Australian politicians are fond of looking down the barrel of a camera and saying “Australia is meeting – and beating! – its international emissions targets”.
They’re lying.
OK, technically they can look their kids in the eye and claim they’re not lying – just – because if you employ a couple of loopholes built into those targets back in the 1990s, Australia is (technically) meeting them. But that’s a bit like various bad actors that pay zero tax saying they meet all their tax obligations. They might domicile themselves in low-tax countries and/or use shell companies to avoid paying taxes. Yes, to the letter of the law, they are acting ‘legally’. According to the spirit of the law – i.e reality – they’re tax-avoiding arseholes.
Australia is a climate arsehole. Climate change in Australia is a bit of a joke.
As I write, Australia is in the grip of a national fire crisis.
Bushfires have so far burned 5.8 million hectares of land (over 22,000 square miles). That’s twice the area of Belgium, or around half of Pennsylvania – burned. At last count, 19 people have died. Over 1700 properties have been lost and an estimated half-billion animals have died, including thousands of already endangered koalas.
For too many Australians, the Australian summer tradition of beaches and BBQ’s has been replaced by P2 breathing masks and wholesale evacuations. This weekend, all down the south-east coast, Australian towns saw sunny days turn into visions of hell itself, complete with blood-red skies (if not complete darkness).
It’s only January 5. Summer won’t end until Australia’s hottest month is done with. That’s February.
These fires are so bad that they’re creating their own weather systems. One created a fire tornado powerful enough to overturn a 10-ton fire truck, killing one of the volunteer firefighters inside (Australia’s large cities have professional paid firefighters. Outside of the cities, we have professionally trained and equipped volunteers).
This is a big bowl of not-good we’re eating.
Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, was asleep at the wheel when it all started and has scurried (tripping over his own feet) to make amends ever since.
This weekend, he announced a significant assistance package from the federal government. That assistance is welcomed (even if it’s late) but in reality, it’s just applying a bigger bandaid to the symptoms of Australia’s climate recalcitrance.
Australia needs prevention rather than triage.
Making sense of Australia’s climate arseholery requires a bit of a history lesson.
It all starts with an emissions agreement called the Kyoto Protocol. Let’s go back to 1997, when John Howard was still a first-term Prime Minister, and some 8 years before he bowled a cricket ball like a punchdrunk gibbon (which has nothing to do with anything. It’s just funny).
This is the short version. For the full Kyoto story, check out The Conversation.
Australia’s Environment Minister at the time was Robert Hill. He went to Kyoto and by all accounts, he earned every dollar of his salary by negotiating an extraordinary agreement. Hill argued special circumstances for Australia and, keen to have everyone on board and ensure some positive optics, the conference eventually (and reluctantly) agreed. While other regions committed to reducing their emissions by 5-8% compared to 1990 levels, Australia was allowed to increase emissions, committing to a cap of 8% over 1990 levels.
Hill also argued for an insertion now known as the “Australia Clause”, whereby emissions from changes in land use would be included in calculations.
Emissions were supposed to be based primarily around the burning of fossil fuels. The inclusion of land use (i.e. land clearing) was a big deal because around 1990, Australia had been clearing land at crazy rates. That rate had dropped substantially by 1997 so Australia’s emissions target – an 8% increase – would be measured against an artificially inflated base year. We could do next-to-nothing and still meet our targets, which is exactly what we did.
Australia went on to increase fossil fuel emissions by around 28% but because of the Australia Clause (let’s call that the Kyoto Loophole), the government could claim we had still met our 8% increase target.
Fast forward to 2007, when Kevin Rudd was elected as Prime Minister. Rudd called climate change “the greatest moral challenge of our time”. He was right.
Rudd’s government developed a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme but after the debacle that was the 2009 UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen (where countries would not agree to binding commitments, only to “take note” of agreed targets), Rudd found himself devoid of the numbers to pass his Scheme in parliament and devoid of the management skills to do anything about it. Constantly pricked by the opposition leader, Tony Abbott (the blackest soul to ever darken the door of Australian politics), Rudd went into meltdown mode and was eventually replaced as Prime Minister by his deputy, Julia Gillard.
Australia’s first real attempt at a climate policy had gone down in flames.
I won’t go in to further detail on the history of Australia’s climate policy here. If you’re a wonk and you want some more info, check out this timeline that covers the dotted history of attempts at a carbon tax in Australia (including a jaw-dropping cameo by Al Gore posing with one of Australia’s biggest – figuratively and literally – mining barons).
Suffice to say that Australia has rarely tried and ultimately failed on climate change. Julia Gillard got an emissions trading scheme up and running but Tony Abbott repealed it when he came to power a few years later. Abbott established a direct action fund that let businesses set their own targets and then made it easier for them to expand those targets if they couldn’t meet them. Malcolm Turnbull proposed a National Energy Guarantee that would look to cut emissions from power generation, then lost his Prime Ministership over it.
Australia first failed to establish a climate policy way back in 2009 and we’ve had no credible climate policy and no credible national leadership since.
Even worse, we’ve had cynical politicians treating us like mushrooms (keeping us in the dark and feeding us bullshit), counting on the notion that history has forgotten the Kyoto loopholes.
Tony Abbott, our conservative Prime Minister from 2013 to 2015, was the first to make the cynical claim that Australia was doing more than other countries because we were actually (invoke Dr Evil fingers here) ‘meeting our targets’. Anything to appease the masses.
That talking point has now evolved into various conservative MPs claiming that we will meet our Paris targets “in a canter”. If we meet our Paris targets – a big if, given that emissions continue to rise – it’ll only be because of decisions taken by the conservative government to include ‘carryover credits’ calculated using the dodgy Kyoto Loophole.
Yep. Against plenty of international criticism, we’re stacking the deck again.
Australian politicians also like to say that our country only contributes 1.3% of world emissions.
Again, this is Australia being a climate arsehole.
The raw statistic is technically true but the statement ignores a couple of things.
A) – the fact that we’re the world’s second-biggest emitter per capita. Yes, we emit 1.3% of world emissions here but we’ve got just 0.3% of the world’s population.
B) – Even worse, the coal we dig up here counts for the emissions totals of other countries. If the coal we profited from around the world counted towards our emissions totals, we’d be responsible for something more like 4-5% of world emissions.
I know I’ve used the term ‘Climate Arsehole’ to describe Australia and its historical behaviour in this article. The truth, really, is even more damning.
One of the worst things you can call an Australian is a ‘bludger’ – someone who doesn’t like work; who doesn’t do their fair share, preferring to slack off and rely on the efforts of others. It goes against something at the core of our national character – the Aussie notion of a fair go, doing your bit and helping out your mates.
Australia is a climate bludger.
What makes that even worse is that Australia being bludgers gives permission for others to be climate bludgers as well. It reduces our credibility as a country on the international stage. It reduces the trust that other nations have in us.
Worst of all, and most important of all, it places our country at significant risk because Australia is getting hotter and hotter. The fire season claims more properties, more ground, more businesses and more lives every year – and it’s only getting worse.
To the Australians reading this…..
Whenever a politician says that our climate policies are credible, that we will meet our targets – they are bullshitting you. They are counting on you not knowing the truth behind the numbers, and being too busy to find out.
Australia can’t fix climate change by itself. That much we know. But we have to be real about the science and what it means for our country, and for the world. We have to get on board and work with sincerity to get other countries on board, too.
Mother Nature doesn’t care about your talking points. She will have her way.
If you want to make a difference, you need to write to your local member of parliament. Here’s how you can do that (Facebook link). I might cover that more in a follow-up post.
Conservative politicians were recently fond of saying that Australia’s national debt was “intergenerational theft”.
I couldn’t think of a better description for our climate policy debacle yet strangely, you don’t hear that phrase at all from Canberra during bushfire season.
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post-script…..
Someone will bring up the idea of The Greens being responsible for Australia’s fires because they wouldn’t allow backburning or fuel reduction burns.
This is a theory fondly pushed by Barnaby Joyce on occasions, and recently mentioned in passing by Scott Morrison as well.
It’s bullshit.
#1 – Making a policy like that requires the power to make laws. When have The Greens ever held power anywhere at state or federal level sufficient to develop, impose and enforce such a policy? They haven’t. They shared power once in Tasmania and no such policy was enacted. Other than that, they’ve been a bit player in Australian law-making, at best.
#2 – The Greens own website talks about fuel reduction burns and their support for them. Check it out.
The widely acknowledged reasons for any existing drop in fuel reduction burns are:
- A shorter window for doing so without risk of the burn-off spreading.
- Reduced funding restricting the number of personnel available to conduct these burns.
- Local community groups being concerned about them.
