Australia is Burning

As I write, thousands of fellow Australians are still battling to contain an armada of bush fires burning along the Eastern coast of the continent and in parts of Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. Thousands more are sifting through burnt out homes. Farmers are discovering the heartbreaking loss of their animals and the devastation to fencing, sheds and equipment. Tens of thousands of native animals have been incinerated, and many who have survived face a loss of habitat and the promise of slow starvation.  The air in our large capital cities is full of smoke.  In the nation's capital, Canberra, the air quality last week was rated as the worst in the world, worse than Beijing, Mumbai and the other mega cities of Asia.

The fact of the fires is not in itself surprising. Ever since European settlement the newcomers have had to deal with nature's recurrent infernos, without the experience and expertise of our Indigenous peoples. What is shocking this time is the sheer geographic scale and the incredible speed and sweeping devastation of the fires. We had a foretaste of this in 2009 when the Black Saturday fires scythed around Melbourne's northern and north eastern arc. Observers then commented on the way that the heat and embers travelled on the gale-force winds, kilometres ahead of the following blaze, exploding trees and structures, obliterating all in its wake and sucking the air clean of life-giving oxygen. There was no surviving that then, nor in the current disaster. At least this time, in spite of the hundreds of individual fires up and down the country, many merging in an ever-expanding front, the loss of lives has been lower than in 2009. At least, this is so to date. Some lessons have been learnt from the earlier disaster but not, it seems, by government.

The key question hanging is why did the Federal government take so long to react? Why did the Prime Minister and his senior Ministers happily leave emergency responses to their State and Territory colleagues? Why did the Prime Minister slip off unnoticed to holiday with his family in Hawaii? Why weren't the full resources of the Australian Defence Force quickly mobilised and deployed to help vastly outflanked volunteers in late Spring when the massive fires engulfed large regions of Queensland and Northern NSW? When the ADF was finally called into action it was only after the fires in Eastern Victoria had isolated a whole coastal community, cut off with the fires bearing down on them and the Pacific Ocean at their backs. Even then, the trigger was not the extreme need but the way in which the Prime Minister was sorely and very publicly embarrassed in the small south coast town of Cobargo, the mouse that roared with the sound reverberating around the world as mainstream and social media captured furious locals berating him for his government's tardy and inadequate response. The refusal of quiet Australians to remain quiet and shake his hand made a deep impact. The goat didn't help.

Six months before the unprecedentedly early fire season began, a large group of current and past emergency services leaders urged the federal government to make plans for what they forecast -- correctly -- would be a catastrophic 2019-20 fire season. The same experts joined a host of others to urge the government to implement a comprehensive energy and climate change policy so that the trend to ever-worse fire seasons and other mega-climate disasters could be reversed or averted. These pleas fell on deaf ears. The Prime Minister even refused to meet with representatives of the group to seriously discuss their concerns and proposals. Why? How can he and his senior colleagues and advisers have such tin ears?

What is perplexing to foreign observers becomes clearer when it is explained to them that climate change denial is deeply embedded in the DNA of the ruling coalition parties at the federal level. Scott Morrison is the fifth Australian Prime Minister since 2007. His four predecessors were, in various ways, all brought down by their attempts, to resolve the issue of climate change and Australia's global role in fighting it. All serious attempts to tackle the problem by introducing a sensible energy policy were blocked by vested mining interests, their mouthpieces in the Liberal and National parties, and the pervasive reach of the Murdoch media empire. Morrison himself rode to power hauling a lump of coal into the Parliamentary chamber. At the base of this collective recalcitrance is a purely political judgment that the Labor opposition can be wedged on the issue of coal mining and exports. As the electoral potency of the Coalition's inhumane 'border protection' policy wanes, coal has become the wedge of choice. Labor's recent shock loss in the May 2019 federal election, thanks to mass voter rejection in the coal-heavy state of Queensland seemed to validate this political judgment. A slowly recovering Labor Party is acting as if this is so. The new Opposition leader Anthony Albanese has moved quickly to reposition his party in favour of coal mining, especially in Queensland. The view in Labor circles seems to be that they can't win back government without kow-towing to Queensland voters. This, I think, is mistaken for reasons I give later.

But first, let us look more closely at the claims for and against coal mining and export.  It is claimed that:

(1) Australia 'only' contributes 1.3 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

(2) our coal, especially in Queensland, is the 'cleanest' in the world.

(3) if we didn't export our coal to those countries demanding it for energy production, then other countries would do so by supplying their much more polluting coal.

(4) most of our coal exports will be for steel-making not thermal purposes.

Arguments against include:

(1a) the rapidly rising take-up and falling cost of renewable energy is beginning to undercut the cost of extracting and transporting coal. In the interim, gas and pumped hydro can meet base load dispatchable power demands, until new storage technologies come online.

(2a) the private sector 'gets' this. More and more companies are refusing to work or invest in the sector, including BHP and a number of financial firms and large investment vehicles.

(3a) there is no such thing as clean coal. It is a matter of degree of 'dirtiness'.

Most of the other arguments against also depend on knocking down the arguments for. For example, re (4), once mined and sold overseas, Australia has no control over how the coal is used. Metallurgical coal, so called, can just as easily be used to stoke power stations, since there is no way of tracking coal through to its end use. We can't even do that well for live animal exports. Other arguments in favour are actually blatant arguments in bad faith, like the claim that we have a moral duty to help poor countries get coal-fired power to develop their economies and living standards. If we were serious here, we would be looking at much more direct and effective ways of helping.

But it's argument (1) above that I am most interested in questioning. It is an argument beloved by Coalition politicians, mining industry lobbyists and shock jocks like Alan Jones and the Sky-after-dark crew. Ignoring the fact that there is no generally accepted measure of what counts as carbon emissions and offsets, it is a fallacious economic argument as a support for Australia doing little ourselves to directly reduce our emissions. (I apologise in advance for the slightly technical nature of what I'm about to say; but bear with me.) The Morrison government's approach is a classic example of the 'free rider problem' of public goods. A sustainable climate is perhaps the most important public good of all. Everyone has an incentive to let everyone else carry the load; my contribution alone won't 'pay' for the good, and my not paying won't make a difference either, so it's not my problem. If others pay to provide it, I'll benefit. That means everyone has a case for doing nothing or as little as possible, with the overall result that the climate continues to warm. The harsh logic of free riding can only be overcome by collectively agreeing to an unanimity arrangement. This was first pointed out by the Swedish economist Erik Lindahl who also devised a tax (the Lindahl tax) that theoretically, if applied, would finance public goods while ensuring a Pareto-efficient allocation of resources to that particular end -- defence, lighthouses, control of infectious diseases and limiting global warming.

Although coherent analytically, a Lindahl tax would be impossible to accurately determine, still less implement. But the underlying point that to produce any quantity of a public good requires an all-in cooperative agreement still stands as the most sensible starting point. For public goods that exist at a global level, like a stable climate, that means negotiating binding agreements between national governments. There is still plenty of room to vary individual contributions to emission reductions. For example, poorer nations cannot be expected to bear the same costs and foregone opportunities as richer nations that have previously benefitted from running down the Earth's natural capital at zero cost to their populations. Any attempt by a single country to free ride must be collectively and comprehensively condemned. The force of international moral approbation is the optimal policy to force universal compliance and to defeat the temptation for national free-riding. This is why creating, strengthening and committing to agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, Doha Amendment and Paris Agreement are critical to effectively resolving the existential threat that hangs over all of us, and future generations. It is why the self-serving rhetoric of the coal lobby and their political representatives must be confronted, especially this year when leaders sand activists are to meet in Glasgow to determine the scope of future commitments.

As an aside, proponents of coal over-egg their case by advancing all four of the above arguments in favour. Clearly, some of the four are mutually contradictory. Thus, to claim that Aussie coal is only to make steel (4) conflicts with the aim of beating international competitors in supplying thermal coal (3).

Back to Labor. Anthony Albanese needs to embrace and promote the logic of defeating the environmental free-rider problem and propose concrete policies that would bring investment, retraining and jobs to mining regions like those in Northern Queensland. It is not beyond the wit of man and woman to win back the hearts and minds of deeply disadvantaged regions that have suffered decades of misguided economic policies and government neglect. The rage of Cobargo suggests that the people have woken and are stirring.

We appear to have strayed a long way from the current bush fire emergency. But the fires are 'only' a dire promise of things to come. The difference between an emergency, which the fires and drought and floods that ravage our land undoubtedly are, and the full catastrophe of runaway climate change, is that emergencies can be fought and, critically, forestalled before they result in catastrophe. When the latter arrives, it's lights out.  That's why the call by countless expert and community bodies that we currently face a climate emergency is so compelling. Time to act not react, Prime Minister!