Just days out from the poll that matters the Australian Conservation Foundation’s scorecard of the parties’ environmental policies shows both major parties have failed to offer credible policy packages on climate change.
ACF’s scorecard has the Coalition on 20 out of 100, Labor on 44 and the Greens on 89.
“Neither major party has produced a credible plan to cut pollution and lead the transition to a clean energy future,” said ACF Executive Director Don Henry.
“This is unacceptable, as 79% of Australians support putting a price tag on pollution.” (Auspoll, June 2010)
“The Prime Minister said she would lead on climate policy, but there is no reason to further delay action.
“The Coalition has run a misleading scare campaign about the impact of putting a price tag on pollution – a big step backward from 2007 when John Howard went to the election with a plan for an emissions trading scheme.
“The fact is, we simply can’t afford not to move away from a pollution-dependent economy.
“Labor has managed 60 out of 100 in the sustainable cities and transport category.
“Both the Coalition and Labor need to pull up their socks on cutting pollution and achieving a healthy environment in the last days of this election campaign.
“The Greens are currently the only party offering effective policies to cut pollution and fast track Australia to a clean energy future.”
The Climate Institute:
Pollute-O-Meter Update HERE
phill Parsons
“To deny comprehensive, effective and timely action to address the level of carbon emissions in line with the best scientific advice available and thus to risk the supply of water upon which everything depends is insane…This election should be considered by you as a referendum on climate policy, a chance to register Yes for comprehensive, effective and timely action by Australia by voting 1 Green on both ballot papers. Such a message will not be lost on whoever wins government or to world opinion at the important round of international climate talks in Mexico at the end of the year.”
Abbott’s coal fired endless summer is fuelled by Gillard’s empty talk and hollow gestures.
In this election campaign the old parties are vying for voters’ attention, and ultimately their support, at the ballot by offering a range of somewhat similar policies to deal with the usual matters of interest to the families of Australia; health, education and welfare.
Also in the frame is the divide between the policy threads that are the management of the economy; which businesses to support, how much to tax them and what infrastructure and where will make it work.
However, both parties are skirting the central and singular issue, unable to come to grips with a climate policy that will please their hard heads by making no changes to business as usual for Australia’s carbon emissions and con the voter into believing they are taking action to limit ‘climate change’ and thus please all those concerned.
This Claytons policy approach is not just a failure, it is also dangerous. The recognized safe point to arrest growth in greenhouse gas emissions before causing them to fall is rapidly approaching. Prior to the GFC it was 2015. It may have been pushed out by a downturn in economic activity, but only by a short period.
The policy failure of the old parties arises partly because such changes have never been faced by a modern democracy before, so there is no precedent except perhaps wartime, but it is difficult to see yourself as the enemy; and partly because although the climate underpins everything, we have taken it as granted, a free good, a commons which has never been paid for.
From now on everything we do the old way, with its high emission levels from the use of fossil fuels, will cost in terms of the impacts an increasingly unstable climate will have on us.
The climate is central to everything, one only has to look at the differences between places and in the lives of people in the many different climates we have today. Each is structured physically and socially to a stable climate.
The climate system regulates what is available for humans to conduct their activities and thus the climate prevailing has determined the investments made ports for a particular mean sea level, dams for known rainfall patterns, houses for predictable temperature ranges, governance systems in expectation of cohesion and stability.
Consider water, something for which parts of Pakistan have a surfeit and with whom the people of Chad would probably trade places, their country being in long term deficit, when only a short while ago some rains could be depended on.
In areas of reasonably reliable rainfall and low population in Australia we were able to capture and store sufficient water to meet our needs.
Lately, other jurisdictions, have taken measures to underpin their supply; by taking the salt from the seawater, by making water supply grids through connecting smaller systems and by piping water huge distances, all because the reliability of rainfall has declined. The cost of these measures must be approaching $20 Billion, with no guarantee they will be sufficient.
Are the old parties carrying on about such waste, and had we listened 40 years ago, unnecessary expenditure. No, they are not taking themselves to task for failures of foresight or leadership in that period, although adaptive measures may still have needed to be taken the cost to the economy may have been much less.
In Tasmania, the storage and supply infrastructure is being upgraded and users are experiencing the costs associated with those water reforms, hopefully some to meet needs in a drier climate. At least one hopes the planners are including that in their planning.
In places where rainfall fails, water becomes extraordinarily precious. In places where population increases and demands on water continue to rise the water stored underground from rainfall, usually over long time spans, is being depleted as use exceeds replenishment rates, for example in parts of India and the US where the water table is increasingly deeper.
To deny comprehensive, effective and timely action to address the level of carbon emissions in line with the best scientific advice available and thus to risk the supply of water upon which everything depends is insane. But this is what the old party’s offer, policies of denial, policies to pander to the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry and to those who fail to heed the advice of the experts in the field of climate science.
And yet Gillard and Abbott seem like ordinary humans, full of good and bad points, of follies and foibles as well as abilities; but although they exhibit a capacity to reason they are apparently unable to perceive the degree of imminent danger we all face when the available evidence has been put before them.
Ignorance of the laws of physics and chemistry cannot be claimed as an excuse. They have the advice of Australia’s best ‘tech-heads’ on climate. The judgement of the climate will be harsh and unforgiving.
Gillard may have put forward a program of limited action, but facing up to Abbott with his threat of a great big new tax on everything mantra just after she had quieted him applying this mantra to mining, the safe Julia, the Julia of the first 2 weeks of the campaign, is committed to seeking consensus through a nationwide forum.
This idea went down like a lead balloon among those who have serious concerns about the need for action now, rather than more delay. One can understand the need for measures to be accepted in a democracy, but there is also a need for leadership at times of looming crisis.
Recently Gillard has mirrored Abbott and added a new ‘real action’ string to her policy proposals, offering to pay larger landowners to sink and store Carbon. Good of and in itself, but hardly sufficient given the task of turning emissions growth around in the middle of the current decade and taking it on a steep decline.
The science summary
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated projected temperature changes for various scenarios in 2007 and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg have now gone one step further: they have developed a new model that specifies the maximum volumes of carbon dioxide that humans may emit to remain below the critical threshold for climate warming of two degrees Celsius [2dC.]. To do this, the scientists incorporated into their calculations data relating to the carbon cycle, namely the volume of carbon dioxide absorbed and released by the oceans and forests.
“”What’s new about this research is that we have integrated the carbon cycle into our model to obtain the emissions data,” says Erich Roeckner. According to the model, admissible carbon dioxide emissions will increase from approximately seven billion tonnes of carbon in the year 2000 to a maximum value of around ten billion tonnes in 2015. In order to achieve the long-term stabilisation of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, the emissions will then have to be reduced by 56 percent by the year 2050 and approach zero towards the end of this century. Although, based on these calculations, global warming would remain under the two-degree threshold until 2100, further warming may be expected in the long term: “It will take centuries for the global climate system to stabilise,” says Erich Roeckner.”
Now 2dC. is the point where the science shows that once passed the change to the climate is very likely to become self perpetuating, the mechanisms for limiting increases being overwhelmed by the heating caused by human Carbon emissions, a positive feedback loop with major negative consequences as whole biomes come under pressure and begin to collapse as new relationships between the atmosphere, the soil and life are forced to emerge to deal with the increased temperatures and the associated changes in the climate such as more intense storm events.
The rate at which this occurs depends on the level of warming greenhouse gases, the emitting of some our only control over ‘cooling’ the planet.
Since 1970 climate events have increased markedly, even allowing for better reporting. Growing from 330 events to 828 last calendar year. The first 6 months of this year have seen 382 climate related disaster events. Soon insurers will be unable to give coverage and the impacts of disasters will fall completely on the community, either through government or by neighbours helping each other through climate related disasters.
How long before aid and relief fatigue, along with the need to address climate related problems in the aid donor countries, finds nations left to fend for themselves. If you thought refugee flows are bad now, such a scenario will see a different magnitude of asylum seekers.
Russia is seeing fires sweep their countryside and have banned wheat exports to avoid the sale of their wheat store, given that the country is seeing widespread drought, they do not want that to be followed by high bread prices, especially given their history.
The summer of 2010 has been agonizingly hot in much of the continental U.S. with record-setting temperatures.
There is an historical and archaeological record of the impacts of changes in the climate on human activity. Changes are perhaps more bearable where society was less tied to a complex interlocked system of built infrastructure and international trade supporting 6.7Billion humans.
Now we are locked in with no room to move. National boundaries are set, arable lands all occupied, coastal megacities have sunk huge volumes of resource into their being, water supplies are at their limit in many places.
At the end of the Permian there was runaway global heating, when 95% of all organisms went extinct and it took 100 Million years for a complex system of life to restructure and give rise to the Age of the Dinosaurs. We don’t know the rate of change leading up to that point or how that impacted on life just prior to what would now be a disaster that Homo sapiens may not survive.
In the north of Tasmania July and half of August have been particularly mild with July running 1.2dC above the long term average, well above the 0.7dC global average increase. The ocean is sinking heat acting as a short term cooling mechanism and causing it to heat. This heating is reporting to the Southern Ocean from the Pacific and Indian Oceans, enfolding Australia and thus far northern Tasmania.
Currently thermal expansion is driving sea level rise and coastal erosion is being recorded around Tasmania [C. Sharples]. As temperatures rise further the rate of sea ice melt will increase to cause the complete disintegration of glacier tongues leading to a more rapid flow of land ice to the sea along with those increased temperatures driving melting [thinning] of land ice. The start of these events are being seen and recorded now. They will not stop until global temperatures fall in hundreds of years time, if we stop emissions now and put them into a steep and rapid decline above the rate recommended by the Max Plank Institute .
The atmosphere is moister and with increased temperature it has more energy to drive more intense storm events.
The temperature increase will go close to the 2dC. limit given the amount of greenhouse gases already emitted and likely to be added even if the IPCC recommended path for reductions of 40% by 2050 is followed. Currently the major emitters have not committed to following such a path, let alone the new evidence that the reductions need to be by more than 56% [~5.6BtCO2].
Abbott’s limited action plan, a plan to do nothing real, and Gillard’s consensus building delay have a crying need to be shown as failures of leadership.
This election should be considered by you as a referendum on climate policy, a chance to register Yes for comprehensive, effective and timely action by Australia by voting 1 Green on both ballot papers. Such a message will not be lost on whoever wins government or to world opinion at the important round of international climate talks in Mexico at the end of the year.
The Climate Institute has compared the impacts of the policies on offer and currently gives the highest score by a wide margin to the Greens. This ranking is unlikely to change. Not only should voters support the Greens in the Senate, they should register a lower house vote as well, to show that they understand that the climate underpins everything and that government needs to lead action to limit the degree of instability future generations will face.
