Future Shock has arrived

It’s rarely that a professional cynic, which is what a journalist is, loses their cool and explodes all over the page of a quality newspaper like the Sydney Morning Herald. Paul Sheehan did just that this week. His irritation? The disaster unfolding on farms across Australia and the federal government’s wilful refusal to acknowledge climate change as the underlying cause. (http://www.smh.com.au/news/scorchedearth/we-fiddle-as-the-continent-turns-to-dust/2006/10/22/1161455605817.html)

The canary in the coal mine is “a highly innovative grazing enterprise” called Coombing Park, near Orange. George King “inherited a badly eroded property and turned it into a showpiece, using holistic landcare techniques that are absent from most rural businesses.” But this drought forced him to reduce his stocking rate to 40 per cent of peak capacity. That was last year. This year they are destocking to 20%. That’s below the cost of production. He’s going broke.

“Even the best farmers are suffering now. The bush is dying. The towns, the landscape, the rivers are being killed by this climate change."

City commentators usually chorus, at these times: “Get the old-fashioned cockies off the land.” The assumption is that good management will solve the recurring crises in rural areas will be solved. But now the peak performance farmer is being crushed. And Australian farmers are the best in the world. Their European and American counterparts are payed to get out of bed by their governments.

George King believes this is no ordinary drought. He sees an unusual “compounding effect." It is the Climate Change effect: "As more country is stripped bare and dried out we expose more soil. This is releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. Organic carbon levels are falling, and the soil is losing its colour. There are more fires than ever because the dry summers are adding enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and creating more bare ground.” So when it does eventually rain the topsoil will be washed down the gullies, creeks and rivers.

If George King is in trouble, you can bet everyone else is worse off. Because George uses holistic land management practices that give the soil and grasses the best chance to recover between grazings. But the carbon imbalance is turning grasslands into deserts, he says. "Pretty soon we will be able to see the great deserts from the Great Dividing Range."

Apologists for the Government’s constirpated response to the environemental crisis are still brazenly trotting out their pseudo-scientific explanations and spin. The Institute of Public Affairs’ Jennifer Marohasy is content to say Climate Change can’t be responsible for the drought because some institute on Colorado announced that things should be getting wetter, not drier as the globe warms. (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5076) But even a schoolchild knows that the world’s scientists agree on the following: some parts will get wetter, some will get drier.

Yet her website proclaims: “Concerned that public policy on environmental issues is increasingly driven by moral crusading, rather than objective science or need, Jennifer works to provide an important counterpoint in public debate and discussion.” The morality of continuing to push the “Climate Denial” line of conservative propaganda is breathtakingly bleak. Albert Einstein said repeating the same action over and over while expecting a different result was a definition of insanity. Sheehan explains that these lunatics have been allowed to flourish and peddle their witchcraft because of a failure of political will on the Opposition benches.

Where does that leave us? Stuck with a Prime Minister who will put ideology before the public good? Who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to admit warming is real? Whose government gagged CSIRO scientists when they spoke out about the danger? Whose Government allows the coal mining and power generation industry to write policy for ministers? Who’s government robbed the Australian Greenhouse Office of its independence and brought it in under the Minister of Natural Resources? The same Greenhouse Office which now parrots the Government’s propaganda line: “We are meeting the greenhouse challenge?”

Something has got to give. Refusing to ratify Kyoto is like arguing about he price of lifeboats on the Titanic. The Federal Government must immediately introduce a cap and trade scheme and the markets must immediately settle on an averaging regime for trading soil carbon credits. Because the soil is the only sink which can start sequestering carbon now, which is available in large amounts, and which is inexpensive to use for sequestering.