The ultimate irony - George Bush slashes worldwide carbon emissions

Ironically the man who signed off from last year’s G8 meeting with the quip "Goodbye from the world’s largest polluter" and his big-business, neo-con allies have done more to reduce global carbon emissions than all the environmental efforts by governments, green groups and individuals put together. It’s time we acknowledged that we are completely on the wrong track in tackling global warming.

If you’re concerned about global warming, you’ve probably already changed to energy-efficient light bulbs, you take your own reusable bags to the shops, compost your scraps and turn your TV off standby. That will solve the problem. After all, that’s what the government and environment groups tell us to do, right?

Except of course this type of demand-reduction behaviour, while slowing the rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions, will never solve the problem.

These sorts of behaviours have been going on world-wide for some years now, so surely it must have had some appreciable impact? Well, no. Take a look at atmospheric CO2 levels to date - notice anything? They are not only going up, but the rate at which they are increasing is accelerating.

Now take a look at future projections of CO2 - the rate of increase is, again, exponential.

So what’s wrong?

George Marshall, writing for The Guardian took a look at these sorts of demand-reduction measures in his article “Can this really save the planet?” and found them wanting:

The average Brit uses 134 plastic bags a year, resulting in just two kilos of the typical 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide he or she will emit in a year. That is one five thousandth of their overall climate impact ... The electricity to keep the average television on standby mode for a whole year leads to 25 kilograms of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. It's more than plastic bags, but still very marginal: 0.2 per cent of average per capita emissions in the UK.

... Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking. It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punchline: "It's easy to be healthy - smoke one less cigarette a month."
We know without a moment's reflection that this campaign would fail.

So why do we persist with something that we know is failing?

Marshall explains:

Their logic is as follows. Simple actions capture people's attention and provide an entry-level activity. Present people with the daunting big-ticket solutions and they turn away. Give them something easy and you have them moving in the right direction and, in theory, ready to make the step up to the next level.

That is the theory, but, as plentiful social research confirms, it doesn't work. For one thing, making the solutions easy is no guarantee that anyone will carry them out ... And there is a greater danger that people might adopt the simple measures as a way to avoid making more challenging lifestyle changes ... In other words, people can adopt the simplest solutions as a part of a deliberate denial strategy that enables them to feel virtuous without changing their real behaviour.

The government’s tokenistic schemes

It’s not just individuals who fall into this tokenistic trap; just take a look at the Australian government’s Greenhouse Friendly carbon offset projects and its proposed emissions trading scheme.

It turns out that Australians who voluntarily spent money with the government's Greenhouse Friendly carbon offset projects to cut their impact on the planet were simply "giving big polluters a free ride", because the government could sell the spare emissions created by voluntary action to another country which was producing excess emissions. Josh Harris, head of carbon markets for The Climate Group, a global coalition of government and industry groups, said Greenhouse Friendly offsets "were not benefiting the atmosphere".

If you think that deserves the Enron prize for accounting, wait until you take a good look at the federal government’s proposed emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Tim Colebatch did and discovered one little word undoes the PM's claims on greenhouse gases:

We all think the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme will cut Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent relative to 2000 levels - right? No, we're wrong.

Treasury modelling estimates that even with a cleaner, more effective model than the one now adopted, Australia's emissions in 2020 would rise 5.8 per cent above 2000 levels. We would pump out more emissions in 2020 than we do now.

It's an ugly reality that exemplifies why the Government's model is doomed to fail. It promises change, but tries to shield everyone from all the points that drive change.

... There's a crucial point we all overlooked. Labor has not committed Australia to cut its emissions by 5 per cent, but to cut its emissions allocation by 5 per cent. And that is very different. In 2000, Australia emitted 553 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. In 2020, the Government will allocate permits for 525 million tonnes of emissions. But even before ... changes weakened the scheme, Treasury estimated that Australia would emit 585 million tonnes.

The key to it is that the scheme allows companies to use unlimited numbers of permits from other countries instead of our own. And the permits we import will be subtracted from our emissions tally.

They would come from other Western countries or (more likely) from developing countries, under rules such as the Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism (CDM), which allows Western companies to buy permits for emissions saved in developing countries by using cleaner technology. A noble idea, unfortunately it has proved easy to rort.

So when industry groups and the big fossil fuel suppliers whine in the media about a 5 per cent cut being too big, what they’re actually saying is that a 5.8 per cent increase in emissions is simply not big enough.

Not only will Australian emissions increase, emissions from those countries we buy permits from for their “reductions” will also increase because the cleaner technology introduced does not have to actually replace some existing dirtier technology. The new technology may be a cleaner than before, but its emissions are still adding to the total emissions of that country.

So the total emissions in Australia go up, the total emissions in the rest of the world go up, but we create a carbon-credit and pretend, Enron style, that everyone’s emissions have gone down.

Rather than point out the Orwellian nature of the ETS’ “reductions”, environment groups play along with the government’s deception and argue that the 5 per cent “cuts” aren’t large enough, instead of pointing out that the ETS will actually increase emissions.

Enter George W. Bush & Co.

While George wasn’t the slightest bit interested in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, eight years of his presidency have resulted in the credit crisis which looks set to decimate worldwide productivity and perhaps result in the first reduction in atmospheric CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution.

Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, is now famous in economic circles for being one of the first to predict the present credit crisis well before it happened, the root causes of which go right to the policies adopted by Bush.

In his article The decline of the American superpower, Roubini set out the main reasons for the credit crisis, which have the fingerprints of Bush all over them:

The US squandered its economic and financial power by running reckless economic policies, especially its twin fiscal and current account deficits. The last time around the current account started to go into negative territory in 1991 after a brief surplus during the 1990-91 recession. In the 1990s the growing US current account deficit was driven by a private investment boom - the internet technological revolution - and thus the accumulation of foreign liabilities of the US was driven by FDI and M&A activity, i.e. the US accumulated foreign liabilities in the form of equity rather than debt. But since 2001 the further worsening of the US current account deficit was driven instead by growing fiscal deficits - especially in the 2001-2004 period - caused by unsustainable tax cuts and by the buildup of spending on foreign wars and on domestic security and since 2002 by the collapse of household savings and boom in investment in unproductive stock of housing capital that the housing bubble induced ... By now the US is the biggest net borrower in the world - running current account deficits still in the 700 billion dollars range - and the biggest net debtor in the world with its foreign liabilities now over 2.5 trillion dollars.

However to be fair, even Bush alone couldn’t engineer this mess by himself. Since President Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, the markets have been reconfigured according to an entirely new model, “structured finance”. Glass-Steagall was the last of the Depression-era bulwarks against the merging of commercial and investment banks. As a result banking has changed from a culture of “protection” (of deposits) to “risk taking”, which is the securities business. Through “financial innovation” the investment banks created myriad structured debt instruments which they sold through their Enron-like “off balance” sheets operations. They are steadily losing value with every rating downgrade.

It also took a small army of Wall Street and European bankers to load their balance sheets so high with debt that debt to credit ratios often reached about 40:1.

The results for the world economy are catastrophic

The latest data on Q4 2008 GDP growth (at an annual rate) around the world are even worse than the first estimate for the US (-6 per cent): -6.0 per cent for the Eurozone; -8 per cent for Germany; -12 per cent for Japan; -16 per cent for Singapore; -20 per cent for Korea.

As at February 2009 German exports dropped 7.3 per cent from the previous quarter and company investment in plant and machinery declined 4.9 per cent.

The European Automobile Manufacturers Association is reporting European truck sales plunged 35 per cent in January, more than double the drop in December.

Japan's exports plunged more than 45 per cent in January compared to a year ago to hit the lowest figure ever recorded. Toyota, Japan’s biggest automaker, slashed global production 43 per cent in January. Honda’s production dropped 33 per cent and Nissan’s slid 54 per cent.

Honda’s global production decline in January was its biggest since at least 1999; Mazda’s global production fell 63 per cent in January.

General Motors sales dropped 53 per cent in February 2009 and Ford’s dropped 48 per cent.

On February 11, Britain’s The Telegraph reported that European Commission officials have estimated that impaired assets may amount to 44 per cent of EU bank balance sheets - £16.3 trillion (18.1 trillion euros / US$25 trillion).

By December 2008, every country in Asia had contracting exports. Chinese exports contracted by 17.5 per cent year-on-year in January 2009, the steepest in 13 years. Imports contracted 43.1 per cent. China has suffered a decline in electricity demand caused by factory closures so large that already some 20 million workers have been laid off.

The price of oil has collapsed as demand is down. Coal prices are going the same way.

The global economy is now literally in free fall as the contraction of consumption, capital spending, residential investment, production, employment, exports and imports is accelerating rather than decelerating.

Summary

Simple demand-reduction steps obviously help the environment, but the fact is they will not reverse greenhouse gas emission growth so as to avoid runaway global warming. Pretending that they can is not only counter-productive, it is frankly dangerous.

Ironically, the only thing that looks like slowing, and maybe even reversing emissions, is the greed of bankers and the blindness of politicians like Bush; but it does so by causing misery and poverty world-wide.

The only thing which will lead to a permanent reduction in emissions which builds wealth, rather than destroying it, is the conversion to large-scale renewable energy supplies. It’s time we stopped resting on the laurels of our tokenistic demand-reduction efforts, stopped pretending that the emissions trading scheme will reduce anything other than our bank-balances, and demanded the immediate, total conversion to renewable energy.