I love a sunburnt country,
a land of sweeping plains,
of rugged mountain ranges,
of droughts and flooding rains.
It’s more than a century since Dorothy Mackellar wrote ‘My Country’, her gushing paean to Australia. Today, the ‘droughts and flooding rains’ are proving increasingly problematic, not to mention the bushfires, the cyclones, and the coastal erosion.
To all but the most determined sceptics, climate change represents a growing threat to Australia both economically and environmentally. What has often been a challenging country to live in has become downright hostile in many places.
Just ask the 27,000 residents of Lismore in New South Wales. The town is prone to flooding. However, of the dozen highest floods over the past 150 years, a third have occurred in the last five years. Two of them in 2022 alone – once in February and again in March.
The February flood beat the previous record by more than two meters and caused catastrophic damage to the town. 3,000 homes and buildings were inundated. Incredibly, just four weeks later the rain struck again delivering the sixth worst flood in the town’s history.
A recent report from the NSW 2022 Flood Inquiry states that the NSW and federal governments together provided nearly $4 billion of support in NSW for victims of the February and March floods. According to the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA), insurers received 230,000 insurance claims for flood damage in NSW and southeast Queensland. The estimated cost of those claims is more than $5.1 billion.
The ICA reported a cost of $2.3 billion from claims attributable to the 2019-20 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires. The total damage, insured and uninsured, suffered by the Who should bear the cost of climate change? alone was between AU$4 billion and AU$5 billion.
Droughts and cyclones are other expensive natural disasters that have long plagued Australia. But in recent years their severity and frequency have been increasing. Unfortunately, predictions around the impact of climate change indicate that they will become even more devastating in the future.
Coastal erosion is another threat. In the last few years, Sydney beaches have been ravaged by ultra-high tides and wild storms. A March report from property analysis firm CoreLogic concluded that coastal risk will increase with “sea level rise, combined with potentially more extreme climate episodes such as cyclones or storms”.
This is a significant concern for a continent whose major population centers cling to the coastline. According to CoreLogic, 10% of residential dwellings are situated within just 1km of the coast. That’s more than AU$1 trillion of residential property.
The position is clear. In the coming decades, the cost to Australia of natural disasters driven by climate change will be immense. What is much less certain is who is going to bear that cost.
Climate change was a major issue in the recent Australian federal election. However, the focus of the campaign was on emissions targets and promoting renewable energy, rather than on what happens when disaster strikes and who bears the cost.
To date much of the cost has been covered by either private insurance or government relief. The big question is whether that is sustainable going forward.
According to the Climate Council, “climate change is creating an insurability crisis in Australia”. By 2030 approximately 520,000 residential properties in Australia, 4% of the total, will be so “high risk” that they will effectively be uninsurable. A further 9% will be “medium risk”, rendering them likely to be underinsured.
Riverine flooding will be by far the biggest problem. Many residents living on flood plains are already finding that either they can’t obtain insurance, or it’s prohibitively expensive. This creates an obvious dilemma. Do they stay and risk financial loss when (not if) the next flood strikes? Or cut their losses and leave?
And what is the appropriate course of action for state and federal governments – subsidise insurance, fund major protection measures, purchase uninsurable property, continue to provide ad hoc relief as required, or put those in flood prone areas on notice that further government assistance will not be forthcoming?
These are difficult questions.
Soon after the most recent flooding, the Queensland state government announced a AU$750 million scheme to help those affected. Significantly, assistance options include the state government purchasing some homes.
The NSW 2022 Flood Inquiry has just released its report. One finding stands out –
Certain regions and certain areas of cities and towns … are increasingly dangerous places to live and will increasingly be a drain on the public purse as people who live there have to be evacuated repeatedly and then re-housed.
The recommendation to address this ongoing “drain on the public purse” includes two notable options – “buy backs and land swaps”. In other words, it may be cheaper in the long run to permanently relocate some people at government expense than to keep incurring regular flood related costs.
Last week the NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet announced that his government would accept all the inquiry’s recommendations. A new reconstruction authority will shortly start taking expressions of interest for buy backs and land swaps. This will cost billions of dollars and the Premier is looking to the federal government to contribute.
The federal government recently addressed problems arising in northern Australia from extreme cyclone events. In March it created a reinsurance pool backed by a $10 billion government guarantee. This will protect insurance companies that provide insurance in the area from catastrophic losses thereby enabling them to provide affordable insurance cover. According to the relevant minister, the pool will apply to 880,000 policies and reduce premiums by up to $2.9 billion.
In what may be a sign of things to come, the Greens Party wants the government to consider reinsuring all climate related disasters.
There is a major issue here for Australian governments. Are they going to assume all the cost of climate-related damage in the coming decades? That cost could easily run into hundreds of billions of dollars if some of the dire predictions about the impact of climate change are accurate.
And there is an obvious danger of moral hazard. If governments assume the risks from floods and fires, cyclones and coastal erosion, there will be little incentive for Australians to take steps to avoid those risks.
As a minimum, governments need to either prevent further development on flood plains, in bushfire zones, and on low-lying coastal land, or make it very clear that anyone who invests in such areas does so at their own risk.
The latter is a potentially unpopular message. But it might save future Australian taxpayers a great deal of money.
Ross Stitt is a freelance writer with a PhD in political science. He is a New Zealander based in Sydney. His articles are part of our 'Understanding Australia' series.
93 Comments
Like I said a few weeks ago, Australia will be unlivable in 10 years time and I was told to "Get a grip". Plenty of parts of it are already unlivable. Its only got to stop raining and its all over or else stop raining for years and when it rains it floods instead. You will need a very special setup to survive those conditions, most people will be forced to move.
Like I said a few weeks ago, Australia will be unlivable in 10 years time and I was told to "Get a grip"
Get a grip Carlos, 10 years? Lismore is built on the confluence of 3 rivers. As population has grown, Councils in Australia have increasingly consented development on flood prone land. Do you know how we know it's flood prone? Because it has flooded in the past. So, you will hear about more flooding because we have built on land at greater risk from floods.
As humans, we would set out across vast oceans in only canoes to discover new lands, head to the South Pole in tents, attempt feats that require bravery we could only dream of now. And here are you forecasting the end of Australia because they had a flood in a flood prone region. I genuinely despair for what we are becoming.
Sorry mate but life has changed and so have peoples expectations. Things change fast, if you cannot get insurance then this has immediate effect because you cannot get a mortgage without insurance. If the climate continues to get worse, which is odds on then more and more people will get squeezed into smaller "Livable" places. Yeah a few places around the world have rivers, or should I say did have rivers, they are currently running dry. Like I said, things can change fast and at the current rate of change, a lot can happen in 10 years.
You said Australia will not be liveable in 10 years. I suspect they are probably a lot more resilient than you are Carlos, they will be fine. As for insurance, do not buy in flood prone area's. Do you research.
I mean, if there was even a 0.01% chance of sea levels rising in the next 100 years, do you think waterfront beach sections would still be so much more expensive than that immediately one back? The market for this land tell's you all you need to know about climate change, it's not going to be an issue.
That is a new one. The market is all knowing, and Te Kooti can interpret it directly.
The market is not all knowing, it reflects the participants thinking at the time. Everyone used to think the sun revolved around the earth, doesn't mean they were right.
To think you can directly interpret knowledge from price signals is also dubious. Buyers might simply not care what happens in 50 years time, they might just care about getting their beach views now, and to hell with what happens to the property value. Or they expect to be able to sell to a greater fool before the sea rises and eats their investment value too much. Or they believe that the Govt/Council will save them if it happens to enough people at once. Who knows, there might be a strange religious sect buying up all the beachfront properties because their leader instructed them to.
Te Kooti,
"The market for this land tell's you all you need to know about climate change, it's not going to be an issue". Two comments; tells is plural and that is one of the stupidest climate comments i have heard and that's saying something.
It's( as in it is so requiring an apostrophe) on a par with your views on the creation of money-you are right and all the reserve banks are wrong. Yea right.
Maybe you should tell that to all the people down the West Coast of the SI whose houses have been flooded in massive storms... or all the other people around the country facing increasing erosion as a combination of worse weather events and increasing sea levels.
Beachfronts probably aren't the biggest problem, it's that what was known as a flood plain is being redefined by increasingly bad rain events (think Nelson/Marlborough now or many of those towns in Aus last year that were flooded). "do not buy in flood prone area's" doesn't quite work when what gets defined as flood prone areas is increasing all the time. That advice may as well be "don't buy on flat land", which is where about 70% of the worlds population lives. But then also don't buy on hill sides that slip during bad rain events... the squeeze is real.
Flooding on the notoriously rainy West Coast and slips on an eroding landmass are hardly issues that are caused by climate change. Even if marginally exacerbated by them, they still do not rise to the status of existential threat, can be priced by insurance, taken into account by banks, etc. In good times, houses are (I'm guessing based on experience) are held for no more than ~40 years by one owner. Even extreme climate change is on a different scale to that; so I'm convinced that we will easily adapt, as we always have. We just also have to contend with the Chicken Littles of the world, as we always have.
TK - absolute nonsense.
The market tells you - anyone - nothing. It's a bunch of lemmings, under-informed, reliant on each other for direction......
They have no idea - the scientist do; but economists, bankers think they do - but don't.
But the buck will stop - and stop shortly - with the insurance 'industry'.
And that might just influence the lemmings. But maybe not - they weren't smart enough not to overpopulate, weren't smart enough to reduce consumption, weren't smart enough to realise exponential growth cannot happen forever, or indeed for very long, within a bounded system.
Makes one wonder whether Sapient applied....
Yeah, and all of the things that climate change idiots told us would change and lead to disaster over the past 40 years have come to pass haven't they....actually they didn't, none did, not any at all.
I agree with not making a mess of the place, chucking rubblish everywhere and cutting down trees. But forcing yourself to embrace the inconvenience of an electric car, and eating fake cheese and meat whilst thinking you are saving the planet.....only an idiot would do that, and there seems to be more of them around lately.
The most likely cause of the warming of the planet and the changing of the environment is because the planet is going through a natural period of warming up. That will end, and reverse just like all the other times it has happened, and we will have to deal with it getting colder again eventually. Thinking we can change it......we have to get real at some stage and adapt.
You sound like all the people on here last year telling us that house prices would go up forever, and interest rates would be negative this year.....
Well sorry to burst your bubble, all the experts and the commentators on here were completely and utterly wrong. So wide of the mark it was not funny. Now they are flailing about trying to blame each other and pick the person who made the most idiotic suggestion.
Same is the case with climate change. Just wait.
I've been interested by climate change for 50 years. What is written by journalists is usually wildly wrong but the average climate scientist has been about right. Sea level increasing by very small but increasing amounts. Recently they have been able to measure the miniscule changes to deep ocean temperatures.
Should we panic? Well it is like being on a bus rolling gently downhill with the brakes cut - we can live with what we have now but who knows what lies ahead. I was in the 42C England, rather warm but easy to survive. It is time we begin to do something but not shout extinction nor rebellion..
Yes this! Journalists often take the worst case presented by climate scientists and paint it as the likely scenario in their headlines, often to have in small print "this isn't what is likely just possible". Sensationalism sells. Whereas if you look back to the early reckonings of ranges of likely outcomes given by climate scientists, they are surprisingly accurate if you take their mid scores, if a little under what they should have been. Even Hansens reckonings from the 1980's stand up surprisingly well 40 years later. https://phys.org/news/2012-04-climate-eerily-accurate.html
Yeah, nah. Hansen (1998) had warming of 1.5 degrees above 1951-1980 mean level by 2020 - see figure 3b. Instead all we have is 1.1 degrees above the Little Ice Age - consistent with the boring inter-galacial warming prior. Hansen pick of 1951-1980 was a period of global cooling after the rapid 1910-1945 warming.
1988_Hansen_ha02700w.pdf (nasa.gov)
That link proves exactly what I said and I encourage people to look at the graphs in the link. They have worst case to best case range with likely in the middle. Of course, profile fails basic statistics yet again by claiming we haven't hit Hansens worst case, so he was wrong, when in fact his middle most likely case is eerily accurate at projecting where we are 40 years into the future. When you can't do basic statistical analysis profile, maybe you shouldn't make claims you don't understand. An absolute own goal.
The northern hemisphere should!
Because it's the largest consumer of stuff and is where largest population resides and their consumption drives the factories manufacturing and emissions in Asia.
Lil ole NZs contribution is a minuscule 0.017%. We are not a first division Emitters Club.
Time to wake up to the "Big Lie!"
By some counts we have one of the highest per capita carbon emissions. That includes the problematically-measured agricultural emissions, which KW tells us are steady state or reducing.
On that note I was reading a (UK) book on food myths and it busted the food miles myth using Spanish tomatoes and NZ lamb as far less carbon emissions than Welsh lamb.
I'd like to see my irritating family member bear the cost - her entire job appears to consist of flying at least once per month to Europe (business class of course ... although Emirates first class last time) to do some kind of nondescript "climate change policy" work that seems to involve nothing more than fancy dinner meetings, posting about it on Instagram while also posting about how bad emissions from transport are, and then at the same time berating us at every family get-together about how the rest of us pollute too much.
I'd like to know what her oh-so-hypocritical carbon footprint is.
What's your solution Solar? I advocated banning all international visitors here, completely shut down international tourism to anywhere but Australia and those who arrive by boat. We of course will be able to go wherever we are permitted. So places like Bali etc, or we sail.
That international flights are brought into the COP negotiations , so carbon tax is paid on all flights worldwide.
Interesting discussion on RNZ on cruise ships. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thepanel/audio/2018855327/the….
Personally , i think we can be choosy about which tourists we choose to attract to NZ. And not be afraid to charge for the rest .
That's no good. You fall into the trap economists fall into; thinking money and physics are interchangeable.
Sorry, you can't get rid of carbon by taxing it. Energy underwrites money 100%, and ex fossil energy you have no economy. Well, 15% of what we have now, all going well. Think that will keep the lights on? Bollocks it will.
Taxing carbon increases its cost in relation to another product that isnt taxed. so people are more likely to go for the least carbon option.
As an example,a consumer is choosing between a holiday in Europe , vs going on a mountain bike tour in NZ. ATM( well precovid), the holiday in Europe may even be cheaper . A significant carbon tax on the flight , and the NZ mountain bike tour becomes cheaper. Therefore less Carbon produced.
So the carbon tax must be at level where it will influence consumer decisions , therefore reducing carbon emissions.
At the moment , we have the absurd situation whereby there is carbon tax paid by the shuttle bus to the airport, but none on the international flight.
Who should pay? Those that lead humanity down the rat hole of course. Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch, Lord Christopher Monckton, US right wing think tanks, Koch industries, the airline industry, the advertising industry, fossil fuel industry/auto industry, economists, bankers. There's plenty of money out there.
Who will pay? Guess!
Australia is just as likely (actually more likely if you follow climate change forecasts) to be a green tropical oasis as it is a desert in 50 years
And currently people live in these climatic conditions in other countries as will Australians in Australia
But the doom mongers like a good story so we will get more of them which doesnt really help solve the problem of moving some people away from the places where houses should not have been built
NZ has the same problem - think West Coast - as well as others. After all its silly to build a city on volcanoes or fault lines but we have so need to manage any consequences despite Carlos thinking we are all doomed tomorrow
I know enough about statistics to see no discernible trend in our rainfall data from 1960 to 2019. I really don't care about your forecasts. https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators/rainfall
I'm talking about a link to the forecast that Australia will be a green oasis in the future.
Our local rainfall has had a deficit form average of 300-500 mm from average over the last few years . More concerning is the spread, with summer dry months been anything form October to May now . apparently , local groundwater levels are too scary to report.
But some areas will get wetter , some dryer. Generally it has been seen that extremes are getting more extreme, which has been forecast since the late 80 's.
Interesting. You do realise the maximum wet bulb temperature a human can bear is 35degC? As much of Aus already spends considerable time above this temperature, increasing its humidity to that of a tropical oasis would make outdoors uninhabitable. All good though, right?
This may help raise your IQ a digit or two.
https://www.britannica.com/science/climate-meteorology/Relation-between…
You're welcome.
I realise you have this enormous ego brock, along with an enormous IQ, but this might help your understanding of human tolerance to the combination of heat and humidity? https://theconversation.com/how-hot-is-too-hot-for-the-human-body-our-lab-found-heat-humidity-gets-dangerous-faster-than-many-people-realize-185593
I wish people would stop talking about who will 'pay for it'. It misses the point.
The question is how will we make sure that we have the tradies, aggregate, concrete, timber, project managers, plant, equipment and other resources we need to move, replace, or repair housing and other infrastructure on a massive scale. Dealing with the impact of climate change requires a 'war effort' - the war will be won by those that understand the challenge as one of logistics.
The financial risk arises if countries do not have access to the resources they need domestically - e.g. if they are dependent on foreign steel, or if they don't plan in advance and make sure they have a bufferstock of people with the skills they need.
The macroeconomic risk (inflation) arises if Governments are stupid enough to think that a 'fund' to pay for stuff is the same as actually being able to access that stuff at a stable price.
Everyone needs to read more Keynes.
"I wish people would stop talking about who will 'pay for it'. It misses the point."
I can't try this line with my power company or at the supermarket - naturally people are more concerned with the actual tangible cost to them. I'd go further and say that this is the only actual thing that matters, given that these decisions will be made in a democratic context.
I suspect that you are not the official issuer of the NZ (or Australian) dollar. If you were, and you were faced with a catastrophic threat, you would be worried about the resources that you could buy in your currency without causing inflation - not who is going to 'pay for it'.
You got me, I am not the Reserve Banks of New Zealand OR Australia.
The catastrophic threat is academic if no one can afford to make ends meet in your country before the climate decimates it. Most people would love to be in a position where the climate could be a primary concern over making ends meet. Unfortunately, they are not.
The threat from Nazi Germany is academic if no one can afford to make ends meet in your country before Hitler invades and decimates it. Most people would love to be in a position where the Nazis are a primary concern over making ends meet. Unfortunately, they are not.
I agree. People rightly or wrongly deal with the ’tangibles’ as you describe. Paying bills, buying food, raising a family as best they can. Looking at the global efforts to reduce emissions is an exercise in despair if I wanted to dwell on it for too long. I am I think like most people I know in that living life as best I can trying not to cause any harm. A day by day proposition like it has always been. Not looking too far into the future. With the climate knowledge we have acquired we now know what to avoid in terms of where to live. In our country flood plains for one. Kano, Waitotara, Westport etc.
Who should pay, it will be the current land owner of the house that's is found to be in a compromised location. This is already happening to some beach front owners in the form of no or very costly insurance, managed retreat directed by council, and having to clean up the property on a semi regular basis.
But in the short term enjoy that outlook at the amenity it offers. Before it is eroded away.
It's a bit disheartening to read climate change sceptics on a site that is supposedly comprised of relatively educated people. The scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet is about as close to unanimity as one can find. Moreover, the IPCC reports over the years have consistently under-estimated the rate of warming and its many harmful effects, including sea-level rise. These reports are not written by radical environmentalists.
Regarding who should bear the costs, one thing you can be sure of is that when private insurance becomes unavailable, it will disappear overnight for entire areas/regions. The most obvious places are coastlines, but in the Wellington region, for instance, parts of the Hutt Valley are at increasingly high risk of flooding and are fairly risky places to invest for the medium term. Of course, once insurance becomes unavailable, the market in those areas will completely collapse. This is not a question of if, it is a question of when, absent immediate concerted international action. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests it will happen much sooner than most people think.
We all know it is more nuanced than that, which it needs to be if we are going to apportion costs because of what the climate does.
So the first question is, how much (%) of what happens is due to anthropogenic climate change? Otherwise every time it rains or not, it will be some human's (taxpayers) fault.
I disagree that determining percentages is the first question. We already know that human activity is warming the climate and causing adverse events such as flooding that will only become more frequent. The question is what we should do now about that eventuality.
As I understand it, the main question in the article is: what role should the government play in socializing the risks of private investment decisions such as buying a house on Wellington's south coast? I think the author ends with a sensible suggestion: the government should send a clear message that it's role will be increasingly limited going forward, eventually ending completely in some respects.
So it's irrelevant if it's man-made or not, which I agree.
Thus it should be left up to private individuals, and the likes of private developers and their insurers to assess the risk. This should also mean if the Govt. is going to back out of it, it should also show in their less interference and levies reductions.
Oh get of your high horse Joe. No one has "denied" climate change, they/I have challenged the "we are all about to die" existential crisis narrative. CC is an industry Joe, with considerable financial investments on the line. It's a "white man's" construct, where having burnt most of the fossil fuels and built their first world infrastructure, and hit peak growth, they now want to pull the ladder up. The very people pushing CC the hardest are the ones with the largest CO2 footprint. Should we cut C02 and treat the planet better, of course.
It's almost certain man made AGW will not be the existential crisis we face as a human race.
Keep separate a few questions:
1. Is human activity warming the planet to a dangerous level?
2. If yes to (1), is it essential that humans drastically cut GG emissions?
3. If yes to (2), who should bear the cost of those cuts?
I maintain that the answers to (1) and (2) are clearly 'yes' and if I understand you correctly, you agree at least with (1). However you seem to think that poor/indigenous/POC should not bear the main burdens associated with harmful CC. If that is your view, I agree. In fact, I think countries such as, e.g., India are absolutely correct in saying that their hundreds of millions of desperately poor citizens should not be denied the right to industrialize in the way that countries in the West have. The main burdens should be borne by the wealthy, industrialized states such as NZ, and within those states, the poorest should be given the greatest assistance, i.e., the main costs should be borne by the wealthiest.
What I'm saying Joe is that the risks are over-hyped for financial gain. Are 8b people having a detrimental affect on the planet, absolutely.
I have an acquaintance/friend who is v senior at a high profile firm that is very active in research, policy, advisory in the CC area. He has two absolute waterfront propertys, 3 boats, and catches >50 flights a year. See where I'm coming from....
Educated people Joe or indoctrinated? Human activity very marginally warms the climate and to an advantage. Unanimity is bullshit, the sun plays a bigger role. The sea level is constant and has been for ever. Why do you even need insurance? You are a total alarmist, indoctrinated into the western world of thought.
Climate change has always happened.
We simply need to deal with it - not find someone / something to blame.
Flood plains flood - we seem to have forgotten that - so either we build resilient homes that are on piles and can be moved and easily repaired, of we fight the sea - something even King Canute showed couldn't be done.
Maybe we would be better putting our resources into that, than fighting battle that we can't win.
LWTF (Light Weight Timber Frame) houses on a concrete pad are so last century. We have better tech and should use it
Your first sentence is correct, but you should have added ", but humanities pollution is supercharging this cycle".
You do realise that "dealing with it" requires a mammoth expenditure, which results in... massively more carbon released into the atmosphere, under today's economy... meaning a lot more climate change supercharging... meaning a lot more mitigation... not exactly a virtuous circle.
Prevention is and always will be cheaper/better than the cure by a large magnitude. Thinking we can "out tech" it at this point is magical thinking both in terms of mitigation or cure. As PDK says, we need to find a safe way to power down our economies. Yes, that may mean lower living standards, but the alternative looks far worse.
Yeah pretty shocking the number of people that still don't get it, still people don't really care until it suddenly directly affects them and then its full on panic to do something about it. Amazed how people think technology is suddenly going to save the day, awesome so relying on something not even invented yet that sounds like a great Plan A, whats Plan B....Ooops to late for that.
Indeed, the problem is also climate lag. We have already locked in warming for the next 20-50 years even if we stopped all CO2 emissions today. People just don't get the issue, so think "it's not too bad right now, I will do something if it gets bad" at which point you are already a few decades behind in terms of action. It's a rare case where you can't just deal with the consequences when it happens, at that point it's too late. Kind of like people who sit around on the couch all the time eating chips and decide to just deal with the consequences of sedentary/unhealthy lifestyle choices when it hurts them. At the point where it really kicks in is the point of no return. Which is also a good insight as to why people don't want to act on climate change.
Wrong. Degrowth is an inhumane scam by anticapitalists.
Even if it were true, it’s not happening. The majority of the world is going to give you the middle finger pretty quick if you tell them “the music has stopped, stay in your place”. If you really want to lead by example, you should reduce your living standard to below the world median, which is probably below the poverty line here.
Climate change hasnt done much to NZ (compared to the rest of the world) yet.
If aussie or europe become a lot less livable maybe people will move here and push up our house prices, it will bring in some professionals to sort out our health, infrastructure etc. Few million low paid ones to pick the kiwifruits too.
Alls good.
Sometimes i wonder about those billions of poor people that will be left to suffer as the elite make more money and screw the environment. But that never stopped anyones 'progress' before.
And where exactly did the UK get all it's windfarms and electric cars and nuclear power etc from to ensure it's GDP remained relatively untouched by reducing CO2 emissions? Did it build them itself including coking it's own steel and concrete? Nope, they imported them from somewhere, i.e. exported their emissions. Compare the graph to the global CO2 level graph, you will notice that there hasn't been a global fall off that matches the UK. They simply export the emissions of the things that lower their "within country" CO2 emissions. That doesn't help the problem, really.
The embedded carbon in those materials is accounted for as exported emissions.
You’ve shown me a non-logarithmic graph with a straight line since 2000. Over that period, the world population has increased by ~30%, and gdp more than doubled. What the hell are you talking about? Of course that shows a decoupling. Emissions are decelerating globally, and absolutely falling in developed countries, despite economic growth.
Look up the history of the degrowth movement. It was started by sick eugenicist hippie boomers. Their predictions have been flat out wrong since they started in the 1970s. But for some reason that hasn’t stopped it from becoming an edgy midwit ideology today.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. India and Africa are not going to freeze economic growth. And attempting to make them do so is effectively genocide. Technological progress has been and is the only way to reduce emissions (though neoliberal market making helps this process).
A sad little diatribe. Reminds me of those who thought there was a heaven, just above the bright blue sky.
Sorry buddy, this is a finite planet, we are in overshoot, and neoliberalism was nothing more than a self-serving sermon preached by some who stood to gain.
As with all such, there were many eager lower-tier believers, alle same tupperware/amway.
Meantime, we are depleting the planet's finite resources, its renewable resources and are filling the sink capacities, and have been doing so at exponentially-increasing rates. Only one way that was going to end, and that is happening now.
And your posit is demonstrably a crock. I can predict - with 100% accuracy, that you will die one day. I can also state, with 100% accuracy, that every day which goes by, brings your demise one day closer. Your posit, seems to be that because you haven't kicked the bucket yet, death has been disproved.
And the truth about 'decoupling' is that the Laws of Thermodynamics apply. Therefore we who do physics, look for the missing emissions. We see they are either offshored (and usually not accounted due to the shonky regimes) or they represent increasingly unaddressed entropy. So you don't have 'economic growth' in developed countries; since at least 2008 you have printed debt, increasingly creating ponzi-bubbles rather than real wealth (making something, using energy and resources).
You need to do some research. As did those pulpit-bashers of old.
Yeah cool bro. Throw all the buzzwords and weird analogies at me you want. The truth is, people who peddle your worldview have been consistently and dramatically eating s*** since Malthus, trying to peddle their death cult. This time is different eh? I wouldn’t count on it.
What about the laws of thermodynamics? Just invoking random laws of physics without any context isn’t convincing. Like “you can’t build a faster plane because of the speed of light” or “your cant build a better computer because of quantum electrodynamics”. What are you on about?
I need to do some research? Sounds like something from an antivax mum Facebook group. I’ll take Our World in Data over your fringe unreviewed journals, thanks.
Perhaps you should read Malthus, before slanging off (you haven't, or you wouldn't; it's a default situation).
The Laws of Thermodynamics are not random - they are indeed immutable. You don't even seem to have researched energy - which I reckon to be 6th-form physics - at all. Please do so before commenting.
And rational thought - aka logic - says that it is irrelevant how many hold a view. It is either right, or it isn't. The majority on the Titanic though it wouldn't sink. The majority thought there was a God. The majority thought the Earth was flat. The majority think that economic growth can somehow go on forever.
In all cases, ignorance is the problem. As in: to ignore. We are all primarily ignorant; the ones I cannot fathom are the ones who choose to remain so.
Which you are a prime example of. What are you fearful of? Status reduction? Lynch-mobs? No future-relevant skills? The Second Law doesn't really care about those.
Well for a start, that CO2 graph doesn't look linear to me, short on time scale sure, but a definite curve is apparent. Secondly, the Our World in Data link says that there has been a decoupling, then tries to prove it with another graph... that graph states explicitly "emissions caused in the production of goods that were exported to another country are excluded." so yeah, completely contradictory, they exclude the carbon emissions from the "UK emissions" side, and also exclude them on the country of origin side because they are considered exports. Magically all the emissions disappear like they never existed. So your statement "The embedded carbon in those materials is accounted for as exported emissions." is absolutely false, according to their own data.
"Over that period, the world population has increased by ~30%, and gdp more than doubled"
Using the same source: https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels#:~:text=Fossil%20fuel%20consump….
You will also note that fossil fuel use over that same period has gone up 44%. I note that you happened to exclude that from your statement. Certainly GDP has more than doubled, but is GDP a good measuring stick? With the financialisation of much of the worlds economy and the obvious and sudden spike around the 2000's when mass money printing began to become the norm, the nominal $$ values start to skew the picture. They have compressed the measuring stick by devaluing money. A better measure maybe to measure peoples real income over time, if that had grown significantly, then you could claim success. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to have increased much if at all (at least in Western countries, maybe a slight increase of 10-15%). Alternatively we could say it's increased around 30% given more people exist and real wages have basically been flat over the same period? Unsurprisingly, the calculations mirror about the same amount of increase worldwide of fossil fuel use.
Every unit of growth must require energy. Whether it's building an IT company or creating electric cars or whatever, they all require energy, which is almost exclusively derived from fossil fuels. Until that changes significantly, we won't see a difference between real economic growth and emissions. Producing large renewable projects are great but create a sunk cost that can't really be recovered and at this point is like trying to put out a fire by smothering it with gasoline. It's amazing that we are only just creating recyclable wind turbine blades, for instance.
I am hopeful that we can escape the energy trap we have put ourselves into, I don't subscribe to Manthusians, but the physics of the situation is pretty damning currently. Nuclear appears to be the only way out of the current energy trap, but the scale we need for nuclear or fusion is staggering, to replace fossil fuels.
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