Coral reefs – including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – will be dead by 2100 due to human “maltreatment of the oceans”, David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II has declared.
Attenborough’s follow-up documentary series, which took four years to film and produce, finished airing in Britain on Sunday night (local time). It ended with his grim warning about the state of our oceans, which Attenborough said were “under threat now as never before.”
He said climate change, plastic pollution and over-fishing were all contributing to the demise of coral reefs.
…Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg defended the coalition’s record on the reef and said it was “rightly valued by the Australian and international community as a place of intrinsic beauty and incredible biodiversity.”
But he did not address the coalition’s plan to cut back the marine parks and the amount of renewable energy, instead attacking Labor’s management of the reef when they were in power.
“After six years of Labor mismanagement, the Great Barrier Reef was on the World Heritage Committee’s watch list to be ‘in-danger,’ with five massive dredge disposal projects in the marine park planned,” he said.
Australia’s emissions over the past year were the highest on record, when relatively unreliable emissions from land use are excluded, according to estimates by the carbon consultancy NDEVR Environmental.
Greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise in recent quarters, with the most recent the second highest for any quarter since 2011, despite electricity emissions being driven down by wind generation.
The government’s official public release of data on emissions is now six months behind and NDEVR Environmental’s estimations attempt to mirror that methodology. Released in partnership with Guardian Australia, the results have proven very accurate when compared with data eventually released by the federal government.
The ever-increasing emissions are taking Australia further from both its carbon-reduction commitments made in Paris and the much bigger reductions demanded by the science-based targets, recommended by the government’s Climate Change Authority.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
