Get on the calculator, Barnaby
What is climate change really costing? I certainly don't know, but it's not my job to.
I know we’ve all been busy and there’s a lot going on, but in between it all you’ve probably noticed that large parts of Australia have flooded multiple times in the past year. Before that were those fires. Between them they’ve contributed to Australia’s massive housing shortage and rents that most people can’t afford, which has played its own part in labour shortages in health and aged care and hospitality and so on, because who can afford to rent a home in the places those jobs are, given the wages those jobs pay (if you could even find a home to rent)?
It’s not great, and it got me thinking about a few things our politicians decided to do in 2002, 20 years ago now.
As is traditional, at the end of the year secret cabinet papers from two decades ago were released to the public: here’s a summary of what they revealed.
The part that took my interest, unsurprisingly, was the section on climate change. The ABC reports:
In 2002, cabinet noted key messages from a presentation by the CSIRO regarding the science of climate change and its impacts.
"Greenhouse gas build up is lifting global temperatures and changing the climate to an extent that is not sustainable," a cabinet document states.
Cabinet also noted that climate change would have considerable impacts, implications and costs for Australia, including "more extreme climate events".
However, ultimately, the government made the decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol after the US withdrew from the process.
"…there are risks for Australia in burdening its emission-intensive, trade-exposed industries with costs not faced by competitors and, at present, it is not in Australia's interest to ratify the Kyoto Protocol."
From our vantage point at the end of a few years of ‘considerable impacts, implications and costs’, it’s pretty clear those politicians would wish they’d done things differently. Isn’t it?
The ABC asked Amanda Vanstone, who, they tell us, ‘remains adamant that the 2002 cabinet made the right decision’.
Elsewhere on the ABC was an in-depth report on the floods Australia experienced in 2022, which noted that:
Flooding in February and March became the single most expensive natural disaster in [Australian] history, according to the Insurance Council, with more than $3.5 billion worth of claims paid out by insurers.
Over the course of the year, there have been ‘more than 277,000 claims from declared events, with nearly $6 billion paid out as a result of major flooding’. The report continues:
Even if we weren’t directly affected, most of us will have at least noticed the effects of natural disasters, with surges in fruit and vegetable prices caused by the destruction of crops in some of Australia’s biggest food bowls.
And that was before floods in northern Western Australia at the start of this year, where roads and bridges have been destroyed, meaning truck drivers carrying essential supplies ‘now have to complete a 6,000 kilometre one-way journey via South Australia and the Northern Territory to move freight from Perth into the East Kimberley — an expensive journey considering the price of fuel…There is concern small businesses in the East Kimberley would shut their doors due to sharp increases in freight prices.’
I don’t know what you were doing around 2010, but I was editing climate change articles for The Conversation, many of which were dealing with claims that it would be cheaper to adapt to climate change than to take steps to prevent it.
Author Bjorn Lomborg was proving massively popular in Australia’s Murdoch press and among its conservative politicians with his ‘reasonable’, ‘moderate’ line that of course climate change was real, but spending money on reducing emissions from fossil fuel was not the way to deal with it - why not just adapt to the consequences instead? In an article for the Guardian in 2007, Lomborg wrote:
The Kyoto protocol, with its drastic emissions cuts, is not a sensible way to stop people from dying in future heatwaves. If the US and Australia had committed to the pact, it would have set us all back by $180bn each year. At a much lower cost, urban designers and politicians could lower temperatures more effectively by planting trees, adding water features and reducing the amount of asphalt in at-risk cities.
If only we had added more water features before the 2020 fires! Crisis averted.
Tony Abbott spoke kindly of Lomborg in his 2009 David Davies Oration:
Bjorn Lomberg, who thinks that increased carbon dioxide is responsible for climate change, makes the point that it would be simpler and cheaper to adapt to it rather than to try to create a carbon-free economy. He thinks, for instance, that it would be better to re-settle the inhabitants of low lying islands than to try to reengineer the power industry
You might also recall Barnaby Joyce’s 2012 claims that a price on carbon would lead to $100 roast dinners. Thankfully, scrapping the carbon price saved us from that fate, except that in 2019 - thanks to three years of climate-change fuelled drought - a leg of lamb cost $60, never mind the price of the veggies. I can only imagine what families in Fitzroy Crossing would pay for a roast dinner now, if they could get their hands on one.
Is there any way to ask the decade-ago proponents of ‘adapting to climate change will be cheaper than mitigation’ how their sums are stacking up now that we know just two months of flooding in one part of Australia cost $3.5 billion in insurance payouts alone? Or when economist John Quiggin estimates the cost of recovery from the 2020 bushfires is $100 billion when all factors are taken into account? Perhaps, like Amanda Vanstone, they will be unrepentant. But still, I’d like to see them held to account.