Global "Leadership" On Display As Govts. From Pole To Pole Approve More Oil & Gas Development
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The incongruity is hard to stomach. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has this month spelled out unequivocally that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius is rapidly becoming impossible, and that staying under 2 degrees will require “deep and rapid reductions” in CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC’s new synthesis report, which pulls together the findings of its most recent scientific reports, underlines that Alaska’s fate is just a fragment of the picture of what’s happening worldwide. Emissions continuing to rise will mean more heat waves, floods, droughts, and sea level rises—more biodiversity losses, epidemics, and food insecurity.
And yet so many governments—Norway, Australia, and the United States, to name just a few—are still approving new fossil fuel projects. The IPCC has found early signs that mitigation efforts are starting to work. Yet more public and private money is still being spent on financing fossil fuels than on climate change mitigation and adaptation in its entirety. The problem is “the world isn’t acting as one—it’s all of these individual national interests,” says Frank Jotzo, a member of the core writing team for the synthesis report and a professor of environmental economics and climate change economics at the Australian National University in Canberra. “It is a global good to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Jotzo says. “But from any individual nation’s perspective, there is a free-rider incentive to let others go ahead and hang back.”
Just last month, Australia showed off this selfish behavior. Its new-ish federal government—voted in through an election dominated by concerns about climate change—gave mining company Santos approval to sink up to 116 new gas wells in the northeastern state of Queensland. This is despite Australia’s east coast experiencing two record-breaking floods last year that proved to be the most expensive in Australian history, costing insurers around AU$3.35 billion (US$2.24 billion). The deluges were almost undoubtedly climate-change-related.
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“We see that play out perfectly in Australia: strong attention on reducing domestic emissions, and policy shying away completely from addressing the export side of things,” says Jotzo. The Australian government elected in 2022 has set a target of net zero emissions by 2050, but it refuses to ban any new coal or gas projects. It has promised hundreds of millions of dollars for community batteries, solar banks, and EV charging, yet the nation is the second-largest exporter of coal in the world and has the third-largest coal reserves. Given recent record-breaking droughts, temperatures, bushfires, and floods, one might expect the Australian government to rethink its continued extraction of coal, oil, and gas. But Polly Hemming, director of the climate and energy program at independent think tank the Australia Institute in Canberra, says the government is too beholden to industry to do that. “Climate policy has been completely subverted. Industry sets the climate standards that they want from governments,” she says. That influence is wielded through political donations, industry lobbyists (who are frequently themselves former politicians and political staffers), and scare campaigns against government actions on climate change. “Fear is a much more powerful motivator than hope or optimism, and so governments just step right back,” Hemming says.
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https://www.wired.com/story/ipcc-synthesis-report-australia-us-fossil-fuel-expansion/
