Things got hot (pun intended) last Sunday for Barrie Cassidy and Angus Taylor (COALition MP). Cassidy, host of Insiders, interviewed Taylor via remote link. Whether by design or chance, I can’t tell, but that may have saved Cassidy much grief.
The interview soon veered towards the subject of the COALition Government’s record on greenhouse gas emissions reduction. You see, the Commonwealth compiles and periodically releases data on that (with an unexplained delay). The latest release includes yearly data only to 2016, but quarterly data to the September 2018 quarter.
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Above you see a screen capture of the latest official data release’s webpage.
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When Cassidy mentioned that GHG emissions have risen since 2013 Taylor went ballistic.
Out of masochism, I downloaded the data and prepared the chart below. Ignore the blue line for now; we’ll come back to it later. The red bars represent the combined emission of 12 GHG expressed in terms of CO2 (thus, the “-e”, for equivalent)[*]. Its three main components are CO2 proper, methane and nitrous oxide.
It’s clear that, much to Taylor's chagrin, GHG emissions increased since 2013, as Cassidy said.
But there’s more. In fact, they decreased only between 2007 and 2013. It just so happens that those years correspond to the Labor interregnum between the COALition’s John Howard long reign (which ended in 2007, just in time to avoid the GST) and the subsequent COALition’s period Tony Abbott inaugurated (starting in 2013), followed by Malcolm Turnbull, and then Scott Morrison.
That could explain Taylor’s tantrum (lest readers get the wrong impression about the whole period, this little and now incomplete history of backflips should disabuse them).
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To counter Cassidy, and instead of focusing on the whole story, Taylor apparently could only see what’s highlighted below:
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Well, no. Not really. Taylor didn’t see all that’s highlighted above; just the first bit. When Cassidy mentioned the second all hell broke loose and Taylor had a meltdown.
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Can one conclude from that that Taylor was lying shamelessly to cover the nakedness of his party as election time approaches?
No, one cannot. The notion of lying implies intention to deceive. I’m not privy to his thoughts. It’s entirely possible that Taylor, who is an economist and Federal Minister of Energy, was unfamiliar with the economic statistics produced by the Department of Energy he heads. In other words, he may just be monumentally negligent and inept. I mean, if you were a politician, would you bother to prepare yourself for interviews on issues of your responsibility?
Like “Ronald” McCormack says: Dats Shtraya, mite.
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Now, let’s go back to the chart. The blue line represents chain measure GDP (“real” GDP): I got the data from the ABS (5206.0 Table 1. series A2304334J). As measured by GDP, the Australian economy grew over the 2000-2016 period at a remarkably steady pace.
That chart conveys some relevant messages.
The first one is not particularly new: it is certainly possible to have growth as emissions fall. In other words, increasing GHG emissions are not the inescapable price economies must pay for growth. That’s the optimistic bit in that chart.
More precisely, the Australian example shows that economic growth of 16.8% is compatible with a 15.1% reduction in GHG emissions over a six-year period. This is what is called carbon-GDP decoupling. That’s not bad, but the challenge now is bigger: according to the IPCC report released last October, GHG emissions must be cut by 45% within 11 years and come to 0 within 31.
A second caveat is that those emission figures are production-based. Australia, like most developed nations, has been actively outsourcing manufacturing to underdeveloped countries, to import their much cheaper output. It’s at least plausible that a considerable part of that 15.1% reduction was also “outsourced” but is still consumed here and that’s why it’s produced there.
An even more troubling message is that it is possible -- in fact, easy -- to transition back from falling emissions growth to increasing emissions growth. Gains from reforms can be lost to reforms: decoupling is not irreversible. That is something believers in reformed capitalism seem too prone to forget.
An optimistic view had it that GHG emissions grew until reaching a peak at a certain stage of development, after which they fall: the so-called Kuznets environmental curve (similar to the Kuznets inequality curve). That’s one of those iron laws of history economists, always consistent in their theories, liked. Well, in developed Australia emissions started to fall as expected, to then unexpectedly rise again (keep in mind that two years of data are mysteriously awaiting to come to light).
A final question is that I can’t see anyone really giving a damn about mass extinction. We don’t know how things will turn out, so it is possible that cutting emissions will also kill that elephant in the room. But maybe it won’t.
Even if it does, maybe 11 years is too long to wait.
UPDATE 2 (07/03/2019):
I had missed this:
Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
The world has two years to secure a deal for nature to halt a ‘silent killer’ as dangerous as climate change, says biodiversity chiefBy Jonathan Watts, November 7, 2018
NOTE:
[*] Gg: read as “gigagram”, one billion (American usage of the term) grams
9 6 3
Gg = 10 g = 10 kg = 10 tonne
UPDATE 1:
07-03-2019. I had to correct the vertical axes labels: they were switched. Apologies to readers. And I added a note explaining what a Gg is.
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