougher emissions reduction targets.
According to Nature Conservation Council spokeswoman Cate Faehrmann, about 150,000 people marched in 50 towns and cities in the second annual Walk Against Warming rally.
“It’s clear that there’s a lot of support out there,” she said. “Much more needs to be done and that’s what the community said today on climate change,” she added.
Faehrmann also called on Prime Minister John Howard’s conservatives and Kevin Rudd’s Labour Party to set a short-term target to reduce greenhouse gases by 30 percent by 2020.
Howard and Rudd face off in a general election later this month and neither has committed to a 2020 target.
“Both major parties have credibility problems on climate change because of their failure to commit to the sort of deep cuts to greenhouse emissions in the next decade that are necessary to help prevent dangerous climate change,” Wilderness Society national campaign director Alex Marr said.
Labour Party environment spokesman Peter Garrett was among the 30,000 people at the Sydney rally but was booed when his name was announced. Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull didn’t attend.
On behalf of the government, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said diplomacy rather than protest was the solution.
“The key to success in terms of climate change is diplomacy,” he said “We should negotiate a proper and a serious convention which will stabilize and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and it’s not going to work and not going to be meaningful if developing countries and the US aren’t prepared to participate,” the minister added.
Australia, along with the US, has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol that commits 35 industrialised nations to binding emissions-reduction targets. However, the Labour Party has pledged to sign Kyoto if it comes to power in Australia.