continent in reverse: it is going backwards on nearly every major
Australia is currently in the
grip of an ecological and
environmental crisis, one
that is characterized by the
current drought gripping
over half of Australia's agricultural land.
This drought is estimated
to be a one in 1000-year
event and is widely acknowledged to be exacerbated by rising average
global temperatures.
Bushfires between September and December last year, centred in Victoria were some of the worst on record and were made worse by the drought.
The effect of the drought has been devastating for Australian farmers and rural communities. Although rain fell in May and June 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 shitt in popular environmental consciousness, but still will not engage in any meaningful discussion about real measures to reduce carbon dioxides emissions 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
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:
"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 "Over the past decade, in ecological terms, Australia has been a indicator of our environmental health" 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 coun try.
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.
BHP which is mining the world's 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 greenhousegas 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 coun tries 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 extinc tions 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 the world must embrace clean coal' technology and nuclear energy.
The path for increased uranium mining was opened this April when the Labor
Party dropped its 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, lan 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 year's 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 are 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 carbon trading schemes.
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.