The case against carbon trading—but is it a fair assessment?

It seems the debate over carbon trading just won’t stay out of the headlines at the moment. The opposition party in Australia—in their usual blatant political opportunism—have decided this week to unveil an alternative climate change policy to carbon trading. However, in spite of calling carbon trading “a great big fat tax”, they have yet to specify how their own policy will be funded—and even worse, it will basically mean business as usual for big polluters anyway. So it’s basically a climate change policy for those who don’t believe in climate change, and for those who think profits for big business should always take precedence over everything else. They want to appear as though they are doing something without actually doing anything useful, while incurring costs to the consumer and pretending it won’t cost them anything. This is hardly surprising, given their present leadership.

It appears as though the vast majority of people who oppose carbon trading also oppose action on climate change, period. But as I explained in my previous Let’s Give the Planet the Benefit of the Doubt post, this is both a logically and morally indefensible position. Once again, even if you don’t think the evidence proves that human induced climate change is real, that does NOT disprove it either—if you deny the possibility of climate change, you are simply sticking your head in the sand. And in any case, we need to move to renewable energy resources anyway, as our fossil fuel reserves will eventually run out (very soon in the case of oil), and we do know for a fact that they pollute the environment (even if you don’t think this leads to climate change). Anyone who opposes moving to renewable energy resources is just selfishly looking after their own hip-pocket, pure and simple.

Still, there are some who very strongly support action on climate change, but nevertheless oppose carbon trading as the way to do it. A good example is the video above by Annie Leonard, creator of the famous Story Of Stuff video. She clearly raises a lot of issues that require serious consideration, but as with most criticism of carbon trading, the problem isn’t really carbon trading itself, but how it is implemented. With the right systems and controls, it could in theory still work very well, and could provide a way for the third world to profit directly from our efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Annie thinks we should give some of the proceeds of direct taxes on carbon emissions to the third world, but let’s face it—taxes very seldom go directly to the places they are supposed to. And besides, it really does seem as though aid has done little if anything to help the third world, and may even have harmed them. The people of the third world need a way to make a living for themselves to get out of poverty, and properly implemented carbon trading provides a great opportunity for them to do that.

I also wonder if this video really is a fair assessment of the subject. For one thing, her implication that Enron and Goldman Sachs executives will control the carbon global trading market is seriously misleading. It leads me to wonder if any of the other statements in the video could be misleading as well—if you are knowledgeable on the facts and figures of this subject, I would greatly appreciate it if you could clarify some of the issues it raises. I do absolutely agree with her on one thing though: the current government subsidies of fossil fuels are beyond absurd, and could go a very long way toward covering the costs of our (undoubtedly essential) move toward renewable energy resources.

As to whether carbon trading is a conspiracy or not, I will be devoting a future post to our peculiar willingness to believe in conspiracies, which I suspect is related to our tendency to believe in God. I certainly do not think action on climate change generally is a conspiracy though, as it is very much against the short term interests (in other words, short-sighted greed) of big business. After all, they have always opposed it in the past—and with very good reason, as it hurts their short term profits.

After looking as though no deal might be struck at all, a last minute agreement has been reached at the Copenhagen summit on global change. Although the deal is disappointing, as Obama says, it is only the beginning, not the end, and in my opinion far better than no deal at all. At least now we have something to build on—as Australia’s leading campaigner on climate change Tim Flannery has said, I think we have to accept the political realities, and accept this deal as a positive outcome overall.

And boy, have their been a lot of political hurdles to overcome! Of course we’ve had the predictable acts of self interest from many of the countries involved. Most depressing of all, however—just when I thought we’d finally reached agreement on the reality of climate change (if not its cause or what to do about it)—has been the massive resurgence of climate change denial. Even here in Australia, we have had a change of leadership of the political opposition over this issue (the so-called ‘Liberal’ party, who are in fact anything but liberal, especially now). They have now staked out an election platform opposing an Emissions Trading Scheme as “nothing but a great big, fat tax”, even though (under their previous far more liberal leader) they had already agreed to support the scheme, and when they were previously in government, they ended up settling on a similar scheme themselves. This is blatant political opportunism, although this is nothing new for the Australian Liberal party, who don’t seem to have any principles at all, except for their desire to win elections at any cost.

The fact that climate change denial has become a political opportunity in the first place is the most depressing thing of all though. It seems that since the global economic crisis, people have become so obsessed with the almighty dollar that they want to ignore climate change, even to the point of wanting to convince themselves that it isn’t actually happening at all. People have become willing to accept the most improbable of conspiracy theories—a green conspiracy to deindustrialise the world, a United Nations conspiracy to impose world government etc.—while the reasons for climate change denial are very simple, clear and obvious: the desire of powerful, polluting big business to maintain as much short term profit as possible, and the desire of individuals to avoid paying extra taxes. It has gotten to the point now that whenever you do a search for political news videos on YouTube, you are greeted instead with endless conspiracy theory videos—it seems that the combination of human greed and insecurity makes us willing to accept the highly improbable over the blindingly obvious.

I will be the first to admit that human induced climate change is far from certain—there are just far too many uncertainties and variables involved, particularly as we are dealing with two of the most unpredictable things of all: the weather and the future. Climate change deniers love to pick up on every little uncertainty in the scientific data, and given the nature of this issue, there’ll be plenty of it. Yet at the same time, the climate change deniers are certain that climate change isn’t happening—this exposes their insincerity, as they can’t have it both ways. Furthermore, the contention that the world has been warming since the start of the industrial revolution is backed by a wealth of data, and quite frankly, it just doesn’t seem reasonable to me that all the crap we pump into the environment wouldn’t have any effect on it at all. Indeed, we know for a fact that it leads to pollution, which surely is in itself a good reason to reduce our emissions anyway. Even more importantly, we’re going to run out of fossil fuels eventually in any case, and as we do, their cost will become ever greater, and they will cause ever more wars. The cost of switching to renewable energy resources is relatively small, and will lead to huge cost savings in the long term. If human induced climate change is real however, the cost of inaction could be catastrophic—and likely will be anyway even if it isn’t real, as we fight over the last of the world’s fossil fuel resources, and the pollution of our environment increases. For goodness sake, let’s give the planet the benefit of the doubt here—this really should be a no brainer.

Which brings me to the next part of my good news story. At the recent G20 summit, the leaders of the top 20 economies in the world agreed to a very simple measure that I feel will have far reaching consequences—to end fossil fuel subsidies. I’ve always felt it was both extraordinary and ridiculous that—when we really need to encourage the development of alternative energy—the governments of the world are still subsidising fossil fuel production. I am also proud to say that Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spearheaded these changes, even though our economy is currently very highly dependant on fossil fuel exports (particularly coal and gas). It’s hard to imagine that just a few short years ago, both Australia’s Prime Minister and the American President denied climate change, and refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Once again, if they were still in government, it is hard to imagine that the lifting of fossil fuel subsidies would ever have been agreed to (for the reasons cited above).

Of course, that isn’t the only good news to some out of the G20 summit: it is also good to see such widespread co-operation in dealing with the economic crisis (which already appears to have averted another great depression), and that they are taking affirmative action to try and prevent corporate greed from creating such a situation again (such as the measures to control executive salaries).

So why on earth do we use such ancient computers? Basically, because we run the classic Mac OS exclusively. All these machines are more than fast enough for this wonderfully simple, elegant and fast yet functional OS, and machines newer than Lee’s eMac won’t boot into the classic OS anyway. So how do we run our web sites with such an ancient OS? In a way, we think it’s a good thing: if our sites work on our machines, we know they will almost certainly work on any current computer or OS! However, it also means we can’t keep up with the latest web technologies, so we are going to buy a new computer soon to allow us to launch an exciting new venture we have planned—stay tuned!

So what is the point of this post anyway? Basically, to tell you about the philosophy behind the new web initiative, Last Year’s Model—”saving the planet through sheer laziness”. In a nutshell, they are encouraging people to simply keep their old tech gadgets that still work fine, rather than buying new ones just for the sake of having the latest. This is something I can strongly agree with: my mobile phone is a few years old as well, and Lee and I both still watch old fashioned CRT TVs! (Still, one of the reasons we will be getting a new computer is that we realise our future video work will have to be in HD, even though we personally don’t care about HD at all). In part, I think it was all this rampant, uncontrolled consumerism (and the resulting debt) which led to the current financial crisis, and not throwing stuff away when it still works perfectly fine is certainly much friendlier to the environment.

In the mean time, the Maldives have vowed to become carbon neutral within a decade, by totally eliminating their dependency on fossil fuels, and switching completely to solar and wind energy. Even though the total cost of this plan will be worth more than their entire annual GDP, it will save them a lot of money in the long run: it should pay for itself in ten years, then after that their energy costs will be cut dramatically from what they are now (as they are currently dependent on oil imports to supply their energy needs). Hopefully they won’t be the only country who does such a calculation.

So why is a country of such modest means (and carbon footprint) as the Maldives leading the way in climate change initiatives? Basically because they—like other low-lying island nations—will be the first countries to be seriously effected by global warming, as predicted sea level rises will mean they are threatened with being under water in the not too distant future. They want to set an example that other nations will follow, in the hope that they will be able to avert this threat to their very existence. As we are such selfish and shortsighted creatures, nothing motivates us like our own self-interest.

Thing is though, dealing with climate change isn’t just in the self-interest of the Maldives and other island nations; it is in all of our self-interest. The fact of the matter is, to say that environmentalism is “saving the planet” isn’t really correct, as the planet will survive no matter what we do, and life will adapt and survive. Of course, many of the species that exist today will go extinct, so you could say environmentalism is saving the planet as we know it. But more than anything else, environmentalism is about saving ourselves. Perhaps no other species in the history of our planet is more dependent on a stable, unchanging environment than we are, yet ironically, we have also done more to alter the natural environment than any other species in history. Of course, we have only set out to modify the environment to suit our own selfish needs, but when one species is so out of balance with everything else, there will inevitably be consequences. I will discuss the likely extent of this in a future article.

However much of global warming is caused by human activities though, it is very clear that we are ill-equipped to deal with dramatic climate change. In the mean time however, in order to get people to act most effectively on this issue, I think we need to put it in the terms that matter the most to us: it is about our survival, not the planet’s. If we do that, I think people will be more likely to act.

The Story of Stuff

Although there’s probably some exaggerations here and there, I certainly agree with the gist of what they’re trying to get across. I think it is especially important to examine these issues in light of the current economic crisis—many people seem to want to put the environment on the backburner until we get our finances in order, but not only can we not afford to do this, I see the destruction of the environment and the financial crisis as symptoms of the same problem: an economic model that is based on endless growth, and encourages ever increasing (over) consumption. We just cannot have limitless growth on a planet with finite resources—at some point, we need to reach an equilibrium with what our planet is capable of sustaining. Switching to renewable energy resources will help a lot, and is essential if we don’t want to face a resources crisis in the near future. Yet even then, we need to ask tough questions about population control and other difficult issues, if we are to survive.

While this has been going on, southern Australia has been experiencing a record drought, which just recently produced a record heat wave. Adelaide has experienced more than a week of temperatures over 40°C (over 104°F), and Melbourne went for 11 days with temperatures over 40°C—both cities’ morgues filled up due to heat related deaths. The heat wave has now ended, but it did so with utterly disastrous results in the state of Victoria. The exceedingly dry conditions resulting from the record drought, and the strong winds that came in ahead of the cool change combined with a 46°C (115°F) day, produced the worst fire conditions on record. And they certainly delivered—untold properties have been lost to ferocious, uncontrollable fires, and the death toll is currently at 181 and counting.

Bush fires are a fact of life in Australia, so much so that major loss of life is quite rare, as we are well prepared for them. But the ferocity and scale of the fires in Victoria are the worst Australia has ever experienced, and such loss of life is unprecedented here. Hence, Australia is in shock and mourning at the moment. Still, in a sense I guess that shows how lucky we are: most other countries’ worst natural disasters produce far greater loss of life and property than even these terrible fires. Living as I do in southeast Queensland, I have avoided the heat wave, the fires and the floods. Lucky me!

All over the world, we seem to be getting record heat waves, record cold spells, record storms and record floods. It is hard to believe that climate change is not occurring given such extremes. This—combined with the current economic crisis—has really made me think that mankind’s excesses are now finally coming back to haunt us. I am deeply concerned that things are only going to get worse.

Oh, and there’s even more human destruction behind this: many of these fires were deliberately lit.

For the latest updates on these crises, see ABC News: Bushfire Emergency—Queensland Floods.

Photo courtesy of AAP: Simon Mossman