Abbott's 'mean and tricky' Australia: Lima's Colossal Fossil
The Abbott Government has managed to turn Australia into
an international climate pariah and laughing stock in the course of
just one year, writes deputy editor Sandi Keane.
The Abbott Government’s abject failure to address climate change
copped a deserved hammering at Lima. ‘Fossil of the Day’ awards from the
international Climate Action Network
raining down on Foreign Minister Julie Bishop — the only person there
who didn't see global warming as a threat to the Great Barrier Reef. It
all culminated in the final humiliation for the nation, with the ‘Colossal Fossil’ award being bestowed on Australia as the worst performer on climate change action for the entire year.
Having failed to sabotage any new global agreement by demanding
legally binding emissions, Julie Bishop is now trying a different tack:
as the planet cooks, she wants to cook the books. This could see Australia’s emissions skyrocket to a massive 49-57% above its original 1990 Kyoto pledge.
This latest attempt to protect vested mining interests – the
Coalition’s major paymasters – hedges around the success of Bishop’s
threat to scuttle any agreement on the second stage of the Kyoto Protocol
unless she can use the same favourable rules around land clearing
agreed to in Kyoto in 1997. This would involve changing an amendment
made at the Doha talks two years ago on how Australia’s target is to be
calculated.
The current Protocol is due to expire in 2020 and will be replaced by
a new agreement signed up to in Paris next year. It also requires the
dumping of Australia’s 2009 Copenhagen Accord commitment to cut overall emissions by 5% on 2000 levels by 2020.
So, as the rest of the world acts, Australia wants to do sod all.
It was inevitable. The Abbott Government’s Direct Action Plan is a fizzer — especially now that the Queensland Government has overturned the ban on broad-scale land clearing.
What has gone unreported by mainstream media is a reminder of the
land clearing con trick played by John Howard on the rest of the world
back in 1997 at Kyoto.
Kyoto 1997: How rat cunning Howard conned the world
Not for nothing did current Attorney General George Brandis call John Howard the ‘lying rodent’, or Sharon Stone, his party’s federal president, describe his government as ‘mean and tricky’.
In the lead-up to Kyoto, public support for action on global warming was strong. A Nielson-McNair poll
showed 90% of Australians were either ‘concerned’ or ‘very concerned’
about global warming; 79% felt we should sign a treaty to cut emissions;
and 68% said economic pain should not stop such a treaty being signed.
In response to public concerns, vested interests both here and in the
U.S. stepped up their campaign to discredit the science of global
warming and the governments of both countries – responsible for the
world’s highest per capita GHG emissions – rolled over. If the public
wanted action on global warming, said big money, they could take a hike.
Right up until the last weeks before Kyoto, Howard had accepted the
principle enshrined in pre-Kyoto agreements of mandatory targets solely
for the wealthy countries. But big money can buy big favours. The
world’s biggest polluters convinced the U.S. and Australia that similar
reductions should be sought from developing countries.
So, to derail negotiations at Kyoto, alone among other developed countries, Howard took key lobbyists from the mining industry
along as members of the Australian delegation. Australia’s about-face
on mandatory targets was met with great hostility, but no surprise,
after officers of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the
Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) had
toured the world, using research paid for largely by vested interests to
lobby for a special case for Australia because of its dependence on
fossil fuels.
In an eleventh hour bid to restore some credibility, Howard used his legendary rat cunning to
hit on a trick that would con the rest of the world, appease his
party’s major donors and get him off the hook — land clearing.
Ignored by the Government until then, a greenhouse inventory showed
that emissions from land clearing were around 20% in 1990 — the expected
base year for the treaty. What really piqued Howard’s interest was that
land clearing had been in rapid decline since.
The scam was sheer genius and here’s how it worked:
In the late 1980s, up to 500,000 hectares of land in Queensland were
cleared every year. But, after a 15 year campaign by the Wilderness
Society, supported by the public, the new Goss Labor government
signalled that, after 1991, permits would be needed to clear native
bushland. Unsurprisingly, in 1990, land clearing reached a record
765,000 hectares, as huge bulldozers using chains were unleased on a
massive scale to demolish native bushland.
In the year following the introduction of permits, it shrunk to about 325,000 hectares.
The arithmetic was obvious.
By insisting land use emissions be included in the calculation of the
total greenhouse gas emissions, Australia’s emissions could be
dramatically reduced paving the way for the big polluters to increase
theirs.
It was the lowest point in the sorry history of the Coalition's
shirking of its responsibility to act on global warming. Howard would do
sod all and there was nothing the rest of the world could do about it.
Fearing a lack of consensus would wreck any hope of an agreement at
Kyoto, a reluctant deal was struck — henceforth known as the ‘Australia clause’.
Only three countries were permitted to increase their
emissions: Greenland 110%, Australia 108% and Norway 101%. Other
industrialised nations had to cut emissions from between 6 to 8%.
Australia’s diplomatic reputation suffered serious damage as a
result. Two years later, Japan would use the ‘Australia clause’ to
undermine Australia’s claimed environmental credentials during
negotiations over a whale sanctuary in the Pacific.
Newman Gov't on collision course with Kyoto and Copenhagen
Newman’s environmental vandalism threatens to take Australia back to
the dark old days when land clearing in Queensland ranked alongside some
of the most disastrous regions in the world, such as the Amazon, the
Congo and Borneo .
After promising not to lift the bans on broad-scale land clearing
(contributing to about 12% of Australia’s total emissions in 1998), the
‘let-‘er-rip’ Newman government has now overturned the ban introduced by Labor’s Beattie Government in 2006.
The Wilderness Society’s Queensland campaigner, Karen Touchie, told Independent Australia:
“The ban was the most important factor in Australia reaching its
108% Kyoto target. It remains Australia’s most significant emissions
abatement measure, saving an estimated 24 million tonnes of CO2 per
annum.
“The two proposed agriculture schemes for Queensland’s Gulf
County – IFED and Strathmore Station – aim to clear or flood almost
200,000 hectares of land. Destroying 195,000 hectares of savanna
woodland would be the equivalent of adding 27-43 million tonnes of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or 5 to 8% of Australia’s annual
emissions.”
With Paris 2015 talks looming, time is running out for the Abbott Government to act on global warming.
The Wilderness Society issued a warning:
“The scale of land clearing will make it impossible for Australia
to reach its 5 per cent emissions reduction target. There is no way
Abbott’s Green Army can plant enough trees to compensate for what would
be like bulldozing a 10km wide strip for 200km.”
The overturning of land clearing bans will surely throw a spanner in
Bishop’s machinations, putting at risk both Australia’s Copenhagen
Accord commitment and any gains in GHG reduction resulting from the
introduction of permits in 1991 and the bans in 2006.
Next year is shaping up as the year from hell for the Abbott
government. Reforming its ‘mean and tricky’ image sounds like a sensible
New Year’s Resolution right now.
Read IA’s ‘Here we Joh again’ series
to find out more about the mean, tricky and allegedly corrupt
Queensland Government under Campbell Newman. You can follow Sandi Keane
on Twitter @Jarrapin.
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