We’re headed back to the Pliocene if we don’t face climate demon
Peter Boyer says Australia is in denial about the serious ramifications of global warming
NEXT time you hear a political leader talk about progress in curbing greenhouse emissions, bear in mind that the carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere is rising at a record rate.
Observations on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa show CO2 levels since 2010 rising at an average rate of 2.38 parts per million per year, well above the average annual rise of the previous decade, 2.04ppm.
Concentrations in the air are at their highest level since the Pliocene, about three million years ago. Back then the world was about 2.5C warmer than today and sea levels were about 20m higher. That tells us a lot about where we’re heading.
Australia and every other country that signed the 2015 Paris Agreement claim to be on track to meet Paris targets. The atmospheric readings tell another story altogether.
When a person rejects scientific evidence that humans are changing Earth’s climate, we call them a climate denier. Most political and business leaders let it be known they’re not in that category, saying they believe what science says and support measures to fix the problem.
We keep hearing from governments that measures are effective and targets are being met when CO2 readings show this isn’t true, that measures are not working. Saying all is well when it is not is a form of denial.
Australia can lower its emissions a little through better agricultural and forestry practices, but 80 per cent of our emissions are from burning fossil fuels: oil mainly for transport, gas for generating electricity, heating and industry, and coal for electricity and steelmaking.
The only way to make an impact on emissions is to target fossil fuels, and our only scheme to do that was the carbon tax – inadequate because it did not tackle transport emissions, but much better than nothing. In 2014 the Coalition replaced it with the Emissions Reduction Fund. The ERF pays for lowest-cost abatement projects out of existing revenue, without a supporting tax. Far from the economywide scheme it replaced, it focuses on land management and farming and avoided deforestation, soil carbon, savanna burning and methane from piggeries.
Working in very narrow limits, the ERF funds lowhanging fruit, involving feelgood actions that could offend no one, like tree-planting and waste management. It has had no impact on coal power, transport or industrial processes.
Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg touts the scheme an outstanding success. After the most recent ERF auction
in December he asserted “the ERF is in stark contrast to Labor’s $15.4 billion carbon tax” which he said produced “little emissions reduction”.
Comparing the ERF with the carbon tax is comparing apples with oranges. The effectiveness of the carbon tax, which dealt directly with fossil-fuel emissions, was clear from generating and market data. Not so the ERF, whose emissions claims are all but unverifiable.
A principal objection to the ERF among those who have seriously studied it has been a lack of scrutiny of proposals to ensure they are not simply seeking government funding to do things, like leaving trees in the ground, that would have been done anyway.
Back in 2016, in the ERF’s early years, an environmental economist at the Australian National University, Paul Burke, expressed concern at the amount of money awarded to low-effort land projects – sometimes many times the value of the land concerned.
The Turnbull Government’s state of denial about climate change was thrown into stark relief a fortnight ago when it announced a $500 million Great Barrier Reef restoration package which ignored the elephant in the room: a warming Coral Sea that has killed vast areas of coral.
Less obvious but just as dangerous is the shared fantasy in political, bureaucratic and business circles across the developed world, including Australia, that nations’ Paris pledges are going to do the trick, when they are orders of magnitude less than what is needed.
Most leading economic advisers and commentators, while professing support of national and global action to cut emissions, overlook climate factors when ruminating about future prospects. That crucial omission leaves a gaping hole in all their analyses.
As long as our governments keep pretending they have addressed carbon emissions, and leaders and pundits refuse to acknowledge the climate demon, looking every which way but squarely into its face, ours is a nation in denial.