What climate change will mean for Australia
People don’t change their minds, or their behavior, until they experience personal suffering. The recent Australian bushfires may be the event, or at least the beginning of the events, that cause Liberal-National coalition voters to change their minds and realize that they’re voting against their own safety.
When the fear of losing their house in a fire outweighs the job-security they get from supporting the coal industry, or the satisfaction they get from torturing refugees, then they’ll change their vote.
However it won’t make any difference. They’ll still lose their house in a fire if they live in a rural community. They’ll still lose the tourism income from the great barrier reef. They’ll still see the end of the Australian dairy, beef and wool industries due to water scarcity, because they changed their vote 40 years too late.
We need to switch our thinking from ‘how can we convince people that climate change is real?’ or ‘what can we do to prevent climate change?’ to more practical questions.
Questions like:
- Knowing that our tourism, beef, dairy and wool industries will soon fail, how can Australia continue to support 25 million people?
- Where will the remaining people live, assuming the annual bushfires make rural housing un-insurable?
- How will we supply water to our cities when drought becomes normal?
- What will we export to ensure we can afford to import food, if we have no agriculture or tourism?
The answers to these questions are fairly self-evident, but painful to accept.
Population:
Australia may not be able to sustain its current population. Bushfires, water-scarcity and poverty in overcrowded cities will not only directly reduce the population, but will also make Australia a less-appealing destination for immigration.
Housing:
The remaining people will live as close to the coast as possible, in urban areas. The sparsely-populated regions on the map below on the east coast will become less tenable as drought and fires increase. Our cities will need to grow to accommodate this population transfer.
Water:
We need to start building water-recycling and desalination infrastructure now, and to plan our cities with water-scarcity in mind.
Exports:
We will probably continue to export coal. As insane as this sounds, there’s no reason to believe we’ll be able to afford to reduce our coal exports in the short-term. Coal is our most profitable export. Many countries who buy our coal will move power production away from coal-fired power stations, but coal will always be needed to produce steel. In 2016 Australia was the largest coal exporter in the world, accounting for 32% of the global market. If we continue to export coal at the current rate our reserves will last over 500 years.
This graph shows Australia’s profits from coal exports since 1970. This trend is unlikely to reverse, particularly when we’re facing ruin in many of our other industries because of their dependence upon on cheap water and plentiful farmland.
The other area where Australia can maintain profitable exports is non-tangible products and light industries such as software, digital media, intellectual property and technology.
These exports don’t rely on manufacturing or heavy industry support and don’t need huge water supplies. However they do need fast, reliable network infrastructure. The failure of the Liberal-National coalition government to provide decent network infrastructure will mean we will be reliant upon commercial satellite internet services like Starlink. If we wish to remain competitive in the technology space we will need to remake the National Broadband Network in its original form — meaning fiber-optic connections to every building (this will be significantly cheaper when the only insurable buildings are in cities).
We should be investing in emerging technologies with high profit potentials and low materials and water needs, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum computing, autonomous vehicles, virtual and augmented reality, micro-satellites and communication technology.
The most important support you can give to the technology sector is education. We need to make university level education in Australia free again, fully tax-funded like it was before 1989. We should tax the coal industry heavily instead of subsidizing it — fairly taxing our coal industry could cover the cost of college education for all Australians. Norway invests the profits from its oil industry into a Government Pension Fund to pay for its citizens’ retirement. Since establishment in 1990 it has amassed $195,000 for each Norwegian citizen!
Digital technology currently accounts for 5% of Australia’s GDP whereas mining is 8.5% (with coal being the majority of that, followed by iron ore). If we can boost non-polluting industries we can reduce our dependence upon coal and reduce our carbon emissions — digital technology seems like the ideal candidate to do this.
