Critical Times

Climate changeNot only are Australia’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions the highest of any nation in the world today, as Tim Flannery (The Future Eaters) and Tom McMahon (Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons Of Annual Flows And Peak Discharges) showed around 15 years ago, Australia has a uniquely fragile environment. This can be seen in the drying up of Melbourne’s water supply, and in the severity of some recent tropical cyclones (George, Jacob, and the two last year in Queensland).

In northwestern and central-western Australia, the seven wettest years since 1885 have all occurred since 1995, while Melbourne has not had a year of above-average rainfall since 1997.

This fragility should require Australia to have the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world, not the highest.

Merely to cut it back to the per capita levels of the EU or Japan or South Korea would mean a 75% cut. Putting it at levels that would fit Australia’s ecological fragility would mean an almost 100% cut.

Moreover, Australia should have to do this — not within a few decades — but within a decade at most. Australia should plan to eliminate — and plan to do so now — all car transport and fossil fuel energy. It should have done this as soon as McMahon’s book (published in 1991) showed the unusual ecological characteristics of Australia.

Massively cutting car production is the most basic step to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, yet Australian governments continue with outdated pro-freeway transport planning abandoned in other developed nations.

Julien Peter Benney

Carlton, Vic [Abridged]

Banning selected items, like incandescent light globes, is not the best way to tackle environmental problems. What matters is only our total pollution levels and use of scarce resources. Why not classify broad categories of products as environmentally good, moderate or bad, and impose a higher tax rate the more damage they do? Such a tax system could replace the single-rate GST.

This way, people with a strong desire for a specific good or service could still obtain it – at a price. They would not be inconvenienced in the manner they are by a ban. But they would then have to compensate for their indulgence by buying less, or buying more environmentally friendly products, with the rest of their income.

A comprehensive, consistent environmental tax policy is preferable to selectively banning some environmentally undesirable items while under-taxing many others.

Brent Howard

Rydalmere, NSW

From: Comment & Analysis, Green Left Weekly issue #703 21 March 2007.