Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to use the opportunity afforded by the appropriation debate to talk about where we now are in a global sense in relation to climate change issues. Obviously, the starting point for that has to be the Copenhagen climate change talks and, in order to set the scene, I want to recap on a few comments that I have made elsewhere.

Copenhagen was a complete and utter failure, and there is no purpose served by trying to pretend otherwise. As Mark Lynas said in the Guardian:

After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.

Mark Lynas was attached to one of the delegations and was present during the closed-door negotiations at Copenhagen. He has reported on what happened as follows:

China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful ‘deal’ so Western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.

China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again.

Mr Lynas said that Sudan behaved at the talks as a puppet of China, ‘one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public’.

Mr Lynas said that at late night meetings, as the heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors, Barack Obama was present for hours, with Gordon Brown, other Prime Ministers including the Danish Prime Minister who chaired the talks, and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Only about 50 or 60 people were present in the room. The Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, did not attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier foreign ministry official to sit opposite Obama. Mr Lynas said the diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as were the practical consequences, and stated:

Several times during the session, the world’s most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his superiors.

Mr Lynas says it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80 per cent cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. ‘Why can’t we even mention our own targets?’ asked Angela Merkel. Brazil’s representative also pointed out that this position was illogical—why should rich countries not announce this unilateral cut? But the Chinese delegate blocked it. Mark Lynas says this is because China did not want the talks to succeed and wanted the rich countries to get the blame for Copenhagen’s lack of ambition. He said:

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2°C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak ‘as soon as possible’. The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050 was also excised.

Mark Lynas went on to say:

No one else, perhaps with the exception of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen.

The Chinese delegate also moved to remove the 1.5 degree Celsius target so beloved of the small island states and low-lying nations who have most to lose from rising seas. President Nasheed of the Maldives, supported by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, fought to save this crucial number. ‘How can you ask my country to go extinct?’ demanded President Nasheed. The Chinese delegate feigned great offence, and the number stayed, but surrounded by language which makes it all but meaningless.

It is clear to me both that the talks failed to achieve anything like the action that is needed to stop the earth’s temperature from rising to dangerous levels with unpredictable consequences and that the dynamics at work which are preventing global agreement need to be shifted or else the crippling impasse at Copenhagen will continue indefinitely.

Climate change is the great moral challenge of our time, but the problem is not being solved. In order to solve it, I believe we are going to have to rethink a number of things that we have taken as articles of faith for quite some time. We are going to have to slay a few sacred cows.

Sacred cow No. 1 is population growth. I have written and spoken a lot about this particular sacred cow during the past six months. You cannot have a serious plan to tackle climate change which does not address the world’s dramatically increasing population—estimated to be over nine billion by 2050. It is pretty hard to reduce your carbon footprint when you keep adding more feet. Australia’s population has taken off in recent years and is now tracking for an increase of over 60 per cent to 35 million by 2050.

Once of the many disappointing features about the talks at Copenhagen was that there was negligible discussion of the need to stabilise global population. Countries talking about emissions per capita, emissions intensity or anything other than absolute emissions are not going to solve the climate crisis. Stabilising global population needs to be put on the agenda for all countries as part of a suite of measures to reduce carbon emissions.

In December last year Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy, from the Monash University Centre for Population and Urban Research, produced a report showing that population growth would be responsible for over 83 per cent of Australia’s growth in carbon emissions between 2000 and 2020 on Treasury’s base case scenario. Treasury has calculated that, without government measures such as the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, Australia’s carbon emissions will go from 553 megatonnes of carbon dioxide to 774 million tonnes in 2020. Of this 221 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent rise, Mr Birrell and Mr Healy have calculated that population growth is responsible for 184 million tonnes, that is to say over 83 per cent of it.

To put the impact of population growth on carbon emissions another way, Mr Birrell and Mr Healy state that if population had remained at the 2000 level of 19.2 million through to 2020, cutting carbon emissions by five per cent would only have required a per capita reduction in greenhouse emissions from 28.8 tonnes per head in 2000 to 27.3 tonnes per head in 2020. That is quite manageable. But with Australia’s population rising to a projected 25.2 million by 2020, cutting emissions by five per cent will require per capita emissions to fall from 28.8 tonnes per head to 20.8 tonnes per head. That is a much more challenging task, for a five per cent reduction which some green groups are saying is not good enough given the scale of the problem.

Sacred cow No. 2 is that the rich countries alone must solve the problem. It is quite correct that it is the wealthy countries of the Western world that have pumped the carbon pollution into the atmosphere which is causing the climate to change. It is, however, quite incorrect to think that if the rich countries now reduce their carbon emissions, the problem will be solved. If the space created by falling emissions from developed countries is simply filled by rising emissions from China, India and other developing countries, the planet will be no better off.

The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, which has been a key part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for over a decade, is reasonable enough, but it cannot mean that developing countries have no responsibilities when it comes to carbon emissions. There is a risk that we have been trying to do too much at once—solve global heating and world poverty at the same time. Both of these challenges are massive, and like a diver attempting a triple somersault with backward pike, or a cricketer trying to hit every ball for six, we may overreach and fail to achieve either objective.

No doubt, it will be objected that this approach will hurt the poorer countries because they are the ones who are going to need to increase their emissions to break out of their poverty. There are a number of flaws in this argument. Firstly, it may have worked if the world had accepted it and come up with an agreed approach for the developing countries’ emissions. Copenhagen makes it clear that the world has not. The attitude that the rich countries have to fix the problem single-handed is a recipe for ongoing failure. It is simply not going to achieve the necessary carbon reductions.

Secondly, the ensuing stalemate—the stalemate we have now—damages many of the poorest countries most, because it is they who are in the firing line from rising sea levels and increasing climate disasters like hurricanes and floods, and it is they who have the least wherewithal to adapt to climate change.

Thirdly, we need action to produce money to help the poorer countries and reward those who are genuine about decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. Of course it is desirable to close the gap between rich and poor. I support measures such as lifting Australia’s aid contribution to the United Nations target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income with this objective in mind. But I fear that trying to close the gap between rich and poor through the same mechanism as tackling climate change is trying to do more than we are humanly capable of.

Copenhagen failed because it had only a very small carrot, and no stick. Why do I say this? Because China did not need anything to come out of the talks, and wanted to avoid the risk that in years to come it would be required to adopt more ambitious carbon targets. Its coal based economy is doubling every decade, and its leadership does not want to change this. China was not put under any pressure from within, where there is a glaring absence of democratic debate. In January, Google announced that it had detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack by the Chinese government on its infrastructure, including the theft of intellectual property and spying on human rights advocates. Google said it would not tolerate this, and that if it cannot broker a satisfactory new arrangement with the Chinese government it may shut down its Chinese operation altogether.

Nor was China put under any pressure from without, where non-government organisations routinely line up the Western countries for criticism, but ignore developing countries. Mark Lynas also noted a complete lack of civil society pressure on India, who he says uses:

… the language of equity (“equal rights to the atmosphere”) in the service of planetary suicide …

After Copenhagen, India skited about the lack of action at Copenhagen. According to an article in the Age, India’s environment minister, who attended the Copenhagen talks, told the Indian parliament:

… his mandate had been to protect India’s right for fast economic growth, and listed killing off binding targets for reducing emissions as a key victory for his country.

“We can be satisfied that we were able to get our way on this issue [targets],” Mr Ramesh said.

Mr Ramesh later told a news conference that a bloc of key emerging economies - Brazil, South Africa, India and China - had worked effectively to protect the rights of the developing world.

India is one of the world’s top five greenhouse gas emitters.

I want to express great disappointment at the role played by China and India in blocking action on climate change. I contest absolutely the idea that allowing carbon emissions to increase is in the interests of developing countries. The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, and the report by Nicholas Stern has made it clear that the costs of inaction will exceed the costs of action.

The developing countries are highly vulnerable to the impacts of extreme weather events, such as floods and cyclones. They are highly vulnerable to the impacts of melting glaciers, to drought related food and water shortages and to the resulting boat people and conflicts. China, India and all the countries of the world have an obligation to press for action on climate change; to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. In order to succeed we need a lot more of both carrot and stick.

Sacred cow No. 3 is 1990 baselines. I think one of the things which are causing us to struggle with climate change solutions is that we have tended to focus on big, far-off targets, which can be an excuse for inaction on both counts. If the targets are big, that can be paralysing—we think that the mountain is too high to climb. And if the targets are long term, we think we do not need to do anything now—we can act later, or even leave it to those who come after us.

I am attracted to thinking of the carbon reduction task in small bites which are at once both more manageable and more demanding because they require immediate action. Worryingly, Australia’s carbon emissions have been continuing to rise. I think we should be setting a goal of stopping them this year, stabilising our carbon emissions by the end of the year. Then each year after that we should aim to cut our carbon emissions by two per cent. It does not feel that impossible, taking it one step at a time. If we could do this for the next 40 years, we would have cut our carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, and if we could do it for the next 50 years we would have made our country completely carbon neutral—a 100 per cent reduction by 2060.

These reductions use a 2010 baseline rather than a 1990 or 2000 one. So some environmental organisations may see them as too soft, but the fact is that emissions rises have already happened. In Australia’s case, they were authorised under the Kyoto protocol. So harking back to 1990 is particularly onerous for Australia—effectively an attempt to rewrite Kyoto history—and I also think it complicates matters so much that it makes it impossible for the public to understand who is doing what and when. If we reset the clock and ask countries to commit to stabilising their emissions this year and reducing them by two per cent every year from now on, this is something that communities in Australia and around the world could potentially understand and embrace.

For Australia it could demystify the task of reducing greenhouse emissions and make it more publicly understandable and, therefore, make governments more accountable. Australia’s present greenhouse emissions are around 550 megatons of carbon dixode equivalent. If we are committed to cutting them by 80 per cent by 2050, which is consistent with what the climate science is telling us, and committed to a two per cent annual reduction target, we could cut to 440 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020, 330 megatons by 2030, 220 megatons by 2040 and 110 megatons by 2050. Indeed, we could seek to go the extra mile and make the economy completely carbon neutral by 2060, which would simply involve more annual two per cent reductions. The Australian Capital Territory government has committed to being carbon neutral by 2060, in 50 years time, and I commend it for this initiative.

I know these sacred cows will take a lot of slaying. They are sacred cows for a good reason. The population growth sacred cow is one very beloved of the business community and the right of politics while the climate change sacred cow that rich countries must solve single-handedly is much beloved of the left of politics, and the 1990 baseline is much beloved by environment groups who do not want countries that have been slack over the past 20 years to get off lightly. But the present approaches are simply not working. We cannot solve this problem by being less than honest about the situation. The fact is that our global measures to tackle climate change have nowhere near the seriousness or the urgency that the problem demands and, therefore, some new thinking is required.

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