On March 21, it will be 10 years since 154 countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) following the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil.
The only implementing treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, is in limbo. The US and Australian governments lead a small gang of rogue states that have refused to sign it.
Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide have risen 11% over the last decade, and are expected to grow another 50% by 2020.
The hottest years of the 20th century have occurred since 1990, and up to 37% of all species in several biologically diverse regions could be driven extinct from the climate change that is likely to occur between now and 2050. Even a report commissioned by the US Department of Defense concluded that abrupt climate change from global warming was a greater security threat than "terrorism".
Yet the Coalition government remains in total denial of the greenhouse problem.
This is just part of the environmental vandalism of the Howard government.
In a continent that is 70% arid or semi-arid, the more fertile areas have been ruthlessly exploited during the last two centuries. The indiscriminate clearing of natural vegetation for commercial farming has led to serious climatic changes and devastated the habitats of indigenous animals.
Inappropriate crops and farming methods have exposed the soil to erosion, and pastoral activity in semi-arid areas has contributed to the spread of the desert. Poorly considered irrigation, excessive clearing of trees, and overuse of artificial fertilisers have led to the poisoning of more and more farming land through salination and acidification.
The rape of the land has accelerated with the corporatisation of agriculture. The rapacious growth of agribusiness is not only ruining the land but also eradicating the family farm from rural Australia. The message from the banking sector and agribusiness is "get big or get out"!
The dumping of household, industrial and mining waste products and extensive use of chemical pesticides, has led to the poisoning of land, rivers, lakes and coastal waters.
The poor design of cities and excessive reliance on private automobile transport rather than public transport has led to serious air pollution problems and the disappearance of much of the best agricultural land under suburbs.
The technology already exists to deal with these but there is no concerted action on these problems because it gets in the way of corporate profit making. Instead, today we witness railway lines being closed down, train services cut back and fares increased when we need to go in the opposite direction. Our cities are enmeshed in a web of privately owned, but publicly subsidised, tollways and tunnels. And yet the traffic snarls get worse and the air becomes even more unbreathable.
Protection of the environment and health on the job are closely related matters. Under the lying banners of "free trade" and "efficiency", pro-corporate Liberal and Labor governments are trying to roll back existing environmental and health standards.
But we can imagine an altogether different course in which:
- Environmental and health standards are established by the community with full access to technical information and expert advice;
- Elected community committees decide directly on projects to establish factories or use industrial processes that may adversely affect the local environment;
- It is recognised that the poisoning and destruction of the environment is a crime that threatens human survival, and treated as such;
- A nation-wide public project to clean up our land, rivers, and coastal waters, to carry out reforestation projects, and to establish publicly owned plants for recycling industrial and household waste, is launched creating thousands of useful and much needed jobs.
- Where environmental protection can only be achieved by the closure of an industry, as in the case of the logging of old-growth forests and uranium mining for example, governments and employers are forced to provide alternative work, training and retraining, and where appropriate, compensation to employees and communities affected by such closures.
We can imagine such an alternative course. And we know this is not just a nice dream but a matter of survival. But it will take more than the idea to make this a reality. People need to work together politically for that different future. The Socialist Alliance unites many of the activists who are dedicated to building a society based on putting community and the environment before private profit. It is a part of the process of political regroupment and social empowerment that is needed to make the dream a reality.
Peter Boyle
[Peter Boyle is a member of the Socialist Alliance editorial board.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 24, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.