Who will swindle whom?

phill Parsons

Who will swindle whom over global warming …

PM Howard’s age has come into question as a political factor since his lapse of memory in relation to the Liberal candidate for Franklin. However, his denial of the dangers associated with climate change has been a long standing lapse of another kind.

That denial is clearly related to the support of the coal mining and export industry for the programs of his government including that of limited and delayed action on climate change fuelled by Howard’s skeptical position right up until the opinion polls made that position untenable for a national leader expecting re-election. Have a read of Clive Hamilton’s book Scorcher for a look into the world of the dirty politics of climate change.

One doesn’t have to look for long to find impacts of climate change on the natural world, there is plenty of it in the global news.

Researchers for the US Geological Survey have found that just 37 percent of polar bear dens were built on sea ice between 1998 and 2004, compared to 62 percent between 1985 and 1994.

Right now, pregnant females foraging offshore in summer must wait up to a month longer than they did even 10 years ago for new sea ice to form so they can travel to denning areas on land.

Due to the changes in the ice cover in the Arctic that have occurred, and are predicted to follow the further warming that is already unavoidable, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing the polar bear as endangered. The estimated population is between 21,500 and 25,000 to give some idea of the scale of the expected impact.

Massive glaciers in Tian Shan, northwest China, have melted at an alarming rate over the past 40 years. The remote Xinjiang region is home to 42% of the glaciers found in that nation. Glaciers supply the rest of the country and other parts of Asia with water.

The glaciers in Xinjiang region have shrunk by 20 percent and snow lines there have receded by about 60 metres since 1964, with the internal temperature of the glaciers rising by 10 percent over the past two decades.

In the most alarming example, the largest glacier in Xinjiang, located 3,545 metres above sea level in the Tian Shan, split in two in 1993 and has since been melting extremely quickly.

The China Academy of Sciences expects these water reservoirs to fail completely by 2100 on current trends.

I have written before on the importance of glaciers in supplying water to many areas including the major rivers of Asia, the irrigation areas of Montana and water supply in East Africa. East Africa will be first with problems from glacier fed water supplies and that within a decade.

India knows its problematic and as part of its coming Council on Climate Change’s plan to reduce the Indian economies impact on the climate, one that is about 1/6th of the US impact, will be a strategy to mitigate glacial melt because of the importance of that water in food production. Look for it about India’s National Day the 15th of August.

So will Rudd have a plan to significantly reduce greenhouse gas production by 2020 or will it be more of the same.

Well, Tasmanians have experienced the competition between the 2 old parties and the Greens over the forests and from this perhaps some conclusions on policy can be drawn.

Like coal to the national economy, forestry in Tasmania has been portrayed as an essential underpinning of the economy.

As the ‘threat’ to the forestry industry gained traction in the national electorate’s mind a solution by government was sought and the Keating Labor government began the process of the intergovernmental Regional Forest Agreement.

By the time of signing Howard’s Liberals had been elected and agreed an RFA with the Liberal Rundle government, a minority kept in power by Green support. Replaced by the Bacon Labor Government and now the Lennon Labor government the 2 old parties have been married to this agreement, even at the cost of Tasmanian Labor leaving its national leader’s election campaign to fail.

The forest issue had become one where the first of the 2 old parties to blink left the other to play a countering card. Howard did so and captured both the industry, its workers, their union and even a Labor MP.

Will it be the same with the climate change [ and therefore energy ] policy at the coming election.

As with the Tasmanian forest the Greens position on climate change and energy is out there for all to understand. Plenty of time for criticism and questions, open and therefore a part of the democratic process.

The 2 old parties have elements of a policy out in the electorate. Drought is an important factor in the Australian economy and the evidence is that it will be exacerbated by climate change.

Water policy has great similarities, with another Murray Darling scheme to conserve that resource and Labor with a promise for a National Water Summit. Also Rudd promises funding to assist with water tanks on houses and Howard, with the benefit of incumbency, a grant to put a tank on each Scout Hall.

The Liberal government has offered grants to various energy projects with an aim of reducing greenhouse gas over an unspecified time, although it has put a 2015 date on the first geosequestration plant in some energy planning papers

It has also left large scale wind energy projects to find their own way in the market, competing with coal, whose downside, carbon emissions, will not become a cost to coal until after 2011, at least another election away, making alternatives compete when the technology and scale has not developed sufficiently to make them competitive.

Howard has also raised nuclear power as an alternative for Australia. When this power source is too slow to be an effective option given the projection for the impacts of further dangerous climate change one must question the reason for this diversion.

Labor offers to support a range of options, greening cars in a more comprehensive way than the Liberals conversion to gas subsidy [ that was more around the impact of energy prices than on climate ], to increase the investment in geosequestration through an industry partnership and to significantly increase the mandatory renewable energy target.

The most important element in this policy competition, because of its scale in value and employment, is the coal industry.

Coal has determined both of the old parties policies with a marriage to geosequestration and it will determine the type, scale and pace of action in this country.

Another forestry example where powerful interests are at play with peoples health and the climate.

The annual phenomenon that is oddly called the ‘haze’ is back and beginning to blanket parts of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei in thick, acrid smoke from the forest fires in Indonesia, mainly from the Kalimantan and Sumatra islands.

The fact that the ‘haze’ has returned indicates that all the promises and plans announced by the ten-nation Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) last year to prevent forest fires and end the annual return of the haze have failed.

Experts had however predicted that the plan will not work because both countries have powerful commercial interests to turn Indonesian forests into plantations for oil palm which currently enjoys a historically all-time high of US$700 a tonne.

Firing the forests during the dry season from June to August is the cheapest way to clear land for oil palm. Once the land is cleared and its biodiversity destroyed, oil palm is planted extensively turning the entire landscape into a monoculture jungle.

Cash-flush plantation companies, both Malaysian and Indonesian, have marked out vast tracts of forest and peat land in Sumatra and Kalimantan for new palm plantations.
The peat land in Sumatra’s Riau province is the current main target because it burns fast and is ideal for oil palm.

The statistics tell it all. Indonesia is targeted to produce 17.4 million tonnes of crude palm oil this year for the first time, outstripping Malaysia as the world’s number one producer. Malaysia, which is expected to take second place with 16.5 million tonnes, is a major developer of Indonesian oil palm.

Malaysian companies, in joint ventures with Indonesian partners, owned 1.3 million hectares of oil palm plantation in 1999, from a mere 6,000 hectares in 1967.

A leading industry expert estimates another three million hectares would come under palm oil in Indonesia by 2020, effectively wiping out the last of the great rainforest to produce biodiesel. [Although some countries may ban biodiesel from such sources will all do so.]

Malaysian companies will play a major role in the opening up of new plantation land in Indonesia given Malaysian expertise and Indonesia’s favourable climate and low labour costs.

The return of the haze has brought out the familiar blame game with Indonesian officials blaming Malaysian and Singaporean companies for firing the Indonesian forest. This is exactly the same script that Indonesia has been giving out every year for the past 20 years.

Countries in the region have been pressing Indonesia to ratify the ASEAN agreement on trans-boundary haze pollution which is being touted as the answer to the annual haze from forest fires.

With public anger rising over this year’s haze, Indonesia quickly assured its neighbors that it is taking “all necessary steps” to ratify the agreement.

Unfortunately, Indonesia also said the same during the 2005 and 2006 haze season.

Environmental experts say even if Indonesia ratifies the agreement it will still be unable to completely eradicate forest fires given the limits of the country’s administrative, technical and financial resources and its huge size.

In addition, a ‘strange clause’ in Indonesia’s forestry law allows open burning of forests if ‘permits’ are obtained, and according to Indonesian NGOs such permits are easily obtained.

In the end it all boils down to huge profits — first from logging, then from oil palm whose amazing productivity surpasses all vegetable oils.

For the giant plantation companies and their political backers, a spot of haze each year is a small price to pay.

This must contain elements familiar to many readers.

Here is where Howard’s $200M to conserve tropical rainforests will have to work a special magic to alter the impacts of greed. Even the countries where the investment companies are located are unable to control those companies behavior when it comes to impact on the health of the Malaysians and Singaporeans.

The same dilemma will face Labor and Liberal, making reigning in the coal industry a very difficult task indeed. On the one hand is the financial support of the Liberal party from industry and on the other is the financial support of the Labor party from the coal miners.

Neither will want to see their industry phased out and so the tie to the unproved process of geosequestration of carbon from coal fired power plants will be held out as a panacea for some considerable time.

As I have written before even with geosequestration the growth in energy demand will see no change in the business as usual path unless the carbon is also removed from hydrocarbon fuels or an alternative is found that does not also destroy the important tropical rainforest carbon sinks including their peat soils.

So what is another conservative party doing in a land renowned for its sunshine

The greening of conservative parties over energy and climate sees Florida adopt a 20% renewables by 2020 target to combat global warming under Republican Governor Crist, coming into line with California.

What a stimulus to the US solar industry with the sun providing 5 to 6 kilowatt hours per M2 per day, twice the sunshine of Germany, a global leader in solar power. Part of Germany’s success is paying their home owners for feeding the solar power they produce into the grid.

Targets for the near term need to be set and both of the old parties are failing in their current policy offers. Perhaps it will improve closer to the election, the question being who will blink first.

FPL Group, the parent of Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest utility, is the top U.S. wind power generator with 47 wind farms in 15 states. It does not have any in Florida because of the poor wind patterns there.

It has a major solar plant in California’s Mojave Desert, the price of land dedicated to a solar plant making it prohibitive in Florida. Rooftops are an ideal location for solar power units with the cost of land being removed from the equation and the user close to the daytime source of energy production.

FPL Group has no coal fired plants, owns natural gas, oil fired and nuclear power plants. Florida Power & Light is noncommittal about the Governors plan.

Its not writ in stone that policy has to be held in the thrall of vested interests, although we know from experience it is often the case.

Our dependence on the natural services supplied by the climate and its associated biota is absolute.

To threaten the function of those systems in the patterns that have allowed the growth of human activity to its present state is madness, especially when we have an understanding of the possible impacts.

The people involved may have not understood the decline of the mega fauna as factors including hunting led to its extinction in many areas. We now understand those pressures but still seem unable to take comprehensive action to protect the remnants of megafauna that are now isolated across the globe.

The impacts of deforestation are now better understood, the erosion, the burial of productive land, flooding, the siltation of rivers and ports, but it still is allowed to continue with the last tracts of the ancient forests planned for conversion even though we now have some idea of the climate impacts those conversions will have.

And so toward the end of the debate about the cause of climate change we have The Great Global Warming Swindle.

A forum for the main ideas of the skeptics and deniers.

Did they stand up to scrutiny? No, the programs website continues to alter its ‘evidence’ as pieces are shown to be false. The debate following the broadcast showed that the skeptics don’t have credible evidence for another cause besides human activity.

Capital and industry have moved beyond the question of cause, which is now clear enough, to one of risk management. For example Rupert Murdoch has taken his media empire on a path to being carbon neutral, a bet each way on his understanding of the risk.

But there are other risks associated with the climate change debate that also need to be managed. That is the perception of the degree of risk. Is it high and immediate or small, thus allowing a gradualist approach to action.

Here is where we see the consensus of the IPCC reports in conflict with some of the latest evidence of the rate at which global warming is occurring.

For example it is postulated that ice shelves such as that of Greenland may, by the process of warming move into a phase where the weight of the ice, its fissuring and the lubricating melt water flowing beneath it see a more rapid breakup and melt of that ice. The same could drive ice in Antarctica into a more rapid decline.

Modeling of the Amazon rainforest by the Hadley Climate Center show its carbon storage mechanisms declining post 2030 with a business as usual rate of carbon emissions.

Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology and critic of The Great Global Warming Swindle, said in his Lateline interview following the Swindle debate that climate change is not a subject a documentary to entertain, it is real and we should be very concerned about the impacts of continuing our current behaviors.

He also said we do not have enough information to be totally predictive, therefore indicating that a cautionary approach should be taken.

We will be asked to choose between courses of action when the actual outcomes are not clear but the costs of failure are. Therefore beware if you are told the impacts will be small and not much needs to be done. Nobody can guarantee that

There is a lot at stake and the least risky course for the climate outcome would seem to me to be the course Australia should choose, not the one that reduces the risk to the coal industry. A climate out of control, a real possibility, cannot be compensated for by export income

The measures to reduce greenhouse gases must be comprehensive, effective and timely and currently neither of the old parties can be trusted to ensure that there isn’t wool pulling swindle to avoid Australia taking meaningful action.

phill Parsons