AUSTRALIA is in the weakest position of any industrialised nation to compete in a clean-energy world, a new report has found.
Despite high levels of wealth and education, the nation's heavy-polluting coal-fired electricity, its energy-intensive exports like aluminium and its high levels of car ownership make it one of the developed countries least able to generate prosperity in a future marked by drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
The report, commissioned by the Climate Institute and the European environmental group E3G, compared the performance of the Group of 20 countries, including Australia, the US, China and India, as their leaders prepared to meet in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this month.
Climate change and clean energy investment will be high on the agenda at the G20 meeting, on September 24-25. G20 economies account for almost 70 per cent of the world's carbon emissions.
The report, G20 Low Carbon Competitiveness, placed Australia as the "lowest ranked" major industrialised country in terms of its ability to generate material prosperity for its people in a world that limits greenhouse gas emissions. China, Russia and Turkey outranked Australia.
The only G20 countries to sit below Australia were Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
France topped the list of nations able to compete in a clean energy world. The report found that while the French and Australian economies are broadly similar in size, France gets three times as much gross domestic product for each tonne of its carbon emissions as Australia.
"I didn't think we would be as far behind as this," said John Connor, chief executive of the Climate Institute. "Many of our trading partners are moving faster than us, and we risk missing opportunities for investment, jobs and profits in emerging clean-energy industries."
Yesterday protesters converged on Australia's most heavily polluting coal-fired power plant, Hazelwood, in the La Trobe Valley, calling for it to be shut down and replaced with renewable energy.
A heavy police contingent moved in when demonstrators began to scale the fence around the plant to present a "community decommission order" to its owners, the British company International Power.
A spokeswoman for the protest, Louise Morris, said police arrested 22 people, including doctors, teachers and scientists, and charged them with trespass.
The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, will attend the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, at which leaders will also discuss the Copenhagen climate negotiations and the fallout from the financial crisis.
Next week Mr Rudd will attend a summit of world leaders in New York hosted by the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, aimed at revitalising the global climate negotiations.
The New York summit will be the first opportunity for the US President, Barack Obama, to make a big pitch on climate change. He is expected to urge developed and developing countries to invest in clean energy. He is also expected to press the US Senate to pass a clean energy bill by the end of the year that aims to limit US greenhouse gas emissions.
Last week, his special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, told Congress the effort to reach a new climate agreement in Copenhagen was about the development of clean energy, too.
"Countries that would cling to the old developing world adage that development must precede the environment make a fundamental error,'' he said. ''In the world we inhabit now, the only sustainable development is low-carbon development."
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