There is no other single issue affecting the future of each one us as much as the risk of climate change. The federal government’s newly released carbon trading White Paper is about the only story today that really matters long-term. The emissions reduction target of just 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020 is appalling low. I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised when politicians make political decisions, but it is still very disappointing. People need to inform themselves fully about this issue and get active on pushing for stronger change.
So don’t stick around this site - head off to some other sites and make your views known.
The environmental blog Rooted at the Crikey site is liveblogging the announcement, so that’s a good place to start.
Some other links: Sam at Public Polity, economist John Quiggin equates the White Paper with a White Flag, George Megalogenis at his Meganomics blog unpacks the economics and equity (or not) of the ETS compensation package, Mark at LP examines the politics of ‘balance’, Robert at LP says the targets are simply to low given the reality of the science, Peter Wood at Climate Dilemma also examines the targets, Tim Lambert at Deltiod provides an easy logical shortcut to analysing the adequacy of the White Paper, Ben Eltham and Anna Rose at New Matilda stirs up a lively debate. Possum at Pollytics tries to bring some hard political numbers into the analysis.
Hugh White at The Interpreter makes what he suggests are some obvious points, followed by an obvious conclusion:
“Obvious conclusion: Australia should launch a major campaign, perhaps working with others, to design a credible, effective outcome for Copenhagen and sell it around the world.”
Jonathan Green asserts that the fact the Ben Cousins’ story is far bigger than the government’s climate change response in itself is a failure of leadership.
7 Comments
Andrew, why is it disappointing?
Why do climate change zealots want to see the destruction of our economy? Illusive “green jobs” are touted in response, but never has any proponent shone light on where these jobs would arise.
This is a copy of an e-mail I sent to my local MP, Peter Garrett & Penny Wong:
Carbon pollution is causing the world’s climate to change, resulting in extreme weather, higher temperatures, more droughts, and rising sea levels.
Eleven of the past 12 years rank among the 12 warmest years since records began and Australia has experienced warmer-than-average mean annual temperatures for 16 of the past 18 years.
As one of the hottest and driest continents on earth, Australia will be one of the nations hardest and fastest hit by climate change if we don’t act now.
Without action, rising temperatures will affect our way of life and the Australian economy, including by:
threatening coastal property in Australia through rising sea levels, storm damage and tidal surge reducing food production from our farms through longer and more frequent droughts damaging our national treasures, including the Great Barrier Reef and the Kakadu wetlands and the big tourism industries they support.
Unmitigated climate change poses a significant threat to Australia’s economic security. It challenges our prosperity and risks undermining the viability of many of our coastal, rural and regional communities. It is in our national interest to take strong and decisive action on climate change.
Climate change is a global problem requiring a global solution—one where all major carbon polluting nations need to take comprehensive action to stabilise and reduce global levels of carbon pollution. The longer it takes for all major emitters, developed and developing, to act, the greater will be the unavoidable impacts of climate change.
While progress on a global solution is being made, it has been slow. There are many obstacles to achieving a strong international agreement by the end of the next negotiating round, due for completion by the end of 2009.
However, the least responsible path that Australia could take would be to do nothing while we wait to see how the rest of the world acts. Acting now will reduce our own costs of adjustment in the longer term. It provides us with opportunities to develop new industries and new jobs.
I can’t take responsibility for the words above, they come from the Executive Summary of your “CARBON POLLUTION REDUCTION SCHEME: Australia’s low pollution future” White Paper, 15 December 2008. By your own admission, carbon pollution is causing climate change. It is time to stop talking and start acting and, by acting, I mean something more substantial than a lip-service action.
It is not going too far to call climate change the defining issue of our time. If we don’t fix this problem of our own making, there won’t be a planet that we will easily recognise in another 50 years. Rising sea levels will make it so that most of coastal Australia won’t exist any more – never mind about our neighbours in Asia. It is conceivable that the oceans will rise by 20 metres – some scientists have said up to 80 metres! Grab a topographical map of Australia and check out how much of Australia is less than 20 metres above sea level and you will see what I mean. I’m OK; I live near Essendon Airport (at an altitude of 78.4m according to the Bureau of Meteorology website) and so will still have dry feet but I work in the Melbourne CBD which means I will have to learn to tread water for an awfully long time.
It is time to stop calling the current climate a ‘drought’ – it is the new norm. Expect more of the same together with an increasing number of Extreme Weather Events – a EWE that we can’t ride on the back of!
It is no understatement to say that progress on a global solution has been slow but this “commitment” announced today does nothing to address this and will only add to the obstacles to achieving a strong international agreement.
I gave up a well paying IT job a year and a half ago and this year, at the ripe old age of 52, went back to school to study Renewable Energy at NMIT. I couldn’t get a mature-age electrical apprenticeship as I had wanted; perhaps I’m too mature! I wanted to do something positive about climate change – you know, be part of the solution, not part of the problem – and I thought installing PVs (solar panels) would be the way to go. I have since come to believe that, in the interim at least, the best way to reduce GHG production is by efficiency measures – “the greenest watt ever produced, is the one you never use” has become my mantra. Yes, it would be great to phase out brown coal electricity generation (and we have to do this as well) but by concerted action to reduce the use of electricity we can achieve so much more than has been proposed in your white paper – allowing us to ‘strut our stuff’ in the international community.
I thoroughly believe we can reduce emissions by at least 25% by efficiency measures alone. At present our building stock, both domestic and commercial, uses a large proportion of our annual energy production to heat, cool & light. Retrofitting these buildings with effective insulation, solar hot water systems and energy efficient lighting would dramatically reduce energy consumption. How would you encourage this? These measures could be as simple as requiring energy audits (with ‘star’ ratings) on any building going up for sale. I believe the ACT has such a system in place already. There could then be incentives to increase this star rating – I prefer the carrot to the stick.
Any bailout of the car manufacturing industry should be dependent upon improvements in both vehicle efficiencies as well as production efficiencies with an holistic, cradle-to-grave mentality pervading the production process. We only have one planet; it is time we started acting as if the resources we dig up are not inexhaustible. Australia already looks too much like one big mine as it is.
If a 5% reduction is your idea of “strong and decisive action”, I’d hate to count on your action if I personally needed it.
Let’s put our collective heads together and come up with a proper plan to tackle this issue. The people are on-board; the government needs to run to catch the train.
“The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” – Michelangelo
You have the power; do you have the passion?
Andrew,
This is where the inability of ‘we’ the media to report the essentials of carbon cycle science has played into the hands of coal and oil. The government’s pathetic target can readily be met from carbon reductions that have sod all to do with fossilised carbon releases, which are THE only issue that counts.
Farting livestock, forestry, and methane recovery from landfills are all part of the clownish trivialisation of the critical issue which some scientists encouraged in the mistaken belief that carbon hysteria would somehow produce the desired results.
The focus always had to be on cleaning up base power load generation and any form of transport that burned fossil fuel that can and will be replaced by alternative fuels and technologies.
The whole emphasis of the popular push to reduce carbon was hijacked by fools and social engineers, and has now been turned back on them. Add to that the fee fest and synthetic fiscal instruments that an ETS will spawn, and the penalties for misguided populism on this issue appear to me to be very very painful.
Ben
I can’t agree that other issues are trivial - particularly methane and other emissions from livestock. This is low-hanging fruit (low hanging meat) in significantly reducing immediate climate forcing impacts with no technological changes needed and minimal overall economic cost. It just required a fairly simple change in behaviour. However, if there is one obvious message from the approach that political parties are taking with climate change, is that they still want people to think we can get the emission reductions necessary without having to change our own behaviours. That just can’t be done.
However, you are right that cleaning up power generation is crucial. In some ways, ane evn bigger disappointment than the 5 per cent target is using so much money to over-compensate people, while having so little put into funding the immediate infrastructure changes needed to rapidly shift power generation AND rapidly improve energy efficiency (retro-fitting buildings, etc)
I know politicians never want to tell their supporters things they don’t want to hear, but we can’t achieve these targets (even the ones that are too low) without some personal sacrifice and changes to our lifestyle. Changing a few lightbulbs wont cut it.
Andrew,
Livestock emissions are part of the natural carbon cycles. Just like human respiration and photosynthesis.
It is immaterial I think whether coal is cleaned up (count me a skeptic on this) or replaced by an alternative technology but it has to be fixed one way or the other. Australia has very promising beds of hot rocks. It is incredibly disappointing that there is no really substantial exploitation of this resource under way, and I’m with the pessimists in thinking that the current pilot programs are too starved of financial and technological resources to produce large scale greenhouse gas reductions with anything like the urgency required. Tim Flannery’s suggestion of large scale schemes to integrate hot rock and solar energy with natural gas and the in-situ refinement for export or local consumption of resources is a daring vision that deserved serious attention.
Likewise the kerosene replacement technologies I mentioned today in our Plane Talking blog.
The government had a chance to make the pursuit of alternative energy technologies into a major part of its so called nation building agenda. It has blown that opportunity away.
Ben, methanogenic microbes, whether in livestock or elsewhere, have the capacity to change the
ratio of methane to carbon dioxide, even without introducing new carbon. This is an important part
of increased climate forcings. Plenty of other short term forcings can also be usefully reduced
to buy us time. E.g., check out.
http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/Short-term-mitigation/cleaning-the-air-helps-cool-planet
About 50% of each years annual anthropogenic forcing increases are methane (Chapter 2, AR4, p.206)
See also James Hansen’s 2004 paper, where he calls for a 40% reduction in anthopogenic
methane to buy time:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2004/2004_Hansen_Sato.pdf
Geoff,
Thanks for those links which I will absorb with interest ASAP.
But turning to strategy, by not keeping a tight focus on fossilised carbon the government can avoid meeting targets in the most material and unambiguous way, which would be by cutting coal.
It can even get away with rewarding coal, and ensuring that it continues to grow, as it did yesterday, and it will now set about interpreting the most banal and symbolic of carbon saving acts as an alternative to real action, which would have required measurably less coal and more sustainable energy and alternative energy research. The fudging will make the accountants at ENRON look saintly by comparison.
The all-carbon-is-evil approach has been deftly turned against those who failed to focus on the really big issue, base power load generation and the need for replacement fuels for oil and gas burning transport systems.