After the bushfires, Australia’s leaders still lack courage on climate change

In Australia, the worst summer in living memory has slipped into autumn, though temperatures that still approach 40 degrees in Sydney are a parting reminder of an unprecedented bushfire season that claimed lives and property, flora and fauna. As attention shifts to a new threat, that of Covid-19, the opportunity to learn from the last catastrophe should not be neglected. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has replaced his bushfire ineptitude with early and decisive leadership in addressing the coronavirus outbreak. But if this leadership doesn’t carry back over to tackling the threat of climate change, last summer’s tragedy will certainly be repeated.

Real action cannot wait. Daily findings are exposing new consequences of climate change. Among the latest reports, scientists at the European Commission have this week warned that half the world’s beaches could disappear by the end of the century due to rising sea levels and storm erosion. Australia would be the worst affected, with even a moderate reduction to emissions still leaving at least 12,000 kilometres under threat. That’s around 40 per cent of the country’s beaches.

Nature Climate Change journal’s current issue has a paper led by Benjamin Sanderson from France’s CERFACS institute, which uses high performance computing to address challenges of public and industrial interest. It found that the extent of the fires in Australia, and New South Wales in particular, exceeded simulations based on four degrees of warming. “The fact that Australia,” it said, “has experienced damages that go beyond what is currently simulated highlights that current syntheses may be missing major risks.” In short, the fires were worse than our worst expectations.

A Royal Commission has been formed and will report back by the end of winter. “My priority is to keep Australians safe,” Morrison said in a press release, “and to do that, we need to learn from the Black Summer bushfires how nationally we can work better with the states and territories to better protect and equip Australians for living in hotter, drier and longer summers.”

The inquiry “acknowledges climate change” but “is focused on practical action that has a direct link to making Australians safer” rather than addressing the underlying global climate crisis. The Terms of Reference make no mention of examining Australia’s climate change policy or the reduction of carbon emissions.

“Inquiries are only as good as their terms of reference,” a former director general of the NSW Parks and Wildlife Service, Brian Gilligan, told the Guardian. “And they’re ultimately going to be judged by history by the actions that governments take in response to them… We have to deal with the elephant in the room that is the implication of climate change on all of this.”

The government’s current policy is to reduce carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030, through using questionable Kyoto carry-over credits. Even if Australia genuinely met its Paris Agreement targets, along with the rest of the world, the United in Science report released ahead of last September’s United Nations climate action summit made it clear that commitments would need to be at least tripled to have the desired outcome of restricting global warming to two degrees by 2100, relative to pre-industrial levels. Failure would see temperatures rise by between 2.9 and 3.4 degrees, and continue rising thereafter.

Noting that the past decade had been a lost opportunity for reducing emissions, the United Nations Environmental Programme found that “bending the emissions curve and bridging the emissions gap, while presenting an unprecedented challenge, is still possible . . . It will require concerted climate action of all stakeholders, at all levels and in all sectors. The next decade will be defining — postponing ambition and action is no longer an option, if we want the goals of the Paris Agreement to remain within reach.”

The opposition Labor Party has finally raised its voice on climate change policy, having been all but silent since last year’s shock election loss. It proposes to set a target of zero net emissions by 2050. In reaching this goal, Labor will not commit to winding up Australia’s coal exports, but will rather wait for a global dip in demand as a result of other nations’ emissions policies.

Rather than taking the opportunity to form bipartisan consensus, the government has criticised the 2050 target, even though it signed and ratified the Paris Agreement that involved “the world achieving net zero in the second half of the next century,” as Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor explained in parliamentary question time last Monday.

The latest Guardian Essential Poll showed that 75 per cent of Australian voters supported zero net emissions, up four per cent in a fortnight, while among Liberal-National Coalition voters the number had jumped 12 to 68 per cent.

Alarmingly, polling conducted for News Corps’ The Australian, showed that the majority of people asked believed inadequate hazard reduction was the main cause for the severity of the summer’s bushfires, and not climate change. This position has been refuted repeatedly by scientists, but propped up by the likes of Morrison and Rupert Murdoch. At least meeting emissions targets was a greater priority than cheaper energy prices — for the first time ever.

Leadership on coronavirus does not mean the Prime Minister can now ignore the climate crisis, even if a strong-borders health policy does fit better with conservative Liberal Party philosophy than the necessarily global challenge of climate change. Leadership will also be needed for Morrison to confront the more extreme elements of his party. For example, once the fires had died down, Liberal Party MP Craig Kelly decided his focus would be on exposing climate change as a “hoax” in educational resources produced for children and distributed to his electorate.

At least United States President Donald Trump isn’t responsible for Australia’s coronavirus response. I’m not sure we’ve got the energy for two hoaxes right now.