Howard's Kyoto resistance could be costing billion

September 9, 2007
From

THE Howard Government's refusal to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases is costing Australian businesses about $3.8 billion a year, a study has found.

The report by respected environmental consultant Cambiar said the country was missing out on economic activity because local businesses could not fully participate in the $37.5 billion global carbon market, which last year alone tripled in value.

"This is the first time this analysis has been done and what we have found was that a significant opportunity has been forgone because we are not participating fully in the Kyoto process," Justin Sherrard, one of the report's authors, told The Sunday Age.

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Exaggeration, Climate Change and the economic cost of climate change

Here is a blog about an article by Clive Hamilton.



I was alerted to the article by Professor Sinclair Davidson (Economics Commentator and Collumnist), who was on Difference Of Opinion (http://abc.net.au/tv/differenceofopinion/) Thurs 20th Sept 2007. Professor Sinclair read the quote from Clive Hamilton in the newspaper article so out of context that it totally changed the meaning. Clive's statement went from meaning that there is a lot of exaggeration about Environmental and social matters and often times exaggeration is done for the sake of a strong emotional response. Clive went on to say that with Climate Change, the exaggeration has been by the Australian Federal government about the cost of tackling Climate Change. Sinclair Davidson used the quote "Environmentalists have often overstated the effects of environmental decline." without presenting the rest of Clive's argument.

This of course is typical of a climate change denier. The issue Clive presents about the Howard government is that not only have they failed to address climate change, but that they have purposely encouraged climate change through denial, policy setting and direct action such as "New Kyoto Protocol" (an excuse to try and distract the rest of the world from the true Kyoto Protocol). Guy Pearce discusses this in his book "High and Dry, John Howard, Climate Change and the Selling of Australia's Future" (see http://www.abc.net.au/ rn/latenightlive/ stories/2007/1967488.htm). And by Clive Hamilton in his book "Scorcher" (http://www.theage.com.au/ news/book-reviews/ scorcher-the-dirty-politics-of-climate-change /2007/05/25/1179601645988.html).

This information highlights that if you care about the environment and climate change, then do not believe any of the lies and green washing that the Howard Government is putting forward in their election campaign. They have some positive actions, but they are too little too late.

BTW, the Difference of Opinion program discussed what the Federal Government (post the election) should do with our large 20 billion surplus. Not is all as it seems! (http://www.abc.net.au/ reslib/200709/ r185236_688864.asx).

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September 09, 2007
From Courier Mail

Article by Clive Hamilton.



In the climate change debate, while the dangers of global warming have been deliberately understated, those opposed to taking action have engaged in absurd exaggeration of the economic costs of cutting emissions.

The Prime Minister, various ministers and the fossil fuel lobby have for years claimed that cutting emissions would be economically ruinous, cause massive job losses and destroy our international competitiveness. None of these claims is backed by credible evidence and can easily be shown to be false.

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Beattie to lift coal royalties

May 09, 2007
From Courier Mail (QLD, AUST)

QUEENSLAND'S coal industry will be hit with increased royalties in next month's state budget to help curb climate change.
Premier Peter Beattie said today he was planning to increase coal royalties to force the industry into paying for clean coal technology research.

Speaking in New York, Mr Beattie said the increase would be for their own good because if the industry did not clean up coal it would not survive.

He said research was vital to cut greenhouse gas emissions, save the planet and ensure the long-term future of Queensland's powerhouse coal industry.

He angrily accused the state's coal companies of reneging on an agreement to provide $300 million for research into clean coal technologies.

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CSIRO contradicts PM over emission cuts

25 April 2007
From Blaney (Aust) - AAP article

Prime Minister John Howard says "I think it is crazy and irresponsible of any political party in this country to commit to a target when you don't know." He cited the Greens and Labor's cuts they would want to see.

But this article hightlights that a CSIRO report sent a month ago to Howard told him what the cuts would need to be and that they would not affect the economy greatly (if done now). (CSIRO are an Australian Government Research and Development group.) The Stern report also gave the same message and came from Nicholas Stern (from the UK Treasury):

• hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change,
  
• Guardian (UK) discussion of the Stern Report,
  
• 'Mustelid' blog on the Stern Report.
  

So I'm still not understanding why John Howard doesn't have enough evidence to convince him to change the way he looks at the problem of climate change.

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Suzuki Climate Interview

February 12, 2007
From ZMag.com (Canada).

For the first time in a long time, the environment is getting some major attention, or at least major lip-service, from the powers that be, nationally and internationally.

To try and "turn concern into concrete action" David Suzuki, one of Canada's leading environmentalists, will be crossing the country in February on a 50 city tour, speaking with communities on the theme 'what would you do if you were Prime Minister.'

David Suzuki is author of more than 40 books including From Ape to Super Species and the Sacred Balance. He has a PHD in Zoology from the University of Chicago and was named one of the ten greatest Canadians in CBC's competition.

The following is what transpired when Suzuki spoke with ZNet columnist Chris Arsenault by phone from his office in Vancouver just before deadline last week.

Chris Arsenault: You've been talking about the environment and climate change issues for the last 40-some years. Why do you think world government and business leaders are finally starting to pay attention?

David Suzuki: The Federal government has gone through a change of heart because the public has registered this issue so high in the polls. People know there's something screwy going on with weather and climate.

Here in British Columbia, we've had incredible extreme weather. Storms destroyed 3,000 trees in Stanley Park. We have forests turning red from the pine beetles that aren't killed by cold winters. Tofino, in the rainforest, was shut down in the middle of tourist season because they didn't have clean water. All these things are coming together, and people are freaking out.

In 1988, I want to remind people, the environment was the number one issue.

That's why Brian Mulroney became the 'environmental Prime Minister', because the public was so worried. Very shortly after that, the economy became a concern because it went into a dip and everyone was worried about jobs. The economy is doing very well now so we can look at other things like health and the environment.

CA: If we are talking about the economy, the Alberta tar-sands oil industry is a major engine of growth and Canada's biggest polluter. How are we going to take on an industry with such political, regional and economic clout?

DS: Even [former reactionary Reform Party leader Preston] Manning, is saying that you can't just act as if air and water are free. It takes a huge amount of energy just to melt the tar sands and then you have to use a huge quantity of water. That's a cost which has to be internalized. Right now the oil industry is getting away scotch free. They aren't having to pay for the air and water they use.

If the industry were paying for the pollution, I don't think the tar sands would be economical right now. We've already subsidized the tar stands to the tune of billions of dollars. Those costs have been externalized; they should be internalized by the companies who are doing the polluting.

The reality is what we need right now is strong Federal leadership to set standards, concrete targets and legislate timelines to meet those targets.

We've got to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. They're making windfall profits and we're still subsidizing them to the tune of billions of dollars. It doesn't make any sense. Take that money and use it for green energy, rapid transit and all sorts of other good stuff.

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Cost of climate change

From New Internationalist and George Monbiot's book "Heat".

George Monbiot resists the urge to do battle in a fog of meaningless statistics.

Now that the dismissal of climate change is no longer fashionable, the professional deniers are trying another means of stopping us from taking action. It would be cheaper, they say, to wait for the impacts of climate change and then adapt to them. They have the figures to prove it. It is tempting to prove them wrong. Given the new projections of major drought in continental interiors, of a possible global food deficit, of sea level rises with the potential to affect billions of people, it should be easy to demonstrate that the price of waiting for the catastrophe is higher than the price of reducing emissions. But it’s a temptation we should resist. Such calculations use costs which simply cannot be compared. The most famous exponent of the comparison is the Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg. In his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, he argues that the cost of doing nothing about climate change – of letting nature take its course – is $4,820 billion. The cost of stabilizing global temperatures at 2.5° above the 1990 level would be $8,553 billion; and the cost of stabilising them at 1.5° above the 1990 level would be $37,632 billion. He warns that ‘with the best intentions of doing something about global warming we could end up burdening the global community with a cost much higher or even twice that of global warming alone’. It would be better to use our money to make investments with higher returns, leaving ‘future generations of poor people with far greater resources’.

Many environmentalists have taken him to task, claiming that his costs for taking action are too high and his costs for the impacts of climate change are too low. But they have been drawn into a fake debate. For while the costs of taking action can reasonably be measured in dollars, most of the costs of climate change cannot.

We are told, for example, that the financial costs of Hurricane Katrina, which may have been exacerbated by climate change, amount to some $75 billion, and we can use that number to help derive a price for carbon pollution. But does it capture the suffering of the people whose homes were destroyed? Does it reflect the partial destruction, in New Orleans, of one of the quirkiest and most creative communities on earth? Does it, most importantly, measure the value of the lives of those who drowned?

In other words, is it possible to place an economic price on human life? Or on an ecosystem, or on the climate? Could such costs, when rolled out around the world, really be deemed to amount to $4,820 billion, give or take the odd dollar? Such figures are not just wrong. They are meaningless.

When economists have tried to put a price on such things, they have simply exposed the limitations of their science. In 1996, for example, a study for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that a life lost in the poor nations could be priced at $150,000, while a life lost in the rich nations could be assessed at $1.5 million. The researchers produced these figures by estimating how much people would be prepared to pay for the adaptive measures that would save their lives. Unsurprisingly, they discovered that the lives of rich people were worth more than the lives of poor people.

These days, economists are less prepared to expose themselves to ridicule. So anything that cannot be quantified is simply excluded from the balance sheet. What this means is that the loss of all the really important things – a functioning ecosystem, human communities, human life – is overlooked. Because they aren’t counted, they don’t count.

It would be wrong to blame only Bjørn Lomborg and the economists whose work he promotes for taking this line. Almost everyone feels obliged to attach a price tag to global catastrophe. The British Government, for example, has decided that the ‘social cost’ of carbon emissions is somewhere between $60 and $250 per tonne, with a middle value of $120. We might reasonably ask what the heck this means. Does the British Government really believe it can put a price on the people of Africa? On Bangladesh?

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