Norm Dixon
The Australian government's policy on global warming could be summed by a verse from Bobby McFerrin's facetious late-'80s hit song "Don't worry, be happy": "In every life we have some trouble/ But when you worry you make it double/ Don't worry, be happy/ Don't worry, be happy now."
On July 26, federal environment minister Ian Campbell endorsed a government-commissioned report that, while providing disturbing details of the likely impact global warming will wreak on Australia in the next 40 or so years, recommended only that the government promote "an efficient adaption response", i.e. learn to live with it rather than take any concerted measures now to force a reduction in big business' emission of greenhouse gases.
The privately prepared report, "Climate Change Risk and Vulnerability", warned that Australia's annual average temperature could rise 0.4°-2°C by 2030, and by 1-6° by 2050. This will result in more heatwaves, more frequent and severe droughts, and more frequent and intense bush fires.
There will be more extreme weather events like cyclones, storm surges and floods, which will be amplified by rising sea levels. It is expected that a range of dangerous diseases and conditions will become more widespread. Millions of people living in coastal communities and remote Aboriginal communities are likely to bear the brunt of this.
Warming will impact severely on Australia's fresh water supply, and will have a severe negative impact on much of the country's major agricultural industries. Australia's most important river system, the Murray-Darling, will come under severe pressure. The tourism industry will suffer as the Great Barrier Reef, the Ningaloo Reef in WA and the NT's Kakadu National Park, as well as Australia's alpine regions and rainforests, will be badly affected.
@sub = 'Pro-greenhouse pact'
On July 28, the US government announced that Washington and Canberra had, for the last 12 months, been secretly cooking up an agreement with the capitalist governments of Japan, South Korea, India and China.
The Asia Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate will, in the words of US President George Bush, "allow our nations to develop and accelerate deployment of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies" rather than requiring or enforcing any greenhouse gas emission-reduction targets or time frames.
The new pact is a blatant manouevre to sabotage the next stage of international negotiations on enacting further mandatory emissions-reduction targets for the rich industrialised countries and bringing the larger industrialising Third World countries into the post-2012 emission-reduction process. Those talks are scheduled for November in Montreal.
However, the rival Asia Pacific Partnership will meet in Adelaide just a few weeks before the Montreal gathering. While the exact details of what it will entail remain unknown, the intention of Washington and Canberra is clearly to tempt India, China and South Korea into breaking ranks with the rest of the world with the bribe of privileged access to advanced — albeit yet-to-be developed — energy technology.
Between them, the members of this fledgling pro-greenhouse gas pact are responsible for almost half of all current emissions. Leader of the Australian Greens Bob Brown, noting that a majority of the body's members were among the world's biggest coal producers, warned that "this is all about taxpayers' money being diverted from developing clean, renewable technologies to try to make coal less dirty". It is also likely that Washington will exploit the pact to promote the renewed expansion of nuclear power generation, and Canberra will eagerly seek to exploit this to sell more Australian uranium overseas.
Greenpeace International's Stephanie Tunmore said on July 28 that "the pact ... is entirely voluntary and does not even mention greenhouse gas emissions reductions ... Unfortunately, it seems likely that Mr Bush and Mr Howard are seeking to protect the interests of their domestic fossil fuel industries and to deflect criticism for their total failure to address climate change... Up to 70-80% of global emissions must be reduced by industrialised countries by mid-century in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. Voluntary technology agreements, negotiated by the world's worst polluters, are not going to get us there."
@sub = Greenhouse effect
The concentration of industry-generated greenhouse gases — most significantly carbon dioxide (CO2) from the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity and fuel transportation — in the atmosphere is rapidly rising, trapping heat like a greenhouse. If world industry's greenhouse gas emissions do not begin to be significantly and rapidly reduced within decades, humanity faces potentially catastrophic consequences.
The average global temperature is already 0.6°C hotter than at the end of the 19th century and even if CO2 levels were stabilised today, the temperature will continue to rise for the next 30 years. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere today is higher than at any time in more than 400,000 years.
In 2001, the 2500 international scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that unless CO2 levels are stabilised at around twice the pre-industrial level, the Earth's average atmospheric temperature will rise 1.4-5.8°C by 2100. To achieve stabilisation, total human-generated greenhouse gas emissions must be slashed by at least 60%-80% by 2050 at the latest, they said.
If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced the IPCC forecasts that, on the increasingly questionable assumption that the ice caps will remain intact, there will be a sea level rise of between 20 centimetres and 1 metre by 2100. Global warming will trigger more extreme weather events, including more severe storms and floods, worse droughts and increased desertification, severe shortages of fresh water and increased epidemics of dangerous tropical diseases. The world's impoverished majority will bear the brunt.
Every day brings more evidence that not only confirms these conclusions, but raises fears that they may be significant underestimations and the time left to enact genuine greenhouse-gas emissions is getting shorter.
Trust the market
In defiance of these dire warnings, the US and Australian governments have worked hand-in-glove to try to prevent the introduction of mandatory international greenhouse gas reduction measures. Like the Bush administration, the Australian government refuses to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, with its token goal of an overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012.
Instead, the US and Australian governments are promoting a series of dubious schemes and hugely expensive technological "fixes". In particular, they are talking up so-called "clean coal" technology, such as carbon sequestration, which has yet to even leave the drawing-board stage, and resurrecting the international nuclear power industry — both in a bid to sell the irresponsible claim that overall greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved without binding international emission-reduction targets, or the imposition of domestic regulations and legislation necessary to speed their implementation.
Bush and Howard want us to share their blind faith in the power of the anarchic capitalist market — the mechanism that got the world into this fix in the first place. They say the promised development of new technology, no doubt to be greased with billions in public subsidies ("incentives") to the big energy corporations, will solve the global warming before it's too late. In the meantime, they argue, the world's governments must "hold the fort" by concentrating on measures that encourage their peoples and economies to "adapt" to the "unavoidable" effects global warming.
That is the underlying logic behind Canberra's endorsement of the local "adaptation" strategy and its collusion with Washington to torpedo the international Kyoto Protocol.
These utopian schemes are not designed to halt the potential catastrophe of global warming. They are self-serving means to defend the vast investments and huge profits of the West's most powerful fossil fuel-related corporations and to prevent or delay large-scale research, development and the rapid introduction of industrial-scale renewable sources of energy that will be essential if the global warming crisis is to be averted.
It is a textbook example of how capitalist governments put the short-term profits of big corporations, and the welfare of the tiny group of extremely rich people who own them, above the long-term interests of the vast majority of the world's people and countries.
From Green Left Weekly, August 10, 2005.
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