Barnaby Joyce can put on a pretty good show of political outrage when he wants to, and the former Nationals leader was in full flight last week in defence of his private member’s bill to do away with Australia’s net-zero carbon emissions target.
“People are furious,” he told reporters in a Parliament House corridor. “They believe the government is just running roughshod over them.” He went on decry as “insane” what he called a “singular crusade … that has no effect on the climate but is incredibly deleterious to the standard of living and the cost of living of the Australian people.”
There is definitely insanity about, here and round the world, but Joyce misses the mark. Take as a starting point the months-long algal bloom in warm ocean water that’s killing off a big chunk of South Australian marine life. If Joyce had opened up on the topic he’d very likely say that algal blooms happen all the time – one of those half-truths that keep the denial industry alive.
Unlike those toxic waters, the science explaining them is increasingly clear. High sea surface temperatures, intense rainfall and weakened westerly winds, matching long-standing extreme weather predictions, are providing the right conditions for toxic algal blooms – a disaster exacerbated by another man-made factor, nutrients from agricultural runoff.
As fisherman Tim Cunningham said last week, warming ocean waters off Tasmania – the only Australian state without a marine plan – indicate that we may be next. “If we keep delaying action, keep treating the ocean like an endless resource, the losses will keep piling up – and the algal blooms, the dead zones, the disappearing species will only get worse.”
Both Labor and conservative parties drag out the jobs mantra to shoot down anyone mentioning the environmental harm being done by mineral extraction and processing along with land-clearing. In Tasmania last week premier Jeremy Rockliff led a chorus of disapproval of cross-bench MPs and candidates who refuse to support current salmon farming and logging regimes.
When you add to global warming the overwhelming evidence of damage inflicted by these industries, the refusal of the two major parties to prioritise environmental regulation is clear dereliction of duty. It wouldn’t be certified as insane, but you have to wonder where it comes from.
In his spray last week Joyce took aim at the renewables rollout, claiming that Australia’s target of net zero emissions by 2050 was ahead of others. It is higher than China’s target (2060) and India’s (2070), but about average by Western standards. The United States had a similar target until President Donald Trump dumped it.
Home to some of the world’s finest centres of learning, the United States has fallen prey to Trump’s delusion that the world’s not warming and the environment’s not suffering because he says so. As a result, the entire US climate, weather and ecological research budget has disappeared. That is disaster-level madness.
This at a time when all the world’s leading scientists and intellectuals are at their wits’ end trying to alert people and governments to the dire outcome of continuously rising carbon emissions. A month ago, an Australian-led study revealed that Earth is trapping much more heat than climate models forecast – and the rate has doubled in 20 years.
Barnaby Joyce, with Queensland senators Matt Canavan and Pauline Hanson, assert that the rollout of solar and wind energy and the infrastructure to transmit it to homes and businesses must be stopped before it drives the Australian economy to the wall. National and Liberal state branches are pushing to drop the net zero target, defying Australia’s international commitment.
These people are deeply mired in Trumpian denial, but as long as they remain excluded from power it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. More to the point it ignores completely the madness that really matters, taking in federal Labor under Anthony Albanese along with most of the Western world.
The “net” in net zero allows all sorts of subterfuge to cloud the simple fact that Australia along with the rest of the world is continuing to release fossil carbon at an accelerating rate. And while rolling out a cleaner electrical system (tick), the government keeps approving gas and coal projects guaranteed to take us in the opposite direction.
I keep getting the sense that I live in a separate universe, completely shut off from the world inhabited by leading politicians. Increasingly dire, well-supported warnings from science about warming and ecosystem collapse keep being ignored by a world seeing rising global fossil fuel investment, much of it in Australian offshore gas (a story for another day). Is it me who’s mad?