A critique of the FoE Environment and population position paper

Dr Clive Hamilton
Executive Director
The Australia Institute

Dear Cam

I was disappointed to read your report "Population, Immigration and the Environment". Your arguments were in places factually incorrect and favoured assertion over evidence, and some of these were evident in your criticism of the paper prepared by The Australia Institute on the implications of differing levels of immigration for the growth of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

First, let me say that I make a clear distinction between economic immigrants and humanitarian immigrants and that I have always argued that Australia should adopt an open and generous policy to asylum seekers. I say this even if accepting large numbers of asylum seekers were to result in additional environmental damage as I believe that we must balance our concern for the environment with our commitment to a compassionate society. Like other progressive people I have been appalled at the vilification of asylum seekers by the Howard Government.

I am perfectly willing to accept that more economic immigrants could be of benefit to Australia, taking account of the range of impacts, and believe that, overall, post-war immigration was excellent for Australia. However, I believe that taking account of the various impacts we should not have high levels of economic immigration, and the environmental arguments are an important part of that assessment.

Your paper makes no distinction between types of migrants and you are left arguing that any form of immigration in any numbers is good for humanitarian reasons (does this go for white racists fleeing South Africa?)

Because of this undiscerning position your paper takes the view that migration cannot worsen environmental impacts and to sustain this it ignores the evidence to the contrary. So instead of considering the evidence that we carefully put forward in our report about the expected impacts on greenhouse emissions of different rates of immigration your paper just makes unsubstantiated assertions that the environment will be unaffected no matter what the population growth of Australia. This is just plain wrong. The paper ends up repeating the argument of the Government and the fossil fuel industries that "much of the resources extracted in Australia ... are exported overseas and hence are effectively independent of population levels". when you look at the numbers (as we did in our paper) domestic consumption is responsible for the great majority of Australia's emisisons (eg. electricity consumption by households and firms in the services sector plus transport - all domestic).

You say that environmentalists should avoid arguments that might play into the hands of racists. Quite so, and we should also avoid arguments that play into the hands of the fossil fuel lobby. But in the end one cannot control what other people do with your arguments, and the position we put in our paper was based strictly on the very careful modeling we carried out.

The paper states that "to argue that immigrants are a potential source of environmental degradation is simply a form of scapegoating, which deflects attention from the real problems". According to this view, no one is allowed to examine the issue or collect evidence on the relationship between immigration and environment because any argument, no matter what its basis, is just a form of scapegoating.

This looks like an argument designed to silence people with a different view by attributing nefarious motives to them. "Please don't bother with the evidence, if you don't agree with us then you must be a racist."  That sort of posturing does not advance the debate.
Incidentally, in your paper you used The Australia Institute's data on per capita emissions without giving acknowledgement. Note that our figures show Australia has the highest per capita emissions in the industrialised world.

I would be grateful if you would circulate this response to those on your mailing list.

Sincerely
Clive Hamilton
 
 
 
 

Dr Clive Hamilton
Executive Director
The Australia Institute
Garden Wing, University House
Australian National University, ACT  0200
Tel: 02 6249 6221 Fax: 02 6249 6448
Email: exec@tai.org.au