Coronavirus: Science is clear on climate and the pandemic

You don’t need to be a Nobel laureate to work out our emissions policies won’t save the planet.

Greenpeace activists protest at EU headquarters in Brussels during the COVID-19 lockdown. Picture: AFP

Climate activists seldom waste a crisis, whether it is a drought, a bushfire or a viral pandemic. Having failed to come up with a way to blame the pandemic on climate change (yet), the green left is ­begging for more renewable ­energy funding to boost the post-pandemic economy.

They also reckon the corona­virus response offers a template for global warming policy. “Above all,” The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised this week, “Australia should take the same evidence-based scientifically led approach to climate change as we took to COVID-19.”

This is the same newspaper that editorialised last September about how the Prime Minister should have attended a climate speech in New York, not by a scientist but by a teenage activist. “Scott Morrison should have gone to hear Greta Thunberg,” counselled the Herald.

Presumably, the pandemic has turned the paper’s focus away from teenage slacktivism and back to science. It makes sense given that Earth Hour in March couldn’t make much of a mark when everything was ­already shut down, and school strikes don’t real­ly cut it when the kids aren’t in their classrooms to start with.

So, science it is. Let’s take up the Herald’s challenge and compare a science-based pandemic response to the climate policy debate.

The COVID-19 pandemic, like rising global greenhouse gas emissions, is a global problem emanating largely from China. The big difference is that by banning overseas arrivals and enforcing strict quarantine rules, Australia has been able to isolate itself and deal with the virus within our borders.

This has been Australia’s single greatest scientific advantage: isolation. It has meant that all the other actions we have taken — from hospital treatments to social distancing, from testing to infection tracing — have delivered ­material benefits for this country, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world.

By contrast, the atmosphere knows no borders; we all share the same air and experience whatever climatic variations occur globally, regardless of the policies of individual countries. On climate action Australia is beholden to what the rest of the world does or does not do; we could cut our emissions to zero and our climate would still be hostage to rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.

The science is clear. If global emissions growth delivers a warming planet and dire climate changes for Australia, our own emissions reductions effort will do little more than reduce the economic resilience we need to deal with the consequences.

The appropriate analogy ­between climate and COVID-19 is to imagine how effective it would have been for this country to impose social-distancing measures but still allow tens of thousands of international visitors to arrive every day. Our anti-infection measures would have been rendered almost as futile as our emissions reduction schemes.

The fundamental evidence-based point the green left continues to ignore is that the minuscule reductions in our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions have been eclipsed many times over by ­increases elsewhere. According to the National Greenhouse Gas ­Inventory, annual emissions to September last year were 531 million tonnes, 69 million tonnes (or 11 per cent) less than the corresponding period in 1990. Across those same three decades, annual emissions in China alone rose from 3265 million tonnes to 13,405 million tonnes — from more than five times our total emissions to more than 25 times.

You don’t need to be a Nobel laureate to look at those facts and work out the likely impact of Australia’s renewable energy target on global atmospheric conditions and climate patterns. Those who pretend our policies make any difference globally are indulging in a giant deceit or a grand delusion. Our efforts are mere gestures, and science tells us that gestures will not save a planet.

The economic pain Australians have inflicted on themselves has produced no environmental gain. The cost-benefit analysis is stark: the cost in the energy sector alone tops something like $100bn, while there is no gain or, to be generous, the negligible benefit that we might have marginally reduced global emissions increases. The only plausible argument for deepening our emissions reduction ­effort is to suggest that where we go, others will follow. But like our early settlers who believed the rains would follow their ploughs, this theory is bound to end in heartache.

Malcolm Turnbull’s secret gift to our political debate, Guardian Australia, had a treatise this week from an unlikely triumvirate pushing the pandemic-climate coupling. “If we have learned anything from what we have already endured in 2020 it is that stopping an emergency is far better than responding to one,” said Australian Council of Social Service chief Cassandra Goldie, Australian ­Industry Group chief Innes Willox and Investor Group on Climate Change chief Emma Herd.

This stuff is trite and superficial. It is a level of political advocacy that demeans their case.

The coronavirus pandemic was and is a real and present danger. We know it is highly infectious and kills people, mainly those who are elderly or already ill. Even then, there is widespread and ongoing scientific research and debate trying to ascertain precisely how virulent and contagious it is. We can see the damage that is done when the virus runs rampant.

The science on stopping the spread of a virus is simple. We need to avoid direct human contact and be careful with indirect contact.

There has been no scientific ­debate about how to deal with the problem. The dilemma has been in deciding what is practical — we could all self-isolate in our bathrooms for a month, which would stop the virus but destroy our society — so we have had ongoing debates and adjustments to balance the battle to slow the spread of the virus against the sustenance of our community and economy.

Our domestic response is being sullied by political science. Buoyed by their successful suppression of the pandemic, some premiers have fallen into egotistical mission-creep; forgetting that their aim was to restrict infections to a level our health system could handle, they now see every new case as a personal and political blemish.

We need to prize our society, its economic viability and its self­-reliance above a zero-tolerance policy on COVID-19 that we would never apply to influenza, cancer or syphilis. To fight HIV-AIDS in the 1980s the left took ­delight in promoting condom-protected promiscuity; to battle the coronavirus Daniel Andrews demanded that lovers who did not live together should not even visit each other. This viral puritanism could have flattened more than the curve. Thankfully, Andrews was sweet-talked out of it.

“Our success in flattening the curve,” that Herald editorial continued, “has been because the ­advice and science have been believed and clearly communicated.”

This is a very unscientific ­simplification of what the nation is enduring. The whole conundrum of the pandemic response has been balancing the scientific objective of minimising human contact against the economic imperative for human engagement. If it were science alone, we would all be wasting away in our bathrooms.

Likewise, notwithstanding the futility of Australia reducing carbon emissions while they rise globally, any attempt to reduce emissions here is far more complicated than merely following the science. It is scientifically accurate to declare that burning fossil fuels generates CO2 emissions, therefore if we stop doing it emissions will reduce. But what would we do for affordable and reliable energy? How would our civilisation function without this crucial input? And if science reigns supreme, why would we not embrace scientifically proven, emissions-free nuclear energy?

The wrongheadedness of the Herald’s sloganeering was laid bare when it declared: “We have also learned in the past couple of months that working together as a nation we can actually beat global threats and climate change should be no different.” This is utter tripe.

We have banded together to solve a national problem. Look outside our borders and you can see COVID-19 chaos in the US, Britain, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Australia cannot solve the global pandemic unless we come up with a vaccine (which would solve our export diversification issues, too). Science suggests we cannot come up with a vaccine for global warming.

This all underscores the scientific absurdity that anything the Australian federation can agree to do on emissions reduction policies can make the slightest difference to global atmospheric conditions or improve the climate in Australia or anywhere else. Any rational scientific analysis of national climate policy can only conclude that it will have an infinitely greater impact on our economy than our environment — yet that is precisely the aspect the green left ignores.