In the past six weeks, China announced it would be carbon neutral by 2060, and the EU said it would achieve the same target a decade earlier. US Democratic presidential aspirant Joe Biden matched the EU’s undertaking, and last week spelt out plans to “transition” America from a fossil-fuel driven economy and re-sign the Paris Agreement on climate change if he wins next Tuesday’s election. And this week, new Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga pledged to cut the country's greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2050.
Earlier this year, however, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison vaguely predicted Australia will achieve zero net emissions some time during the second half of this century. Morrison further papered over tensions in government ranks by saying the Coalition’s climate change policy is “evolving”.
Labor is also divided, with coal-seat MPs like frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon undermining the ambitions of inner-city ALP members to achieve rapid carbon neutrality.
This Australian fudging is taking place as climate change is becoming a more urgent concern for powerful governments representing up to 60 per cent of the world’s GDP. The issue has also broadened, a process reflected in increasing references to the "biosphere" and a world under severe stress.
The causes of this stress range from the pressures of deforestation to a build-up of carbon dioxide emissions generating climate change, overpopulation, the increased rate of extinction of animal species, degradation of the ocean including the bleaching of life-generating coral reefs, and the human and economic devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
'Headed for disaster'
Some groups such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, and an increasing body of scientific opinion, believe that kicking the climate change can further down the road is a sort of global warming version of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
“Our planet is headed for disaster,” warns David Attenborough, the British naturalist and broadcaster, in his documentary A Life on Our Planet.
“Even the biggest and most awful things that humanity has done pale into insignificance when you think of what could be around the corner, unless we pull ourselves together,” Attenborough said in a recent interview on the US CBS network program 60 Minutes.
The need to “pull ourselves together” is the central message of a series of books on climate change that have rolled off Australian presses in the past few months.
There’s Paddy Manning’s Body Count: How climate change is killing us, Ralph Evans’ Toast and Marian Wilkinson’s account of the powerful pushback against government-led climate change mitigation policies, titled The Carbon Club. These will be joined at the end of November by Andrew Glikson’s The Event Horizon: Homo Prometheus and the Climate Catastrophe.
Australia’s climate change publishing boom echoes a battery of books recently appearing in Europe and North America. The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells forecasts a climate change meltdown if we continue our CO₂ emitting ways, and there’s Losing Earth, by Nathaniel Rich, with a similar message. Earlier this year there was Climate Change and the Nation State by international relations scholar Anatol Lieven, a former foreign correspondent for The Financial Times and The Times.
I recall sharing a rickety railway compartment with Lieven on a train leaving Bucharest just after the violent overthrow of Romania’s communist party dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, at the end of 1989. There’s an ominous echo from Ceausescu’s grisly end to today’s alarm about global warming. Lieven argues "too many countries" are influenced by ruling groups “shaped by past conflicts who are unable to adapt to the great challenge of climate change,” as The Financial Times’ Pilita Clark, a former journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald, puts it.
Then there’s The Citizens’ Guide to Climate Success, by Mark Jaccard, which analyses the myths surrounding climate change from both sides of the argument; and The Future We Choose, by former UN climate change chief Christiana Figueres. Figueres promotes what she calls a mood of “stubborn optimism", or a sort of "accentuate the positive" attitude. We need it.
Of course, there’s also the contrary view incorporated in books written by climate change denialists. They prefer the nomenclature "climate change sceptics", partly because it suggests they are more considered, rational and logical in their approach. The most prominent is Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. Among many others, there is Australian geologist Ian Plimer’s Climate Change Delusion and the great electricity rip-off.
The three Australian books by Manning, Evans and Wilkinson have differing approaches. But all are aimed at spreading the view that more needs to be done to not so much stop climate change from happening but moderate its impact. The current aim is to limit temperature increases to 1.5-degrees Celsius. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a special report in 2018 that on present rates, the Earth will warm by an average 1.5 degrees by around 2040 and possibly as early as 2030.
According to the IPCC report, there is no "single answer" to the question of whether it is feasible to limit global warming to a rise of 1.5 degrees. However, the significance of the recent raft of carbon-neutral deadline commitments is underlined in Ralph Evans’ comments that "all pathways that level off at 1.5 degrees without overshoot require net carbon dioxide emissions to fall to zero by around 2050". Moreover, "most of the pathways require cutting global emissions by about half by 2030", Evans writes.
Responding to this climate change emergency, Japan, the world’s third biggest economy, has rushed to meet the deadline with its announcement of carbon neutrality by 2050.
Other countries where carbon neutrality is already established law or declared policy include the UK, Ethiopia, Switzerland, South Africa, Chile, New Zealand and Costa Rica. Taking account of the Suga commitment, and in the event that Biden wins the US election, more than a quarter of the world’s population, and about 60 per cent of global GDP (when measured in terms of purchasing power parity), would be committed to securing carbon neutrality by 2050, or – in China’s case – 2060.
One glaring exception in this rapid carbon neutrality deadline trend is Australia. Another is Canada, and it is significant that both have big, carbon-polluting, mining industries.
Since the explosion of climate change-related books published in the northern hemisphere and Australia, there has been the flurry of activity aimed at radical atmospheric carbon pollution abatement. It comes after three decades of exhortation from global bodies such as the UN, followed by tepid commitments by UN member states. These have, in turn, been followed by a powerful pushback. Three examples in the past decade have been the George W. Bush and Trump administrations in the US and the Tony Abbott-led Coalition government in Australia.
Decades of disagreement
There have also been decades of disagreement over just about every aspect of climate change, despite compelling evidence on the ground, in weather patterns, in the oceans and in the air. To be fair, any emerging carbon neutrality consensus opens up another daunting set of problems: how will this be done? Who is going to lead the way? Who will pay for it?
But the case for urgent action is compelling. And scenarios that envisage the stabilisation of global temperatures below 1.5 degrees of warming require "large amounts of carbon dioxide now in the air to be captured and stored permanently".
"In my layman’s judgment, it is far from clear that this can be done," writes Evans, a chemical engineer with a Stanford University MBA, who has experience as a management consultant for McKinsey in Algeria, Tanzania and Europe, and as head of both Austrade and the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
He writes that even confining temperature rises to 1.5 degrees – the aim of the UN-sponsored Paris agreement – will result in more droughts in the Mediterranean’s littoral states, in Central America, the Amazon basin and southern Africa. Agricultural yields will be degraded, "increasing the risks of food shortages and extreme poverty".
Evans refers to a two-year-old paper from the US Academy of Science, which included ANU climate change scientist Professor Will Steffen as lead researcher. Two degrees of warming generated by CO₂ emissions may trigger a "cascade" of effects that could last for millennia, according to the report. In a follow-up published in New Scientist, six prominent European scientists, plus Will Steffen, warned that adopting the "denialism" option "would be to make a very risky bet with the future of the whole planet".
In fact, the science on climate change has been building for about 200 years, Ralph Evans points out. In 1824 the French mathematician and physicist Jean-Baptiste Fourier hypothesised the atmosphere may be “asymmetric” in its transparency to heat. Solar radiation passes inwards through the atmosphere more easily than it can radiate back out into space, Fourier reasoned. “This would have a warming effect like that of a greenhouse” – a term that has entered common usage.
Fourier's research was followed up by many other scientists and in 1979 the UN held its first World Climate Conference in Geneva, followed by climate summits in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris.
But the pushback has continued. According to British climatologist Mark Maslin, the theory of man-made climate change "has been one of the most comprehensively tested ideas in science". Evans argues "so-called sceptics" who disavow the science of global warming have not put forward any leading alternative theory to explain changes in the climate we are experiencing.
The Carbon Club
It’s the roles of the sceptics, and their well-heeled corporate backers, that form the core of Marian Wilkinson’s The Carbon Club. A former journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC, Wilkinson traces the history of opposition to successive Australian governments putting a price on carbon through an emissions trading scheme or other measures. She uncovers a powerful group of business figures, conservative politicians, professional lobbyists and academics, with crucial American input.
Wilkinson provides new detail to explain how Australia’s climate change wars became littered with casualties. Other causes played their part, but the list includes two former prime ministers, Labor’s Kevin Rudd and the Liberals’ Malcolm Turnbull. There’s also a long list of antagonists including the former head of Western Mining Corporation, Hugh Morgan, and his side-kick, Ray Evans; former Liberal prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott; the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs; more arcane bodies like the Lavoisier Group – backed by Morgan and Ray Evans – and a collection of mining and energy companies.
As the head of Western Mining, Morgan was galvanised by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was developed under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The protocol encouraged 192 parties to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, with many developed nations committing to modest emissions reduction targets.
According to Wilkinson, Morgan calculated that Western Mining was "looking at a $100 million bill to meet the cost of its greenhouse gas emissions reductions. But Morgan’s opposition to the new climate agreement was not just mercenary, it was ideological. He saw environmentalism as a religious movement and the battle over climate change as the biggest threat to liberal private enterprise culture since socialism."
Twelve years later, then conservative South Australian Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi was launching a new book – Ray Evans’ attack on climate change believers provocatively titled Thank God for Carbon in Adelaide. Channelling Morgan, Bernardi labelled the then Labor government’s attempts to curb the impact of climate change as "a bit too much like socialism for my liking, but perhaps that is the ultimate goal of those who worship at the altar of global warming". The two comments, plus heavy pressure from the mining and energy lobby, help explain the opposition to climate change policies, such as emissions trading schemes, among conservative Liberals.
However, it’s not that simple. During the same period, there has been a smaller, but significant, climate change abatement policy-amenable group within the Liberal Party. This has included figures like South Australian Liberal, and one-time Environment Minister in the Howard Government, Senator Robert Hill. Later there was Turnbull, who lost his leadership of the Liberal Party twice (2009 and 2018) – both times at least partly due to hostility among conservative Liberal MPs and branch members to climate change abatement policy proposals.
Figures like Morgan, Evans and Bernardi enjoyed close connections to US business lobbies which were vigorous proponents of climate change denialism. Wilkinson explains how they sponsored vaguely titled bodies like Frontiers of Freedom, the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Global Climate Coalition, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. All were guided by well-known US climate change sceptic Myron Ebell and figures like conservative Republican Senator Malcolm Wallop, from Wyoming, who were implacably opposed to any attempt to oblige carbon emitters to pay for their emitting.
Bonnie and Clyde
In the late 90s, Wilkinson reports, they came up with the multimillion-dollar Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan, which was aimed at nixing the Kyoto Protocols. The US campaign influenced the Australian formation of the Lavoisier Group. Its driving force, Ray Evans, warned that if the Kyoto Protocols came into effect it would lead to "unprecedented" levels of "economic dislocation".
Meanwhile, then prime minister John Howard, who was in Washington on the day of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, formed a firm anti-Kyoto alliance with US President George W. Bush. Bush had replaced the climate change-sensitive Bill Clinton as President earlier in the year. One of Bush’s first acts as President was to pull the US out of the Kyoto agreement. Howard also announced Australia would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol because it "would cost us jobs and damage our industry".
"Part of the problem with this debate is that to some of the zealots involved, their cause has become a substitute religion," Howard said in comments to a group of climate sceptics in London. "And although not given to agnosticism in other matters, I have for a long time been an agnostic on the issue of climate change or global warming."
However, public alarm about climate change rose. Seemingly unconnected events like the terrible death toll and damage of Hurricane Katrina in the US in 2006, the wide currency of former US vice-president Al Gore’s documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, and drought in Australia added pressure on Howard to act over Kyoto. Gore equated the Howard and Bush partnership against carbon pollution policies as “Bonnie and Clyde”.
Towards the end of his prime ministership, Howard himself was promoting a modest emissions trading scheme, which was being strongly supported by his new Environment Minister, Turnbull. Howard lost the 2007 election – and his own seat – against a surging Rudd. The latter was calling for "new leadership" over the climate change issue.
However, two years later Turnbull’s leadership of the Liberal Party was destroyed by Abbott, who had described climate change as "absolute crap". Seven months after that Rudd was scythed down from the prime minister’s job by members of his own party. His problems were many, but among them was failure to successfully implement climate change abatement policies.
Turnbull had a Lazarus-like recovery in 2015, defeating his nemesis, Abbott, in a party room ballot, and emerging as prime minister. He lasted just under three years before becoming a casualty of, among other things, an Abbott-led revolt against his carbon pollution abating National Energy Guarantee.
Wilkinson’s book covers the drama, twists and turns. She reveals how the climate change drum-beat was never far from Australia’s political leadership carnage over a decade, to the point where the BBC labelled Canberra the "political coup capital" of the Western world.
But now the ball game has changed yet again. Major powers are committing to, or are shifting towards, carbon neutrality deadlines. At the same time, the cost of renewable sources like solar and wind to replace fossil fuels as energy drivers is plunging rapidly, along with rapid developments in battery storage technology.
These changes are encouraging to the point where, as French President Emmanuel Macron recently put it, we can "make the Earth great again".
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