This is a piece for the next issue of Socialist Resistance by Marcus Greville who is an organiser for Green Left Weekly. If Marcus can get a job as an organiser then I’m in with a pretty good chance of becoming captain of the New Zealand rugby team.

Australia is currently in the grip of an ecological and environmental crisis, one that is characterised by the current drought gripping over half of Australia’s agricultural land. This drought is estimated to be a 1 in 1000 year event and widely acknowledged to be exacerbated by rising average global temperatures. Bush fires over Sep to Dec last year, centered in Victoria were some of the worst on record we also exacerbated by this factor.

The effect of the drought has been devastating for Australian farmers and rural communities and while mitigated by some May and June rains, it has already driven food prices up and knocked 1% off the country’s GDP. Water supplies will only start to recover however if Australia receives above average rain fall over the next few years, and if this rain doesn’t appear the threat of irrigation being cut off to farmers may be realised before the end of the year.

In this election year, the Howard led Liberal government is starting to notice the shift in popular environmental consciousness but still will not engage in any meaningful discussion about real measures to reduce carbon dioxides emissions or repairing Australia’s degraded environment. Following US President George’s Bush’s lead and the Australian primary industry pressure, Howard refuses to introduce measures that would harm the national economy. While the Stern report explained that the cost of not acting now to reduce global warming gases will cost more than introducing measures immediately, Howard remains unmoved.

In fact Howard, who has been in power since 1996, has been unmoved on all environmental questions in Australia and has overseen increasing rates of environmental degradation on all key indicators. According to a 2002 report by Dr Peter Christoff of the University of Melbourne which was commissioned by 19 organisations including Oxfam and Greenpeace http://www.acfonline.org.au/uploads/res_climate_in_reverse.pdf.

“Over the past decade, in ecological terms, Australia has been a continent in reverse. It is going backwards on nearly every major indicator of our environmental health, including the loss of plants and animals, land clearing and degradation, the condition of Australia’s inland waters, and greenhouse gas emissions. Per capita, Australians generate more greenhouse gases and clear more land than the people of any other wealthy nation.”

Between 1993 and 2001 the number of extinct, endangered or vulnerable bird and mammal species rose by over a third from 118 to 160 which is mainly due to the permanent clearing of native vegetation. This is the single largest contributor to the losses in Australia’s terrestrial biodiversity and land clearing is continuing to accelerate. While reforestation offsets a large amount of vegetative cover, plantation forests do not provide the habitats for native animals.

Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent, but also has one of the highest levels of per capita waters consumption of any country. Water conservation projects have managed to have an impact on domestic usage but the real culprit for water usage is big industry and in many cases they pay tiny amounts for their water allocations or receive them for free. The world’s 5th largest river system, the Murray-Darling, which provides water

BHP which is mining the worlds largest uranium deposit, Olympic Dam mine in South Australia pays nothing for the 33 million litres of water it uses each day. It also consumes 10% of South Australia’s total electricity production, making it the biggest greenhouse-gas producer in the state. To date the mine has produced 60 million tonnes of radioactive tailings and this will increase by 10 million tonnes this year. The report goes on to say that.

“Internationally, Australia is a laggard state. It has performed significantly behind other industrialised countries on most environmental measures. It has the second highest level of per capita waste production, the highest percentage of arable land degraded, the world’s fifth highest per capita level of water consumption, and the world’s worst record of any nation for known extinctions during the past 250 years. Australia also has the highest per capita greenhouse emissions of any developed country. At 27.9 tonnes CO2-e per person, this
is more than double the average of 12.8 tonnes per capita for all industrialised countries.”

In face of this Howard is making the case that to solve the problem of global warming, Australia and world must embrace ‘clean coal’ technology and nuclear energy. The path for increased uranium mining was been opened this April when the Labor Party dropped it’s longstanding ‘3 mines’ policy which supported the existing 3 uranium mines in Australia but no more than that.
The national conference dropped this policy in support of open slather uranium mining. Howard and the nuclear industry have lost momentum on the debate about nuclear power generation in Australia but the debate is not yet won.

Clean coal technology is being touted as a viable way to keep coal fired power stations and the powerful coal mining industry going. At the May 27-30 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation’s energy summit held in Darwin, the energy ministers present spent most of their time discussing securing oil supplies for the 21 member states. The Australian resources minister, Ian MacFarlane described his vision for meeting future energy needs was one of coal and nuclear and this is a more or less bipartisan view point of the Labor and Liberal parties.

The Socialist Alliance which will be standing candidates in this years federal election, has by comparison adopted a position to reduce stationary power emissions by 95% by 2020 with an overall emissions cut of 65% increasing to 90% reductions on 1990 emissions by 2030. These targets to be met in the main through massive increases in renewable energy investment and using natural gas fired power plants as a bridge between phasing out coal and full scale renewable power production.

Like the rest of the world, dealing with the generalised ecological crisis in Australia is not possible using market driven solutions such as water and car
bon trading schemes because the resources are always diverted from the most socially useful to the most profitable. The power to make decisions about the impact of our activities on the environment needs to be taken out of the hands of big industry and put into the collective decision making hands of those who bear the brunt of the decisions made, the working people.