David Fogarty PlanetArk 3 Feb 11;
Australia has endured two of its deadliest summers on record, blamed in part on global warming, but record fires, floods and cyclones have not persuaded it to take strong action on climate change.
But some experts hope that Wednesday's arrival of giant Cyclone Yasi on the coast of Queensland, already hit by massive floods last month, will help bring more of a sense of urgency to the political debate over climate policy.
Environmentalists have despaired that one of the world's highest per-capita carbon polluters will ever embrace the need to cut emissions, given that most politicians and voters have not made a strong connection with disasters and manmade global warming.
They say they are baffled why weather-beaten Australians are not pushing for stronger policies to cut carbon emissions from power stations, mines, transport and refineries.
"If you want a picture of what a hostile and costly environment looks like, we've had it in spades over the past couple of years," said John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute think tank.
"Most of our politicians and most of our major media outlets have been extremely hesitant in drawing any connection," he told Reuters, referring to a climate change link.
"It's a toxic blend of denial, media management and sheer lack of leadership," he added.
The government has pledged to put a price on carbon emissions this year as a key pillar of its climate change fight after failing to get sweeping emissions trading legislation through parliament and nearly losing elections in 2010.
At the heart of the issue is that emissions trading would affect all sectors of the economy through higher fuel and power prices. The government has rowed back by reviewing the issue, without saying how carbon emissions will be priced.
"It's right to price carbon, the most economically efficient way of reducing pollution," Prime Minister Julia Gillard said in a speech on Tuesday.
A few days earlier in a radio interview, Gillard said she recognized that climate change was real but did not want to connect it with the recent floods.
"I don't think you can look at one, a bit of the weather and say that equals climate change. I don't think it's as simple as that."
Australia has looked at trying to price carbon for over a decade but has faced fiercely opposing views, with lobbying from miners fearing higher costs and opposition scare campaigns over higher taxes and job losses.
Connor thought the recent floods and Cyclone Yasi could be a game changer by putting more pressure on the government to beef up its climate policies.
"People may look afresh at this once we're through managing the emergency and added up the costs," he said.
The Australian Greens, which give key support to the ruling Labor party, believe Australians would be willing to pay for steps to fight greenhouse gas emissions and want an initial carbon price followed by an emissions trading scheme.
IT'S NOT ALL CLIMATE CHANGE
Veteran climate scientist Neville Nicholls said a possible reason for lack of public action was the tendency for some people to try to link all Australian extreme weather and climate events to climate change.
"When a climate extreme of the opposite variety comes along, this makes it easy for those who want pretend that it is all just natural climate variability to paint all climate science as 'alarmist'," said Nicholls of Monash University in Melbourne.
Since 2006, Australia has suffered a string of disasters that have costs hundreds of lives, caused losses in the billions disrupted the crucial agriculture and mining sectors.
In March 2006, Cyclone Larry tore through the northern Queensland town of Innisfail, causing an estimated A$1.5 billion in damage to the area.
A combination of drought and a record-breaking heatwave February 2009 triggered the nation's deadliest fires around the southern city of Melbourne that killed 173 people and A$1 billion in insurance losses. Severe storms in Perth and Melbourne last year also caused losses of about A$1 billion.
Floods in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria since December have killed 35 people and become the nation's costliest natural disaster, swamping 30,000 homes and crippling Queensland's coal industry.
Australians were already paying for weather extremes through food price inflation and higher insurance premiums.
"The insurance industry knows the damage bill from these events is already on the rise," said Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
"So we can't just continue to mop-up without thinking about how fossil fuel emissions are changing our climate," he added.
Australian disasters spark call for climate action
Reuters 4 Feb 11;
CANBERRA, Feb 4 (Reuters) - An architect of Australia's stalled climate-change policy has linked the nation's recent natural disasters with global warming and called for a new political push to cut carbon emissions.
Ross Garnaut, releasing updated advice to the government, said extreme weather events like massive Cyclone Yasi, which hit the northeast coast on Thursday, and recent floods were just a taste of what would come if climate change went unchecked.
"The greater energy in the atmosphere and the seas can intensify extreme events and I'm afraid that we're feeling some of that today, and we're feeling that at a time when global warming is in its early stages," he said in a speech late on Thursday.
Australia accounts for 1.5 percent of global emissions but is one of the world's top per-capita polluters because of its reliance on coal for around 80 percent of power generation.
Canberra has delayed plans to force polluters to pay for carbon-emission permits on an open market and has instead set up a committee to find the best way of putting a price on carbon.
Greens and independent MPs are involved in developing the new policy, with other options such as an interim carbon tax also being considered.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Monday reaffirmed a commitment to pricing carbon pollution, likening the move to key economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and saying the move would lead to a new technological revolution in Australia.
The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper has said the government is moving towards the Greens idea of a hybrid carbon-trade plan, with an initial fixed price on carbon pollution until a full carbon market could be established.
The government's previous carbon-trade plan proposed an initial set price of around A$1 a tonne, before moving to a market price, and emission cuts of at least 5 percent of year 2000 levels by 2020. The Greens want cuts of 25 to 40 percent.
In Europe, the world's largest carbon market, prices have been trading around 14.50 euros ($19.70) per tonne.
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet has previously played down the benefits of a carbon tax, saying a carbon trade scheme would give more certainty on cuts to emissions.
($1 = 0.735 Euros) (Reporting by James Grubel; Editing by Mark Bendeich)
