A commentary by a Victoria resident, former journalist and keen observer of global political theatre.
The federal government is aiming to place emissions caps on the production of fossil fuel. It tried to persuade the industry to reduce its carbon footprint by placing a price on it. It didn’t work.
Everyone seems to be willing to pay the price and keep right on burning.
But let’s be clear: A cap on emissions in the production of fossil fuels is nowhere near what needs to be done to avert climate disaster. To do that, production and consumption need to be reduced — and fast.
Capping the emissions of that production does not reduce production. The time for nudging the laissez-faire orthodoxy, seeking to change behaviours through timid caps and taxes, is long passed.
The time has come to ration the use of fossil fuels. That means individuals would be given an annual ration of fossil fuel for a vehicle to allocate as they see fit.
Air travel also needs to be rationed: individuals would get a ration of air miles each year: They can save them from year to year, maybe they can even sell them to others. Industry would need to curtail travel.
Businesses that depend on fossil fuels, such as transport and delivery companies, would also receive a ration, calculated on their routes and responsibilities.
Understand that what humans are burning now is way too much, and it is increasing rather than decreasing. And we are exploring for and exploiting even more sources of fossil fuels.
It would be nice if people and industry understood the need and took steps to reduce consumption voluntarily or because of extra taxes. But they aren’t reducing consumption and happily pay more so they don’t have to curb their oil appetite.
How much fossil fuel consumption needs to decrease to avoid disaster is already known or can be easily determined. Fuel rationing can be calculated for individuals and industry so that the reduction is achieved, and not in 2030 or some other distant “realistic” target date.
Reductions need to happen now. Hardships will occur.
Lives and commerce will be disrupted but business-as-usual is no longer tenable. Suddenly, public transit and electric vehicles will look a whole lot more attractive. Industry will push harder for clean electric alternatives.
Momentum for the kind of needed changes will pick up its pace and, despite all the doomsday fears, cleaner economies will thrive.
Only then is there a chance to avoid the astronomical costs and human misery that await us as we sleep-walk toward a precipice, a tipping point of no return. We are learning year by year that this is not hyperbole.
The lamentable thing is that what needs doing will never be done. Few are willing to do with less, to make sacrifices in the face of the threat of a climate catastrophe or for the promise of a livable planet.
Many don’t even believe it is threatened, despite calamities that are already taking place.
The political climate that has evolved over the past few years — accelerated since the previous U.S. president campaigned, took office and was defeated — and spread globally is focused on distrust of government and an anarchistic take on personal freedom.
The chance of marshalling the necessary public will for sacrifice that apparently only war can engender (think back to wartime rationing and coupons to buy groceries) is now remote at best, given how spoiled we are in the West.
Moreover, no politician is willing to run on a platform that tells voters they will need to give up something, a kind of austerity that hits everyone individually and collectively that has nothing to do with cutting government budgets.
Rationing fossil fuels is also necessarily an international initiative and there is little likelihood that nations can band together to agree on it, let alone implement it, given the anemic results coming out of COP28.
The inescapable conclusion is that humans — in fact all of life all over the globe — will experience exponentially more misery as ecosystems are stressed and collapse. If that seems pessimistic, it’s just realistic.
The human capacity to act collectively has become too corrupted by individualism and sacrosanct private enterprise.
The human capacity to damage the global ecosystem with endless chemical invention and clever technology is unlikely to be stopped by anything but total collapse, and perhaps not even then.
The reality is that those who have lived since the 1950s have likely experienced life on the planet at its best. For the vast majority, our children and grandchildren, it’s unlikely to get any better. Unless…
