Australia - Eyes Wide Shut On The Issue Of The Century

[hatrack]

Australia is unusual among First World countries in combining a relatively educated populace, an extraordinarily fragile environment and a crude mining mentality. It's not a good mix. Indeed, as Jared Diamond pointed out in Collapse, our ruthless extension of the mining mind-set from minerals to renewable resources such as soil, fisheries and forests has only intensified our continental fragility. Yet we go on exploiting our land rather than our intelligence, global warming or no, and choosing our leaders accordingly.

This is the mystery. Polls show we worry about climate change, but we vote from the hip pocket. John Howard, the polls tell us, makes us feel safe. But we blind ourselves to the yawning chasm between feeling safe and being safe. Ask the ostrich. Howard is right to berate the states for their pathetic record on environmental initiatives, but wrong to attack their push for carbon trading (worth $13 billion worldwide last year). He is right to suggest Australia could become an energy superpower but it is reprehensible of him to focus the strategy on grubby old non-renewables such as coal, oil and uranium. Right to press the climate-change button, however tentatively; wrong to offer the nuclear solution.

Climate change has become a moral issue. Maybe the moral issue. If, as is arguable, morality is no more (or less) than a herd survival code, we might reasonably see all wars as the discordant death rattles of opposing fundamentalisms, soon to be replaced by some clean new enviro-religion. This new faith will make sacraments of rainwater, commandments of cycling and recycling, and prophets of … well, there's the rub. In Australia, where governments quail before moral issues, the vacuum is filling with an unlikely alliance of business and philanthropic lobby groups. The Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change argued in April that a 60 per cent cut in Australia's emissions is compatible with strong economic growth. Westpac's chief executive officer, David Morgan, known for lampooning emissions proposals as Mein Kampf and seeing carbon trading as a European conspiracy, notes that "the next president of the United States … to initiate urgent action on climate change".

Now at last, the Climate Institute of Australia, has launched its Top Ten Tipping Points on Climate Change. Headed by the Australia Institute's Clive Hamilton, the institute is intelligent, purposeful, well placed. Never mind that the best it can do in the profit, sorry, prophet department is Bob Carr, whom you will remember as the man who turned a decade-long opportunity to green NSW into a filthy enviro-mess. Any church is more than the sum of its saints, and there are bigger issues at stake. As Tipping Point says, we are entering the "oh shit" phase of global warming. Pretty much everyone is taking it seriously except us.

EDIT

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/eyes-wide-shut-on-the-issue-of-the-century/2006/07/18/1153166377686.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1