It’s hard to find the words to express quite how atrocious today’s decision announcement has been.
Here’s a video that expresses what a lot of us are starting to think – that all those who voted for Kevin Rudd thinking he’d be better than John Howard on climate change were sold a lump of coal.
If you’re angry, come along tomorrow and join us at the rallies listed here and below the fold.
NSW
11AM – Commonwealth Government Offices, 70 Phillip St, Sydney
Contact John Kaye (02) 9230 2668
Victoria
12PM – Cnr of Collins, Spring and MacArthur Sts, Melbourne
Contact Alison 0402 075 306 or pc@vic.greens.org.au Vic Facebook Event
ACT
12.30PM – Parliament House, Canberra
Contact Simon on 62476305 or office@act.greens.org.au
SA
11AM – SA Parliament House, North Terrace, Adelaide
Contact Tammy (08) 8212 4888 or tammy@sa.greens.org.au
TAS
12.30pm – Tasmanian Parliament House Lawns
Contact Karen 03 6236 9334 or 0417 555 309 or networker@tas.greens.org.au
WA
12PM – Wesley Church, cnr Hay & William Sts, Perth
Contact Rachel 08 9225 5799 or rachel.pemberton@aph.gov.au
11 Comments
Forget the rallies. Get into the real science. The release of fossilized carbon by big coal and big oil through base load power generation and all forms of transport of people and goods where innovation can replace those greenhouse gas emitting fuels are the real issues. Everything else is ignorant, populist trivialisation.
Rudd’s natural gravitation to the status quo on any issue has been greatly helped by carbon hysteria that lost the necessary concentration on fossil fuels and diverted itself with tinkering with natural carbon cycles that have no relevance to throttling back climate change.
What is needed is intense action to replace kerosene in jets, and petroleum in cars, and oil and coal in power, heating, and shipping. All of these things are possible. They will all hurt vested interests. They will all make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of a type and scale that are not being removed by the natural carbon cycles.
But science is always harder than slogan chanting, which is why I’m not feeling very optimistic at this moment.
That’s great Ben, but how exactly do you propose that we create a space for these innovations to be economically viable in a market place which is protective of polluting businesses and industries?
There has to be action on all fronts. That’s where true optimism will come from. This idea that one way is the best way and all other ways are pointless is simply turning the climate action movement in on itself. Its exactly the kind of attitude that kept us sniping at each other, while the coal lobby slunk behind us and got in the Prime Minister’s ear.
If you think that’s the way of the future, then great… go do something about it. Those of us who have other skills will use those skills the best we can… and political activism still has a place in our society.
At least that’s my view.
Hi Ben,
The natural carbon cycle is a whole lot bigger than our use of fossil fuels. Total anthropogenic CO2 emissions from fossil fuel are on the order of 25 gigatonnes per annum. The seasonal wobbles in atmospheric CO2 measurements indicate that the “natural” carbon cycle absorbs (in the northern summer) and re-emits (in autumn and early spring) about 50 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, net. MORE than the total contribution from fossil fuels.
Obviously since the tropics have a near-continuous carbon cycle and the southern hemisphere is going the other way, the gross magnitude of the biosphere’s carbon cycle is far larger than that. The net increase in CO2 indicates that natural carbon sinks including the biosphere and ocean take up approximately half of the anthropogenic CO2 (about 20% of which is attributed to anthropogenic changes in the biosphere rather than to fossil fuel use) emitted each year.
Now there is every likelihood that this uptake will diminish with deforestation and warmer ocean surface temperatures (indeed some researchers believe that the biosphere is actually a net carbon source already, and it is effectively only the ocean which buffers contemporary emissions), but it has definitely been happening up to now.
There is no point claiming that natural carbon cycles are somehow dwarfed by fossil fuel use. The truth is quite the opposite, and our influence over the biosphere is one of the bigger tools we have at hand to clean up our fossil-fuel-induced mess.
Ending deforestation and expanding productive agriculture and silviculture with modern soil improvement techniques into deserts and degraded pastures has huge potential. The International Energy Agency notes that 14% of existing primary energy use is already from biomass (most of it very inefficiently burned in the least developed countries) and that the world has the potential to provide more energy each year, sustainably and without adversely impacting on food production or high-value conservation areas, from biomass by the end of this century than it currently gets each year from fossil fuels.
http://www.ieabioenergy.com/LibItem.aspx?id=5584
Replacing diesel and jet fuels with biomass energy is not rocket science, it’s just expensive. Do it on a large scale and it gets much cheaper.
http://www.choren.com/en/
J
Jonathan,
We may be at cross purposes. The science about the magnitude of the natural cycles is compelling. So is their incapacity to deal with industrial releases of fossilised carbon at the now rapidly accelerating rates consequent on once undeveloped societies trying to consume their way into a place in the sun. Give nature tens of thousands of years and everything is fine. But not at the rates of growth of our species. Hence the subscript in some quarters that we have entered a new period of mass extinction of species, and that our species may become one of them.
Unless we concentrate on the real issue, the industrial release of fossilised carbon, we are toast. Rudd had a chance to do this. He chose the status quo, and the foolish, ignorant, populist view that all carbon is bad, played into his policy settings perfectly.
Vicki,
I’m all for informed political activism.
Ben: I am an ignorant, populist producer of trivia. However, if you honestly believe science, unaided by populist ranters (aka the electorate) can achieve anything quickly in what is, after all, a Doomsday scenario, I would be more than happy to hear it.
Can you not see that arguments about science solving anything at this late stage are but an exercise in semantics?
I’m going to live in another country, one whose politicians have some courage, OZ is stuf-ed.
Venise#2: Ben, what if I was to put the whole thing under the heading it should always have had. World Population Explosion Outstrips The Earth’s Ability To Sustain It. Pray tell, how are scientists going to solve the problem of too many people on the planet within the next twenty years?
Not only can science be too slow to cope with a problem like this; the same science is completely unable to convince religious leaders to make birth-control a mandatory law.
We are all, quite literally, dying to know how you are going to deal with this little doozy.
Ben, I have to say, I am quite confused by your first comment.
I think what you mean to say is that we should stop talking about forest carbon and instead focus on fossil fuel emissions. Is that right? Or are you trying to put some strange argument about the causes of climate change that got so caught up in itself that it lost its meaning?
If the former, well, I’d say 99% of campaigning work that the Greens and green groups do around the world is around fossil fuel emissions and driving them down. If this is what you mean, we’re in furious agreement, and I’m not sure what you think we’re shouting slogans about if not about stopping industrial carbon emissions…
If the latter, please explain?
Venise,
Apparently you’re with Clive Hamilton on that one. I can’t agree.
Ongoing unbounded exponential growth is a physical impossibility, but neither the world’s nor Australia’s population is already approaching any ultimate environmental limit. Projections of global population estimate that it will peak around the 9 billion mark in 2060 or so. It’s wasteful and destructive exploitation of resources which is straining ecosystems today, not actual consumption levels. The countries with the greatest population pressure are not the ones whose people have the greatest consumption — on the contrary, the poorest people have the largest families and the least viable farms (no water storage, poor soils and no soil improvement, and no secure storage of food or seed), while the more affluent countries are the ones which can afford to protect their forests, secure their food supplies, improve their farm yields and clean up their waterways.
It is entirely possible for both production and consumption to proceed at current levels and even (in the short-to-medium term, not infinitely) increase in a more sustainable, equitable manner. Population growth of a couple of per cent per annum over the next few decades will not cause us to hit any hard limits if we are at the same time reducing the destructive impacts of our economic activity.
Abrupt climate change, if it occurs, will cause a massive agricultural and economic collapse that will hit the poorest first and hardest. It will touch those of us who presently “overconsume” least of all.
Tim,
I’m dismayed at the lack of focus on the real and unambiguously measurable components of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, which involve coal and oil consumption. I went into this argument a different way on Plane Talking yesterday in this item:-
Rudd’s stunted vision rewards dumb carbon populism
December 16, 2008 – 8:13 am, by Ben Sandilands
A few weeks back Airbus sent an alternative fuels expert to Australia (Sebastian Remy) to explain how it could reduce the release of fossilised carbon from jet fuel by half by 2020, and create a major new agricultural industry that would not impact food production.
Canberra didn’t want to know. For over a year Remy’s counterpart in Boeing, Billy Glover, has been explaining how algae grown octanes could completely replace kerosene by around 2040.
Both companies talk about the relevance of these advances to replacing fossil fuel in trucks, cars, and ships. Not just in the ‘toys’ of the jet set and the political elite.
The disinterest in Canberra is painful. Rudd’s mission in life is to gravitate unerringly to the most mundane of status quo positions, which he did yesterday. Bright invention just isn’t in the frame.
In the next few days a Continental Airlines jet in the US is set to trial a blend of biofuels including an algae derived component equal to more than 20% of the energy contained in it. This is about 10 years sooner than the best estimates given for algae based kerosene replacements only a year ago at a Boeing sponsored conference in Sydney.
Unfortunately the government’s stunted vision has been fed by the populist nonsense that characterises the carbon debate in this country. While it sticks with big oil and big coal, the carbon fascista sticks with social engineering and an insistence that science and technology really have no answers. This situation has been fueled by scientists who don’t trust the public with the actual science, and sit back and watch people fret about how much they might fart or the amount of carbon they exhale and hope that this hysteria will deliver big research grants and real power.
The driver of anthropogenic global warming is the release of fossilised carbon in volumes that overwhelm the natural and very complex cycles that reprocess carbon. It is the real problem. It is breaking the marine food chain, causing severe high level atmospheric cooling, and cooking the lower layers of the atmosphere under the blanket of excessive accumulations of carbon dioxide.
Everything else is a side show.
The 5% reduction target can be readily met from all sorts of carbon savings that will have sod all to do with the real problem, fossilised carbon. This travesty is possible because the populist campaign is scientifically illiterate, and much of the blame for this can truly be laid on the media, which is too lazy to inform itself about the realities.
Well, I’m totally with you on that, Ben. Not sure where we disagree. Rudd and co are working damn hard to pretend they are doing something while simply refusing to do anything about the underlying cause.