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By Susan Laszlo

In the countdown to the UN-sponsored climate conference in Kyoto in December, Prime Minister John Howard has stepped up his government's campaign to block the adoption of binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. At a business dinner in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, Howard stated that his government would put "jobs" and the "national interest" first, and this meant arguing for an increase in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite growing criticism from Britain, the US, many European Union countries and the 36-country Alliance of Small Island States, the Coalition government is steadfastly sticking to its reactionary position.

It is buoyed, no doubt, by the "greenhouse sceptics" — powerful right-wing lobbies (some of which are funded by the fossil fuel industries) which are churning out propaganda reminiscent of the late 1980s, when many scientists were yet to be convinced of the dangers of global warming.

Since then, some 2000 of the world's leading scientists have concluded that present warming "is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin" and that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate".

The main culprits are the gases produced from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and petrol. Since the industrial revolution, the increased amounts of carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane and other greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere have been found to heat the surface of the planet. Deforestation also significantly increases CO₂, the levels of which are some 30% higher than 200 years ago.

Compelling evidence

The World Wide Fund for Nature in its recently published booklet State of the Climate: A Time for Action summarised compelling evidence that human activities are having an unprecedented impact on global climate patterns.

For instance:

• 1995 was the hottest year since records began, and 1997 looks set to be close second. The five hottest years have all occurred in the 1990s.

• The world is experiencing the biggest thaw since the last ice age. Much of Siberia is 3-5° C warmer than earlier this century. Europe's Alpine glaciers have lost half their volume since 1850.

• Much of the tropics has become hotter and drier — especially the already arid region stretching from western Africa to Indonesia.

• Sea levels have risen, on average, 10-25 centimetres higher than a century ago. Rising tides threaten the survival of many of the low-lying coral island nations, including the Marshall Islands, Anguilla, Tokelau and the Maldives.

• Tropical oceans were up to 0.75° C warmer during the 1980s than in the previous three decades. This appears to have affected the intensity and frequency of the largest single influence on tropical climates — the cyclical weather phenomenon called El Niño, in which winds and currents across the equatorial Pacific switch direction, pushing warm water east across the Pacific towards the Americas.

• Global warming is affecting wildlife and plants worldwide; some trees in tropical Africa, central and South America, south-east Asia and Australia are growing faster and dying younger.

• In Europe and the US, doctors estimate that several thousand people died of heart attacks and respiratory diseases as a result of heat wave in 1995. In the 1990s, mosquitoes are carrying malaria, dengue and yellow fever to new places in Latin America and Africa. Malaria is reaching further into central Africa; yellow fever has now struck Ethiopia.

A health impact study published in September in the British Medical Journal by Doctors Anthony McMichael and Andrew Haines also warns of the dangerous effects of higher temperatures on human health.

Global warming "would cause malaria to move to higher altitudes and thereby affect highland populations who are currently protected", the authors state. They believe that the percentage of the world's population living in malaria-infested areas may rise from the current 45% to 60% by 2100.

Cholera, which spreads with warmer coastal and estuarine waters, will also become a bigger threat.

And as changing weather disrupts agriculture, hundreds of millions of people will join the world's hungry. Rising seas, which will devastate coastal areas, will also be "a particular health hazard, especially in poorer, populous countries".

Third World

These observations are particularly worrying for the peoples of the Third World, who have fewer means to cope with unpredictable changes to weather patterns. The disastrous Indonesian fires — the consequences of which will be felt for years — provide a glimpse of what is in store if the industrialised nations sit on their hands at Kyoto.

Howard's decision to step up his head-in-the-sand approach follows his paternalistic blackmailing last month of the leaders at the South Pacific Forum who called on the Australian government to agree to binding targets.

Howard's willingness to risk the lives of Pacific peoples for the sake of profits was applauded by such toadies of big business as P.P. McGuinness, who sneered in his regular Sydney Morning Herald column: "Anybody this near sea level is leading an extremely precarious life already".

The Alliance of Small Island States has the most radical position to be presented to Kyoto. It wants the industrialised countries to adopt a binding 20% cut to 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2005. The European Union has proposed targets of 7.5% below 1990 levels by 2005 and 15% by 2010. Japan wants emissions reduced 5% below 1990 levels by 2010 and says that targets should not be legally binding.

The US, the world's biggest emitter of CO₂ (some 22% of total emissions), has yet to state its target but is insisting that developing countries also set targets. This contradicts the 1995 Berlin Mandate and the 1996 Geneva meeting outcome — agreed by the US.

This laid down the ground rule that industrialised countries — which have 25% of the world's population and are responsible for 80% of greenhouse gases — should be the first to commit to legally binding targets.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has calculated that global emissions would need to be reduced by 60-80% in the long term to stabilise CO₂ levels at twice the pre-industrial level; even stabilising at this level is expected to increase the mean temperature of the earth's surface (by 2100) by 1.5-4° C.

Five years ago in Rio, industrialised nations agreed to stabilise their CO₂ emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. The targets now being proposed by the major industrialised countries show the lack of political resolve to take global warming seriously.

Between 1990 and 1996, emissions from the OECD countries rose by 7.7%. Australia's emissions, at present rates, will grow by 40% above 1990 levels by 2000.

Australia has the sixth highest per capita emission rate in the world. Howard's claim that Australia cannot "afford" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because of the threat to jobs is absurd given his government's neo-liberal austerity drive which has already wiped out 30,000 public sector jobs, with 15,000 jobs to go after Telstra is part-privatised and thousands more in the public service.

While claiming to defend the "national interest" and jobs, Howard is really out to protect the profit levels of some of Australia's most powerful companies — the fossil fuel lobby. Already the mining sector receives some 40% of all government subsidies.

If it were serious about tackling greenhouse gas emissions, the government would, at the very least, promote and fund research into sustainable energy (the Energy Research and Development Corporation was abolished in this year's budget) and control the clearing of native vegetation (which accounts for 23% of emissions).

The promised $100-150 million for the national greenhouse plan is a fraction of the $800 million it gives to the mining industry each year in the diesel fuel rebate.

Hostage to profit

In their attempt to force the government to take action, environmentalists in the Australian Conservation Foundation, WWF, the Green Party and the Democrats, have concentrated on rebutting the government's economic arguments by arguing that a greenhouse-friendly strategy could be more profitable for Australian corporations.

They point to the savings achieved by British Petroleum, IBM and Johnson and Johnson (among others), which, only recently, have decided to set their own emission reduction targets.

While savings and profits can undoubtedly be gained from more efficient and less polluting technologies (the major reason for industries' change of heart on greenhouse), such arguments do not go to the heart of the matter — the refusal of government to force industry to clean up its act.

Policies to reverse the greenhouse effect should not be hostage to their profitability for Australian capitalists. The greenhouse problem is a global one, and unless urgent action is taken now, the whole of humankind will suffer (although some worse than others).

Several CSIRO scientists (whose funding for research into renewable energy has been slashed) have noted that renewable energy production would employ more people than the current fossil fuel-based energy industry. That would be good news for society, but it could be less profitable for the energy companies. A socially and environmentally responsible government would reject the limits of corporate profitability.