The clear implication is that this isn’t the impression people would form if they went by the coverage and commentary in the Australian media.

Similarly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Copenhagen spelt doom for any concerted international action on climate change (despite the fact that the Coalition’s policy is still tied into setting emissions targets, no matter how ineffectual it would be; and that it also provides Liberal moderates some leverage if the Abbott truck hits an electoral blackspot). There’s been nary a word published about the targets that states agreed to submit post-Copenhagen. It’s as if the event’s only significance was its ramifications for Australian domestic politics.

The Economist links to The Sustainability Institute’s interactive Climate Score Card, which enables a picture to be drawn of the probable impacts on average temperature of the various nations’ commitments. The paper also points out that:

countries can express their intentions in different ways, and that many have provided two or more levels of commitment: a low one that they say they will pursue regardless, and one or more higher ones that they will try for if enough other countries are also going high.

For those whose horizon is wider than the prism of the Australian partisan debate, the whole thing, as they say, is worth reading.

“The collapse of the Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme provides Australia with a great opportunity to move ahead with ambitious action on the climate crisis,” Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne, said.

“The CPRS would have locked in failure on the climate crisis with its inexcusably weak emissions target and its $16 billion handout to polluters. Three in four Australians support the Greens’ decision to reject the bill if the Government refused to toughen it up.

“The collapse of the CPRS opens the door to a suite of other measures that can be implemented immediately, before an amended CPRS returns to the Parliament, in order to begin reducing Australia’s emissions without delay.”

The Greens are probably mostly correct that the proposed measures were too timid, but was their strategy of blocking this bill in hopes of getting a more effective one the right strategic choice? Xenophon agrees with them that the targets were too low, with extra opprobrium for what he considers unnecessarily expensive plans.

Family First’s Fielding voted with the Greens to block because he still isn’t convinced that human activity is causing global warming at all. (Question for the Senator: is it possible for humans to ameliorate the effects of phenomena they don’t actually cause? e.g. floods, fires, earthquakes? Yes? Why not do something in this situation then?) The Senate Nationals seem to be of the same mind.

So now the Government have to turn to the Senate Liberals to get this bill through, and those Senators appear to favour waiting to see what the rest of the world has to say in Copenhagen (at the U.N. Climate Change Conference) rather than have Australia show any initiative in implementing our own effective scheme.

So there’s two camps of people standing on separate principles arguing that the CPRS was wrong wrongitty wrong either because it gutlessly didn’t do enough to make a difference or was recklessly diverting scarce resources into a non-existent problem, while various pragmatists are mourning a lost opportunity to at least take a first step in cutting emissions. What can we expect regarding emissions targets now?

…while the mean distance travelled by car in the UK is 9,200 miles per year, in a plane we can beat that in one day. On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once the necessary cut in emissions has been made.

Also he says that the other stuff emitted by planes means you have to multiply the CO2 output by 2.7 times.

So even if air travel may be competitive with multiple people travelling in a car this is blown out of the water by the facility with which we can flit around the planet in a plane for serious or trivial reasons.

You’ll notice that he talks about a personal entitlement.

Monbiot’s piece must be seen in the context of his 2006 book Heat. The commonly accepted notion at the time, and you still see it, is that the earth system can absorb 5gt pa of carbon benignly. That’s 18.35gt of CO2e (C times 3.67). Monbiot found a research piece (Jones, 2003, from memory) that said the carbon sinks would reduce to 2.7gt by 2030, that’s 9.9gt of CO2e, say 10. He divided this by the projected 2030 population of 8.2 billion and came up a personal allocation of 1.2 tonnes of CO2 per capita pa.

As it happened this was exactly what India was putting out in 2004, ranking 133 out of 206 countries.

Monbiot, ever concerned about social justice, calculated that each person on the planet could have an allocation of 1.2 tonnes of CO2 pa. That is for all needs, including grid electricity, the inherent CO2 in food and shelter. His 90% by 2030 applied to Britain’s share of permissable output. Australia’s task in those terms, with roughly twice the emissions, would be a 95% cut.

2030 is chosen as the earliest pragmatic time we could get things into gear.

Since then the task has gotten harder. We know now that we are committed to overshoot, if you don’t think, as I do, that we have already overshot, so we need to go to negative net emissions.

We now know that ocean acidification is a problem.

Gwynne Dyer in writing his book Climate wars talked to top scientists and policy makers in a dozen countries in the first half of 2008. He came to the conclusion that we needed to take emissions down in 20 equal steps on average over 20 years. That’s 5% of current emissions in 2010 and repeated in quantity, not percentage, every year to 2030. Even then we might get caught by nasty tipping points. He thought we’d fail and pointed out that security planners everywhere amongst the big powers were making plans against the notion that we would fail.

It’s more than probable that our defence White Paper is concerned not so much about the Chinese as such, but what happens if things really go pear-shaped with the climate.

Monbiot decided against nuclear, and Britain is not well-endowed with clean energy possibilities compared with Australia. So he came to the conclusion that air travel, whether for business, politics, love miles or frivolity (eg sporting teams flitting around the globe) would have to be severely constrained because it just doesn’t fit in the world’s carbon budget.

Offsets ostensibly are fine, unless you consider that offset capacity is going to be needed for arguably more necessary activities. Certainly, short of a technical fix we are going to have to do some hard thinking on this one.

Update: We discussed air travel last August where I quoted Monbiot’s relative calculations thus:

George Monbiot in his book Heat (2006) calculates that in order to achieve a 90% reduction in emissions the British will have to reduce the number of flights they make by 87%. That is after allowing for a 20% increase in fuel efficiency. He compares the carbon efficiency of various modes of transport from London to Manchester (298km):

Plane (70% full) 63.9kg CO2 per passenger

Car (1.56 passengers) 36.9kg

Train (70 % full) 5.2kg

Coach (40 passengers) 4.3kg

Monbiot believed the UK Government was not serious about limiting air travel. He quotes the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee as calculating that the extra capacity the government was proposing meant “the equivalent of another Heathrow every 5 years”

The surrender is virtually complete. Our biggest polluters have won, and the rest of us will be paying for it under a joke of an emissions trading scheme that encompasses a significant transfer of wealth to our largest polluters.

Also writing in Crikey, Mungo McCallum acerbically targets Rudd’s mantra of “balance”:

The search for balance is in essence a policy of appeasement, an attempt to please everyone and avoid making a hard decision. In the short term this may appear to be good politics, but in the end the balancer is revealed as an equivocator, someone with out the courage of his convictions — if indeed he has any real convictions. But worse still, attempts at balance at the expense of genuine commitment almost invariable lead to bad policy.

Kevin Rudd has shown his true colours with the White Paper. We’re seeing a combination of the tawdry managerialism of the public policy wonk – split the difference and get the most ostensibly powerful actors onside – with Rudd’s own desire to rub the Liberals’ nose in their poor standing. As far as the politics goes, that’s about it.

What we’re not seeing is the other side of Rudd’s dialectic – the supposed attacks from the right. Rather, industry and polluters have had their wildest fantasies fulfilled while right wing bloggers are delighted that the left are unhappy. Reading between the lines, the fiction of denialism stands exposed, ideological bollocks which itself masks uncritical worship of big business.

It may well be the government’s view that those opposed to the targets set have nowhere else to go. All the silly rhetoric about “the latte left” ignores two political realities. First, as with the increasing salience of climate change itself, it’s mistaken to imagine that a public campaign for a stronger target won’t get traction beyond “inner city lefties”. Secondly, by demonstrating a failure to show political courage, Rudd’s laid the foundations of a broader disappointment which may well arise about his unwillingness to spend political capital and his inability to take “decisive action” or “hard decisions”.

Elsewhere: John Quiggin on the “balance” thing.

Further reports today (as well as Stephen Mayne’s piece in Crikey) reinforce what was being said yesterday – that the polluters and the “skeptics” are making the running on the business response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper. What looks like being the outcome is, in my view, a default back to the Howard position. Not only was the Green Paper based on the work done for the Howard Government by the Shergold Review, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the business position, which is falling on at least some sympathetic ears within the government, is for a very low carbon price and a stack of free permits under the aegis of “adjustment”. In effect, it’s a “waiting on the world” strategy, with the BCA’s president Greig Gailey expected to make the familiar point about Australia only creating 1.5% of the world’s emissions in a speech to the Sydney Institute tonight. Gailey will also be calling for bipartisan support to create “certainty”, and given Kevin Rudd’s previous disdain for negotiating with The Greens, it would appear that there are powerful forces at work to create a policy outcome much more akin to the Malcolm Turnbull/Greg Hunt position than what Labor was actually suggesting might occur prior to the election.

If this is what’s going on, you have to wonder why they’re bothering at all. The outcome would mean that we’d be continuing to increase our emissions, not restraining them, at least in the immediate future.