Climate change is not the point. The point is that the way we live is unsustainable. Irrespective of whether you agree that climate change is anthropogenic, pollution represents a cost. It represents a cost to the environment, to the community and, yes, to the economy. It represents biodiversity lost, value compromised and environmental amenity destroyed.

And yet we cannot seem to end our addiction to polluting.

Despite coming to power on a mandate to reduce pollution, the ALP has, to this point, not provided much successful policy in this space. The centre plank of Kevin Rudd's environmental strategy has been shelved. His successor, supposedly committed to a carbon price, has now instead called for a citizen's assembly to 'build consensus'. Arguably, this is the sign of a government stuck for ideas, or log-jammed between a rock and a proverbial.

The Liberal Party has been no better. Abbott famously declared that climate change is crap and has dismissed the emissions trading scheme as a great big new tax on everything. I'm no economist, but isn't that the point? You break it, you bought it. Instead of committing to a price on carbon, the opposition leader has instead proposed a Hollowmen-esque ‘raft of measures’ that merely skirt the edges of Real Action; will cost a lot more; and will likely be more difficult to administer.

I suppose it doesn't matter when it is not your generation that will have to deal with the consequences.

As the British Met Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration release a report arguing that human-induced climate change is unequivocal, what frustrates me is the doublespeak of our elected representatives. Abbott's comments aside, Gillard has, in one speech, noted that delaying is too costly to contemplate, yet she will not be drawn into debates over creating new economy-wide imposts. (Such behaviour from the government is not unique to the climate change debate, but perhaps that is a rant for another time).

Political inertia may have numerous causes, or none. This time it seems a symptom of the fallacy that the environment is somehow separate from the economy. On the contrary, the environment is the economy. To support the economy and ensure our survival, we need healthy ecosystems, productive agriculture and maintenance of the conditions essential for life. We are all part of a system. Until we are able to make sense of and appreciate our place within that system, our fate seems set.

So the political to-ing and fro-ing continues. The bills keep arriving in the mail. And, so long as we wait, our environmental debt is carried forward, only to be repaid by the generations to come. 

Marty Bortz
Masters Student
School of Social and Political Sciences
University of Melbourne