By Tom Kelly
Australia is among the industrialised countries that are increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, in violation of international agreement to reduce them.
The Climate Change Convention, negotiated at the United Nations Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, became international law in March. Under this convention industrialised countries are committed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000.
This is a very modest goal compared to the reduction required to halt global warming. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from around 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 355 parts per million today. In the 1980s alone, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere rose by an average of 3.4 billion tonnes each year.
If the industrialised countries succeed in holding greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels, they will still be contributing to global warming at the same rate they were in the 1980s. Keeping to 1990 levels would simply steady the rate of accumulation of greenhouse gases arising from these countries; it would mean no more than that the problem had begun to be addressed.
Unfortunately, it seems that governments haven't come to grips with the problem sufficiently to take even this modest target seriously.
According to Keith Tarlo of Greenpeace, the Australian government has been told by its own research arm, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Research Economics (ABARE), that our contribution to greenhouse gases will rise by 38% by the year 2005.
In the United States, energy-related carbon emissions have reached an all-time high. According to Howard Geller and Skip Laitner of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, carbon emissions from the use of fossil fuels in 1993 increased by 2.6% relative to the 1990 figure. Improvements in energy efficiency have not been large enough to compensate for higher energy use.
According to Nick Sundt, editor of Energy, Economics and Climate Change, the US may well need to go beyond the proposals of its Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP) to achieve its modest projections. Yet when it was released late last year, US President Bill Clinton praised the CCAP as "the most aggressive and the most specific first step that any nation on this planet has taken in the face of perhaps the biggest environmental threat to this planet".
If this really is the best governments are doing, they are courting disaster. A key factor is that addressing the problem of global warming seriously will cost serious money, and it is likely to impact heavily on particular industries — coal, for example.
To reorient industry to more environmentally benign activities, and to do so in a way that minimises social and economic disruption, the interests of the majority must have priority over the narrow profit interests of capital. The fact that this reorientation isn't happening, and that ecologically adequate projections didn't come out of the Rio Earth Summit, is testimony to the way that capital dominates most governments.
According to an April 9 Sydney Morning Herald report, the Australian government says it could exceed the UN convention target, but it will do so only on two conditions: "its efforts must not hurt Australia's economy or its export industries; and other major greenhouse producing countries must follow suit".
It's true that any one government's policies can't reverse the greenhouse effect on their own. But if everyone waits to be last, the problem will never be addressed.
We also need to be clear that some industries will have to be cut back or dramatically transformed in order to halt global warming. These changes, which are in the general interest, would win wide support if they were accompanied by the allocation of resources to generate alternative employment wherever jobs were lost. In the long term, the survival of humanity and of the diversity of life on earth will depend on our ability to take such steps.
Accumulating evidence suggests, however, that governments and industry are unable or unwilling to grasp the seriousness of the problem of global warming. We can't let our governments get away with pretending they're representing our interests when they're selling out our future.