"There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead"

It is refreshing to find a journalist who has done a little bit of homework prior to an interview and is ready to question spin, half-truths, strategic inexactitudes and "misstatements" from political leaders.

Rather than contribute another dissection of this particular interview, instead I thought I'd gather a few thoughts on the Australian carbon price and its place in contemporary Australian politics.

As Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott is so fond of reminding us (especially when facing an interviewer turning the screws on his own truthfulness), Australian PM Julia Gillard did indeed say during the 2010 election campaign, "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead". Yet one of the signature pieces of legislation from this minority government has been the introduction a price on carbon coupled with income tax reform.

A straightforward broken promise? Yes and no.

It is axiomatic that a minority government will need to compromise its electoral platform in order to get the support of other parties or independents required to govern. If a party could gain the support of enough MPs without altering its policies, then the extra MPs would just join the party. It is abundantly clear in this case that the price on carbon was the top item on the Greens agenda (and also on the radar of the independents) and so compromise was necessary. Once the election results were known, that such legislation would be the price of Greens support (needed by either party to govern) was entirely predictable.

As far as I can see, there were really only four other alternatives: (a) for the Greens to have dropped this demand, which was considerably more core for them than a promise made once on the campaign trail (did Gillard make this claim more than once? If so, I am not aware of it), (b) for the Greens to have negotiated an agreement with the Coalition, which would have faced the same sticking point (along with likely even more disagreements on other policies), (c) for the two parties who were against a carbon price (Labor and the Coalition) to have made this the sine qua non of their respective positions and so come to a power-sharing agreement between them in order to prevent the Greens from introducing such an idea, or (d) for no agreements to be reached and a new election called.

As I've said before, too much is usually made of campaign promises. Governments exist to execute wise political authority, not merely to implement the majority will.

While it is a minor point, it's worth noting that the carbon price is not a tax. The current system is based on carbon credits that are sold to the five hundred or so largest polluting companies in a market mechanism that spends the first few years with a fixed price and unlimited credits in order to give business certainty and then shifts to a fixed number of credits (declining each year) and a moving price (with a floor and ceiling imposed). It may well have been better as a direct tax at the point of extraction with proceeds distributed equally to all Australian citizens (tax and dividend), but that is not the system that was chosen. Now it is quite arguable that most Australians do not understand the difference, but that is because there has been such an effective effort by the Opposition to muddy the waters and no effort on the part of the government to explain it. Public ignorance is assumed and reinforced by both sides.

More importantly, the current legislation is way too unambitious, with tiny targets that put Australia towards the back of industrial counties in its level of ambition and which, if adopted by all advanced economies, would most likely see us sail past two, three and four degrees. Furthermore, current legislation does not including our massive coal exports, which are already the largest in the world and are planned to double in the next decade (blowing any domestic reductions out of the water), nor the embodied carbon in imported goods, nor international aviation or shipping. It provides extremely generous free credits to many industries to soften the initial burden. And it includes international offsets, so that we can continue to emit locally while paying someone else to make changes elsewhere that Treasury does not actually expect domestic emissions to decline very much, if at all.

Yet perhaps the greatest failure by the government regarding this legislation has been the failure to make use of its introduction to keep raising climate literacy, explaining the basics of climate science (which are still widely misunderstood), why serious action of carbon emissions are morally justified (getting beyond short-term cost-benefit analyses) and necessary at every level (personal, local, national, international), why Australia must do its bit (which is considerably more than most other nations, not less) and why this battle is worth fighting, even if it looks like we're currently losing.

So be assured that I am no particular fan of the present legislation or government, but repeating Gillard's broken promise - while it may be a satisfying way of expressing anger at a government that has had its fair share of controversies while being surprisingly effective at getting more than an average amount of legislative work done - is doubly misguided.

Designed for yesterday's climate, and other stories

Climate adaptation: Trillions of dollars of infrastructure is designed for yesterday's climate (and sea level, for that matter). In warmer temperatures, railways buckle, highways crack, asphalt melts, cooling ponds overheat, electrical grids overload. "In general, nobody in charge of anything made of steel and concrete can plan based on past trends".

Groundwater depletion: Almost one-quarter of the world’s population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished".

Arctic sea ice: Sea ice decimated by huge Arctic storm. There are all kinds of things going on here and the full effects of the week-long storm in the Arctic are yet to become apparent. Why do we care about a storm in the Arctic? Haven't they happened before? Yes, but not with sea ice this thin. Arctic sea ice is considerably thinner than at any time in recorded history, being up to 70% thinner during the summer months than it was back in the 70s. Thin ice is able to be broken up and moved around by large storms more easily. Without the protective cover of ice, storms also churn up the water more, mixing the very cold, fresher surface water (colder and fresher since it is just under the ice) with the warmer, saltier water further down. Warmer, saltier water is much more effective at melting ice.

Biofuels: George Monbiot laments once more the crazy logic of biofuels, which take food out of the mouths of the poor in order to make the rich feel less guilty about a problem to which it is probably a net contributor, rather than any genuine help.

US Drought: The future of drought. "Indeed, assuming business as usual, each of the next 80 years in the American West is expected to see less rainfall than the average of the five years of the drought that hit the region from 2000 to 2004."

Extinction: North American freshwater fish are going extinct at 800 times the background rate.

A little exercise: when will we run out?

Following on from my recent post about the must-read Bill McKibben piece in Rolling Stone, here's a little exercise.

1. Take McKibben's 2nd number (565 Gt of CO2 as the global carbon budget to have 80% chance of staying under 2ºC) and let's call it the somewhat sane global carbon budget: SSGCB. It is only somewhat sane since a 2ºC rise is no walk in the park, but already represents straying into territory agreed by all world governments as representing "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".
By the way, 1 Gt equals one billion tonnes. Current global emissions are above 31 Gt each year - and rising. Also, remember that there is a difference between emissions and atmospheric concentrations.

2. In this list, find your country's current population and its proportion of global population.

3. Imagine that this percentage is your country's fair share of that total carbon budget. Admittedly, this ignores past emissions and so pretends that some countries haven't been hogging far more than their fair share for as long as we've known about this problem. But let's go with it for the moment to keep the picture from getting unmanageably complex and just remember that the results will be skewed in favour of those countries with a long history of fossil fuel use.

4. So multiply 565Gt CO2 by that percentage you found in step to find your country's actual share of the SSGCB. This is how many Gt of CO2 your country can emit between now and, well, pretty much forever, but let's just say 2050 for now, since that seems to be about as far ahead as any national government cares to think.

5. Now find your country's annual emissions in this list. It's a few years out of date, but it will do for the sake of this exercise. This is in thousands of tonnes (kt), so divide it by one million to convert to Gt. We're also going to assume, for the sake of simplicity, that national emissions are not changing (neither are populations). Since most countries' emissions (and populations) only change by a small percent each year, this isn't too much of a stretch for a ballpark exercise like this.

6. Now divide your country's actual share in the SSGCB (from step 4) by annual emissions (step 5) and see how many years it will take you to blow through your entire budget. After this point, all future emissions are stealing from everyone's else's right to emit.

For Australia, we'll be all done by late 2016.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

Groundwater depletion. A new study has calculated that the biggest single contributor to sea level rise over the last fifty years has not been melting ice from Greenland or Antarctica, nor melting glaciers, nor even the expansion of the oceans as they warm, but groundwater depletion. This helps to plug a previously puzzling hole between the observed rate of sea level rise over recent decades and estimated contributions from these other sources. Of course, there is an even bigger problem in many places that results from taking groundwater at a rate faster than it is replenished: running out. For three decades, Saudi Arabia used to export wheat grown in its deserts with water extracted from fossil aquifers (i.e. groundwater that fell as rain thousands of years ago and unlikely to be replaced anytime soon). In the last few years, its wheat production has collapsed and is expected to cease entirely by 2016. As a result, it is buying up productive land in Africa, which results in various other problems: dispossession of traditional owners (who may lack adequate documentation of land ownership), corruption of government officials involved in a lucrative business, reduction of local food stability and so on.

Economic collapse? An update to the 1972 Club of Rome study done by researchers at MIT predicts global economic collapse by 2030 on our present unsustainable trajectory. Much discussed, debated and derided at the time, the computer predictions of the 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, have been tracking well with historical data over the last few decades and their timeframe of very serious ecological and resource problems by 2030 do not need to be substantially revised, according to the new study.

Australian droughts and floods: A land of (more extreme) droughts and flooding rains? This is an excellent intro to the hydrological effects of climate change on Australia and is the first in a recent series on hydrological changes in Australia. Parts Part Two, Three and Four.

Biodiversity decline: EU farmland bird numbers have dropped by 50% over the last thirty years, largely due to farming policies.

2011 CO2 emissions update: John Cook outlines IPCC and IEA scenarios for different emissions trajectories we could follow. Note that the very best (and most difficult) ones still involve major disruption and difficulty in a harsher and less predictable world. They are also likely out of reach without radical and rapid shifts in the global political and economic climate.

UK Climate Policy: George Monbiot traces the latest watering down of UK climate legislation. The UK's Climate Climate Act passed in 2008 with very close to unanimous support, making it the first piece of national legislation setting targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the world. When originally introduced in late 2007, the bill called for a 60% reduction by 2050, but this was increased to 80% on the urging of NGOs, church groups and a Royal Commission.

Great Barrier Reef: The UN has warned that the reef's World Heritage status will be downgraded to "in danger" if Queensland goes ahead with a slew of further port developments to expand the coal and natural gas industries. This article helps to lay out the political context and puts the debate in context, distinguishing between short and long term threats to the reef. It is quite possible to lose the wood of carbon emissions for the trees of maritime traffic. While a major accident would be a disaster, having an increasing number of coal ships successfully reaching their destinations ensures a long term catastrophe through warming and acidifying oceans. Australia's recently announced major marine reserve expansion, while praiseworthy, will do little to save the reef.

WA Forest collapse: "ecosystem change can be sudden, dramatic and catastrophic". Western Australia is rapidly losing its (remaining) forests. The south-west of Australia has experienced some of the most obvious changes in precipitation anywhere in the continent, with a fairly sudden step-change occurring around 1970: "Groundwater levels have fallen up to 11 meters in some forested areas, with larger decreases in populated areas."

Cane toads: A new development with the potential to start turning the tide against Australia's second most destructive introduced species. H/T Mick.

Chinese and US carbon emissions: myths and morality

Statistics and spin

"China is inappropriately made a scapegoat in this case because what causes the climate change is not today's emissions, it's today's atmospheric composition and we [USA] are primarily responsible for the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - more than three times more than China and actually on a per capita basis more than an order of magnitude [i.e. ten times]. So to blame China and to say that we have to wait for them is nonsense."

- James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in this interview.

Statistics can frequently be misleading. And so it really matters which statistics are given the most attention. It is true that China is currently the country that emits the most carbon dioxide each year. Yet Hansen is right to point out the massive historical and per capita disparity between the west and China (and India, of course). The climate change we are currently experiencing and the same again (more or less) already "in the pipeline" are due to emissions so far (there is a lag between the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and rising atmospheric temperatures as most of the energy initially goes into the oceans). And the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere is due very largely to the US, Germany and the UK (in that order).

Since cumulative emissions are more important than the current rate of emissions (due to the long period of time that about half the carbon dioxide we release stays in the atmosphere), then focussing simply on current rates without considering the cumulative totals obscures the bigger picture. And comparing countries with widely disparate populations also assumes that the only relevant moral unit is the nation state, a very odd assumption for individualists in the US to perpetuate. It makes much more sense to speak primarily in per capita terms. When these considerations are included, as Hansen points out, the US has little moral authority to consider China the largest contributor to the problem. Indeed, a further factor worth pondering is that roughly one-third of all China's emissions result from producing goods for western markets, so if we look at the consumption levels driving the dangerous emissions, then once again the west has little right to place the lion's share of blame for today's situation on China.

However, future emissions are also relevant, since (simplifying quite a bit), it is really the total amount of carbon dioxide humans release that matters. If we're to stay below 450 ppm (which has been the rough goal accepted by most governments - whether 450 is already too dangerous is a discussion for another day), then we've already spent more than half the carbon budget. Pre-industrial levels were around 280 ppm and we're currently at 390 ppm and rising (since more carbon dioxide is entering the atmosphere than leaving it). If this is accepted as a reasonable goal, then even if the US entirely stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow (impossible, but this is a thought experiment), China would never be able to emit as much carbon dioxide per capita as the US already has.

Does this mean that China (and other rapidly industrialising nations) bear no responsibility for their current (and rapidly rising) emissions? Of course not, but it is clear that the developed world has contributed far more to the problem than the developing world and so rightly ought to bear most responsibility for addressing it. Simply looking at current emissions obscures morally relevant considerations and enables the world's richer nations to downplay the role we have played in causing the mess. Unfortunately, such arguments are not widely understood or accepted in industrialised countries.

If you would like to see some of these statistics visualised, then Gapminder is an excellent resource. If you follow this link and click "play", you'll see a historical progression of various nations' contributions. The size of the circle indicates population size. The x-axis is per capita emissions and the y-axis is cumulative emissions. Colours are for region. You can play around with all the settings to see all kinds of relationships (a two minute tutorial is here). I haven't managed to find any graphs that compare per capita cumulative emissions. Doing so would demonstrate that China and the US are not simply in different ball parks but are playing entirely different games.