Population pressures

The Rudd Government has allowed vested interests to veto serious action on climate change.

Rudd himself has rationalised this with an argument about rapid population growth but evades the question of population policy. This comment takes up aspects of the nexus between population policy and climate change.

The White Paper’s conditional target for 2020: the backdown

In its December 2008 White Paper on CO2 reduction schemes, the Rudd Government failed to adopt the “conditional” abatement option of 25 per cent reduction relative to 2000 levels by 2020, as recommended in the Garnaut Report. Instead, the Government has adopted the far more modest target of 15 per cent reduction for 2020.

A reduction commensurate with the 25 per cent cut would be required internationally if global concentrations in the atmosphere were to be held to no more than 450 ppm CO2e, thereby significantly reducing the risk of “dangerous” climate change. Such a path would also require countries such as Australia to adopt 90 per cent emission reduction by 2050.

Other examples of weakening resolve evident in the White Paper included its excessive allocation of free emission permits to trade-exposed industries and unconditional payments of as much as $3.9 billion in free permits to coal-fired generators.

Professor Garnaut has harshly criticised the Government for caving in to the pressure from vested-interests in what has been the most expensive, elaborate and sophisticated lobbying pressure on the policy process ever.

In the White Paper, a lower, “unilateral” target of 5 per cent reduction for 2020 is based on an assumption of no comparable burden being accepted by other countries. The purpose of the higher “conditional” rate is to enable Australia play its part in encouraging a sufficient and co-ordinated response from the rest-of-the-world.

The next major step in these international negotiations is in Copenhagen on December 7-18, 2009 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. This will be the first test for the most critical player, the United States under the new Obama Administration.

The urgency of such action is heightened by indications that an Obama Administration may systematically conflate climate change with a bogus campaign - supported by neo-conservatives, “oil hawks” and others - urging US independence of “foreign” oil.

Rudd’s “population gambit”

Prime Minister Rudd’s rationale for rejecting the “conditional” 25 per cent abatement option is that Australia’s population growth is high relative to Europe’s. His claim was that “If the Europeans were to embrace the same per capita obligations that we're about to embrace, then you'd be seeing European reductions of the vicinity of 30 per cent”.

Consistent with this claim, the White Paper states that the 15 per cent cut in Australia’s emissions is equivalent to a 34 per cent cut in per capita emissions. Similar calculations show the 25 per cent cut to be equivalent to a 42 per cent cut in per capita terms, in both cases assuming a projected population of 24.6 million in 2020.

This 2020 population projection amounts to as much as a 44 per cent increase on the 1990 level, or a 29 per cent increase on the 2000 level. The Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projects that by 2056, Australia's expected resident population (ERP) could be between 31 and 43 million people. These are extraordinarily high figures for a fragile land under increasing stress, as documented for example in Jared Diamond’s chapter on Australia in his book Collapse.

We do need debate about the nexus between population and climate change

Clearly, a lower projected population growth to 2020 and beyond would ease Australia’s burden in meeting a tighter emission target. But what Rudd’s rationale for “15 per cent” ignores is the absence of any explicit population policy that takes into account Australia’s limited “carrying capacity”, especially given climate change that is already “inevitable”.

Yet there is a lack of informed public questioning of Australia’s population goals.

That said, prominent environmentalists such as Ian Lowe and Tim Flannery have long argued the ecological dangers of excessive population growth, not least as one major determinant of unsustainable forms of economic growth.

By contrast, in his comments on the deficiencies of the White Paper, Ross Garnaut says:

Our population grows strongly because, for good reasons, we choose to keep our doors open to people from many lands. Our new citizens need transport, a home with Australian accompaniments and access to employment income - all of which generate greenhouse gas emissions.

Other environmentalists such as George Monbiot also discount population growth as an issue comparable to, and relevant to the excesses of consumerism or “affluenza”.

Indeed, the role of population growth, whether due to natural increase or to immigration, is “difficult” for many reasons - political as well as technical.

With respect to natural population increase, it is generally agreed that improved living standards, personal security and education, and especially the empowerment of women, tend to reduce family sizes. But impacts on population growth will also depend on factors such as longevity and age-specific death rates.

The case of “dangerous” climate change shows that affluent states can impose burdens on the less affluent majority of the world’s population. Along with pricing emissions and a variety of other “complementary” mechanisms and abatement policies, this burden can be lightened by curbing excesses of both per capita consumption and of population growth, especially in the affluent countries.

“Lifeboat earth” and right-wing politics of climate change

Immigration and population movements also encompass controversial aspects of population debate.

On the extreme isolationist and elitist right-wing of environmentalism is Garrett Hardin’s notion of “lifeboat ethics”. This envisages the inhabitants of affluent states, having heedlessly created a global environmental crisis such as “dangerous” climate change, then withdrawing behind their own borders to repel environmental refugees by all means deemed necessary. The image is of a “lifeboat” that will capsize if too many boarders are admitted. The Howard government was not averse to playing on such xenophobic fears, when electoral advantage could be had.

Climate change denialists and the “adaptation only” policy pessimists alike can offer only a business-as-usual scenario, both groups failing to support strong abatement of global greenhouse gas emissions. In such a business-as-usual scenario, the affluent states - having predominantly caused the problem - can use their wealth to adapt to such climate change as impacts on their own regions, at the same time choosing to ignore the consequences for the more vulnerable and less self-reliant rest-of-the-world.

Repelling environmental refugees by force - the lifeboat image - is just one component of such a business-as-usual strategy, albeit one rarely highlighted publicly. The Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer has documented military establishments around the affluent world more-or-less secretively planning for just such an eventuality.

Whatever their views on population policy, part of the reason that progressive environmentalists push for sufficient action on abatement of global greenhouse gas emissions is precisely so that such a “Hardin” scenario, catastrophic for human civilisation and humane values, will not come about.

Conclusion

The main conclusions are twofold.

First, the Rudd Government’s rejection of the 25 per cent reduction proposed in the Garnaut report is reprehensible. This is especially so in a political sense, with the Government having rejected any notion of blocking with the Greens on the issue, instead openly seeking to negotiate just with the Coalition, a strategy that risks even further dilution of targets, and offers little prospect of dividing the main political adversary.

Second, Rudd’s population gambit has, if inadvertently, highlighted the role of population growth, not least in magnifying greenhouse gas emissions. Like most of its predecessors, the Rudd Government has sought to keep population policy off the agenda. Its rational and balanced discussion should not be inhibited by “elaborate and sophisticated lobbying pressures” such as those identified by Garnaut.