It rained. And rained. It rained more. The river was rising. There would be minor flooding. It rained more. Actually, it would be moderate. More rain. No, sorry, major.
We moved stuff upstairs. The lights went out. We headed for higher ground, and there we stayed for five days. We were lucky, we just had a couple of inches of water in the rooms we had emptied. Our neighbours, a few metres down the hill, not so much. The rain headed south, wreaking havoc wherever it went.
Amidst all this, along with the war in Ukraine and the ongoing global plague, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report saying how bad the impacts of climate change are, how much worse they will be, and how much we're not doing to adapt. Tell us something we don't know. If you listened to our politicians, you wouldn't know the report had been published. From many of them, you wouldn't even know that its contents were being acted out in real life in communities they were meant to represent. Even our local ones have mostly been slow to make the connection.
And then, as people are still cleaning up and thinking about how to rebuild, we will have an election to which both our leaders will take terrible climate change policies. One absurdly terrible, one a little less terrible. So of course I wrote their two leaders a letter.
Dear Mr Morrison and Mr Albanese
I write
this as my wife and I go through another flood event here in Brisbane. A week of torrential rain sent the Brisbane
River over its banks, flooding my suburb.
We spent five days staying with relatives on high ground. Our lounge room is filled with stuff brought
up from downstairs. The impact on us is
small compared to many but it is real.
Ironically, it’s also the week the IPCC released its latest report
looking at the impacts of climate change and the state of adaptation.
Of course we know that Australia has always had floods. South-East Queensland had a major flood in 1893. It also had one in 1974, the year I started High School. My school year was delayed while we helped with the clean-up, and for weeks after we could smell the mud and mould as we passed the low-lying areas on the train to school.
It’s not
new but as I’m sure you both know, these events are getting more frequent. Somewhere in Queensland has been seriously
flooded virtually every year since 2011, and yet for much of that we have also
been gripped with drought. Stanthorpe
ran out of water in 2020 for the first time in its history and had to truck in
water for a year before the rain finally arrived this time last year. And of course that drought also led to
Australia’s most catastrophic ever bushfires.
All of
these things are not just events in Australia’s history, they are turning
points in people’s lives. One of the
reasons my wife and I are so stressed is that we went through 2011. Yet the impact of the 2011 floods on us was
minor compared to that of many of our neighbours who lost all their possessions
and had to rebuild homes from scratch.
The same goes for those who lived through the 2019-20 bushfires or other
catastrophes, many of whom are still rebuilding.
We know
that climate change is what is making these events more frequent, and more
extreme; that the world’s burning of fossil fuels (including the ones we burn
here in Australia, and the use of those we export) is what is causing this to
happen.
This is why
I am appealing to both of you, in the leadup to this year's election, to change
the story on climate change. For too
long we have heard that reducing our emissions is too hard, too costly, or
somehow not really that important. We
have seen it used as a wedge, a scare tactic, a marker of party loyalty. The result is that so far, both of you have
released policies in the past few months that do less than the bare minimum,
that cut our emissions by much less than our fair share of the global necessity
and hedge these cuts about with caveats and exclusions. We have seen both of you vote to give
government money to new fossil fuel projects, and celebrate the continued
growth of coal and gas. We have seen you
object to the planned early closure of coal generators, or stay silent, when
you should be cheering.
We need you
to stop doing this. We need Australia, a
wealthy country with abundant renewable energy but also a major player in the
fossil fuel market, to move from laggard to leader in reducing emissions. We need this election to be a competition
over who can do more to cut emissions, not who can do less or a little bit more.
In the leadup to this election, here are some things we need to see in both your policies.
Increased emissions reduction targets
We also need to stop pretending that the emissions generated by our fossil fuel exports are nothing to do with us. We need to stop expanding our capacity to extract these fuels and start the wind-down of our coal and gas extraction.
Comprehensive, sector by sector plans
To achieve
these cuts, we need governments to be working closely with the various sectors
of the economy that are responsible for the emissions – electricity, transport,
agriculture, construction, industry – to develop emissions reduction
plans.
At the
moment, our electricity industry has an excellent plan developed by AEMO which
you can easily get behind and help drive instead of dragging your feet over. In other sectors, you need to work with those
who are driving change, not just announce scattergun interventions.
In agriculture you can work with those in bodies like the Meat and Livestock Corporation, the National Farmers Federation and Farmers for Climate Action to work out what support they need to reduce their impact. In construction you can work with our housing peak bodies to use the Building Code to continue to drive up expectations of energy efficiency in materials, construction and operation of buildings. Each sector and industry needs its own plan.
Of course we all know that there are people and communities who rely on fossil fuels for their livelihoods. We need to stop pretending that these jobs and industries can go on indefinitely. The workers and communities know it can’t. We need to start working with them to help them develop what comes next, to develop the new industries and new jobs to replace the ones they will lose. They shouldn’t simply be abandoned to the vagaries of the global market.
Adaptation
I started this letter talking about extreme weather and the impacts of climate change. These will get somewhat worse even if we and the rest of the world act quickly to reduce our emissions. If we don’t, they will get dramatically worse. While we are working to avoid the worst-case scenario, we need to be working with communities around the nation to build resilience – to adapt infrastructure for the new normal and build our disaster response capabilities and preparedness. In my suburb we need to be as flood-resilient as we can be, lifting our houses above the flood line and ready to respond when needed. Many people will need help to do this – technical help and advice, financial help.
Global leader not laggard
ready to be leaders for change. Instead of blocking progress on key aspects of the Paris accords we need to be finding solutions to the blockages. Instead of staying out of treaties and coalitions to drive faster cuts we need to be enthusiastic in joining those that exist and promoting new ones. To signal our seriousness, we need to stop peppering our delegations with fossil fuel executives and sponsoring fossil fuel promotions, and instead showcase innovative zero- or negative-emissions technologies and projects. We need to put our energy behind increased ambition and momentum across the globe
Let’s make 2022 the year we end the climate wars and replace them with a climate championship in which the winner is the party that can do the most, the fastest. Our communities, and our children and grandchildren, are depending on it.
Jon
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