A number of the inhabitants of a small blue planet are concerned that their reliance on carbon-based forms of energy is creating a feedback loop in their atmosphere that is heating the planet’s surface up. Most of their best scientific minds are urging action to move away from a dependence on carbon.
A small, relatively insignificant country in the planet’s southern hemisphere, which produces about 2% of the carbon causing the problems, is furiously debating how best to do just that. The leader of the country’s more successful political group — let’s call them Labor — wants a complex scheme that ostensibly exploits the entrepreneurial spirits of the country’s businesses to drive the shift away from carbon. But many of the country’s businesses demanded that they not have to do any such thing and got Labor to change the scheme. It now amounts to a complex mechanism for recycling money and allowing carbon emitters to keep doing what they do now.
The leader of this small country’s less successful political group — let’s call them the Liberals — wants a similar but more generous scheme, which provides more encouragement for carbon emitters to continue what they’re doing, but somehow also provide more incentive to stop doing it. But he has a problem because many people in his grouping don’t even think that the planet is heating up. He also has a problem because if he doesn’t support the plan of the leader of the more successful group, the latter will call an election.
But one of the leaders of the small country’s least successful political grouping — for our purposes, the Nationals — which is in a coalition with the Liberals, doesn’t want to do anything at all and says so volubly and repeatedly. And a strange man who is in a political grouping of two — he and the deity he worships — feels the same way, and also says so a lot, primarily as a way to attract attention.
None of the small country’s politicians except for one group — let’s call them the Greens — will come out and say that you can’t move away from carbon dependence without some short-term pain.
The media of this small country finds this non-debate absorbing, and each utterance from Labor, Liberal, National and others is carefully parsed and scrutinised for its implications.
But when it comes to the Liberals, the least interesting explanation is the one that is most likely. The leader of the Liberals knows exactly what sort of bind he is in and is working assiduously to achieve the least worst option for both him and his party, which is to get at least some of his party to support the scheme, even if the Nationals won’t. Bit by bit, he has to get his party used to the idea of backing Labor’s scheme, if he can secure some changes that will save face.
It’s a slow and painful process, inch by inch, dragging the recalcitrant to a realisation of their own interests through a gradual change in position. But it should not be mistaken for that leader being in conflict with his own party. The leader will succeed in his task because political survival will be a more powerful motivation than principled objection, as it usually is on this planet.
The real problem for the Liberal leader is that the Labor leader isn’t going to do anything to help him. The Labor leader’s higher priority is damaging his opponents.
The scheme will become law, and make precisely no difference to the country’s carbon emissions. Nor will it make any difference to the planet’s overall carbon levels, which will continue to rise, dragging temperatures up with them.
In a century’s time, the debates between these “Labor”, “Liberal” and “National” people will be forgotten. Most people won’t even remember which side the leaders were on. But the impact of their decisions, and those of politicians just like them in most other countries on the planet, will be clear for everyone to see. And they’ll rue the failure of their forebears.
The observations made in this piece are consistent with climate science.
The cumulative nature of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere is driving combined CO2-equivalent levels toward 500 parts per million, near to the level at which the East Antarctic ice sheet formed and land temperatures dropped to values allowing large mammals to develop from the late Eocene ~40 – 34 million years ago (late Eocene).
CO2-e levels are already exceeding 450 ppm, more than 50 ppm above conditions at which the Arctic Sea ice formed from the mid-Pliocene ~2.8 million years-ago, a period at which the genus Homo developed from Australopithecine bipeds.
Which far exceeds the levels of 280-300 ppm at which stabilization of river flow in the Great Valleys of the Middle East, the Indus and south China, allowed development of irrigation systems and consequently of civilization about 7000-6000 years-ago.
At current emission levels of 2 ppm/year CO2 above the present CO2-e level of 450 ppm the ice age threshold will be crossed into a greenhouse period in a few decades. Feedbacks from the carbon cycle, including release of methane from permafrost and polar sediments, and from ice melt/water interaction dynamics, may accelerate this process.
The lag effects of atmospheric carbon rise, including the melting of Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets, and of sea level rise, may take unspecified periods, shifting the climate system into a transitional state, which it may have already entered. The transition is more than likely to be associated with abrupt tipping points, such as have been recorded during the recent history of Earth (at 14 – 11 thousand years-ago and at 8200 years-ago).
Whereas the unique nature of the current “experiment” Homo sapiens is conducting with the atmosphere, in terms of the rate of CO2 forcing (two orders of magnitude faster than during recorded past climate changes), precludes precise timing of events, as stated by John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor: When driving in the fog, knowing there is a cliff ahead, start pulling the breaks as soon as you can …
Andrew Glikson
Earth and paleoclimate scientist
I would be enjoying so much more the internal destruction of the Libs if it wasn’t such a serious issue. Not an efficient mechanism for delivering change is it?
THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE
should have been applied a fair while back
We should embargo exports of coal whilst
we scale back our own usage.
At least in the future we’ll be able to say we did
something.
NO TAXPAYER FUNDING OF COAL
The Australian contribution of <2% has always been a misleading focus regarding responsibility – though strictly accurate in a woolly sort of way. As I understand it over 1/3 of the total GHG emissions globally is attributable to a host of countries all less than 2%.
So if these say 50 countries at an average of less than 1% each all say what they do is irrelevant then fully 1/3 of the emissions are not addressed.
And if a country with the demonstrable capacity and advantages of Australia gives up early and often it says to all the other comparable countries don’t bother. That’s bad.
This perspective was pointed out by Monica Oliphant elected President of the International Solar Energy Society at their last conference (in Sydney).
What do you mean by embargo J-Boy? As no more government subsidies, or no more coal exported from Australia at all? I know this is the Drug Dealer’s defence, but if we don’t sell it, someone else will. There’s a lot of coal burning infrastructure sitting around that needs coal, and the owners of that infrastructure are hardly going to sit around waiting for it to come if we stop selling it.
Imagine a Chinese economy that NEEDS coal to continue operating? What steps do you think they wouldn’t take to keep it coming? I disagree with the eloquent and intelligent Guy Pearse in that I doubt it will make any difference to global emissions if Australia stops exporting coal. I don’t like it, maybe I’m a glass half-full person, but I just can’t see it making a difference. Worse, I suspect that we might help the climate along a little bit, at the cost of massive civil unrest as a big international shake up of resources takes place.
So what’s the alternative? We’ve got to either get that stupid cure-all CCS working, or prove unequivocally that it doesn’t work, so we can stop stuffing around with it. My preferred option is to give them a tiny bit of money, or better yet get them to pay for their own research! (Apparently the wool board donates 1% to wool research; coal is 0.1 or something similar) But give them some money, and concentrate on becoming solar leaders and having a big crack at the Cooper Basin geothermal resource.
But, I genuinely doubt any of this will happen. Politicians don’t have the stomach for change.