Australia will not dump Paris climate deal if Trump does: Frydenberg
Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg has rejected suggestions from some Coalition MPs that Australia will need to review its participation in the Paris agreement on climate change following Donald Trump's new executive order on the environment.
The chair of the government's backbench committee on environment and energy, Craig Kelly, repeated on Wednesday his earlier predictions that the Paris climate deal was "cactus" if the US President followed through with his threat to withdraw from the treaty.
President Trump signed a new "energy independence" executive order on Tuesday to undo a range of regulatory measures to combat climate change by his predecessor Barack Obama, including eliminating the clean power plan, which sets limits on the amount of greenhouse gases that power plants emit.
US President Donald Trump signed a new "energy independence" executive order on Tuesday to undo measures to combat climate change. Bloomberg
Mr Trump said his plan would launch "a new energy revolution" that will put "miners back to work".
While the executive order does not withdraw the US from the Paris agreement, the possibility remains open amid reports the Trump administration has yet to decide whether it intends to withdraw from the international climate change deal
Mr Kelly told Guardian Australia on Wednesday that he was aware of the new executive order, and if President Trump went the extra step and withdrew from the Paris agreement: "I think we have to review it."
The Sydney Liberal backbencher said regardless of what the US ultimately did, he had concerns about what the Paris deal could achieve.
Mr Kelly said even if you accepted that fiddling with "the CO₂ knob" could influence climate change, he had doubts that countries could meet their Paris commitments "without a technological breakthrough".
Asked whether a majority of his Coalition colleagues would be in favour of quitting the Paris deal in the event Mr Trump pulled out, Mr Kelly argued "it would be a close-run thing".
He said government MPs were under pressure from voters who believed renewable energy targets were responsible for higher power prices.
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