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December 22, 2004
Climate change is hurting Australia - increased droughts and bushfires, the destruction of our coral reefs. Over the next 50 years there will severe damage to Australia's ecosystems: to Kakadu National Park, extinctions in North Queensland's highland tropical forest and the probable destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
Senator Campbell, the Environment Minister, would know all of this when he went to Buenos Aires last week. He would also know the implications it has for Australia's miracle economy. One would hope that he has been so briefed.
So what is Australia going to do post-Kyoto---after 2012?
So 
Moir
I'm not certain that Australia has been that courageous in breaking with the US, which increases emissions while pretending to do reduce greenhouse intensity. The US is not going to do very much to reduce to reduce domestic greenhouse emissions, even though it is world's largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions.
Australia and the US have previously firmly stood together on their objections to signing the Kyoto protocol on climate warming, which comes into force next year. What Senator Campbell says is that Australia does not agree with the US stance against future greenhouse gas targets, or its claim that economic growth and technology were the answer to reducing heat-trapping emissions.
But Australia is not going to met its Kyoto commitment by joining an international emissions trading markets, which start early 2005. Nor is going to put a price on greenhouse pollution through a revenue neutral carbon levy.
Nor is Australia going to pour billions of dollars into clean energy research to utilize the natural sunlight advantage we have? Australia is not going to support the development of a stronger renewable energy industry through a Mandatory Renewable Energy Target of 10% by 2010 and 20%.
So what happens when Australia can no longer rely on reductions in land use to buffer its growth in energy-related emissions.
Are not energy production and transport related emissions predicted to rise by over 30 percent by 2012, from 1990 levels? Does that not mean Australian industry will have to invest heavily in order to meet future emissions reduction targets?
There is very little action at this stage.
Update
Is it not strange the way that the gungho free marketeers, such as Alan Oxley writing in the Australian Financial Review, (20 12 2004, p. 47) oppose the use of markets to help reduce greenhouse emissions?
Oxley fogs the issue of governance of the global economy by following the US line that says that the science, which supports the contention that global warming is partly man made, is unravelling. So there is no greenhouse problem. It is about green activists creating state of fear. This is the denial argument.
The insurance companies are not fooled by this kind of faulty reasoning. They know about the rapidly rising payments resulting from more severe and frequent hurricanes, heat waves and flooding. They acknowledge that extreme weather patterns have always existed, but they maintain that their frequency and intensity has been increasing because of global warming.
Oxley backtracks. In the next paragraph to the one above he talks about Australia rightfully following the lead of the US in focusing on "practical policies to reduce emissions and avoid the economically damaging strategy of energy costs". So there is a greenhouse emission/global problem after all.
What is astonishing is that the Australian Financial Review continues to publishes this kind of twaddle. Presumably they hold that anything that hinders or reduces economic growth is bad. By economic growth on this issue they can only mean the profits of the energy intensive industries. That is what is being defended. Energy policy in Australia is currently run to protect the economic interests particular groups of energy industries.
Where then are Australia's practical programs to reduce emissions and avoid raising energy costs?
Is that not a question the AFR should be asking of the Howard government? Is that not a challenge of governance as much as tax cuts and welfare reform?
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If you have to provide a link for Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" these would be more appropriate:
RealClimate - Michael Crichton's State of Confusion
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=76