The Guardian 8 November, 2006
Stern report says:
"Save the Planet" Howard replies: "No!"
Peter Mac
Sir Nicholas Stern’s recently-released report on the economic impacts of climate change has virtually wiped the Howard Government’s already public credibility on the issue of climate change.
The British report confirms scientific predictions of imminent massive changes in weather patterns. Until very recently these predictions have been scorned by the Howard Government, which has sought to protect the mining industries, particularly coal mining, from any criticism or threat to their profits.
The report warned that radical action is essential to prevent "melting icecaps, higher temperatures, heavier storms, longer droughts, more frequent floods, and rising sea levels", from bringing air deterioration, droughts and famines.
It concluded that taking this action now would cost one percent of the world’s gross domestic product, but that delaying for more than 20 years would cause a 20 percent rise per annum, for "each year, now and forever". It estimated the economic cost of inaction as greater than that of the Great Depression, or either of the two world wars.
The report’s recommendations include the introduction of a carbon trading scheme, carbon taxation and the regulation of carbon emissions, in order to cut global emissions by 25 percent by 2050, and eventually by 80 percent.
The British Chancellor Gordon Brown has called for Australia, Japan and the US State of California to join the European Union’s carbon trading scheme, but this has been flatly rejected by Howard.
The government is unable to denigrate the scientific basis of the Stern report, and instead has sought refuge in the old delaying tactic of claiming that these measures, as recommended in the Kyoto Protocol, will not work until the world’s most populous nations agree to implement them.
The Federal Minister for the Environment, Senator Ian Campbell, sneered that carbon trading and carbon taxing "drives jobs offshore" and would "drive the emissions into the countries where taxes and the cost of trade doesn’t apply".
Campbell claims the report actually demonstrates the importance of developing new technologies for "clean" coal combustion. But Stern simply stated that "the rapid development of carbon capture and storage technology is essential to reconcile the continued use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, with climate change objectives."
This by no means constitutes an unwavering endorsement of the technology of carbon capture and storage (geo-sequestration). This would take many years and possibly decades to develop and involve serious potential hazards in the disposal of carbon waste.
The report may, in fact, underestimate the necessary reduction in carbon emissions. For example, it discusses the necessity of avoiding a five degree rise in global temperature, but even a two degree rise would bring the Amazon rainforest to the point of drying out and burning, with incalculable effects on the world’s atmosphere.
Nevertheless, the report, which emanates from deep within the British establishment, is highly significant because it signals major divisions within the heartland of capital. Its release also foreshadows an imminent titanic clash between the group of industries which mine, process, or benefit from coal combustion, and those which do not, and which see little or no prospect of industrial coal combustion "cleaning up its act" in time to avert climate catastrophe, if at all.
Meanwhile, the Howard Government has lost no time in evading opportunities to improve the situation. In the midst of a seemingly never-ending drought the government has dismissed recommendations to purchase, at a considerably depressed price, one of the huge southern Queensland cotton irrigation farms which ruthlessly drains the Murray-Darling River system.
The government has, it is true, instituted a scheme to immediately buy back water from farms along these rivers. However, the irrigation farmers will be allowed to continue taking the current levels of water until 2009, even though south-east Queensland will run out of water altogether in 2008, if no significant rain falls before then.
There is, of course, no question of the irrigation farms being nationalised by the government, which is pinning all its hopes on a national water-marketing scheme. "With a fully functioning national market for water there would be no need to ration (water)", claimed a bright-eyed Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello last week.
Ignoring the many scientific analyses which had preceded the Stern report, and which anticipated its findings, Howard warned his Cabinet against being "mesmerised" by one report. He has committed another $60 million for "clean energy" research. The funding component for research on solar energy is dwarfed by the remainder, which involves the establishment of a cement centre for excellence, as well as research into mine safety and coal and aluminium mining.
Howard has indicated his determination to protect the right of the coal mining industry to sell its commodity unhindered around the world. "I am not going to lead Australia into an agreement that is going to … destroy the natural advantage that providence gave us", he declared. He anticipates that the implementation of "clean coal" technologies such as geo-sequestration will raise the price of coal-fired power — thereby making nuclear power economically feasible and paving the way for its introduction!
Not surprisingly, a poll has revealed that some 80 percent of Australians now feel that the Howard Government is the worst possible choice for leading the nation through this period of global warming and climate change. The result should be clearly evident in next year’s federal elections.