Why we love the Renewable Energy Target

You can't build a personal coal-fired power station at your home, not that you'd want to of course, but you can have a solar power station on your rooftop.

It's a beautiful, liberating, individually empowering thing to go solar at your own home, harvesting sunshine.

Best of all, every kilowatt-hour of clean energy that replaces dirty fossil fuels is fighting dangerous climate change. Replacing dirty fossil fuels and moving away from our entrenched dependency on coal is also key for protecting natural treasures like the Great Barrier Reef.

Already over 1.4 million Australian households have embraced the sun, with help from the national Renewable Energy Target, the RET, which offsets some of the upfront cost of having solar photovoltaic panels installed.

So our 1 Million Women team didn't hesitate when we were asked to join 20 of Australia's most prominent and progressive civil society organizations in sending an Open Letter to the Prime Minister calling for the RET to be saved.

You can see the full letter to the Prime Minister (and Minister for Women) Tony Abbott HERE. It says in part:

'We, and millions of Australians, believe that powering our nation with renewable energy is common sense ... Showing leadership on the Renewable Energy Target will be a win for jobs, for households, for our health, our economy, and our environment.'

Unfortunately Mr. Abbott and his government have thrown the RET into turmoil for a nearly a year now.

They've done this by trying to reduce the previously long-accepted 2020 target from 41,000 gigawatt hours of renewable energy to something much less, totally destabilizing investment in wind and solar.

For reasons that are beyond me to understand, key Government Ministers seem to hate wind in particular. They seem less hostile to solar, especially the small-scale installations that go on household rooftops, but all renewables have suffered with the RET under attack.

It's time to put an end to this sad year for the RET and get it back on track for 2020 and beyond, so that Australia and the world can pursue zero net carbon pollution by 2050. Anything less than this 'target 0' will expose everyone to an intolerable risk of runaway dangerous climate change.

As part of 1 Million Women's new website and our new Carbon Challenge Activity Centre with 50+ ways to cut carbon pollution out of your daily life, we've just updated the Energy section including going solar. Please check it out HERE.

You can send the PM a message online https://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm or over the phone (02) 6277 7700