Leggett: Kings of the coal habit

The fate of our warming planet hinges on six nations, and five of them meet in Sydney this week

Through his long years of greenhouse denial, George Bush must have been particularly grateful to John Howard. The Australian prime minister was quick to join Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and has batted for his country’s coal interests as trenchantly as Bush has batted for US coal and oil interests.

Now Bush has had to deal with the impact on American public opinion of Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore’s movie, and can no longer afford to ignore climate change. Howard, contending with a killer drought, is similarly finding that greenhouse denial is out of bounds. The flow of Australian rivers has fallen by a staggering 70% in recent decades. All Australia’s major cities are in drought. The “big dry” in the Murray-Darling basin threatens 40% of food production. Global warming has become an issue in the January elections.

Howard hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Sydney this week. Bush will be one of the leaders attending. Everyone who cares about the greenhouse threat should train a microscope on their actions. The fate of human civilisation will probably hinge on the fossil-fuel decisions of just six nations, and five of them are members of Apec.

If we are to avoid tipping the planet over a widely accepted danger threshold of 450 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide, we can only afford to burn fossil fuels in a quantity measured in low hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon. Industry estimates suggest that remaining oil deposits alone exceed this figure, if we include unconventional sources such as Canada’s tar sands.

As for coal, the energy industry suggests several thousand billion tonnes remain to be burned. Even if we believe fossil-fuel proponents tend to exaggerate estimates of the size of deposits, it is clear that most of the remaining coal has to stay in the ground if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. Three-quarters of coal reserves are in five nations: the US, Russia, China, India and Australia.

The Guardian