Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The combination of the global financial crisis and the extreme weather conditions experienced throughout the world in recent times presents world governments with an unprecedented dilemma. It is a dilemma that has become a crisis that is centred around climate change on the one hand and the world economy on the other. It is a crisis that has been made even more difficult to manage because weather patterns and economic management both require cooperative global solutions. Further complicating the problem is the fact that weather patterns affect, and can even devastate, economies. And there is a strong body of credible opinion that believes economic activity is, conversely, having devastating effects on our weather patterns. The two are inextricably linked. It was former US President Bill Clinton who in 1992 coined the phrase: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ One need only look at the economic cost of the Australian drought, the Victorian bushfires and the Queensland floods—without even considering the natural disasters in other parts of the world—to understand that the phrase should be: ‘It’s the environment, stupid.’ Of course, that understanding may not yet have permeated sufficiently throughout the community, and that in itself remains a problem for governments. There is, however, a growing awareness throughout the world, and certainly throughout the global scientific community, that climate change cannot simply be dismissed. No responsible government can continue to ignore the impact that climate change will have on our economy and our natural habitat.

Just who decreed that the economy should dictate how we live our lives, I do not know. But it was no single person; rather, this idea probably evolved from the insatiable appetite of humans to want more and more. And that human trait has manifested itself in the same human greed that has culminated in the global financial crisis. The destructive human greed that has brought down world economies is simultaneously destroying the earth’s environment. Concerningly, the global financial crisis is causing a dangerous distraction from the issue of climate change. Those who think that the economy comes first should think again. Unless we adopt sustainable practices, all life on earth is threatened. What was once thought of as a vague and futuristic problem is now at our very doorstep. Tomorrow’s climate change problem was always today’s problem; it is just that we have been slow in realising it. But it only requires the application of basic common sense to appreciate that the rampant destruction of the natural environment, induced by human activities, would have consequences. The signs have been there for decades and are common knowledge: the rapid extinction of species of life on the planet; the desertification of fertile lands; the global degradation of water and air quality; the growing inability to process domestic and industrial waste; the toxicity introduced to, or increased in, the environment by much of human activity; the depletion of resources; and so on and so on.

Although traditional communities have better maintained and respected their relationship with the natural world, those of us in the not so aptly named advanced world have progressively become detached from it. Climate change is a troubling reminder of this detachment. With each new scientific report there are warnings that its dangers have become more imminent. The latest advice is that the pace of climate change is likely to be much faster than previously predicted. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Christopher Field, the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said we were basically looking at a future climate that is beyond anything that has been considered seriously in climate change simulations. According to Field, the pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions because emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the IPCC’s report of 2007. He said that industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected, and higher temperatures were triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems. In other words, he argues that the unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions have kick-started a vicious cycle of high temperatures that melt more of the Arctic permafrost, which in turn releases more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. According to Field, the shrinking Arctic ice cover is being countered by the north-west spread of vegetation. However, although the extra vegetation takes carbon out of the atmosphere, it is a relatively slow process compared to the immediate benefit from the ice cap reflecting the sun’s heat.

Concern about the wide gap between public policies and scientific knowledge about global warming led award-winning US researcher Professor James Hansen to personally write to President Barack Obama. In his letter, Professor Hansen referred to the profound disconnect between public policy on climate change and the magnitude of the climate change problem as detailed by the science. At the same time, last December a report from the US Geological Survey, commissioned by the US Climate Change Science Program, also highlighted that climate change could be coming faster than previously feared. Konrad Steffen, from the University of Colorado, who was the lead author of the report’s chapter on icesheets, said in the Washington Post that cutting emissions linked to global warming was one of the best strategies for averting catastrophic changes.

Politically, we have been playing catch-up with the scientific assessment of climate change risks. In 1992 in Rio de Janeiro the world economy recognised that climate change was real and promised to reduce CO2 emissions along with taking other measures against global warming. It took five years to develop the first climate change treaty—that was the Kyoto protocol. The intent there was to cut emissions by five per cent of 1990 levels. Hopefully we will see further treaties and agreement will be reached in Copenhagen at the end of this year. The irony however is that the level of emissions has skyrocketed over the past decade.

Of course we have choices. We can take the view that we will adapt to the environment as it changes. That may well be possible—who knows? Nobody knows because never before have the world’s climatic conditions been quite the same. Climate change sceptics point to past similarities in weather patterns. Similarities are exactly that—similarities—and do not mean that the weather patterns are identical. An alternative choice is to understand the cause of changing weather patterns and determine whether modifying human activity will affect climate. This brings me to the issue of carbon emissions and climate change.

There is compelling evidence that human-caused carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change. There is equally compelling evidence that humans can reverse that impact if the nations of the world act in unison. I am also aware of some of the counterarguments in this debate, and I do not necessarily dismiss them. The stakes however are too high. We are gambling with the lives of future generations—not just some lives but all lives. We are gambling with the future of every living creature and plant on the earth as we know it today. We have already caused the destruction of too much of our world through a combination of ignorance and greed. We can no longer plead ignorance. Just as the risk of doing nothing in the wake of the global financial crisis is too high so too is the risk of doing nothing in the wake of the recent extreme weather introduced natural disasters.

So what are the consequences if we reduce carbon emissions and our climate still changes? The consequences are that we will breathe cleaner air, we will have fewer health problems, we will cause less destruction of our natural environment and we will leave our children with a planet in much better condition. The choice is stark and it is simple. Of course critics will say that carbon emissions reductions come at the expense of jobs. That is disputable and there is substantial evidence that the carbon-emitting jobs will be more than replaced by green economy jobs.

The earth has finite resources and economic growth compounds the destruction of the earth’s natural environment. Whilst the predictions may be questioned, never before has the earth sustained so many people and never before has mankind been so environmentally destructive. Comparisons with past weather patterns provide little comfort. What is meaningful and what we must rely on are rational predictions based on the current economic output, future growth forecasts and documented climate trends over recent decades. In that respect the evidence of the IPCC reports is alarming and compelling.

Even taking a conservative view of climate change forecasts, the environmental and economic consequences of doing nothing will be catastrophic. For example, a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature will result in between 660 million and three billion people being at risk of water shortages, 25 per cent of species in the present habitat becoming extinct, and between 25 million and 50 million people being at risk from sea level rises. The list goes on.

There are alternatives to high-carbon-emitting energy sources. There are tens of thousands of jobs to be created in a green economy and the cost of transitioning to a green economy is affordable. We need to act now. The Rudd government has a comprehensive environmental strategy that it is implementing; the coalition has a confused political strategy. There may be disagreement about forecasts, but we cannot wait to see who is right or wrong in the climate change debate.