Jul 12 - AAP General News Wire


Australia needs to become a renewable energy superpower, leading environmentalists have warned at a youth climate change conference.

People including former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, South Australian Premier Mike Rann, Greens Senator Christine Milne and independent senator Nick Xenophon were given standing ovations as they passed the baton onto the next generation of young leaders.

There is a critical six-year window to rapidly reduce carbon emissions and the world can not afford to wait, the youth Power Shift climate change conference heard in western Sydney on Sunday.

Mr Flannery told the thousand-strong student audience he was not optimistic that world leaders would be able reach a climate change deal in Copenhagen this December.

"You have to shoulder that responsibility," Mr Flannery said.

"Aspiration can take us so far.

"It's important we hang together to save the planet.

"Are you organised to do this?

"You know more and you have more at stake than all the older people."

Greens Senator Christine Milne blasted the Rudd government's carbon trading scheme for setting the carbon credit price too low and giving too much compensation to the coal industry.

"You can't be (half) pregnant or go five per cent of the way to the moon, you either go the whole way or you don't," she said.

"For people to say couldn't we just start with this and amend it some time in the future? Well who's going to amend it?"

"Labor is going for a weak program and the Liberals are going for a weaker one."

Senator Xenophon reiterated his call for a federal takeover of the Murray Darling Basin, where the effects of climate change and drought are stark.

"It's the last best hope for the river system," he said.

"NSW, Queensland and Victoria are over allocating, we need a full federal takeover."

Mr Rann said his state was leading the nation with renewable energy targets and will reach a 33 per cent target seven years early.

"We have eight percent of the population but supply 56 percent of wind energy," he said.

"We solar powered the museum in South Australia ... we did the art gallery, the State Library, Parliament House, we put panels on the roof of the airport, we have the biggest solar array of any roof in Australia at the convention centre at the Royal Agricultural Showgrounds.

"We started a project of rolling out solar panels on the roofs of hundreds of South Australian schools."

He challenged other state premiers to ban plastic bags and get serious about renewable energy projects.

Mr Rann's address was interrupted by heckling from an Aboriginal woman and a group of six protesters who stood up and turned their backs on the premier.

They're angry about uranium mining in South Australia and the lack of compensation for Aboriginal people facing cancer and alleged birth defects from Britain's nuclear atom testing at the outback site of Maralinga during the 1950s and 1960s.

The woman grabbed a microphone and told the crowd she had three ovaries, her family members had brain cancer and she was taking her case to the United Nations.

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