How much is the future worth?

Not much, it seems, to the New South Wales Treasury’s bean counters. They’ve just costed the impact on the Australian economy of adopting the Garnaut report.

Armed with the figures, NSW Treasurer Costa has painted a bleak picture of a 4% reduction in the size of our economy. The figures sound daunting and it’s tempting to shrug and say, “Ah well, we’d like to reduce our carbon emissions but there’s no point trying if it’s going to send us broke”.

Four hundred and thirty billion dollars it’s going to cost us by 2030, according to Treasury, to meet the Garnaut target of an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050.

But wait, how about looking at it this way: $430,000,000,000 is the projected cost over 22 years. That’s $19 billion per year divided by our poulation of 20 million, which is $950 each.

There you go. $2.60 per person per day is what it will cost us to save the planet. Is this too much? Is my maths up the creek, or is theirs? Is there any point in touting dollar figures in the climate change debate anyway?

Mr Costa supports paying our money to compensate big business for any change in the law that affects profits.

But it is not a banana revolution going on here. There is no guerrilla army hiding in the hills, waiting to nationalise our industries.

We’re facing a crisis of planetary proportions and everybody has to help, including multi-national resource corporations.

Then there is another sinister argument floating around in the fossil-lovers lobby. It goes like this:

Australia has a small population with a high standard of living. What would be the point of jeopardising our position if other countries will step in and nick our markets?

We’d be making all the sacrifices (the argument goes) so that some other blighter can have our share of foreign investment and do all our polluting, or worse.

It’s a stupid argument of course and it must look ridiculous from overseas.

Australia is not in the forefront of the climate change battle, even though we are the biggest polluters per person on the planet. We’ve been rabbiting on about it for years yet the amount of carbon we pump into the air increases every day.

Even as we flibbitigibbet about in a superabundance of cheap consumables, the idea is put about that we shouldn’t be the first to bite the bullet. It has a terrible air of cultural superiority about it.

“The [insert country] and the [other one] don’t care about the environment. We’ll get left behind if we’re not careful.”

But there are environmentalists in many other countries writing in their local papers about the dangers of polluting, centralised power production. There is also an informed awareness of climate change peril.

How tragic for the world’s children if the pernicious bean counters in the developing world can point at us and say:

“Why on earth should we worry about the environment. Look at those Australians, educated, well-off, good at cricket; yet so far they’ve done nothing at all.”