New figures show Australia will fail to meet Kyoto target

New data from the US Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC) shows Australia is likely to fail to meet its Kyoto target. Figures from CDIAC shows Australian CO2 emissions increased 8.5 percent between 2004 and 2005. In 2005 Australia produced 101 metric tonnes of carbon with coal consumption accounting for 58 percent of the total. Australia is the world's fourth largest coal producer and by far the world's largest exporter of coal. The data shows that Australian emissions have grown steadily since World War II and have gone exponential since the 1960s. Emissions grew every year until 1998 before declining slightly. However, the data shows emissions rising again as of 2005.

The data ranks Australia ranked as one of the world' top 10 polluters on per capita use of fossil fuels. The data also shows carbon emissions are growing more than four times faster than figures quoted by the Federal Government, placing Australia's Kyoto target at risk. The Federal Government claims that national fossil fuel emissions rose by only 2 per cent over the same period. Australia has committed to meeting a target of 108 per cent of its 1990 emissions levels (which were 80,000 million tonnes) annually by 2012. But the CDIAC figures of a 130 percent increase as at 2005 suggests this cannot be achieved.

University of Adelaide's Professor Barry Brook agrees with this finding and says the Government are doing nothing to stem the emissions. Brook is the head of the university’s climate change research institute and he condemned the rhetoric about Australia being on track to meet its Kyoto target as merely greenwash. "In terms of fuel use, [emissions are] spirally upwards at an alarming rate," he said. “Even a conservative projection based on the US centre's data suggested that by 2012, Australia fossil fuel emissions could be 37 per cent above 1990 levels.”

Brook also noted the “worrying discrepancy” between CDIAC’s data and Australia’s newly branded Department of Climate Change. Unlike CDIAC, the government’s data (pdf) tracks all greenhouse emissions (not just fossil fuels). Australia’s Kyoto target is based on 108 percent of the 1990 figure of 555 million tonnes. The government’s 2007 tracking document believes the 108 percent figure is possible despite huge increases in energy and industrial use due to significant savings in land use clearance. But as Brook points out, those gains may be illusory - land clearance in Queensland was phased out http://www.wwf.org.au/ourwork/land/qldlandclearing/ over the period 2003-2006.

So where does that leave Australia and its Kyoto commitment? According to Clive Hamilton, the Kyoto Protocol is not merely symbolic; it is a very substantial agreement that lays down the framework to begin to deal with global warming. He says the scale of the task should never have been underestimated especially with the Rudd government inheriting a huge greenhouse debt from the previous administration. When world met at Kyoto in 1997 to hammer out the deal, John Howard’s team negotiated a last minute clause into the protocol. The clause was Article 3.7 of the Kyoto Protocol which immediately became infamously known as the “Australia clause”.

The “Australia clause” allowed countries with net emissions from land use change and forestry in 1990 to include them in their 1990 baseline. “Land use change” is a euphemism for land clearing – the removal of vegetation for purposes other than forestry. Because of good agricultural conditions of the times, the late eighties and early nineties were bumper years for land clearing, particularly in Queensland. This artificially raised Australia’s emissions in the Kyoto base year of 1990 by around 30 per cent, masking extraordinary growth in fossil emissions and made the 108 per cent target far cheaper and easier to achieve.

But as Brook pointed out with the Queensland data, Australia has now already played its get-out-of-jail-free card. Any further cuts must now come from coal, oil and gas. These cuts are a legacy of 11 years of profligate Coalition rule. As former shadow environment minister Duncan Kerr put it, the Howard Government’s refusal to introduce abatement measures has turned the target from “a three-inch putt into a six foot one”.

The CDIAC data suggests the ball may actually be stuck in a bunker. Clive Hamilton believes drastic measures must be taken now. He says it is imperative federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong blocks state governments from approving new coal-fired plants. Both Victoria and NSW have been in an obscene rush to get plants off the ground before the Carbon Trading regime is installed in 2010. Last month, Victorian energy minister Peter Bachelor announced the approval of a $750 million Latrobe Valley power station expected to be operational by 2012.

While Victoria seems to be locked into a huge flow of emission for another 40 years, the NSW power industry is in disarray after Premier Iemma’s failure to privatise the industry. Iemma warned the cancellation of the original sale plan won't spare the state from having to invest in upgrading and fitting coal-fired power plants with equipment to reduce pollution, with taxpayers having to meet these costs. But one of the reasons the sale plans fell through is that investors won’t commit until NSW indemnifies them against all future carbon liabilities.

It is not just the power industry that is jockeying for position ahead of the Carbon Trading Scheme. Last week, the Business Council of Australia (representing the 100 largest companies in the country) responded to the Government’s already weak climate green paper by threatening to take industries off-shore if the carbon price was high. It claimed that if the European price of $40 a tonne was brought in, it would force the closing of half the exporting plants in the cement, sugar, paper, electricity, gas and other industries. It demanded polluting industries pay as little as possible for permits, the scheme start later than 2010 and the modest targets be reduced further. As Olga Galacho points out in the Melbourne Herald Sun, the BCA came up with a laundry list of "full compensation for trade exposed, emissions intensive industries and welfare for coal generators.”

As well as pandering to business, Labor will also be sensitive to any voter backlash from the trading scheme. But Hamilton says the scheme must pass seven tests to be successful. It must 1) be illegal to emit greenhouse gases without a permit 2) it must include all fossil emissions, including petrol 3) give no incentives or loopholes to avoid obligations 4) avoid vested interests in the allocation of permits 5) be compatible with overseas schemes 6) avoid putting a price cap on the price of permits and 7) include the flexibility to set more stringent targets as the science changes. The CDIAC data would suggest the time for more stringent targets is already upon us.

Brisbane Writers Festival: Clive Hamilton and The Dirty Politics of Climate Change

As the NSW government announces that water restrictions will be permanent due to climate change, it was fitting that one of the best sessions at the Brisbane Writers Festival yesterday was “The Dirty Politics of Climate Change” where the speaker was Clive Hamilton. Hamilton was at the festival to promote his new book “Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change” and his dispassionate and eloquent speech was a frightening wake-up call to combat government inertia on the subject of climate change.

The session was introduced by Chris O’Connell. O’Connell is the general manager of Channel Ten in Brisbane and sits on a number of committees dealing with the impact of climate change on community and business. He described Dr Hamilton as Australia’s leading enviro-economist will great expertise in the areas of climate change and environmental tax reform. Hamilton is executive director of the Australia Institute, an independent policy research body in Canberra. Hamilton has a BA in Maths, a bachelor’s degree in economics and a PhD in economics.

Hamilton then took the floor. He said he wanted to talk about the politics of science and the role of sceptics and then move on to observations about APEC and its implications. He began by discussing the role of advocates and how they naturally exaggerate to advance their case. He said environmental campaigns had often overstated cases of environmental decline in areas such as urban air pollution. They overstate their purpose in order to elicit a more emotional response – usually fear. And especially when their opponents resort to spin, they find this urge to exaggerate irresistible.

However one subject that is continually under-estimated is climate change. Yet Hamilton said the culture was one of refusal to face the facts. Environmental scientists are afraid to talk about the true effects of climate change. They know the truth is so frightening it tends to intimidate. Hamilton said there was a “cavernous gap” between the attitudes about scientists and politicians on the subject. Public concern is well ahead of the politicians but there is no real sense of the magnitude of the disaster that lies ahead. And apart from the US, nowhere is that radical disconnect greater than in Australia.

Perhaps that is not surprising, as the science truly is frightening. In the journal of atomic chemistry and physics, environmental scientist Doctor James Hansen concluded that a one degree raise in global temperatures would lead to severe disruptions to climate systems and a rise in sea level. Yet Hansen says that a two degree rise is “locked in” and that a return to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is simply not possible. Hansen said instead with the current levels of industrialisation and continued growth, a three degree rise is more likely, possibly rising to four or five. Few people have faced up to the facts of what Hansen and others are saying.

At two or three degrees Australia would face a doubling in the number of very hot days (over 35 degrees C) and long, hot summers would be the norm. Extreme weather events such as storms, cyclones and bushfires will increase. 95 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef would die due to coral bleach, half of the core habitat of eucalypti would be lost and 60 percent of the Murray-Darling would never flow again. Experts worry about "non-linear weather events" and “climate tipping points” are ignored when they say should go on a “war footing” against global warming.

But scientists around the world are pressured to tone down their findings in order to seek publication, even in academic journals. Scientists self-censor in the face of public criticism and the fear of seeming to ‘cry wolf’. No-one seems interested in facing the truth that there will be a disastrous multi-meter sea level rise in the next century. There is little evidence the world is prepared to do what is needed. And there is absolutely no sign the world is prepared to tackle the problem of greenhouse gases in aviation as that industry continually expands. Hamilton said that if Australia committed to a 50 percent cut in emissions, aviation alone would consume the other 50 percent by 2050. He said there should be a moratorium on airport expansion.

The recent demonstrations at Heathrow showed that some people are beginning to take the issue seriously. However the press painted the demonstrators as "anarchists" and "eco-fundamentalists" to undermine their argument. Sinclair himself has been attacked in the press for call for a moratorium on expansion. The Federal Government, Labor opposition and Virgin Blue have all condemned the proposal. Vested interests in continued growth will simply deny the truth and attack the proposers as “mad greenies”.

This is consistent with how John Howard’s government has treated the environmentalist argument when dealing with climate change. The government describes cutting emissions having “ruinous consequences”, would cause “massive losses” and would “destroy the economy”. James Hansen does say the measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions require a radically different energy use pattern – and this fact is unimaginable to politicians.

Hamilton said sceptics accuse climate scientists as being alarmist but the opposite is true: they are too afraid to tell the truth. Hamilton said this needed to change. He quoted Hansen again who said that scientists have a responsibility to the truth and future generations that is greater than the risk of personal vilification. And there is much to fight. Despite the Australian Government giving the appearance it is now serious about climate change, they still attack climate scientists’ predictions, bamboozle the evidence and create doubt in the minds of the public. Their climate change scepticism gives the impression that scientists are still not certain among themselves and therefore there is nothing to worry about.

Hamilton said the media have been complicit in this downplaying of the scientific evidence in favour of human-caused climate change. He brought up the case of the recent ABC screening of the Great Global Warming Swindle. Filmmaker Martin Durkin had already categorised environmental ideology as irrational in his previous work. Called “Against Nature” it caused an outcry in the UK as it claimed that environmentalism had its roots in Nazi Germany and it now causes suffering in the third world.

George Monbiot exposed Durkin as someone who consistently “misled” his interviewees about “the content and purpose of the programmes”. He is also linked to a Trotskyite splinter group called the Revolutionary Communist Party who take a contrarian position on positions such as climate change, support of Serbia and Rwanda’s Hutus and are opposed to the ban on landmines. The Great Climate Change Swindle was denounced by the prestigious Royal Society (Britain’s academy of sciences) who said those “who ignore the weight of evidence are playing a dangerous game”.

ABC defended their right to screen the program citing the need to promote “a full range of views” but Hamilton asked is this really true. Would they, for instance, broadcast the conspiracy theories of Lyndon Larouche? He said the ABC’s criteria for screening programs should not just be entertainment but should include a modicum of credibility and a minimum of journalistic standards.

Hamilton then went on to discuss the example of the 9 August front page story in the Australian. According to its exclusive, the head of the world’s leading body on climate change, the IPCC, had publicly backed John Howard’s decision to defer cuts in emission targets while on a visit to Australia. The article was written by the newspaper’s new environmental reporter Matthew Warren. Prior to joining the Australian Warren had been the PR director of the NSW Minerals Council, the state's peak mining body.

Embarrassed IPCC head Dr Rajendra Pachauri was called into many embassies in Canberra to explain his position. One lobbyist at the conference he was attending was so surprised to hear Dr Pachauri had endorsed Canberra's position, she asked him about it at a lecture the next day. She wasn't the first to question it. Pachauri publicly denied supporting the Australian position and he wrote a letter of complaint to the Australian. ABC’s Media Watch accused the Australian that it misrepresented an interview. The Australian did not publish the letter or offer any retraction. Instead they repeated the assertion two days later in another story.

Hamilton finished with some observations on APEC. Abroad and now finally at home, the Howard Government has suffered for its implacable opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. The Government has tried to provide cover for their position by conjuring up alternative solutions to make it look like they are doing something. Howard has made some environmental deals in its bi-lateral agreements with fellow Kyoto-holdout US. But the AP6 initiative has proved, in Hamilton’s words “a complete flop”. Then a year ago, the Government announced that the APEC Summit would be its trump card and they would be able to announce a grand “Sydney Declaration” on climate change.

But as the summit approached, other nations blanched at Australia’s plans. Apart from the US, the other nations had all ratified Kyoto and wanted any future plans to be an extension of that. The G8 meeting in June gave a “remarkably explicit” endorsement to work through the UN process. The other APEC countries told Australia they would not sign any deal in Sydney that would undermine Kyoto. Alexander Downer then had the audacity to claim he was disappointed that Sydney could not achieve a more ambitious deal. Malaysia put Australia in its place when its Prime Minister said Australia has no credibility to negotiate anything on climate change.

The countries eventually signed an “aspirational” target without any legally binding targets for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. On the day of the declaration, the front page of the Australian said that China and US’s acceptance was a “sweeping victory for John Howard on climate change”. Hamilton said that newspaper reaches “new levels of absurdity every time I open it”. But, he added, despite the Howard spin, the Declaration was not without merit. It reaffirms the UN objectives on greenhouse gas emissions and implicitly endorses the Kyoto Protocol with its call for “post 2012 international arrangements [which] strengthen current arrangements” and long-term targets. The Declaration was a final defeat for Howard’s isolationism.

Affluenza

It's not influenza, though that has Spanished and SARSed its way across the deathscape. It is not AIDS, though that is proving a moral panic and an arms race against a virus. It is not cancer, whether it be of lung, skin, bowel, throat or breast. In fact it is nothing in our external dimension that has conquered our ability to conquer the planet. It is an internal realisation. It is marketing.

It is the freedom to choose between things that are not important. The problem is, even if the market itself is inherently good, the way the market pushes its wares, eventually lays the seeds for its own destruction. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s book Affluenza explores the malaise that is at the heart of behaviour in Australia. The book is the product of the leftwing thinktank called the Australia Institute, and it commits a lot of time and statistics to fight issues that impact the core constituency of the Howard Regime.

The portmanteau word affluenza was formed from affluence and influenza by a KCTS/Seattle and Oregon Public Broadcasting System documentary of that name in 1997. One of the producers of that program John De Graaf wrote a book called “Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic" which was published by Berrett-Koehler, 2001. His description, the all consuming epidemic described a single threat.

However, the Australian authors offer three definitions for Affluenza. This three-pronged definition, the authors make no bones, is an Australian condition. It is firstly the unfulfilled feeling gotten from the effort of chasing away the socio-economic inferiorness known as keeping up with the Jones. Secondly it is an epidemic of stress and overwork caused by the pursuit of the Australian Dream and thirdly it is an addiction, and an unsustainable one in economic growth. Economics is all about the management of scarcity. But Hamilton and Dennis explore the situation where scarcity is itself scarce. In short, Australia is a society going nowhere. The cure is downshifting.

Today, the real drama is in the distribution of power in the 90% of those in Australia who do not go hungry every day. Politics in the twentieth century was all about a reaction to the means of production. That really has changed much in the 21st century except that information is now the means of production. And as McLuhan predicted, the means is the message. It matters less who was the source or the destination of the message but more the message itself and the fact it took place at all. Our society sends out a lot of messages.

Affluenza follows on from a similar book from Hamilton “Growth fetish” which compared our economic system to a cargo cult. We are all Pacific Islands who believe in the imminence of a new age of blessing which will be heralded and fulfilled by the arrival of special cargo sent to them by supernatural powers. We work hard developing the economic condition that makes us want to work harder and get more of it. The book Affluenza mostly steers of the environmental impact rather than the personal health affects of Western lifestyle. Thus it covers cars, children, debt, drugs, happiness, money and politics. But primary it covers advertisements.

The highest-end advertising is that of the brand. It is perception about the brand that advertisers work hardest on. Hamilton and Denniss describe these people as Australia’s best-paid psychologists. They are devoted to ways of increasing insecurity, vulnerability and obsession in consumers. In pure economic terms, ads add value because they provide information about the product. The problem with brands is that all the information is leached out of them. Nike is the simple victory of a Jordanian swoosh. Coke is the real thing and ipods are bus stops.

Ads also favour competition. In Australia however, competition in business is frowned upon because it is too small a market to cut many throats. Instead, they promote loyalty through brands. Modern corporations don’t like fickle customers. Instead they promote the image that buying the brand is a form of self-love. Loyalty means we abandon critical faculties and buy regardless of real need. We define ourselves by the things we buy. As well fixing our dependence on the brand, the cure to affluenza also impacts the places we live. Continued consumption results in great waste and pollution. The authors’ solution is simple but devastating to the economy: resist consumption. Growth is the dominant framework and this message is not yet popular. As of yesterday, Green parties still hovered under 10% of the vote in Australia’s most liberal state – Victoria. Their 9.7% garnered no seats in parliament's lower house, although the Nationals with only 5.4% grabbed 8 seats. But their lack of power should not convince those in power to be immune to the threat: the fight is on between two world views.