IAN DUNLOP. Climate Policy: Predatory delay destroys prosperity, threatens survival

Many political, media and corporate players still refuse to accept that human-induced climate change even exists. Meanwhile climate impact escalates, resulting in lives lost and futures ruined, as recent disasters demonstrate only too well.  Far too gradually the Australian incumbency is being forced to act on climate change, as investors and regulators open their eyes to the dangers, and children lose patience with their parents’ irresponsibility.

Ian Dunlop.

But the response is complacently reactive, rather than proactive, which is unconscionable when climate change is an immediate existential threat not just to Australian society, but to humanity itself.

John Howard set the scene. Pleading special circumstances because of our high-carbon economy, in 1997 during last minute negotiations, he insisted on the insertion of the infamous Australia Clause into the Kyoto Protocol, effectively holding the rest of the world to ransom.  This allowed our 1990 base to include emissions from an elevated level of land clearing, which he well knew had subsequently dropped off dramatically. Add to that our allowance to increase emissions by 8% in the first Kyoto commitment period (2008-2012), when almost all other countries’ emission allowances decreased, meant that from 1990 to 2012, Australia’s emission from all sources other than land-clearing increased by 28%, yet we met our Kyoto targets.  Our emissions subsequently went down during the short carbon-pricing period to 2014, but thereafter increased, at end 2017 being 31% above 1990.  Some reduction.

Read the story John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations - “IAN DUNLOP. Climate Policy: Predatory delay destroys prosperity, threatens survival.”