In the wake of heatwaves and bushfires, Australia must let go of its attachment to coal
26 December 2019
Published by https://inews.co.uk
AUSTRALIA – The year will soon be over, and with it a decade that may prove to have been critical for the long-term prospects of our civilisation. The 2010s began with photographs of emaciated polar bears in the Arctic, swimming through open water that was once an ice-filled hunting ground.
If the Arctic was the first place to experience the impacts of global warming, then Australia, no stranger to extreme temperatures, droughts and storms, is demonstrating to the world what climate breakdown will look like.
Raging bushfires along the East Coast have destroyed entire habitats and communities. Australians knew this was coming – they knew record-breaking temperatures and prolonged drought had turned much of the country into a tinderbox. But even the most pessimistic would not have imagined that the start of the wildfires would be accompanied by extraordinary heat.
Last Wednesday, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology recorded its highest ever average temperature: 40.9°C. The next day, the average temperature was a full degree warmer at 41.9°C. This intense heat has caused bats and birds to drop dead from trees, while strong winds have produced immense fires.
Given the devastation caused, it’s no surprise that a political storm is now raging as to who is to blame and what should be done. People calling out the cuts to fire services which have impaired fire prevention and firefighting is to be expected.
But it is the battle of ideas about our contribution to this extreme weather that will determine not just the fortune of Australia, but the rest of the world.
Australia is the world’s second largest exporter of the coal burned to generate electricity. In 2018 it mined and shipped overseas 208 million tonnes, which brought in £14bn for the Australian economy. Attempting to resolve the tension between taking urgent action on climate change and earning billions by digging up climate-wrecking coal has arguably played a role in the downfall of a string of Australian prime ministers.
If we are to have any hope of avoiding dangerous climate change, then we must kick the coal habit. This has been an imperative that has run through all international attempts at establishing binding climate-change agreements. And it has been the source of consistent failure.
Copenhagen was the location of the United Nations climate negotiations in 2009. It is a beautiful, progressive and highly liveable city. But saying its name to climate campaigners will cause a dull ache of sorrow. Because it was a disaster. Days of intense negotiations and tentative agreements were demolished by a few countries that simply refused to consider any alternative to fossil-fuel-powered economic growth, notably the US and the Bric nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
It is in everyone’s interests to work together to wean nations rich and poor off of fossil fuels. To share knowledge and technology. To pool resources. To protect the most vulnerable. Unfortunately our current systems of government have proved woefully inadequate. Ten years after Copenhagen, the international climate negotiations in Madrid failed this month because again individual nations could not bring themselves to look past growth-based policies.
Australia played its part in this failure with proposals that would have rendered any agreement practically useless. But its continual production of coal is more destabilising.
It’s no surprise that coal mining corporations want to continue coal mining. But the fact that certain Australian political parties and sections of the media strongly promote coal should be a source of immense shame. The greatest gift they could give to Australians and the rest of the world would be to radically rethink their ideological attachment to this fossil fuel.
James Dyke is a Senior Lecturer in Global Systems at the University of Exeter
