You don’t have to be paying much attention to be aware that the climate and environmental crises are not slowing down.
The flooding in Pakistan is estimated to have submerged a third of the country’s habitable land, destroyed more than a million homes, crippled infrastructure, farms and clean water supplies and killed at least 1,200 people. Tens of millions have had their lives disrupted. The fallout will include food and housing shortages and rising disease.
There have been extreme floods in Pakistan before – notably in 2010 – but scientists say this is empirically worse. As Andrew King, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, has explained, it follows an observed trend of an increase in rainfall on extremely wet days and is in line with projections that south Asia will be hit by more intense rain events in summer as the planet heats. We know that for every 1C of heating, the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture and that is reflected in extreme rainfall and flooding.
The Pakistan disaster follows record-breaking heatwaves and drought across China, the US and western Europe this year that have dried rivers, fuelled wildfires, hit food and energy production and sent temperatures north of 40C in places where temperatures are not supposed to be 40C. The expert scientific view is clear: this is what a climate crisis looks like. This is how it happens.
The chance of extreme events is increasing because emissions aren’t slowing down. A global state of the climate report last week found the atmospheric concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide grew at the fifth-fastest rate on record in 2021 to reach its highest point in 800,000 years.
Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide loads the dice, increasing the risk of events on the scale of Australia’s catastrophic 2019-20 bushfires and the repeat “once in a century” floods that have swamped Lismore.
If this all sounds familiar, fair enough. It should be. But it bears repeating in light of three bits of climate and environmental information that, to varying degrees, flew under the radar in Australia last week.
Pollution is rising
On Wednesday, the government released the latest national greenhouse gas emissions report, which showed the country’s contribution to the crisis is rising again.
In the year to March, national carbon pollution increased 1.5%. It was up in most of the areas that matter – transport, fossil fuel production, manufacturing and farming. The exception was electricity generation, where it continues to fall due to renewable energy slowly but surely displacing coal-fired power. But the emissions cuts from clean power are being wiped out by increases elsewhere.
The report is a slightly dated picture given the national government has since changed, but it underlines a couple of points. The first is how thoroughly the Morrison ex-government and those who influenced it rejected calls for a green recovery from the pandemic. The result is emissions returned as restrictions lifted, with more built-in increases likely to come. Great work, everyone.
The second is just how much effort it is going to take to turn this around. According to the official record, national emissions are 20.6% less than they were in 2005. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? It suggests we’re about halfway to Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target for 2030. But it is misleading.
Nearly all the cut in annual emissions since 2005 has been due to reductions in the pace at which the Queensland cattle farmers clear their land and the timber industry logs native forests on public land. Both continue to knock down forests and other vegetation at a significant rate, just not as fast as they use to (that is if you accept the data on the pace of land-clearing is accurate, and some don’t).
Including the drop in emissions from how land-clearing in the data masks what is happening in the rest of the economy – mostly, the parts that produce and use fossil fuels, but also agriculture and waste management. Pollution in these sectors has hardly moved, falling only 1.4% since 2005. It tells us that the hard work to transform the economy has barely begun.
Fossil fuel subsidies are rising
A second report released on Wednesday by the OECD found that global subsidies to support fossil fuels almost doubled last year to reach US$700bn, an unfathomably large number.
An accompanying report found the subsidies in Australia were A$10.6bn, three-quarters of which was dedicated to measures that helped companies emit more. The rest went to helping consumers dealing with fossil fuel energy costs.
The message from the OECD is that, ridiculous as it sounds, fossil fuel subsidies have grown while commitments to cut emissions have become more ambitious. Shortly before setting a goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, the Coalition “provided” $438.3m to fossil fuel electricity infrastructure, gas production and liquid petroleum storage as part of its Covid-19 stimulus.
Even more was given away in fuel tax credits that, among other things, cut the cost of diesel for mining companies. The OECD found the cost of the credits to the budget increased by nearly $4bn since 2015, up from about $2.8bn a year to $7.6bn in 2020.
This seems particularly remarkable today, when fossil fuel exporters are reaping vast profits due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If the Albanese government is serious about restoring the budget while reducing emissions, a change in the fuel tax credit rate for profitable fossil fuel industries would be a good place to start.
But markets will save us?
The third piece of information from Australia had a different focus, but is worth considering in this context. The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, gave a speech in Bali in which she set out a rough vision for a “nature market” under which companies and philanthropists would be encouraged to spend up to protect the environment. In return, they would get a biodiversity certificate as proof of their good works.
While this could be useful in the long run, as yet there is little detail on how or why it would work. Plibersek told Guardian Australia that it would not be a “substitute for government funding, nor is it a substitute for strong laws protecting nature”. But the initial response from some scientists and conservationists could be summarised as “… really?”
They were incredulous that, having given an introductory speech in which she promised to take on the daunting challenge of fixing the rapidly deteriorating Australian environment, the minister’s first major announcement was that the government wanted private capital to invest voluntarily.
Some made the point that this sort of thinking has hardly been a great success in dealing with the climate crisis. And that, on all fronts, we’re going to have to do much, much more.
