The Conversation

“I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” holds true for many Australians who live on or near the coast. On top of the many lifestyle amenities coastal living offers, much of the country’s crucial infrastructure (such as road and rail networks, hospitals, water treatment works and waste disposal facilities) is located along our coastline.

Virtually all of this infrastructure has been designed and built for a stable climate, yet we are living in a new climate system that is no longer stable.

Rising sea levels pose huge financial, economic and humanitarian risks, as shown by the Climate Council’s latest report, Counting the Costs: Climate Change and Coastal Flooding. If the world ignores the problem, by mid-century rising seas could cost the world more than a trillion dollars a year as floods and storm surges hit.

How much will the seas rise?

Climate change is warming the oceans and increasing the flow of ice from the land into the sea. This drives up sea levels, causing coastlines to recede and making flooding more widespread. The primary cause of the 17cm global average sea-level rise observed during the second half of the 20th century is the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activities. And sea level is likely to increase by 0.4-1.0 m through the 21st century.

Strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would keep sea-level rise towards the lower end of that range, while a business-as-usual approach to burning fossil fuels would drive it towards the upper end of the range – with potentially massive economic consequences.

Coastal flooding and economic damage

Coastal flooding has caused, and is projected to cause, severe damage to economies without adaptation and drastic mitigation measures. Hurricane Katrina, which hit the southern United States in 2005, caused $US100 billion ($110 billion) in damage and about 2,000 deaths.

Seven years later, Hurricane Sandy caused $US19 billion in damage to public and private infrastructure and property in New York City alone, as well as hitting other locations along the US east coast and in the Caribbean.

Forget about the Tom Cruise movie Risky Business – the recent report of the same name, Risky Business: the Economic Risks of Climate Change, led by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is much more apt. It starkly sets out the economic risks of climate change to the United States, including the threat of damage to coastal property and infrastructure from rising sea levels and increased storm surges.

The report predicts that in just over a decade, this double whammy of higher sea levels and storm surges will more than double the costs of coastal storms along the US eastern seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico, to $US3.5 billion a year. Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy are harbingers of things to come.

If the threat of a climate-driven increase in sea level goes unabated, the projected increases in economic damage will be significant. According to a 2011 federal government assessment, more than $226 billion (in 2008 dollars) in commercial, industrial, road and rail, and residential assets around Australia’s coasts are potentially exposed to flooding and erosion hazards if seas were to rise by 1.1m (high-end scenario for 2100).

In southeast Queensland, without adaptation, a current 1-in-100-year coastal flooding event would probably cause about $1.1 billion in damage to residential buildings. With a 0.2m rise in sea level, a similar flooding event would increase the damages to around $2 billion, and a 0.5m rise in sea level would raise projected damages to $3.9 billion.

By 2050, if the threat of sea level rise is ignored, the worldwide losses from coastal flooding (and land subsidence) are projected to hit $US1 trillion per year – roughly the size of the entire Australian economy.

Putting the squeeze on natural ecosystems

Many coastal and near-shore marine ecosystems, such as mangroves, saltmarshes and seagrass beds, may become trapped in a “coastal squeeze” as rising sea levels come up against fixed landward barriers such as seawalls and urban infrastructure.

Damaging these ecosystems has detrimental flow-on effects to water quality, carbon storage, and fisheries. Sea-level rise is increasing the salinity of coastal groundwater and pushing salty water further upstream in estuaries, affecting the health of salt-sensitive plants and animals. Saltwater intrusion from rising sea levels is contributing to the loss of freshwater habitats in coastal regions such as Kakadu National Park. Meanwhile, some corals may not be able to keep up with periods of rapid sea-level rise, which would cause reefs to “drown”.

Australia’s beautiful sandy beaches – a major attraction for Australia’s multi-billion dollar tourism industry – are at risk from coastal erosion. And it’s not just the tourism dollar that is being eroded.

Vulnerable communities

Rising sea level is eroding the viability of coastal communities on Pacific Islands and in low-lying areas of Asia, increasing the likelihood that people will need to resettle elsewhere. Several Torres Strait Island communities live in extremely low-lying areas and already experience flooding during annual high tides. Building seawalls and raising houses can buy time, but in the long term several of these communities may face relocation.

A sea-level rise of 0.5-2.0m could displace between 1.2 million and 2.2 million people from the Caribbean region and the Indian and Pacific Ocean islands, assuming that no adaptation occurs.

The impacts of climate change and coastal flooding are potentially huge. Rapid and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are crucial, both in Australia and around the world, if we are to stabilise the climate and slow the seas’ rise.

If we don’t manage it, then being beside the seaside might turn out not to be so enjoyable after all.

Martin Rice is research manager for the Climate Council and an honorary associate of the Department of Environment and Geography, Macquarie University. John Hunter is an oceanographer at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, based in the University of Tasmania. Prof Lesley Hughes is an ecologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University and an expert on the impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems. Will Steffen is adjunct professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University.

Martin Rice is the Research Manager of the Climate Council, an independent non-profit organisation funded by donations from the public. Its mission is to provide authoritative, expert advice to the Australian public on climate change.

John Hunter received funding from the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.

Lesley Hughes receives funding from the ARC for her work as an ecologist and expert on the impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems. She is the Co-Director of the Climate Futures Research Centre at Macquarie University and the Director of the Biodiversity Node of the NSW Adaptation Research Hub. She is also a member of Climate Scientists Australia and the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.

Will Steffen does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.

NSW Liberals bowled over by ICAC [Graphic: Newcastle Herald]

It’s been enjoyable indeed to watch the humiliation of both sides of NSW politics on the ICAC witness stand. But, unlike Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald — or the Greens, who have been pushing the idea for some time — I don’t think a federal ICAC would either solve the problem of “political corruption” or hold the political class “accountable” any more than the NSW version has. To understand why, it’s necessary to grasp the social basis of the crisis of Australian politics, as well as the limits of modern representative politics in general.Hartcher is scathing of all the political parties bar the Greens, but singles out Clive Palmer for voting for and pushing legislation in his own interests. Yet the reason the political class (most acutely in the case of Palmer, but this holds true across the board) appears to be increasingly self-interested and unaccountable has little to do with a fundamental change in its historic patterns of behaviour. In fact politicians, far from representing some kind of pure “general” or “national” interest, have always acted at least in part in the interests of their bases of support in civil society, as well as in the interests of the state itself. To imagine that Liberal MPs have only recently started doing favours for business supporters is to obscure the reason for existence of the Liberal party — to provide a pro-business bulwark against Labourism. Similarly, the idea that the ALP is only these days feathering the nests of union bureaucrats who have always been central to the party’s operations is more than a little weird.

Once you realize that much of what is being caught out now has actually been business as usual in the past, the issue starts to look a little different. It also explains the perplexity of many politicians as to why they should be punished for what is just normal politics in their eyes, and why they complain that the rules are simply becoming too tough or, in Tony Abbott’s tin-eared view, too confusing to understand.

The real problem for the political class doesn’t lie in the shady dealings that have long infected politics, but in the way that the social bases of the “representative” political system that dominated last century have eroded, hollowed out and in some cases dissolved entirely. It was the relationship of politicians and parties to broad and powerful social groups that provided the material basis for the appearance that “representation” meant the representation of general social interests. When the ALP was the political arm of a trade union movement that not only had as members three or four times the current proportion of employees, but also had active and self-organised networks in workplaces across the country, the party’s sectional base could not be written off as a narrow, irrelevant rump. And the Left-Right polarity of the post-WWII era could have the appearance of playing out, in political form, the great labour-capital divide of modern Australian society. (For a more detailed examination of the hollowing out of Labor’s base, see this from 2012.)

With the loss of such roots in society, the political class is unable to pose as being representative of society in the way it once could, and this is the key reason for its loss of authority over the last 30 years. It no longer appears accountable to a large part of society, only to its very narrow base of core supporters, or in PUP’s case to Palmer’s personal business interests. It is this state of affairs, one that exists not in people’s heads but in reality, which drives an increasingly punitive popular anti-political mood. That this mood has started to spread to the middle class and even sections of big business, especially after the catastrophic inability of the Abbott government to win consent for its pro-business Budget, suggests just how difficult the situation has become. While having a different view of the causes of the crisis of politics to this blog, Paul Kelly has spelled out the worry among elites as to where this might all lead:

I think our political culture is being debased and I’ve argued that we are now in what I call a crisis of the system. For me, this is the main takeout from the entire Rudd-Gillard period. And I argue here that what this period shows is that governing is becoming a lot more difficult, and reform, national interest reform is becoming even more difficult still.

The less connected with society the politicians are, the less they can drive through agendas of the kind that Labor did during the Hawke-Keating years: winning its own supporters in the unions to accepting sacrifice in the interests of boosting weak capital accumulation and more power for bosses relative to workers in the workplace.

Greens celebrate “the most important accountability mechanism” in NSW

To think that a body like ICAC can overcome these kinds of systemic problems is entirely misplaced. All that does is strengthen the idea that the state itself must police its political class, increasingly free of any popular accountability. When NSW Greens MP John Kaye called ICAC “the most important accountability mechanism in the state” he was feeding this logic. Despite my caveats later in this post, surely democratic accountability is far more important than that imposed by an unelected state commission that has broad powers of surveillance and coercion?

The deference to ICAC is part of the same constellation of ideas that looks to greater (or even full) public funding of parties and election campaigns, often alongside selective or blanket bans on private donations. In each case the aim is to reduce direct financial control by private citizens over the political process. This is part of a longer-run trend of the political class coming to terms with its withered base and therefore looking for a stable financial and organisational basis for its activities that no longer relies on a populace increasingly hostile to it. The current scandals over developer donations are themselves the result of the decline of previously much broader sources of party funding. The retreat of the unions, for example, has left the ALP more reliant on other sources of cash, and the likes of Eddie Obeid were central to trying to fill the gap. This happened alongside increasing state funding of election campaigns since the 1980s, so there is less pressure for parties to build the same kinds of mass organisations and networks that sustained them in earlier times. Combined with compulsory voting, these trends have obscured the decomposition of politics, although in recent years things have started to become much clearer — especially as both sides of NSW politics have been sucked into the ICAC singularity.

Sadly, the NSW Greens have been leading the way on such arguments, giving them a Left veneer. When they collaborated with the O’Farrell government to outlaw organisational donations to parties on the basis that this would limit “corporate” influence, the legislation ended up being successfully challenged in the courts not by big business but by NSW unions, who rightly pointed out how the laws had further diminished working class influence over politics. The end result for the Greens was a painful internal debate alongside public humiliation for their stance. Without for a minute defending the financial dealings that have been central to the political system for over a century, it should be possible to recognise that limiting popular influence over politics is a move away from — and not towards — a more democratic society. No amount of hand wringing over the socio-economic disparities that underpin inequality of political representation should lead us to think that the state can or will solve that inequality by political or legislative fiat.

So perhaps the alternative is a return to a more socially rooted, more truly “representative” political system? Leaving aside whether there is a social basis for the rebuilding of those institutions, such a view misunderstands the limitations of political representation in the capitalist state. In developing his critique of the state, Marx argued that the separation between civil society and state in bourgeois society could not be resolved through representative democracy. This is because the state stands “over against” the competing interests of a civil society of atomised private individuals. As Lucio Colletti lucidly summarises in his introduction to Marx’s Early Writings:

At this point one sees how Marx’s critique of the separation between state and civil society is carried to its logical (and extreme) conclusion. Even from a formal point of view, the representative principle of the modern state is shown to be a fundamental contradiction in terms. In so far as parliamentary deputies are elected by the people, it is thereby recognised that the principle of “sovereignty” or power belongs in the popular mass itself. It is admitted that delegates “draw their authority” from the latter — and so can be no more than people’s representatives, bound by instructions or by the “mandate” of their electors. Yet no sooner has the election taken place and the deputies been “sworn in” then this principle is up-ended: they are no longer “mere delegates”, mere servants, but independent of their electors. Their assembly, parliament, no longer appears as an emanation of society but as society itself — as the real society outside which there remains nothing but a formless aggregate, an inchoate mass of private wishes.

The severely limited and alienated nature of political representation cannot be overcome through a reconfiguration of representative forms, or even of the state itself. That is, it cannot be solved at the level of politics because it is the product of deeper social contradictions. Rather, it requires a more fundamental social reorganisation where the interests of individuals and those of society as a whole can be brought together, not in the form of the “illusory community” that is the political state but through “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Such an arrangement — far more democratic than anything we have today — would resolve the question of accountability in a way that today’s ICAC boosters cannot even begin to imagine, precisely because they are committed to trying to rehabilitate the “illusory community” currently decaying before everyone’s eyes