GlobalResearch - Dr. Binoy Kampmark*
Censoring climate change and its reporting is a big business,
notably among fossil fuel obsessives and those in denial. It continues
to fulfil a role in the policies of Australia’s Turnbull government.
Even after the demise of Tony Abbott last year, his successor continues
to scrub his own environmental credentials from his profile. As he
does so, an assortment of weasel words have found their way into the
political argot: “innovation”, “growth” and a host of other empty
treats.
Despite lauding various efforts to pursue “clean energy” (PM Malcolm
Turnbull decided to reverse the previous leader’s decision to scrap the
Clean Energy Finance Corporation), environmental politics in Australia
remains a dirty business.
Turnbull demonstrated as much in March by announcements that he would
remove funds from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and replace it
with a new, slogan rich “Clean Energy Innovation Fund”. Turnbull is
particularly keen on copyrighting innovation, a substitute, he finds,
for actual de-funding strategies for the essentially redundant
environment portfolio.
As Giles Parkinson noted in March, “the move to de-fund ARENA and
create a ‘new’ fund using money already allocated to the CEFC is nothing
but a sleight of hand, and an elaborate ruse by Turnbull to save more
than $1.3 billion and get his new pet word ‘innovation’ included in a
financing scheme.”[1]
This is only one portion of Turnbull’s strategy. Another is a no mean
effort at censorship in an attempt to minimise the effects of climate
change on Australia’s environment. The current prime minister is, after
all, a businessman, and while he lauds efforts of Australian
“innovation” in solar energy, ironically much of it being done in other
countries, he is also happy to remove references to climate change when
needed.
Guardian Australia scored something of a coup on this
tendency in obtaining the UNESCO report on tourism and climate change at
the end of last month. Titled “World heritage and tourism in a
changing climate,” it was modified to incorporate Australian objections.
The draft report, to that end, looks somewhat different to its final
form. One had just to ask the lead author of the report, Adam Markham
of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who expressed profound shock at
“the reasons the Australian government gave for why they pressured
UNESCO to drop the Australian sites.”[2]
Portions removed in the final report include reference to the dangers
posed to the Great Barrier Reef. “The biggest long-term threat to the
GBR today, and to its ecosystems services, biodiversity, heritage values
and tourism economy is climate change, including rising sea
temperatures, accelerating rates of sea-level rise, changing weather
patterns and ocean acidification.”[3]
The section concluded that “without a comprehensive response more in
keeping with the scale of the threat, the [reef]’s extraordinary
biodiversity and natural beauty may lose its world heritage values.”
In addition to this excision came two other sections. The Tasmanian
wilderness, for one, receives no mention as being under threat, despite
the appalling fires in early 2016.
David Bowman, professor of environmental change biology at the
University of Tasmania noted the “root cause” behind the fire season as
being “the record-breaking dry spring and the largely rain-free and
consistently warm summer, which has left fuels and peat soils bone
dry.”[4] Far from seeing the Tasmanian fires in isolation, their
severity had to be considered as part of “a global pattern of increasing
destructive fires driven by extreme fire weather.”
Dr. Michael-Shawn Fletcher of the University of Melbourne would
similarly observe in February that the frequency of bushfires in
Tasmania had become exceptional. “My conviction,” he gloomily noted,
“is that the current trend is evidence of anthropogenic forces.”[5]
The response from the Tasmanian Liberal premier, one that Turnbull
has aped, was to deny that there was any serious problem. The fire, he
claimed in February, burned some 1.2 per cent of the world heritage
zone. While “not insignificant […] it could have been much worse.”[6]
Environmental groups disagreed in what became a public relations war
of images on forest destruction. “It’s damn ordinary,” shot back the
premier, “that you’ve got environmental activists almost gleefully
capitalising on images, naturally caused, which could inflict
significant damage on our brand, our reputation.”[7]
The deleted section on Tasmania in the UNESCO report is cognisant of
the “2013 assessment of climate change threat [which] identified the
same habitats as at high risk from greater fire frequency and drier
conditions, with likely catastrophic implications for fauna.” The
calamitous fires of January 2016 bore out those “dire predictions”.
Warnings about Kakadu national park similarly vanished in the
penultimate report. “Climate change threatens Aboriginal traditional use
by altering the ecosystems of the vast wetlands of Kakadu and raising
temperatures to a level likely to lead to more intense fire regimes.”
Brands, reputations, labels, and management. Do not kick up a fuss
and damage reputations. Those are the guiding words and principles in
the Turnbull environmental protocol. Rather than providing genuine
policy, these constitute the fundamentals of managing decline. And, in
that universe, if profit can be made along the way, so much the better.
*Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne: bkampmark@gmail.com
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