Rising Tide Australia

This article was written by Rising Tide member Steve Phillips in the wake of the election of a new Labor Government for Australia, for the New York independent media newspaper The Indypendent.

The election of a new Labor government in Australia is being hailed as a watershed moment for this country's approach to climate change, and indeed for global climate change politics. For the first time in more than a decade, Australia will attend the UN climate talks in Bali this month not as a rock-throwing antagonist, but as a constructive participant and member of the Kyoto Club.

A defining characteristic of the 11 long years of the Howard Government was its continual white-anting of international climate negotiations. John Howard's government infamously negotiated some of the worst aspects of the Kyoto Protocol and then refused to ratify the severely compromised agreement that resulted. The Howard Government's approach to climate change was marked by denial, obfuscation, fear-mongering, blame-shifting, campaigns of mis- and dis-information, and a steadfast refusal to accept targets to cut greenhouse pollution.

Next to that record, it's easy for Australia's new Labor Party government, lead by Kevin Rudd, to look strong on climate change. Many are hopeful now that Australia will become a constructive player, rather than a spoiler. Indeed, this hope was without doubt one of the reasons Kevin Rudd was elected. Polling earlier this year showed that Australian's rated climate change as our number one external threat – beating nuclear weapons acquisition by unfriendly states, Islamic fundamentalism, and terrorism. 73% of voters polled just prior to the election said that climate change would have a “strong” or “very strong” influence on how they cast their vote. Clearly, Kevin Rudd owes the people of Australia some movement on the issue.

Unfortunately, the complete failure of the Howard Government on climate change made it possible for the Labor Party to win the election without really offering an inspiring alternative. Yes, we will ratify Kyoto. Yes, we'll set ourselves a 20% renewable energy target, and a 60% long term greenhouse pollution target. Neither of these targets are adequate to the task at hand though, and we still have no short term pollution target. Labor's policies will still result in a massive increase in Australia's greenhouse footprint. The most devastating failure of all is Labor's enthusiastic moral, rhetorical, and financial support for Australia's biggest polluting industry: coal.

Burning coal for electricity produces half of Australia's entire domestic greenhouse pollution, but that is only the beginning of the story. We are also the world's biggest exporter of coal, and the emissions from our coal exports exceed our entire domestic greenhouse footprint. Worse still, our coal exports are increasing much faster than our domestic emissions, with all major coal ports in Australia undergoing major expansions. Both major political parties, including the new Rudd Government, support these expansions.

Of course in some areas, the difference between old and new is clear. Rudd will ratify Kyoto immediately, and there will be much fanfare when Rudd himself leads Australia's delegation to the UN climate talks in Bali. There is at least now the potential that Australia will participate constructively to achieve commitments to reduce global greenhouse pollution within a few years, and reach strong cuts of up to 50% within a couple of decades. These are the crucial outcomes needed from the Bali talks, and climate activists in Australia will be watching our country's contribution to this debate closely. It is unclear, as yet, how much our new government knows about the urgency of pollution cuts.

The thing is, it's 2007, and Kyoto ratification should no longer be the yardstick for a government's commitment to solving climate change. It requires much more than that. Kyoto's targets are hopelessly weak (Australia's target is an 8% increase in emissions), and the protocol contains some major loopholes and inequities, such as the carbon trading arrangements that allow rich nations to buy their way out of real pollution cuts and impose timber monocultures on third world communities.

A government nowadays should have to meet much stricter criteria to call itself a leader on climate change. For example, does it accept that rich countries are historically responsible most of the elevated carbon levels in the atmosphere, still have the highest emissions per capita, and therefore must make take the first and biggest steps to cut pollution? Australia's per capita emissions are among the highest in the world (higher even than the US according to some studies), and that doesn't even include our coal exports. While politicians in Australia and the US often point to China and India as the villains of climate change, China's per capita emissions are less than one-fifth of our own. India's are less than a tenth. In general, the developed world's per capita emissions are four times that of the developing world. If you consider historical emissions, the difference is starker still.

Another important benchmark for a government that's for real about climate change: do they have policies that will start reducing greenhouse pollution today, and take them to near zero within a few short decades, which is what a scientifically defensible solution to climate change requires from developed nations? And what about fossil fuels – the root cause of climate change? Fossil fuels produce about 60% of global greenhouse pollution, converting isolated fossilised carbon into active atmospheric carbon, which it stays forever (in human terms). It is simply inconceivable that human societies can defeat climate change while still burning fossil fuels, but that is exactly what most government's around the world will have you believe they can do.

It is against these criteria the Rudd Government will be measured by an increasingly vocal and activist community, that will not accept damaging and meaningless half-measures. Many climate activists in Australia have already been attempting to draw attention to these issues, and reframe the climate debate from “sceptics versus believers” and even “targets versus aspirations” to the far more potent “fossil fuels versus solutions.” In the lead up to the election, groups such as Rising Tide (who organised a mass community blockade of coal ships at the Port of Newcastle, and then blockaded a coal train on its way into the port), student activist groups (who blockaded a power station in Victoria, and coal loaders at Newcastle), and Greenpeace (blockaded a power station near Newcastle) all undertook direct action against coal to put the issue on the election agenda. We are surely witnessing only the beginning of a major direct action campaign against coal in Australia, as many people become aware of the urgency of climate change and the need to quit fossil fuels. Close to three hundred people have taken an online pledge (www.loader.take-action.org.au) to use peaceful direct action to prevent the further expansion of coal exports from Newcastle.

The new Australian Government on the other hand has pledged to hand over more than half a billion dollars of public money to coal corporations, to sink into the mythical and oxymoronic concept they like to call “clean” coal – burying greenhouse pollution underground. The many problems with this “sweep it under the carpet” approach can be largely boiled down to two points: we don't know if will ever work, and if it does it will be too late.

It is acknowledged by all concerned that compared to the dark days of the Howard Era, the new Rudd government is a ray of sunshine. There is an undeniable optimism in the air in Australia, even among climate activists who know the real score on this issue, that at last we have a government that at least has potential to take some real action.

But potential is not enough, and as long as the new Rudd Government has unrelenting support for our biggest polluting industry, our country will continue to lead the world down the path to climatic disaster. The big challenge facing the climate movement in Australia now is to turn public concern with climate change into a recognition that both sides of major party politics are utterly failing us, and then turn that into an irresistible demand for an end to fossil fuels.