A Cleaner World !

 Last week, China's supreme leader, Xi Jinping made an important announcement at the United Nations. He committed what is fast becoming the world's super power to becoming carbon neutral by 2060.

That is a pledge that changes everything.  When China entered the race to become the world's workshop it needed to transform from a backward agrarian economy by marshalling the biggest number of workers on the planet into a manufacturing behemoth.  With that came unbridled pollution.

China's cities are so polluted that the air its citizens breathe is the equivalent of every man, woman and child smoking a dozen packets of cigarettes a day. This fog of modern living denies them a breath of fresh air or the sight of a blue sky overhead, and even when they instituted the coronavirus lockdown their emissions continued to grow by five percent, year on year.

Importantly, that industrial base is still growing.  China is building half a dozen new electricity generating plants which will be fuelled by coal to sustain its ever growing need for more electrical power., and that coal is imported from Australia.

In fact, China remains the world's biggest coal user and we accept that the only way to stop planet Earth overheating is to reduce our consumption of coal and oil.  Such is the power of control the Chinese government exerts over industry in China that Xi Jinping's edict will be obeyed.

The rest of the world has sheltered behind China's pollution to avoid meaningful measures to reduce our own pollution output.  Here in Australia we have a vague plan to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions between 26 and 28 percent by 2030, but no target for reductions beyond that date.  Reduction plans in Europe and America are similarly varied.

There is no doubt this Chinese move will put pollution squarely into the political arena.  We are trying to negotiate free trade agreements with both Europe and America.  This Chinese statement will project pollution as a meaningful component of these negotiations for the first time, and that will overlap into internal politics.

In Australia the two main political parties have left the pollution question to the Greens and the other basic issue parties.   The impetus has been on jobs and the economy and voters have chosen to leave the pollution issue to a later election.  It now seems likely that at the next general election stopping the planet warming may become the prime issue that will influence the vote.

Xi Jinping's announcement at the UN General Assembly came at a bad time for the rest of the world. World finances are stretched thin as we try to recover from the coronavirus and the stress of trying to reduce pollution is something they would prefer to be avoided, but it is now moved to front and centre on the world trade issue.

It will become harder to justify opening a new coal mine in Australia, or to extend the life of an existing mine. We will probably have to force electric cars onto showroom floors to reduce our dependence on oil and obviously the way we earn our living will need to diverge from the harmful aspects of mining.

It looks likely that pollution control has moved to become the issue that decides the vote.  The days of putting it on the back burner - are over !