BY JIM GREEN
Predictably, the Coalition government has been placed bottom of the class for its environmental performance when environment groups — including the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace — released their report card on October 17.
The government's unwillingness to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, its poor forest management, and support for expansion of the nuclear industry were among the reasons for the Coalition's bottom grading.
Labor also rated poorly but managed to do slightly better, after attempting some minor differentiation from the Coalition, including a commitment to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This is hardly a daring step, however, given that the treaty is now so full of loopholes that environment minister Robert Hill said in July, "It could well be possible to achieve our [Kyoto] target with the measures we now have in place".
Labor is promising to spend more money than the Coalition government to tackle land clearing and salinity, though the funding (and the political will) seem nowhere near up to the task.
South Australians have been promised that radioactive waste will not be dumped in their state under a federal Labor government, while residents of the Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights have won an assurance that Labor will not allow construction of a new nuclear reactor there. Under Labor, existing uranium mines will be allowed to continue to operate but no new mines will be allowed.
As for forest destruction, however, Labor has been unwilling to address the issue at all — a stance which is deeply unpopular with many environmentalists.
The Australian Democrats' environment policy, released on October 30, includes ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, mandating a 10% increase in wind and solar energy by 2010, national laws to control land clearing, establishment of a National Catchment Management Authority, improving rivers such as the Murray-Darling, national legislation to control and manage pest plant and animal species, an end to uranium mining, no new nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, and independent sustainability assessments of fisheries.
The Democrats are also promising to attempt to improve the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which the party negotiated in secret with the Coalition government in 1999. Environmentalists were appalled with the furtive process and less than impressed with the final product.
The Democrats also lost an enormous amount of credibility with the environment movement for negotiating with the Coalition government over the GST tax reform package, which includes huge subsidies for corporate polluters.
Australian Greens
The Australian Greens, with candidates in all House of Representatives seats and hopes of winning up to five Senate seats, released their "One World" environment policy platform on October 24.
The Greens describe their environment platform as a "New Deal", with annual funding of $3.7 billion to address numerous environmental issues:
- protection of native forests;
- measures to address land clearing, water pollution and mismanagement, salinity, and loss of wildlife;
- the equipping of every house with solar hot water and an energy-efficient fridge by 2010;
- an end to Australian involvement in the nuclear industry;
- repeal and replacement of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act;
- a five-year moratorium on the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment and promotion of organic agriculture;
- priority funding for public transport and rail freight and bicycles ahead of roads and freeways, and making public transport GST-free;
- reinstating the Energy Research and Development Corporation (abolished by the Coalition government) with capital of $100 million per annum;
- recognition of environmental refugees; and
- a requirement on Australian companies operating overseas to meet environmental standards no less stringent than those in Australia.
In total, the Greens want to raise an extra $9.1 billion annually for environmental and other initiatives. These funds would be raised by a carbon tax ($6.8 billion annually), abolition of the diesel fuel rebate for miners and woodchippers ($2 billion annually), and redirection of Natural Heritage Trust funds.
In recent months the Greens have repeatedly echoed the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) call for a carbon tax in Australia. Senator Bob Brown said in an August 8 media release, "The OECD is no left-wing think tank. But it knows that carbon taxes will improve economic performance."
At a National Press Club address on September 25, Brown quoted a paper released the previous month by the OECD which said, "To achieve significant greenhouse emission reductions, structural adjustment towards a less greenhouse gas-intensive economy is required, and putting a price on emissions, either through an economy-wide tax or a permit trading scheme, would be the most efficient way to achieve this".
Anyone familiar with corporate globo-speak will immediately recognise this statement from the OECD — the club of the 30 richest countries on the planet — as the standard fare from corporate polluters.
The aim is to gut environmentalism of its radical potential by incorporating it within a capitalist economic framework. OECD environment director Joke Waller-Hunter said in April that economic instruments such as carbon taxes should play the "predominant" role in addressing environmental problems in order to ensure "cost effectiveness".
A system of emissions trading is seen by many corporate polluters to be the cheapest way of dealing with the political impetus to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations.
The OECD argues that priority should be given to market-based instruments to address climate change, such as emissions trading, subsidy removal, green tax reform, and international "offset" projects. (A typical carbon "offset" project is the establishment of monoculture plantations in the Third World, often with adverse environmental and social impacts of their own.)
Attacking this free-market climate change agenda has been the first priority for many climate campaigners following an international greenhouse conference in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh, which began on October 29 and finishes on November 9.
The campaign group Rising Tide noted in a statement in the lead-up to the conference, "In Morocco ... world leaders, big business and NGOs will create a new commodity: air. Instead of making real changes to the root causes of climate change such as dependency on fossil fuels and an unsustainable economic model, they plan to buy and sell pollution on the open market."
'Equity'?
It's not clear whether the Greens support the "carbon casino" emissions trading schemes under discussion in Morocco, but Brown's recent infatuation with the OECD is troubling, as is the Australian Greens' advocacy of the "equity principle" that "everyone is entitled to equal per capita shares of the atmosphere".
This "equity principle" assumes a framework of commodification and property rights. An equal sharing of the atmosphere in the neo-liberal "level playing field" would quickly become unequal and inequitable.
As Rising Tide notes, "The privatisation of the atmosphere and the trade in greenhouse gases will not only do nothing to address the problems of climate change; it will also reinforce the structural economic inequalities between the North and the South."
Brown is right, as he put it in an August 8 media release, that the Coalition government's reluctance to introduce carbon taxes reflect "how much the coal, aluminium and woodchip industries are dictating policy in this country".
However, there are more than a few corporate polluters pushing for the introduction of "affordable" carbon taxes as a pre-emptive attempt to avoid legislation and regulations which would mandate changes in polluting production and resource-extraction processes.
There are numerous problems with carbon taxes and "eco-taxes" more generally.
A carbon tax is being sold as a "polluters-pay tax regime" by Bob Brown, but taxes imposed on corporations will usually be passed on to consumers.
Eco-taxes have proven to be very blunt weapons with respect to encouraging shifts in favour of cleaner technologies — partly because of the shift away from earmarking eco-taxes for environmental abatement measures. Instead they become just another revenue-raising measure.
Eco-tax regimes have attracted considerable criticism within the green and left-wing movements.
In a detailed analysis of eco-taxes in the book Environment, Capitalism and Socialism, Dick Nichols, a co-convenor of the Socialist Alliance, notes that "the green tax that typically gets implemented after the 'stakeholders' have had their say leaves business with the space to improve its operations at its own pace and to pass any extra costs onto its consumers, while having a minor effect on pollution and resource usage."
That would certainly seem to summarise the experience in Europe, where certain types of eco-taxes have been put in place. Daniel Mittler, writing in the December 1999 issue of The Ecologist, said that eco-taxes in Germany were insufficient to affect any significant environmental improvement, big business was largely exempted from the taxes, and the poor have been punished by increased consumption taxes on electricity and petrol.
Nichols writes, "While the position to adopt on any given green tax proposal will always involve a concrete case-by-base assessment of costs and benefits, eco-taxation as a general approach still leaves the greatest decision-making power over environmental quality in the hands of those with the greatest economic power.... Environmental protest, action and debate take a back seat as existing social relations and the fundamental legitimacy of the market are reconfirmed."
The Australian Greens' aim of developing "an economy that mimics ecosystems by rejecting the concept of 'waste' and shifting from old resource-gobbling industries to new clean and green enterprises based on information, innovation and service" is a variation on the oxymoronic theme of "green capitalism".
It stands in contrast to more left-wing environmental platforms, such as that of the Socialist Alliance, which advocates similar specific environmental policies — on transport, climate change, energy, forests, and various other issues — but in a radically different framework, one which sees the capitalist market place as the problem and not the solution.
From Green Left Weekly, November 7, 2001.
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