Scorcher
The Dirty Politics of Climate Change
Clive Hamilton
Executive Director of the Australia Institute. <Rating: 5 stars>
"This book blows the whistle on the politics of global warming in Australia".
Hamilton shows that climate change can be stopped with negligible impact on our economy. Even though the Howard Government has gone and Kevin Rudd has ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the information in this book is still relevant as the Greenhouse Mafia will still attempt to maintain business as usual. NSW State Labor government have approved the new Anvil Hill coal mine and have made moves to privatise NSW electricity generation and to enable private companies to build new coal fired power stations.
Hamilton exposes how the Greenhouse Mafia wrote the greenhouse gas policies for the Howard Government. This Mafia consists of the executive directors if industry associations in the coal, oil, cement, aluminium, mining, and electricity industries. These industries all use large amounts of cut price carbon based energy and generate huge amounts of greenhouse gases. They aim simply to protect their own industries, doing so by generating mis-information to stop debate on climate change issues. They had direct contact to John Howard at any time they wanted and thus stopped successive environment ministers from making any policy to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
The book shows how the Howard Government did what it could to keep its place at the table of Kyoto and IPCC discussions only so they could disrupt the progress of forming a international policy on greenhouse gas emissions. Hamilton also illustrates the numerous illogical arguments used by various ministers. Such as Ian Campbell: "Australians should not be concerned about [energy emissions rising rapidly] because we are a growing economy. We've got a growing population".
This is insane point of view. As most countries economies are growing Ian Campbell implied that no-one needs to do anything about carbon emissions. Perhaps he was implying something like 'carbon emission reduction is a percentage on top of growth and thus if the economy is growing then total emissions will also go up by an acceptable amount'. This is not acceptable as it says nothing about the scientific need to cap total emissions below critical levels to avoid looming global disaster.
The rich Western economies that created this problem have the moral responsibility to act first.
Hamilton illustrates two important principles of ethics and justice in this debate.
- Polluter Pays
- Ability to Pay
Global warming is a problem now because first world countries have emitted GHGs for over 100 years, and they became rich by utilising cheap fossil fuel based energy.
- First world countries are responsible for the pollution and have a moral obligation to pay for resolving it.
- First world countries have become rich through cheap energy and thus they have the ability to pay, where others do not.
One flawed argument is that China and India should be equally obligated to mitigate GHG emissions as their current per capita emissions are catching up and are expected to overtake those of the current big emitters. The flaw is that the problem was not caused by current emission levels but by accelerating emissions over the past 100 years by first world countries.
Myth of Mitigation Costs impacting the economic growth and GDP.
There is a consistent myth that the cost of GHG mitigation will be excessive. Hamilton illustrates how the economic impact in GDP is negligible. [The real economic impact will be on the funds the Mafia give to political parties to protect the polluting industies]. Concern is often made over the increasing cost of exports if a carbon tax is imposed on fossil fuels.
Quoting Hamilton [dot point formatting has been added],
For around three quarters of the economy, [international] trade is irrelevant. Yet overseas competition is concern to a number of industries. A company or industry may face a competitive disadvantage from policies that increase energy prices, such as a carbon tax, but only if three conditions apply:The only Australian industries that meet these criteria are
- it must be emissions intensive,
- it must be exposed to import or export competition, and
- that competition must come from countries that do not have similar policies (that is those not part of the Kyoto Protocol).
These industries account for around 1.5 percent of Australia's GDP and 19 percent of merchandise exports. If Australia were to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and impose policies that increased the price of energy, it would be a straightforward matter to provide tax offsets to exports whose competitiveness would be affected [which would reduce the cost to international buyers], just as the goods and services tax is not applied to exports.
- aluminium;
- alumina;
- steel;
- other non ferrous metals (mainly nickel);
- liquefied natural gas and
- gold.
Updated Feb 2008