Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to join this address-in-reply debate. I understand Senator Abetz is otherwise engaged and is unable to make his speech first. The issue I want to respond to in the Governor-General’s address is climate change. The new Rudd government made a good start dealing with this. It is arguably one of the greatest threats to the world as we know it. Mr Rudd engaged in Kyoto to what was the great relief of citizens and scientists alike in this country. It was not difficult to ratify Kyoto and had it not been for Mr Howard’s determined but illogical position for almost a decade—in other words he said, ‘We’ll make our target, but we won’t ratify because that might harm our economy’—the outward expression of taking climate change seriously would not have been Mr Rudd’s to make. But more than 100 days on, the Rudd government is not looking as if it is in any sort of a hurry on this issue. Mr Rudd is demonstrating the same lack of logic: it appears that what is economically affordable is driving his response and to hell with setting a target that might stop the earth reaching temperature increases of two or three or four degrees. We certainly need a plan to stop irreversible climate change and, for sure, finding the most cost-effective way to achieve that is what we should be doing, but we must do it quickly.

The government says that coal must stay part of the mix regardless of the cost of geosequestering its pollution. Economic growth and population growth will doubtless go on being the cornerstone of this new government’s economic aims. Mr Rudd will not begin increasing the renewable energy target until some time in 2010 or 2011, even though there is more than a year’s worth of renewable energy certificates banked up just waiting for it to happen. As I understand it, he will ignore the fact that the science and the development of clever ways of generating renewable energy is heading off overseas where governments are a bit savvier, a bit better organised in getting their systems and their incentives in place to benefit from this work.

There is still no sign of a greenhouse trigger being put in the environment laws, as was proposed by the last government. This means that coal fired power stations and energy intensive desalination plants are being built without any oversight or approval required by the very government that has just made a commitment to the world to contain emissions. The 2020 target that we were all waiting for was on hold until the Garnaut report, but when Professor Garnaut delivered his interim report it apparently frightened the horses and Mr Rudd’s team backed off and said his would be one input into the decision-making process. Treasury, which is not known for its expertise in climate change modelling, is now doing that modelling. After years of ABARE’s dodgy anti-environment modelling, perhaps Treasury cannot be worse.

There is still no sign that we will get minimum energy standards any time soon for appliances, cars, air conditioners, industrial processes or office buildings. Freeways are still being built as if people can go on for the next century wasting fuel to push their car—a tonne or so of metal—to deliver one person typically from point A to point B. And those distances are getting longer and longer as cities like Melbourne now span more than 50 kilometres in width. In fact, Melbourne is far more sprawling than even London with its 7.2 million people. Indeed, London, with twice the population of Melbourne, generates fewer greenhouse emissions—just 8.5 million tonnes compared with 11 million tonnes as reported this morning in the Age. The Victorian government has given in to the goading of the former Howard government and it has decided to release vast new tracks of land for new housing, much of it no doubt two-storey McMansions that will not be designed to cope with summers that are hotter and drier than ever before. Melbourne is growing at an unbelievable 1,500 people a week—more cars on the road, more consumption, more greenhouse emissions. And Premier Brumby’s heart swelled with pride as he announced that Melbourne would surpass Sydney in population some time soon.

This growth is unsustainable, and yet governments around the country still do not get it. Brett Patterson says that the general view is that growth is unambiguously good. He says the ‘growth religion pervades every aspect of today’s society, from the neoclassical economist’s pulpit to the faithful masses. Politicians argue over whose policies will lead to the most growth, like different denominations bickering over whose doctrine is most holy.’

Global warming is much more serious than we thought even 12 or 24 months ago. We now know that nature has its limits. Victoria may have 500 years supply of brown coal left, but the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning the last 100 years worth of coal is already way too high. Our natural systems can no longer absorb this carbon. Our soils are losing carbon and natural nutrients because of our intensive farming and energy intensive fertiliser use. Soils that are dry lose their humus and, with it, the greenhouse gases they contain. We have taken far too much water from our river systems. We have overfished. We have overlogged. We have practically given native timber away. We produce more recyclable waste than we are prepared to recycle. There is not enough fresh water for Melbourne’s current population—at lease at the rate at which we waste it in this new climate of one-third less rainfall across Victoria.

Australia was ranked 49th out of 149 countries in the 2008 Environmental Performance Index. We got a mere 42.5 per cent for climate change—behind China, with 52.7 per cent, and India, with 57.9 per cent. Even the United States outdid us, with 56.1 per cent. It is as if we and our governments do not care or just do not want to know how serious the situation is. Fred Pearce, author of The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Man-made Climate Change, tells us that scientists have known for only a few years that they were wrong about ice sheets at the poles. They used to think it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice sheet to penetrate down to the bottom. Now they know it takes about 10 seconds for the melt-water at the top to form lakes that drain down into the crevasses and reach the bottom, lubricating the join between rock and ice, so that the whole ice sheet starts to slide downhill towards the ocean. And that is exactly what has happened to Greenland glaciers and why sea level rise has gone from two millimetres a year in the early 1990s to more than three millimetres a year now.

In the late summer of 2007, an area of Arctic sea ice almost twice the size of Britain disappeared in a single week. The Greenland ice sheet was melting so fast that huge chunks of ice weighing several billion tonnes were breaking off and sliding into the sea, triggering minor earthquakes, according to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. James Hansen of NASA says that sea level rises will be 10 times faster within a few years as Greenland destabilises. If Greenland melts, sea levels will rise by eight to 10 metres and hundreds of millions of people will be homeless.

The earth’s climate has been relatively stable and benign for 10,000 years, allowing humankind to grow and prosper, to industrialise, to build sophisticated cities and to exploit nature and hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of fossilised carbon. But it was not always the case. Eleven thousand years ago temperatures in the Arctic rose 16 degrees or more in a decade due to tiny wobbles in the Earth’s orbit, changing the heat balance of the planet by only a fraction as much as our emissions of greenhouse gases are doing today. Then, the sea level rose 20 metres in just 400 years, 20 times faster than today. Scientists are now telling us that the world could be returning to a world of climatic turbulence, where tipping points are constantly crossed, and that this has happened in the past when there have been abrupt movements of carbon between atmosphere and natural reservoirs such as rainforests and the oceans.

The British Met Office warns that the Amazon rainforest could die by mid-century, releasing its stored carbon from trees and soils into the air. This could trigger the sudden movement of carbon, which has caused violent climate change in the past. There are trillions of tonnes of methane trapped in permafrost and in sediments beneath the ocean which are likely to be released as ocean waters increase in temperature. This is exactly what happened 55 million years ago and resulted in the extinction of millions of species on earth. James Hansen says we have just 10 years to avert disaster. He may be out by five or even 10 years, but can we afford to wait and see?

Why are we waiting another four years to start emissions trading? Why are we putting off a trading system for energy efficiency? Why wait to extend a renewable energy trading system that is already in place and ready to go? And how can the government possibly say we will wait 10 or 15 years until we have a cost-effective system of capturing carbon from coal fired power and putting it underground out of harm’s way? This is just as ludicrous and pathetic as the last government’s plan to solve the problem with nuclear power—only that would take even longer to get going. A British minister for energy admitted recently that this technology might never become available.

The response of this government, like the last, to rising oil prices is to announce more tax perks for exploration instead of finding ways to use less oil, like better public transport and more fuel efficient vehicles than the monsters Australia’s auto industry currently makes. At some point we are going to have to stop burning fossil fuels, and the sooner we get used to that the better.

There is no point in turning coal into oil, extracting oil from tar sands or drilling for oil in deep oceans, because the result is the same—more carbon released into the atmosphere and more dangerous climate change. Energy supply must move as quickly as possible to renewables—hydrogen from solar thermal collectors; geothermal and wind for electricity; and fully electric, lighter weight vehicles. Fossil fuels must soon be left in the ground no matter what the demand for them may be. So let’s get ready with new systems and new infrastructure and new incentives to bring on the alternatives, so we won’t be caught short. If we can no longer export coal we should use our scientists to be world leaders in exporting clever alternatives. Give our scientists and developers the subsidies and the perverse incentives of around $10 billion a year that currently flow to coal and oil and see what they can do.

Minister Garrett launched Alice Springs as a solar city on Monday to enormous fanfare, but it is another trial. Please, Mr Garrett, tell us when we are going to stop practising and trialling. Why can’t we have a solar country? We already know how to install PV systems, smart meters and solar hot water systems—and we know how to do energy audits. What we don’t have are feed-in tariffs and other incentives to price carbon back in the ground, where it is safe. Reducing emissions is not rocket science and it is not as expensive as disastrous climate change. My message to Mr Rudd and to his intention in his first term of his office is: just do it. The results of not doing so, further procrastination, will be a disaster.