Climate Change Part 1: It's political

I'm doing a subject on environmental politics at the moment. It's fairly chilling. The inevitability of the massive changes to our current way of life that are going to occur over the next 50 years of human history ... well, it's nothing short of daunting. I have no intention of making a case for the truth of man made climate change here - it's been done so many times in so many different ways I honestly don't know what I could say to change the  mind of someone set on denial. But the biggest thing I've learnt from the course is that, like everything in the world, the environment is not above politics.

One of the reasons there are so many climate sceptics in Australia is because its severity (and indeed, its very existence) is debated daily at the political level. 

Most of the nations that are in a position (both economically and developmentally) to best tackle climate change have leaders who are democratically elected, and election cycles of 4 years or less. This creates an incentive toward short term policy, which is woefully inadequate when it comes to the environment.

The reason European countries like the UK and Germany have far more extensive climate change policies than Australia is that in the 1980s when climate change first became an issue they had conservative governments, lead by politicians with a scientific background.* This meant that they understood the science and took it seriously, and when a change to a non-conservative government occurred the environmental policies already in place were improved upon, rather than scaled back.**

The 'ClimateGate' scandal highlighted that even the world's most respected climate scientists have felt the pull of politics, going so far as to manipulate their scientific findings to make them more politically persuasive and/or palatable.

There are more examples, but for the sake of brevity I'll leave it there. The point is, though, that the political debates surrounding climate change debate can explain a lot about it.

Believe it or not, Europeans aren't all climate change believing, sustainability achieving, bike riders. (Until I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo I thought Sweden was full of philanthropists who lived in sustainable apartments, ate organic food, and loved paying taxes. Turns out they have corporate tycoons just like anywhere.)




*Margaret Thatcher studied Chemistry at Oxford before going into politics; West Germany (and later united Germany) was led by conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with environmental expert Klaus Töpfer as Minister for the Environment, Conservation, and Nuclear Safety.
**I unashamedly stole the idea for this dot point from Peter Christoff, lecturer at Uni Melb and actual Climate Policy expert.