Proving that actual carbon reduction is totally irrelevant…
It doesn’t matter what any nation does. The CO2 blame-game is a fashion contest and success is not measured in megatons, but with megaphones.
Over the last 30 years, the Australian population has grown faster than nearly any other western nation on Earth. At the same time the Australian GDP more than doubled. Despite that and against all the odds of being a large, remote, thinly spread population which makes a living from industrial mining and agriculture and is further on Earth from anywhere, each Australian has reduced their carbon dioxide emissions by 40% each.
In a normal world, if environmentalists cared at all about carbon dioxide, Australia would be the star of the Kyoto Agreement. Instead, when nearly all the major nations are failing to meet their Paris agreements, plus the US has left, Indonesia has threatened to, somehow when we are one of the only nations trying to keep up with this game, we are the big evil polluters?
Dear Australians, it’s a con, and we are The Mark.
This carbon reduction comes at a price: We stole land off our farmers without compensation, locked up native regrowth and created million-hectare fire hazards all over the country, and we pay the highest electricity rates in the world.
Emissions per capita and per dollar of real GDP, year to June 1990 to 2019
Our national leaders need to start getting better at negotiating. They undersell our target and our achievements. Isn’t it time to talk “per capita”?
Details:
- Over the period from 1989-90 to June 2019, Australia’s population grew strongly 49% ( from 17.0 million to around 25.4 million).
- Australia’s real GDP (chain volume measures) grew 137% expanding from $0.8 trillion in 1989-90 to around $1.9 trillion in the year to June 2019.
Emissions from the electricity sector are experiencing a long term decline, down 15.0 per cent from the peak recorded in the year to June 2009. Emissions in the NEM for the September quarter 2019 decreased by 1.5 per cent on a seasonally adjusted and weather normalised basis compared with the previous quarter.[3] For the September 2019 quarter, generation from renewables increased 20.3 per cent primarily due to increases in wind generation (21.4 per cent) and solar generation (33.5 per cent).
Past Posts on this
Those Green Australians! Our emissions per person fell 28% since 1990 (2013)
REFERENCE
Quarterly Update of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory: Australia’s National Greenhouse Accounts, Department of Environment. June 2019 PDF