Cutting Emissions at Home Is Great, but Not if You’re Exporting Them Elsewhere

As Australia prepares to sign the Paris Agreement on Friday, you might think we have cause to feel optimistic about the government taking action on climate change. But a report released on Thursday by Greenpeace suggests otherwise.

The report, titled Exporting Climate Change, Killing the Reef points out that while Australia is lagging in curbing domestic emissions, we're also the world's largest coal exporter. This is a fact that tends to get swept under the rug when environment ministers sign big international agreements promising to limit global temperatures below a two degree increase.

This year, Australia will export nearly twice as much carbon as we emit. This means our symbolic signing of the Paris Agreement might feel great, but achieves approximately nothing. Even if we somehow managed to emit zero carbon domestically, we'd still be exporting enough coal to go backwards.

"The Australian Government wants us to believe it is proactive about climate change, but in reality it's sending its emissions overseas through its coal exports," said Shani Tager, Greenpeace Australia Pacific's climate and reef campaigner.

"This isn't a future threat, it's one that is playing out right now before our eyes, with coral bleaching on 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef, and severe bleaching on the most pristine northern parts," reads the report, referring to the damage wrought on the reef in the early part of 2016.

According to the report, Australia's coal exports have more than tripled since 1990, to around 400 million tonnes per year. With every Australian tonne of coal emitting 2.5 tonnes of CO2 on average, Australia's CO2 exports have actually increased by 253 percent.

The Greenpeace report coincides with an announcement yesterday from scientists at the ARC Centre of Excellence that only seven percent of the Great Barrier Reef has avoided coral bleaching this year. The cause? Some very warm water.

"We've never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it's like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once," writes Professor Terry Hughes, convenor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce.

"Tragically, this is the most remote part of the Reef, and its remoteness has protected it from most human pressures: but not climate change."

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