What do you expect them to actually do? The entire CO2 output of Australia could drop to zero with negligible effect on climate change.
Every country needs to do its fair share, and Australia is not: http://theconversation.com/australia-hit-its-kyoto-target-bu...
Oh, and our elected Prime Minister brought a lump of coal into parliament, which says as much.
All that matters is countries having fair targets, and meeting those targets.
Countries are free to meet their emissions reductions targets how they like, including buying cheap coal from Australia, planes from US, and cars from Germany.
Australia's coal industry provides few jobs, is heavily government subsidized (either explicitly or through direct infrastructure funding), pays little to no tax, and creates environmental harm that the majority of the electorate disagree with.
[Sorry HN: I know I should be supporting this with annotations but am time pressed today.]
Regional Queenslanders don't want to end up like the old coal mining towns of the UK, which still have not recovered from the mine closures in 1980s. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/26/blighted-coa...
I'm not saying coal is morally defensible, but this is democracy in action.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_prod...
481.3 million tonnes of coal / 24.6 million people
You're basically saying we should tackle Australia's 481 before China's 3523 or India's 716 or US' 702. Maybe we should tackle China first, as it is producing 45% of the world's coal, compared to 6% of Australia.
Now if you were to say that Australia is the 5th biggest producer of coal in the world, that'd be a more convincing argument.
I'm also surprised by Indonesia (6th). And the fact that Germany and Poland contribute 60% of the EU's (4th) coal production.
Germany is a literal "black spot" in that the coal industry still has political muscle there, despite Germany's otherwise relatively strong (but still very much minority) green movement.
On the other hand, Germany had already experienced the Chernobyl cloud.
We've missed our reduction goals, but reducton did happen (about 20% over the last 15 years, and the decrease has even been monotonic since 2013).
I keep having to correct this on hackernews specifically. I have to wonder, is there some sort of concerted effort to lie about this?
Yeah, there is a strong pro-nuclear group on HN who believe it has unfairly been targeted.
I guess I should not throw stones since both countries I live in are worse than this. Specifically they dig out more and more coal every year without stopping.
Who is 'we', and how do you suggest 'we' tackle China first?
Each country has to take care of its own emissions — we can’t wait for China to act first.
That's not quite true. You're not including Australia's extraction economy in that equation, only their local emissions. A similar miscalculation happens when people pretend Norway is a low CO2 output & impact nation by ignoring its extreme fossil fuel extraction per capita.
The obvious answer is to stop feeding China's emissions engine, which is dramatically larger than anybody else when it comes to CO2 emissions (and they're building a very large number of new coal plants). Unfortunately that probably wouldn't help much for very long, as China is de facto occupying Africa for resource extraction purposes.