South Wind

Donald Trump got off lightly in the US presidential debate last month, which will be forever remembered for Joe Biden’s disastrous brain-fades. 

Media reports skated over Trump’s response to the question asking whether he will take any action as president to slow the climate crisis, but we have to assume that his reply is what he wants voters to know about his climate policy. It went like this:

“So, I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever. And we did – we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever.”

Let’s pause for a moment. This is the man widely expected to become America’s 47th president – at a time when the global scientific consensus is that the viability of human life as we know it hangs on what world leaders can achieve in this decade, the 2020s.

Reading between the lines of Trump’s odd response, he doesn’t need to consider climate because under him everything will be okay – “the best environmental numbers ever.” Let’s face it – he couldn’t care less about it. And his party agrees – climate change didn’t get a look in at last week’s Republican National Convention.

I haven’t previously taken much notice of US party conventions with their razzmatazz and puffery. But this year’s events are unusually consequential – especially given Trump’s near-death experience two weekends ago and Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday not to seek a second term. 

Biden’s successes should not go unrecognised, notably his remarkable “Inflation Reduction Act” which has seen massive investment in getting the US off fossil fuels and building renewable energy capacity. The Democrats will determine their new candidate at the party’s convention starting on August 16; Vice President Kamala Harris is the front-runner.

Trump is currently favoured to win, which begs the question, what will that mean for America and the world?

On climate change, the US will revert to its position from 2017 to 2021, when it abandoned constraints on extracting and using fossil fuels and ignored the Paris Agreement before withdrawing from it completely. It will be the end of any hope that the world might soon turn around its rising carbon emissions.

If that isn’t massive enough, a Trump victory is shaping up as a hammer blow to US democracy. Ever since he told Fox News last December that he would be a dictator just on “day one” of his presidency, the idea of absolute power has taken root in his party. A subsequent national poll found that three-quarters of registered Republicans thought a period of autocracy would “probably” be good for the country.

Any notion that an American dictatorship was just a passing whim vanished this month when a 920-page document published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank, came into the public spotlight. “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is a thoroughly considered political manifesto with the giveaway subtitle, “Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project”. 

Two things are clear: this is not Trump’s work, but his claim that he had known nothing of it or its authors is undermined by a video showing his familiarity with the leading author, Heritage Foundation president Kevin D Roberts. Roberts warned darkly on a right-wing podcast early this month that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The document declared itself to be “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.” It went on to outline how a Republican administration would radically cut the powers of federal regulatory and expert agencies – people Trump has described as the “deep state” – and concentrate executive power in the person of the president and his closest advisers.

The sharpest sting is in Project 2025’s plans for federal elections. It seeks the removal of guardrails that protect electoral integrity including oversight of campaign finances, protection of voting rights, protection of political dissent – and crucially, federal powers to police disinformation and otherwise ensure free and fair elections. 

A compliant, politicised Supreme Court would vastly empower a victorious Donald Trump and allied political operatives. On the other hand, the Democratic Party now has the opportunity to rewrite the playbook with a younger candidate. 

Before politics, Harris – nearly two decades younger than Trump – had a long career as a prosecutor. Prosecutors are not Trump’s favourite people; nor are women if we’re to believe those who’ve stood up to him in court. So if Harris is his opponent we can expect the campaign ride to get even rougher. Buckle up, everybody.

As we know, everyone from individuals and families all the way up to national and international authorities are responsible for protecting the environment and stopping global warming. 

But responsibility that belongs to everyone belongs to no-one in particular – an opening for complacency, which is why the world is failing to rein in carbon emissions and protect biodiversity.

On these matters governments are as complacent as the rest of us. But since their whole job is to do what lesser beings find so difficult – taking hard decisions for long-term benefit and dealing with any discontent that may arise – their complacency is better described as negligence.

Tasmania offers enticing avenues for complacency about climate action. One stems from the fact that in the absence of the abundant coal available to mainland states, the state decided a long time ago to source most of its grid electricity from non-polluting hydro. A good decision, but not a climate measure.

Another huge Tasmanian advantage has been completely accidental, a result of a protracted decline in native forest logging. For over a decade native forests have remained largely intact while fast-growing regrowth has removed copious amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. 

This carbon drawdown has been claimed by successive Tasmanian governments as evidence of their climate leadership, even as they’re doing their utmost to revive logging, a development guaranteed to end the drawdown. You’d think no-one could get away with so stark a contradiction. But they can and they do.

Successive recent governments have named climate change as a ministerial responsibility, like health, education, transport, industry and so on, to the point where it no longer seemed novel. So it came as a surprise last April to find no mention of climate in Jeremy Rockliff’s post-election cabinet. 

We were informed that upper house MP Nick Duigan would be overseeing climate matters. But why any mention of climate was excluded from his formal portfolio titles – Minister for Energy and Renewables and Minister for Parks and Environment – is something only the premier can answer.

Those titles suggest that Duigan has carriage of the latest State of the Environment Report, a mandated five-yearly report which is now a decade overdue. But no – it’s the responsibility of the Minister for Housing and Planning, Felix Ellis, who recently announced it won’t even be finished before the end of August. When the public gets to see it is anyone’s guess. 

In compiling the report, the Tasmanian Planning Commission has had to rely on voluntary help from relevant scientific experts – a funding failure that once would have been completely out of order. This government clearly sees the natural environment as a portfolio responsibility of lesser importance. Like climate change.

Earlier this month Eric Abetz, whose portfolios cover business, industry, resources and transport, complained that environmental groups were using money from the federal government and crowdfunding to pay for expensive legal action to disrupt resource projects, undermine jobs and deter investment.

One of his old federal colleagues, Senator Jonathon Duniam, and Luke Martin, CEO of Salmon Tasmania, joined the pile-on by demanding that the federal government stop funding the “cashed up” Environmental Defender’s Office (EDO), resumed in 2022 after the Abbott government withdrew federal funding a decade ago.

The effrontery of these attacks is breathtaking. The whole reason for the EDO’s existence, as its name says, is to defend the natural environment by supporting environmental laws, whose purpose is to ensure that business, government and everyone else are accountable for messing it up. 

The EDO serves anyone who believes this is worth doing regardless of their financial or political clout – including neighbourhoods suffering from a local business’s excessive noise or nasty effluent. It’s galling to see Martin seeking to disempower community groups who have the temerity to question the environmental record of the large foreign-owned interests he represents.

It’s even more galling to see elected representatives do the same thing. Government ministers have vastly broader responsibilities which clearly don’t include allowing corporations to dodge accountability for their environmental impact.

The technique employed here has been refined for decades by the fossil fuel industry: divert attention from the need for corporations to change their ways by representing them as benign job-creators, ignoring inconvenient facts and downplaying profit motives while characterising opponents as “cashed up”.

With the future of the climate and the broader environment at stake, we expect politicians to acknowledge damage done and act to fix it. Attacking citizens seeking a healthy natural environment and a safe climate future is as low as it gets.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about what a warming climate will deliver, but one thing is certain, locked into the story of our future. The seas will rise. 

Or rather, they’ll continue a 170-year rising trend that today averages 4 mm a year. If by a miracle we held warming below 1.5C, or even if all the world’s fossil fuel emissions stopped today, the extra heat now embedded in oceans and ice sheets will keep pushing up sea level, at a gradually slowing rate, for well over 1000 years.

But we won’t be that lucky. In its 2021 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies 3.5C of warming by 2100 as our most likely fate. On that basis NASA has posted data showing that the seas lapping Tasmania will be over 20 cm higher by 2050, up 60 cm by 2100, and 70 cm higher in 100 years’ time.

Scientists have a rule of thumb that the risk of coastal flooding triples for every 10 cm rise in sea level. If emissions don’t decline Tasmania can expect what today is a once-in-a-decade coastal flood to happen about once a year by 2050 and every day or two by 2100. Our new waterfront stadium will need a saltwater-tolerant playing surface and players attuned to, let’s say, damp conditions.

Another rule of thumb is that the vertical rise should be multiplied by 100 to get the impact horizontally, so we can expect that by 2050 coasts will have retreated an average of two metres. But not all coastlines are equal. Tasmania has many resilient rocky coasts, and many beaches – though not all – retain enough sand offshore to ensure they can be replenished by storms for some time yet.

If you think that’s good news, it ends there. In its latest report the IPCC warns of a high chance of abrupt change with significant ice loss from Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets over a short period of time and an increasing chance that by 2100 sea levels will have risen by around two metres.

It has happened before. The most recent large-scale ice sheet decay started 12,000 years ago, long after humans had walked across low-lying plains to occupy this southern part of Australia. There’s strong geological evidence that the final breach to create Bass Strait happened within one or two human lifetimes.

Earlier this century sea level rise was a big topic here and everywhere, and the Tasmanian government and some coastal councils were moved to consult people in the know. Those early studies called for more refined modelling of offshore sand – how much there is and how it moves about – and other conditions affecting coastal erosion. 

But despite the obvious need to protect vulnerable coastal areas and in some cases to prepare for evacuation, the practical response since then has been limited to occasional ad hoc repairs to damaged coasts.

One of those early consultants was Chris Sharples, a geologist with a lifetime’s accumulated knowledge of Tasmania’s coastal landforms and processes. That knowledge, extending back over many decades and now being further refined with each passing year, is surely pure gold to authorities needing to understand what rising seas will do to their domain, and how those seas might affect their coastal ratepayers. But it seems not.

Sharples is the quintessential scientist, driven to know how his world works, building on his science education in countless field trips, where he’s gathered mountains of data so that he can compare present shorelines with past aerial images.

Having finally decided to put his accumulated knowedge into a written thesis a few years ago, he can now call himself a doctor. But honorifics and public acclaim aren’t what drives him and self-promotion is not one of his strengths. 

Sharples is not a fixer, like a coastal engineer who’ll build you a sea wall or a breakwater if you can pay for it. That might fix your problem until you’ve been able to sell your property, but it won’t tell you what drives all that – the natural forces that shape our coastlines, how that reshaping will roll out in decades to come, and why today’s coastal defences may not be the long-term solution needed. That knowledge above all is what authorities need to pursue.

One of the fundamental lessons from studying how climate changes is that it’s never neat and tidy. Coming to grips with this untidiness requires sustained, disciplined, independent mental effort, the sort of thing we used to expect from universities. That kind of science rarely delivers living wages, but it’s long past time that it did.