Last week’s extreme heatwave in south-east Australia broke temperature records and fuelled fires that raised Victoria’s total lost homes this summer to at least 400. Just weeks ago, flash flooding in the state forced hundreds of people to evacuate and swept cars out to sea.
Homes lost. Communities evacuated. Lives upended. It bears repeating that we have been here before. Climate change, driven by the greed of fossil fuel expansion, is making extreme weather more frequent and more destructive.
Fossil fuel expansion is not just an environmental issue. It’s an economic one. And one need only look to one of the most reliable – if unexpected – sources to prove it.
Insurance agencies make money by insuring against unlikely events – the more likely an event is, the more expensive the premiums will be.
Insurers are not activists. They are in this to make money. And insurers in Australia will no longer offer home and contents insurance when once-in-100-year floods or bushfires happen every few years.
That’s why Australia Institute research has shown climate change is driving a huge rise in insurance cost that many Australians cannot afford.
So, if insurers won’t take on the risk – and households can’t afford to – who's going to foot the bill?
The answer is simple: The predeominantly foreign-owned fossil fuel corporations profiting from climate damage.
A climate disaster levy could raise billions of dollars a year from gas and coal exporters to cover the skyrocketing cost of disaster response and recovery. Qatar exports roughly the same amount of gas as Australia but gets 5 times more money than we do!
The Australia Institute first proposed the levy in 2019. Since then, it’s earned national media coverage and won support from Independent MP Zali Steggall, NGOs like Greenpeace and Oxfam and most recently the Ross Garnaut and Rod Sims-founded Superpower Institute. Momentum is growing.
Now that our petition has over 30,000 signatures, we’re organising a handover to decision-makers at Parliament. Make sure you add your name before we do!
Last year alone a levy set at $30 per tonne of carbon pollution would have raised $44 billion for disaster recovery from fossil fuel companies.
Because every new coal mine or gas field increases the risk, and the cost, of future disasters, a levy would also be a powerful economic deterrent to fossil fuel expansion.
And it would shift the financial burden off the backs of Australians who were hit with an interest rate rise on Tuesday.
We can’t wait for another summer of extreme weather.
As each new climate-fuelled disaster unfolds, we should ask ourselves a simple question: how many more times are Australians expected to foot the bill for the damage that has been turbo-charged by oil, gas and coal companies?
The Australia Institute team