“The worst natural disaster in Australia’s history” was how the premier of the south-eastern state of Victoria described the horrific bushfires that raged over wide areas in February, killing more than 200 people and leaving thousands homeless. But nature was not solely responsible for the catastrophe, Allen Myers writes from Australia.

While bushfires have long been occasional occurrences in rural Australia, it is clear that their frequency and magnitude are being increased by climate change. The extent of the February disaster was conditioned by higher temperatures, extensive drought and strong winds — all products of human-induced warming.

Already the world’s driest inhabited continent, Australia is becoming even drier. Extensive droughts are associated with the El Niño effect, caused by warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and are becoming more frequent. While meteorologists have been aware of the El Niño impact on Australia for decades, more recently they have been examining a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean dipole. This involves the temperature differential between the ocean off Western Australia and eastern Africa. It appears that, when water in the western Indian Ocean is warming more than in the eastern Indian Ocean, as is happening at present, rainfall in Australia is reduced.

“Normal” capitalist agriculture and industry had already stressed Australia’s fragile environment. The Murray-Darling, the country’s only major river system, draining the eastern half of the continent, once supported a vast network of wetlands and provided the southern city of Adelaide with its water supply. Decades of diverting the water for irrigation of large-scale commercial agriculture — especially for cotton plantations — have reduced the flow to a trickle. The federal and four state governments are engaged in a complicated and protracted battle to make each other pay for reducing irrigation “rights” sufficiently to restore some flow to the system. Meanwhile, climate change promises to dry it further. It would not take a very big decline in rainfall to make much of Australia’s existing agriculture unviable.

By far the greatest part of Australia’s land area is desert or semi-desert. Almost all of the non-Indigenous population is concentrated in coastal areas, mainly in the south-east, plus an area in the west around Perth, creating extensive areas of urban sprawl that have wiped out much of the native flora and fauna. This sprawl and the insufficiency and underfunding of public transport, along with government handouts, help to maintain a local automobile industry. They also contribute significantly to Australia’s standing as the world’s highest per capita producer of carbon dioxide.

Large parts of the sprawl will be threatened by rising sea levels. Much of Melbourne, the country’s second largest city, is built around Port Phillip Bay. A sea level rise of just one metre would threaten many suburbs there. A rise of 5-10 metres would flood parts of the CBD, submerge several bridges (not to mention tunnels) and possibly cover two major rail hubs; 200,000 people in just the immediate Melbourne area would be displaced. Sydney is not in general as low-lying as Melbourne, but would experience flooding in suburbs around Botany Bay (which is also where the city’s airport is located) and along the Parramatta River and other smaller rivers. The Gold Coast, a major overdeveloped tourist centre near Brisbane, is built on sand.

Impact on human health

This does not take into account the impact of the increased force of storms such as tropical cyclones, whose strength increases with the temperature of the ocean. Another impact on human health is the gradual spread southward of mosquitoes carrying diseases — malaria, dengue fever and Ross River virus. This spread of disease will be an additional way that people living in the outback — a large part of whom are Indigenous people — also suffer the effects of climate change.

Not only Australia but the world will be the loser if climate change further damages the Great Barrier Reef, the largest reef system in the world. It is described by an Australian government publication as the world’s largest single structure built by living organisms. Stretching for more than 3000 km along the Queensland coast, it is a major reserve of biodiversity and an economically important tourist attraction.

The reef is in imminent danger. Bleaching of coral is the result of the coral polyps that create the reefs being under stress. In the past two decades, there has been previously unprecedented bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, mainly because of sewage and chemicals in the runoff from rivers, but partly because of rising water temperature. The government’s main scientific body has said that even an additional 1° C rise will cause significant contraction of the species that make up the coral ecosystem. A significant sea level rise would kill it completely.

With most of the problems that capitalism creates, the worst effects are felt by the poor — poor countries, and the poorest people within each country. That is true also of climate change. So the Australian ruling class is not much interested in doing much about it.

Coal exports

During the negotiation of the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gases, the Australian Liberal-National Party coalition government of John Howard actually negotiated an increase in Australia’s allowed greenhouse gas emissions. Despite that success for Australian capital, the government then followed the US Bush administration in refusing to ratify the Kyoto treaty.

In the lead-up to the November 2007 election that brought the Australian Labor Party to government with him as prime minister, Kevin Rudd sought support from environmentally concerned voters by promising to sign the Kyoto treaty and to introduce a carbon trading scheme in order to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Even aside from the fact that carbon trading schemes are in general a totally ineffective way of reducing GHG emissions, the Rudd government’s scheme seems designed primarily to justify giving billions of dollars to major polluters.

The reduction targets of the scheme sound like something from a Monty Python skit: 5% if there is no new international agreement, somewhere around 20% if there is.

Various Australian governments’ unwillingness to do anything serious about countering global warming has to do mainly with the profits of their employers. One polluter of note is the aluminium industry. Aluminium and aluminium products are the country’s second most important export. This industry produces using (subsidised) electricity mainly from coal-fired power stations that produce 25 million tonnes of CO2 a year — 6% of the country’s total GHG emissions. Per dollar of product, aluminium is one of the country’s most CO2 costly businesses.

Australia’s largest export is coal. In 2007-8, it exported more than 250 million tonnes of coal. These exports were worth A$22.6 billion in 2006-7 and A$24.7 billion in 2007-8. Rather than doing anything to phase out this destructive industry, the government is spreading pipe dreams to the public and more handouts to industry, promising the development of “clean coal” technology — the so-called carbon capture and storage. This has never been successfully tested, and even were it to be brought into existence on the schedule of its most optimistic promoters, it would be too late to bring about the emission reductions that are needed.

Australian capitalism and its governments are willing to permit massive disruption to human life and the environment rather than threaten profits.

Allen Myers is assistant editor of Direct Action, the monthly newspaper of the Revolutionary Socialist Party