I’ll match your crisis and raise you one Armageddon

The pros and cons of playing the crisis game

By David Salt

Quick, this is an emergency! Do Something!

How do I know it’s an emergency? Because everyone is telling me it is*.

The Australian Medical Association has formally declared climate change a health emergency.

The City of Sydney has just declared a climate emergency (following in Hobart’s footsteps). Indeed, around the world some 660 local governments have made similar declarations.

A few months ago a bipartisan UK Parliament passed a national declaration of an Environment and Climate Emergency (with Canada doing the same soon afterwards).

In Australia there are calls for a conscience vote by the parliamentary representatives for a declaration of a climate emergency but, predictably, both major political parties are resisting. However, pressure is mounting with the Greens tabling a petition of 125,000 people asking the Parliament to declare one.

Crisis talk

Why bother invoking a climate emergency?

Partly it’s because some people feel events are suggesting things have gone way beyond ‘normal’. It is now an emergency.

Partly it’s because some people want our elected representatives to start signalling that they see climate change as being a higher priority than they currently do.

And, given these motivations, some people just want something to be done. Stop talking and do something.

Crises in the past have served to bring on action. Indeed, sometimes a good crisis can galvanise a nation. The bombing of Pearl Harbour, for example, transformed overnight a war-phobic USA into a unified fighting machine that would go on to become the world’s leading superpower.

Calling an emergency signals that special effort needs to be taken to deal with an extra-ordinary situation. It mobilises resources and public sentiment. It ‘allows’ a government to assume more control, often overriding individual freedoms that exist when things are normal. Indeed, I suspect this is one of many reasons conservatives are so loathe to accept the situation we are facing is a crisis. Because to do so leads to constraints on personal freedoms.

Take care when crying ‘crisis’

Climate change is big. Indeed it’s one of the biggest threats facing our species. But does labelling it a ‘crisis’ or an ‘emergency’ really assist us in dealing with it?

David Holmes from Monash University recently set out six reasons why a national climate emergency is not a realistic or helpful option in Australia. Among these, he says it would require bipartisan support (which clearly it lacks), the term ‘climate emergency’ doesn’t mean much to many Australians and no-one trusts politicians. (This lack of trust is especially significant since our Prime Minister visited the UN and told the world a highly misleading and cherry-picked set of facts about Australia’s efforts on climate change).

Beyond Australia’s specific context, I’d put forward five generic reasons why care needs to be taken with crying ‘crisis’.

1. It prevents a calibrated response.
Where do you go once you’ve announced an ‘emergency’? It’s kind of the end of ‘normal’. It often leads the media and government struggling to come up with ways of describing the magnitude of the problem or response. Last year we described the crisis of the fish deaths on the Darling simply as the ‘mass fish kill event’. This year, with the same event looming, we’re told to prepare ourselves for a fish Armageddon!

2. It normalises crisis
And if it’s an emergency this year, what happens when things get worse next year. Is it like emergency plus (maybe that’s what an Armageddon is)? People will just begin thinking that emergency is really business as usual. I find it’s a similar problem when trying to engage people on climate change by discussing how our weather is ‘record breaking’. Yes, they say, we’ve been breaking records each year for much of the past decade. Breaking records is now normal.

3. It causes people to give up
Emergencies promote uncertainty and sometimes even panic. Events are clearly beyond our capacity to deal with them. This leads to anxiety, depression and fatalism (with many people actually declaring they won’t have kids because of the declining state of the world). Indeed, it often induces a form of paralysis.

4. It encourages citizens to not take responsibility
Individuals are often overwhelmed in an emergency and expect higher authorities (usually the government) to take over. In some ways an emergency signals ‘this is not my problem, it’s the governments’ or maybe some other higher power (especially when you start invoking Armageddon).

5. It doesn’t provide a constructive way forward
I’ve spoken before about how people deal with the perception of an existential crisis, an event so big it threatens our very identity. Most people give up and withdraw into nihilism, retreat into fundamentalism or, the constructive option, get into activism. Unfortunately I think too much crisis talk creates nihilists or fundementalists.

Dream on

Several years ago the political economist Anthony Giddens observed that “Martin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming ‘I have a nightmare’.” Similarly, it concerns me that invoking climate change as an emergency may shut down people more than causing them to believe they can make a difference.

Consequently, I think we need to always be talking about where hope may lie as the shadows of climate change darken. To that end I’d like to finish with six sentences of hope recently penned by Richard Flanagan, one of Australia’s finest authors. He put these words to paper (in an article in The Guardian) because he sought to escape the sense of futility that seems to be settling on us as our government continues to shirk its responsibilities on climate change. He said:
“1. We [the general community] believe Australia can be an affirming light in a time of despair, a global leader in transitioning to a carbon-free and socially just society, and that is why we wish our government to –
2. Work with Australian land managers to stop land clearing, protect existing forests and grow new forests to absorb existing carbon pollution.
3. Work with Australian farmers and graziers to make farming carbon neutral.
4. Work with Australian miners to ensure a transition into 21st century minerals (nickel, rare earth) and end thermal coalmining and gas fracking in Australia.
5. Work with Australian regulators to make all Australian ground transport powered by renewable energy by 2030.
6. Work with Australian industry to make Australia a renewable energy giant and carbon-neutral economy by 2050, funded by progressive pollution tariffs on global heaters.”

So, while I agree that climate change is now a real and present crisis, declaring it an emergency and leaving it at that is insufficient and, indeed, may be counterproductive. If like me you think there’s a crisis but don’t want to conjure up nightmares, you could demand your government representatives to take our situation seriously, but at the same time make sure you put forward constructive and possible alternatives to business as usual.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

*Measuring climate change: Actually, I don’t need to be told it’s a climate emergency. I can see it in every news bulletin be it Australia’s fire season getting underway in a devastating manner in September, unprecedented hurricanes ravaging the Bahamas, and the Amazon burning before our very eyes.

And, not only can I see the direct impacts of climate change, I also accept the reports of the World’s leading scientific institutions. Let me reprint here the summary findings of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report on the Global Climate from 2015-2019. This report, hot of the press, brings together measurements made by thousands of scientists using multiple technologies over many years, and it all paints the same picture.

Given this evidence and our government’s steadfast refusal to respond with appropriate urgency, is it any wonder everyone is calling for an emergency to be proclaimed?

The Global Climate in 2015-2019
World Meteorological Organization (WMO)

Warmest five-year period on record: The average global temperature for 2015–2019 is on track to be the warmest of any equivalent period on record. It is currently estimated to be 1.1°Celsius (± 0.1°C) above pre-industrial (1850–1900) times. Widespread and long-lasting heatwaves, record-breaking fires and other devastating events such as tropical cyclones, floods and drought have had major impacts on socio-economic development and the environment.

Continued decrease of sea ice and ice mass: Arctic summer sea-ice extent has declined at a rate of approximately 12% per decade during 1979-2018. The four lowest values for winter sea-ice extent occurred between 2015 and 2019. Overall, the amount of ice lost annually from the Antarctic ice sheet increased at least six-fold between 1979 and 2017. Glacier mass loss for 2015-2019 is the highest for any five-year period on record.

Sea-level rise is accelerating; sea water is becoming more acidic: The observed rate of global mean sea-level rise accelerated from 3.04 millimeters per year (mm/yr) during the period 1997–2006 to approximately 4mm/yr during the period 2007–2016. This is due to the increased rate of ocean warming and melting of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets. There has been an overall increase of 26% in ocean acidity since the beginning of the industrial era.

Record Greenhouse Gas Concentrations in the Atmosphere: Levels of the main long-lived greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4)) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have reached new highs. The last time Earth’s atmosphere contained 400 parts per million CO2 was about 3-5 million years ago, when global mean surface temperatures were 2-3°C warmer than today, ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica melted, parts of East Antarctica ice had retreated, all causing global see level rise of 10-20m compared with today.

In 2018, global CO2 concentration was 407.8 parts per million (ppm), 2.2 ppm higher than 2017. Preliminary data from a subset of greenhouse gas monitoring sites for 2019 indicate that CO2 concentrations are on track to reach or even exceed 410 parts per million (ppm) by the end of 2019. In 2017, globally averaged atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were 405.6 ±0.1 ppm, CH4) at 1859 ±2 parts per billion (ppb) and N2O at 329.9 ±0.1 ppb. These values constitute, respectively, 146%, 257% and 122% of pre-industrial levels (pre-1750). The growth rate of CO2 averaged over three consecutive decades (1985–1995, 1995–2005 and 2005–2015) increased from 1.42 ppm/yr to 1.86 ppm/yr and to 2.06 ppm/yr

https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/landmark-united-science-report-informs-climate-action-summit

What’s in the EPBC Box?

Unpackaging Australia’s national environmental law

By Peter Burnett

I’ve decided to pull apart Australia’s national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act 1999 (EPBC Act). I want to see what makes it tick and, perhaps more significantly, to see if I can explain what makes it tick.

I’m not doing this for fun; there are two major reviews coming up that will delve into this important law and I’d like to have my say in these reviews. If I’m going to have my say, I’ll have to go beyond just knowing what I’m talking about. I have to be able to communicate my understanding to support my point of view.

This is no easy task. A colleague of mine, with extensive experience in public policy but not environmental policy, recently tried to read the EPBC Act. He told me, with considerable frustration, that he found it virtually impenetrable.

I can also draw on personal experience. I recently gave a guest lecture about the Act as part of an environmental law course (the course was for non-lawyers). The blank looks I got from the students, and the absence of questions, challenged me to try a new approach to explaining what this important piece of legislation does.

The two upcoming reviews of the EPBC Act could have significant consequences for environmental law in Australia. The first is being carried out by the Productivity Commission and examines regulation of the resources sector. This review has just started and I discussed it in an earlier blog.

The second review examines the operation of the entire EPBC Act, something that the law requires every 10 years. This review is due to be announced in October.

Only for the ardent

The EPBC Act is around a thousand pages long! And that’s just the Act itself. This doesn’t include supporting regulations and guidelines. There are reasons for this length (and complexity).

Because of the peculiarities of Australian constitutional law, parts of the Act use arcane legal language to attach themselves to certain constitutional hooks.

The Act is also repetitive, because it applies similar processes to different things. The alternative would be to draft master provisions and apply them in multiple places through frequent cross-references. I’ve heard drafters argue that repetition makes the law easier to read but I’m not entirely convinced – what the Act gains in readability through repetition may be lost in the added length.

All in all, reading the Act is only for the ardent.

So, with the blank looks of the students still fresh in my memory, I decided to draw some pictures of it. I’d seen some well-drawn flow charts of some of the Act’s regulatory processes and thought I could do something similar, with a broad readership in mind.

I started with the idea of reverse-engineering a piece of equipment, say an espresso machine: first identify the major components, such as reservoir, boiler and coffee grinder, further dismantling each as necessary to see what it does. Then assemble the machine and observe how the components complement each other to produce a finished product.

So what’s in the box?

It turns out that the Act has 16 major components, at least as I’ve counted them (and leaving out ‘ancillary equipment’ such as compliance powers).

You can see these in my diagram below (Figure 1). The parts fall into three streams, indicating that the Act has three broad functions.

Figure 1: The main components of the EPBC Act (omitting supporting provisions such as compliance powers)

The first stream is about identifying various environmental values for protection. This mostly covers threatened species and special places. Once these values are identified, usually through a formal listing process, they are ‘protected’ by the Act. This means it becomes an offence to do something likely to harm them significantly, unless one obtains permission to do so (see stream three).

Because this is a national law, the values protected are predominantly things of high significance, such as World Heritage places or nationally-threatened species. Hence the term for many of them is ‘matters of national environmental significance’ (or MNES).

Apart from MNES, some values are there because they fall into categories that are protected by federal law alone. For example, marine species are included because the jurisdiction of the Australian states ends three nautical miles from the coast, while our Exclusive Economic Zone goes out 200 nautical miles.

The second stream is about planning for conservation. The Act doesn’t just cover planning connected to MNES and Commonwealth areas. It also provides for bioregional plans across the continent and its territorial sea, although with the major qualifier that for a region within a state (ie most of terrestrial Australia), the plans can only be done in cooperation with that state.

So far, there haven’t been any bioregional plans done with states, something I’ll discuss in another blog.

The third stream is about assessing and approving things that might harm the environmental values protected by the Act, or in the case of trade, the environment generally. The best known component in the third stream is project-based environmental impact assessment, but there is also provision for strategic environmental assessment of development.

This stream also covers assessment and approval of trade in species, whether these be endangered species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), native species for export or exotics for import.

Putting the parts together

Despite the complexity of the Act, its components do seem to fit relatively comfortably into these three broad streams. These are based on the protection and conservation of many of Australia’s most important environmental values, plus the power to assess and, if appropriate, approve (usually subject to conditions) developments that might harm what is protected and conserved.

In the broad this seems like a reasonable approach to looking after the environment while allowing for development. However, as I’ll explain in future blogs, there’s devil in the detail. In its current form, the framework does not realise its potential.

Have we bitten off more than we can chew?

Joining the dots on Sustainability Bites

By David Salt

“A real engagement with sustainability has bite.” That was our contention when we (Peter and I) began this blog. Well, have we demonstrated that in our efforts so far? And have our reflections generated any useful insights, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? With 33 ‘bites’ now under our belt, I thought I’d take a look over what we’ve discussed so far and see if any themes are emerging.

If you read our blog’s ‘about’ page (which we haven’t touched since we began) you’ll see we had our own ideas on what ‘Sustainability Bites’ means. We said: “There are no absolute rights or wrongs in this debate on sustainability, but there are serious trade-offs and important consequences resulting from the decisions we make, and the way we make them.”

Those consequences are, if you like, the ‘bites’ of which we speak.

Governments will always sell their policy formulations as ‘win-win’ propositions but this is simply politically expedient fiction. There will always be ‘losers’ in any policy change and when it comes to sustainability those with most to lose are often big and influential ‘actors’ with considerable power in government decision making. Their vested interest in sustaining the status quo means the interests of future generations are forgotten. The present trumps the future.

33 bites, 5 emerging themes

The other meaning of the title of our blog is that we aim to serve up short, bite-sized stories on sustainability; stories based on emerging news and/or our research on various elements of the policy and science of sustainable development. So far we’ve produced 33 bites, roughly one per week since the beginning of 2019. I’ve listed these stories at the end of this blog in the order they appeared (Appendix 1) with links to each piece if you see something that catches your interest that you may have missed first time round (or maybe you only started following us recently).

Going through that list I see five themes constantly emerging:
1. The challenge of change (and the importance of crisis);
2. The culture of science (and its failure to influence policy);
3. The burden of politics and ideology (frustrating the development of good policy);
4. The value of good policy; and
5. The importance of history.

Of course, these themes arise from our interests in the sustainability sector. Peter comes from a policy background whereas I have been communicating conservation science for many years. However, I feel we have discussed enough examples to provide compelling evidence that these emerging themes are important (we would contend central) to any engagement with sustainability.

I have indicated in appendix 1 where a ‘bite’ is predominantly aimed at one of these themes should you want to read further. Many bites, of course, cross several themes.

And here are a few comments on each.

1. The challenge of change (and the importance of crisis)

Achieving enduring change is hard. Often it’s politically impossible. Vested interests, competing ideologies and weak governance frequently conspire to defeat our best intentions.

The more we (Peter and I) have pondered this point the more it seems the only way enduring change is achieved is through crisis. The status quo needs some form of disturbance to weaken its hold to enable a change in rules to occur.

Of course, there are many things you can do in the absence of a crisis and several of these we discuss. Importantly, when a crisis does occur, make sure there are effective policy solutions available to be deployed. ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’

2. The culture of science (and its failure to influence policy)

Scientists gather evidence to better understand the world and inform our choices. Politicians gather evidence to maximize their electoral return (power). Often this involves the politician selling an ideology or plan which usually leads to presenting evidence to justify a specific idea or refutes a competing ideology. In other words, science and politics are antithetical in their process (something that both sides rarely acknowledge).

But it’s not just that politicians fail to act on what science is telling us; they simultaneously use science as an excuse for not acting on the clear and growing threat of global change. They hold up the promise and power of technology as something that will save us when things get too bad, thereby enabling them to ignore the risk (and implement appropriate policy) today.

It’s really quite perverse. Our leaders often ignore the science that undermines their (political) position but then hide behind the promise of science in defending the consequences of that position.

3. The burden of politics and ideology

The biggest obstacle to meaningful policy reform for sustainability is the inertia of the status quo, and this inertia is based on the politics of self-interest and short termism. It might be that the politics is driven by ideology or it might be that ideology is used as a weapon of power to shore up the politics. In many ways it doesn’t matter which, as both situations add up to today’s vested interests stopping the consideration of the future.

I would note that Peter and I both used our first blog in this series to talk about Conservative ideology. Peter spoke about sustainability actually being a central tenet of mainstream Conservative philosophy (the notion of the good steward). And I discussed how climate denialism was consistent with a Libertarian hatred of big government and constraints on personal freedoms.

4. The value of good policy

There are many policy tools available to government to tackle issues relating to sustainability. For example, Peter devoted several blogs to exploring environmental accounts and environmental impact studies. He also discussed the role and value of the Productivity Commission and the Sustainability Development Goals (and several other policy institutions as well).

In all cases, these processes and institutions developed valuable ideas and assessments that ultimately failed to deliver real advances in sustainable development, not because they were flawed in themselves but because they weren’t implemented properly or integrated with other policy sectors.

A good policy poorly implemented can, in some ways, be worse than no policy at all because it gives the impression that a problem is being dealt with when it’s not, while the underlying problem just gets worse.

5. The importance of history

To understand why a good policy is not implemented in an appropriate way, or why ideology so often trumps rationality, it’s important to understand the historical context and development of an idea or process. Many of the stories we have examined have long histories, and to understand why something works as it does it’s necessary to see from where it came and how it has changed.

Sustainable development is a complex and dynamic field, hardly surprising given we live in a complex and dynamic world. Many of our reflections have looked back in time to see where something has come from and how it has changed over time. Does this throw any light on the past, present and future of the sustainability project? We think so, and in support of this claim I give you a timeline of what we have discussed so far (Appendix 2).

Of course, this is hardly a comprehensive treatise on the development of sustainability. It’s more a patchwork of ideas, a palimpsest of policy intent. But it’s not a bad start.

And we hope to fill in this patchy tapestry of ideas with greater detail as we chew on more bites in the future.

Image by vegasita from Pixabay

Appendix 1: 33 Bites [in order of appearance with main themes in brackets]

1. Environmental Sustainability: a thoroughly Conservative notion – [Ideology; history]
2. Sustainability, ‘big government’ and climate denialism [Ideology, science]
3. Why Can’t We Agree on Fixing the Environment? Tribalism & short termism[Politics, crisis]
4. Wishing for a ‘Goldilocks’ crisis’A crack in the Greenland Ice Sheet [Change, crisis, history]
5. How are we going Australia’s OECD decadal Environmental Report Card [Good policy]

6. Throwing pebbles to make change:is it aim or timing?[Crisis and change]
7. The BIG fixWhy is it so hard [Crisis, politics]
8. Duelling scientists: Science, politics and fish kills [science culture, politics]
9. Making a difference without rocking the boat The FDR Gambit [Crisis, good policy, politics]
10. Throwing pebbles and making waves: Lake Pedder and the Franklin Dam[Crisis, history]

11. Ending duplication in Environmental Impact Assessments [Policy, history]
12. Is science the answer? Technology is not the solution[Science, ideology]
13. Environmental Impact Assessment and info bureacracy [Policy, politics]
14. Confessions of a cheerleader for science: delaying action because science will save us[Science, ideology]
15. Caldwell and NEPA: the birth of Environmental Impact Assessment[History, policy]

16. This febrile environment: elections, cynicism and crisis[Politics, crisis]
17. 20 Year review of the EPBC – Australia’s national environment law [Policy, politics, history]
18. Saving the world’s biodiversity: the failure of the CBD and the need for transformative change[Policy, history, politics]
19. The value of Environmental Impact Assessment [Policy, history]
20. Retreat from reason – nihilism fundamentalism and activism [Ideology, crisis, politics]

21. Too late for no regrets pathway: a pathway to real sustainability[Politics, policy, history]
22. A short history of sustainability: how sustainable development developed[History, policy, crisis]
23. Kenneth Boulding and the spaceman economy: view from Spaceship Earth[History, policy]
24. A real climate change debate: science vs denialism[Science, politics, ideology]
25. Craik Review on green tape: environmental regulation impact on farmers[Policy, politics]

26. Trinity and the dawn of the Anthropocene [History, science]
27. An environmental accounting primer [Policy, history]
28. Displacement activity – it’s what you do when you don’t have a real environmental policy [Politics, policy]
29. The Productivity Commission and environmental regulation [Policy, politics]
30. Framing climate change: is it a moral or an economic issue [Politics, ideology]

31. The Sustainable Development Goals: game changer or rehash [Policy, history]
32. The Great Barrier Reef: best managed reef in the world down the drain [Science, policy, politics]
33. Doing the Tesla Stretch electric cars to our economic rescue [Policy, politics]

Appendix 2: The potted timeline of Sustainability Bites

500 BC: Plato comments on the denuded hills of Attica. Five hundred years later Columella argues the need for the ‘everlasting youth’ of Earth. Also in this blog, are discussions on John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Margie Thatcher.
Environmental Sustainability: a thoroughly Conservative notion

1940s till now: Following the ‘reboot’ of WW2, the international community has made many concerted steps to develop a workable strategy for sustainable development.
A short history of sustainability: how sustainable development developed.

1941: Reflecting on how President Roosevelt prepared for war prior to the crisis of Pearl Harbour.
Making a difference without rocking the boat The FDR Gambit

1945: Monday, 16 July, the world’s first atomic bomb is tested, and the Anthropocene begins (the world will never be the same).
Trinity and the dawn of the Anthropocene

1966: New ways of perceiving the environment came to the fore in the 1960s, Boulding’s evocation of a Spaceship Earth was one of the important ones.
Kenneth Boulding and the spaceman economy: view from Spaceship Earth

1969 (and the 1960s): The US drafts its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), marking the birth of modern environmental policy (ending a decade in which environmental decline was finally triggering legislative responses)
Caldwell and NEPA: the birth of Environmental Impact Assessment

1970s & 80s: The rise of environmental politics in Australia. It really began with the flooding of a beautiful Tasmanian mountain lake.
Throwing pebbles and making waves: Lake Pedder and the Franklin Dam

1972: Anthony Downs publishes on the ‘issues-attention cycle’
The BIG fixWhy is it so hard [Crisis, politics]

1972/73: The world confronts resource scarcity while simultaneously reflecting on measures of economic welfare. These were the antecedents of the environmental accounts.
An environmental accounting primer

1990s till today: A short history of attempts to reform Environmental Impact Assessment in Australia
Ending duplication in Environmental Impact Assessments

1998: Australia established the Productivity Commission to enhance the government’s efforts improving our economy, society and environment (and probably in that order).
The Productivity Commission and environmental regulation

1999: Australia’s premier national environmental law – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – is passed. Twenty years on, it’s in need of a major overhaul.
20 Year review of the EPBC – Australia’s national environment law

2000: The book ‘The Tipping Point’ is released
Throwing pebbles to make change:is it aim or timing?

2005-2009: The United Kingdom shifts from a bland incremental climate policy to an ambitious goal, enshrined in law. That goal is to cut emissions by 80% by 2050.
Too late for no regrets pathway: a pathway to real sustainability

2015: The Sustainable Development Goals are adopted by the UN (following on from Agenda 21 in 1992 and the Millennium Development Goals in 2000).
The Sustainable Development Goals: game changer or rehash

2016/17: The Great Barrier Reef experiences mass bleaching under climate change
Wishing for a ‘Goldilocks’ crisis’A crack in the Greenland Ice Sheet

2017: Ex-Prime Minister Abbott denies climate change to an international forum
Sustainability, ‘big government’ and climate denialism

2017: At the same time that Abbott was denying the existence of climate change, the head of his Church, Pope Francis was saying: “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity.”
Framing climate change: is it a moral or an economic issue

2019: OECD delivers Australia an environmental report card (this is a process that more could be made of)
How are we going Australia’s OECD decadal Environmental Report Card

2019: Mass fish kills signal the latest impact of severe weather events (exacerbated by climate change)
Duelling scientists: Science, politics and fish kills

2019: Geoengineering is being promoted as a silver bullet for climate change
Is science the answer? Technology is not the solution

2019: UN reports unprecedented losses in biodiversity (bit like similar reports in 2015, 2010, 2005; each worse than the one before)
Saving the world’s biodiversity: the failure of the CBD and the need for transformative change

2019: Australia votes and the Conservatives get back in, a repudiation of the growing calls for environmental policy reform.
Retreat from reason – nihilism fundamentalism and activism

2019: Latest outlook reports show the Great Barrier Reef is dying and government efforts to fix water quality are failing.
The Great Barrier Reef: best managed reef in the world down the drain

Doing the Tesla Stretch

Electric cars to our economic rescue (with a nudge from government)

By Peter Burnett

New car sales are flat. In Australia we’ve just had the 17th consecutive month of declining sales. Of course, sales do go up and down and there are many reasons for the current dip including tight lending for cars and low consumer confidence.

Sales are also flat in other countries including the United Kingdom, but some commentators are advancing explanations far more significant than tight money and low consumer confidence. For example, the online newsletter MarketsInsider is suggesting that the US may have already passed ‘peak car’ due to generational and disruptive factors such as debt-strapped millennials, ride-hailing apps and self-driving technology.

I don’t know if being debt-strapped is the only factor for millennials, as my own millennial progeny give me the clear sense that cars just don’t have the allure that they did for me and my fellow baby-boomers. But quibbling aside, it seems clear that such disruptive factors are at work.

A Tesla for the market

I also suspect there may be another disruptive factor operating, a by-product of the ‘Tesla Stretch’. The Tesla Stretch refers to the fact that buyers are so keen to have a pure-electric car (ie, a battery-electric vehicle, or ‘BEV’, not a hybrid) that they are willing to pay around $30,000 more than they would normally spend on a new car. People who would never consider buying an entry-level BMW or Mercedes are paying BMW and Mercedes-like prices for the privilege of owning a Tesla, or at least a BEV.

The so-called ‘mass market’ Tesla, the Tesla Model 3, has only just gone on sale in Australia. In fact, the wider market for electric vehicles is only just getting off the ground here and it will be at least another 12 months before fully-electric vehicles are available here in any numbers and at least another couple after that before the cost of an electric vehicles begins to achieve price-parity with conventional internal combustion engine (‘ICE’: don’t you love these acronyms?) vehicles.

Although it’s too early to tell whether the Tesla Stretch will be a real thing here or not, there’s no reason to think Australians will be any different to Americans or Europeans in this regard. Moreover, I think the Tesla Stretch is already having an indirect impact here and that the current drop in car sales is partly the result of its by-product, which might be called the ‘Tesla Strike’.

A Tesla Strike?

The Tesla Strike would be a form of ‘buyers strike’, in which buyers want a BEV but, because they are not readily available, or not available at an affordable price, decide to wait. This flash of insight has come to me because I am one such buyer. My current car is about due for replacement and I’m keen to reduce my environmental footprint. I also like new technology (and cars, although this feels like admitting to being a dinosaur).

In principle, I’m prepared to do the Tesla Stretch, at least to some degree, but none of the handful of BEVs available so far meets my needs and fits my price-range. So, I’ve decided that my current car is my last ICE vehicle and that I’ll just wait.

In a small market like Australia there wouldn’t have to be too many more people like me out there for the Tesla Strike to be a ‘thing’, a phenomenon affecting sales and thus the economy, and calling for policy attention from government. The Government could act to increase the supply of electric cars by removing barriers to market entry, for example by streamlining the certification of electric cars for sale in Australia, introducing training programs in servicing electric cars, or subsidising the installation of recharging infrastructure, anything that would signal to electric car manufacturers that if they commit to supplying us, we’ll commit to giving this technology a long-term future.

Direct subsidies to car buyers might be one policy option but this may not be as effective as removing barriers to market entry. This is because simply increasing demand in the short term, without more, may not give manufacturers an incentive to establish sales and servicing networks here when there is already more than enough demand in larger markets for the BEVs currently available.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if governments, having so far baulked at spending on an electric car transition as an environmental measure, decided to do so as an economic measure?

As a bonus, oil imports would begin to go down, as would carbon emissions, increasingly so as ever-cheaper renewable energy replaces fossil-fuel power in our electricity network.

Ironic or not, for a government focused on the economy, Tesla Stretch surely beats Tesla Strike.

Image by Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

‘Best managed reef in the world’ down the drain

What’s happening around the Park makes a mockery of our ‘best management’ approach

By David Salt

Is it hubris, arrogance or duplicity when the country’s Minister for the Environment can claim, almost in the same breath, that the Great Barrier Reef is ‘the best managed coral reef ecosystem in the world’ but that the science-based outlook for the Reef’s ecosystem has slipped from ‘poor’ to ‘very poor’? I’m not joking, read her press release (it came out last Friday). How does ‘best management’ produce this outcome?

Well, it might surprise some of our readers to hear that I don’t actually disagree with the claim that the GBR is one of the world’s better managed reefs. It’s one of the world’s biggest marine parks with a significant portion of it off limits to all forms of development (around a third) thanks to the application of world’s best-practice systematic conservation planning. And the management of this world-heritage listed park is supported by a range of relatively well resourced institutions (GBRMPA, AIMS and the Centre of Excellence for Reef Studies to name three).

We monitor it well and in many areas we have led the world on reef science. And that’s as it should be because Australian’s love the Reef and expect our elected representatives to look after it. Economists tell us it’s worth looking after because it employs 64,000 people, generates $6.4 billion each year and has a total asset value of $56 billion.

The shadow of climate change

The trouble is, the looming threats overshadowing the Reef cannot be addressed by best-practice management within the Park’s boundaries. They originate outside of the Park and the Government claims it has limited power to address them.

In 2012, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) released a major peer-reviewed study that found the GBR was under significant stress and that it had lost half of its hard coral since 1985. The cause of this decline was threefold: storm damage (48%), outbreaks of Crown-of-Thorns starfish (COTS) (42%) and coral bleaching (10%).

All three threats had connections with climate change but the government (in this case the Federal Government and the Queensland Government who together share responsibility for the Reef) claimed climate change is a global issue beyond its capacity to control. (And, it should be noted, since this report came out the GBR has experienced catastrophic bouts of mass coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017).

No, climate change is something the government won’t buy into but what it says it can do is improve water quality.

Dirty water

Water quality refers to the levels of chemicals, nutrients and sediments ending up in Reef waters along the coast of Queensland. These ‘contaminants’ largely originate from land-based activities such as sugar cane, bananas and pastoralism. Declining water quality has been an issue for the Reef for much of the last three decades.

Poor water quality is a problem because it alters the balance of the Reef ecosystem – promotes outbreaks of coral eating COTS, encourages algae to colonise spaces previously occupied by corals and generally lowers the Reef’s resilience* – it’s ability to recover from disturbance.

Given the government’s impotence in the face of climate change, the strategy it has elected to follow is to focus on aspects it claims it can influence. In other words, clean up water quality by changing land management. We can’t force other countries to behave differently (in respect to climate change) but we do, in theory, have power over how we manage our own landscapes.

The belief is that if water quality can be improved, this will contribute to overall reef health which, in turn, means the reef should recover faster whatever disturbance hits it (including climate related episodes of bleaching and super-charged cyclones).

Interestingly, the same day the Environment Minister released the appalling Reef Outlook report, she also released the 2017 – 2018 Reef Water Quality Report Card which gave a very gloomy prognosis: “Across all Great Barrier Reef catchments, water quality modelling showed a very poor reduction in dissolved inorganic nitrogen (0.3%) and sediment (0.5%). There was also a poor reduction in particulate nitrogen (0.5%).” What was it, bad news Friday or something; put all the garbage out at the same time (and this following on from the latest carbon emissions data showing Australia’s emissions are still rising over several years even though we say we’ll reduce them!).

So, even if we ignore climate change (exposing the moral void of our environmental stewardship), the strategy nominated by the government to protect the reef – improve water quality – is also failing to achieve anything. And this is not an isolated statement, there have been many reports in recent years showing government action is not working in improving water quality.

Why is it so hard to fix water quality? Because it’s very expensive (though a lot less expensive than taking on climate change). The government’s own costing on what is required is $8.2 billion over 10 years, and so far it hasn’t even stumped up a tenth of this.

Rating the reports

This government prides itself on its managerial approach. However, no matter how well the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is managed, it is a sitting duck facing the coming onslaught of climate-related bleaching events and big storms. The fact that the government can’t even clean up water quality just adds insult to injury.

The science has been saying what we need to do for many years (indeed, see comments by Terry Hughes, one of the world’s foremost experts comments on coral reefs, on the Outlook report) but the government hides behind the notion that because one part of the reef system is managed well (the part inside the Park) then they have met their commitments. But that well managed bit is connected to the land component next door and the greater world surrounding it, and those connections are killing the reef.

So, in light of last week’s horror reports on the Outlook for the Reef and the 2017-2018 Reef Water Quality Report Card, I think it would be fair to rate the Government’s progress as FAIL with the comment: hubristic, arrogant and duplicitous; don’t try to dress up a failure as a good effort because to do so just makes it harder to take the tough decisions that are needed.

*Reef resilience – having co-written two textbooks on resilience science (Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice) that have played a large role in popularising the concept of resilience, it saddens by enormously to see the idea used by governments as a shield to hide behind when they are unable to engage with the science of climate change.

Image: A reef under stress on multiple fronts (Image ARC Centre of Excellence for Reef Studies)