If the world doesnít stop polluting the air, the greenhouse effect will kill it. But if it does stop, we will lose a major export industry: coal. Is that why, despite the rhetoric, Australia seems less than enthusiastic about redeeming its promises on greenhouse gases? KATE SOUTHAM and PAUL CHAMBERLIN report on how seriously our governments are taking a global problem.

TWO weeks ago, Singleton Council approved plans for a new coal-fired power station in the Hunter Valley. When it is commissioned in 1996 it will pump out about a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

The next day, a revised plan for a power station at Collie, about three hours south of Perth, was approved by the West Australian Government. When it starts up in 1998, it will produce three million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

Since 1992, three other coal-fired power stations have been commissioned - in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Together, they produce about 28 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

On the same day the Hunter Valley power station was approved, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change came into effect. The Keating Government has pledged to abide by this 1992 Rio Earth Summit edict on stabilising greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000.

Is it really serious?

Each year, Australian industry pumps at least 276 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

That output will rise by 38 per cent over the next decade if nothing is done, according to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), a key government forecaster which has assessed the impact of Federal greenhouse gas policy on industry and the environment.

But to replace the main culprits - coal-fired power stations - with natural gas plants (which produce almost 60 per cent less emissions) would cost about $5.5 billion, ABARE estimates. And if other countries did the same, who would buy Australian coal? A $7 billion export industry would be crippled.

The Government says it could exceed the UN convention target: it could go back to an earlier target and cut emissions to 1988 levels within six years, then cut them a further 20 per cent by 2005. But it will do so only on two conditions: its efforts must not hurt Australiaís economy or its export industries; and other major greenhouse-producing countries must follow suit.

But organisations such as Greenpeace and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) doubt that the Federal or State governments have the political will to do what is necessary.

A Greenpeace campaigner on climatic change, Mr Keith Tarlo, told the Herald that Australia would never reach its convention targets without introducing Federal and State laws to stop new projects that increase emissions, unless comparable reductions were made elsewhere in the country.

But instead of laws, the Federal Government is putting forward only guidelines to help the authorities decide whether to approve gas-emitting projects such as power stations and roads.

The head of the Department of Environmentís climate change branch, Mr Ian Carruthers , told the Herald that a draft ìgreenhouse inventoryî would be released mid-year. It would provide a national picture of where emissions were being produced to encourage State action to cut the problem.

It appears the Government is doing a lot of encouraging, but little in the way of enforcing. Mr Tarlo believes it should insist that developers produce greenhouse-impact statements if they plan massive road projects, new power stations or oil and gas fields, and that the Loan Council should consider greenhouse gas production when approving funds for State projects.

Greenpeace also wants the Federal Government to offer tax incentives to operations using renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, and reform State energy utilities so they can profit from energy efficiency.

According to the ACFís national campaign convener for energy and transport, Dr Mark Diesendorf , the Commonwealth's reluctance to encourage renewable energy sources such as solar power will ultimately cost the nation the sort of sustainable economic growth it says it wants to promote.

Australia's progress is ìnow so far back it's beginning to look like Saudi Arabia's and Japan's. He says Australian governments were bowing to vested interests by ignoring the many cost effective, job-creating measures that could be taken.

The executive officer of the newly formed Sustainable Energy Industries Council of Australia Inc, Ms Carrie Sonneborn , also believes there are business opportunities in making energy efficient equipment that need to be officially encouraged.

Environmentalists are not the only ones critical of the Governmentís progress. The Federal Auditor-General found that the Department of Primary Industries and Energy had not adequately implemented a package of measures designed to reduce emissions. The department responded by seeking a second opinion from an independent consultant - and got another belting.

The department has a long list of programs such as reducing the demand for fresh water, energy-labelling of appliances, encouraging motorists to buy cars that use less fuel and educating schoolchildren.

The chairman of the Parliamentís Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts, Mr John Langmore, says the report showed the department's energy management programs would provide at best only 10 per cent of the targeted reduction in emissions.

"I was astonished at the triviality of a lot of the programs they were running," Mr Langmore says. "And the paucity of their response." To be fair, this is not completely a departmental problem. Much of the blame lies with the Governmentís budgetary process. The department claims its programs were never meant to achieve much more than 10 per cent of the reduction, and that most of the big cuts have to come from other sectors such as electricity creation.

ABARE's executive director, Dr Brian Fisher, says much remains to be negotiated on the UN Convention, including clearing up what the targets should be and where the reductions should occur.

"It does not matter whether carbon dioxide emissions are from fossil-fuel burning in Australia or China or Invalid extra lead parameter Argentina," he says. "Carbon dioxide still has the same potential impact on global warming no matter where it is produced. ìAdded to this, there is a long time-lag, of up to 50 years, between emission reductions and their impact on atmospheric concentrations."

Global co-operation is crucial, because, without it, some countries will take a free ride and share in the benefits of emission reductions without bearing any of the costs.

China, for example, produces 11 per cent of global emissions, burning just over a billion tonnes of coal a year. But as it becomes more of an economic powerhouse, it is expected to burn two billion tonnes by 2010 and between four billion and five billion tonnes by the middle of next century. By then, it will produce almost a third of the worldís emissions.

One option is co-operation between two countries. Australia could sell its cleaner coal-burning technology (and cleaner coal) to South-East Asian power plants. Some suggest the potential reductions would outweigh all of those that could be made in Australia.

Dr Tony McMichael, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a member of a UN committee on the possible impacts of climate change on human health, described in his recent Invalid extra lead parameter book Planetary Overload the consequences humanity faces for allowing the world's life-support systems to break down because of problems such as climate change, over-population and holes in the ozone layer

Professor McMichael, an Australian, told the Herald that until recently the health impact of climate change had been overlooked.

"The environmental health agenda has been very much framed in terms of local pollution and local events related to disease and not the problems which might arise from large-scale changes in the world's life support systems," he says.

Early signs of climate change include heatwave-related illness and death, and an increase in the number of natural disasters, flash floods and ocean surges. Other signs are food shortages because of damage to agriculture and damage to coastal areas and roads, he says.

In the long term, low-lying islands - such as Kiribati in the Pacific - may lose their fresh water supplies or be completely inundated and their inhabitants become environmental refugees.

Professor McMichael says early effects of climate change in Australia may be the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes, such as Ross River fever, Murray Valley encephalitis and dengue fever.

A Greenpeace climate campaigner, Ms Lyn Goldsworthy , believes there is growing evidence that global warming has already begun to effect the worldís weather patterns.

She is compiling a 250-page report of world weather events that are consistent with climate change. She says scientists have claimed they will not be able to prove a link between weather extremes and human-induced climate change until there is a one degree Celsius warming.

By that time, she says, the worldís weather will have changed irreversibly

PROMISES, PROMISES AND MAYBE, PERHAPS

The United Nations Convention on Climate Change was signed at the Rio Summit in 1992 in response to scientific evidence that the world was warming because of the build-up of human-produced greenhouse gases.

The convention called for countries to bring emissions back to 1990 levels by 2000. Australia says it can cut this more - if doing so does not have an adverse impact on exports and the economy, and if the major greenhouse-producing countries follow suit.

A protocol to strengthen and detail the conventionwill be negotiated at a climate summit to be held in Berlin next March

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