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.