We Completely Dominated Saudi Arabia In The Latest Climate Change Performance Rankings
They came 58th. We came 57th. Losers.
On today’s episode of “Yet Another Gentle Reminder Of How We’re All Absolutely Screwed”, the tenth edition of the Climate Change Performance Index has been released, and boy is it something. Released every year by environmental groups Climate Action Network Europe and the confusingly-named Germanwatch, the index measures how much the world’s largest-emitting countries are doing to combat climate change and ranks them accordingly.
Australia, as one might expect, is absolutely killing it, giving those snobby bastards in Saudi Arabia a sweet lesson in how tackling climate change is done. Saudi Arabia (losers) came in at 58th, a rank due to the fact that “the country’s economy still runs almost entirely on hydrocarbon fossil fuel” and the country’s government intends to “free up even more of its oil and gas reserves for export”. Hey, Saudi Arabia! The twentieth century called, it wants its outdated methods of energy production back! Hold on, let me call the Burns Unit to tend to that burn I just burned you with.
So how’d Australia d- oh, we came 57th. So second last. Okay. Cool.
According to the report, “the new conservative Australian government has apparently made good on last year’s announcement and reversed the climate policies previously in effect,” plummeting us from 40th place in 2013 to second last and making us the worst-performing developed country in the world, behind fellow climate scoundrels Canada and five of the world’s top ten emitting nations — Brazil, Japan, Korea, Russia and Canada — that are still languishing in low spots. The rankings, which you can see here, put such powerhouses as Algeria, Belarus, Iran, Turkey and Chinese Taipei ahead of Australia, because why would people living on the flattest, hottest, driest inhabited continent on Earth worry about the world getting hotter and drier and the sea levels rising *slams head repeatedly in a desk drawer*.
Despite our grim prognosis, the report notes some positive developments which could be optimistically read as “progress”. While no nation is yet doing enough (the top three spots are actually left empty), European nations like Britain, Denmark and France are going relatively gangbusters in their climate mitigation efforts, and will soon be earning the coveted and as-yet unattained “very good” ranking. China and the US have moved up to 44 and 45 respectively, which is at least progress from their bottom-five positions two years ago.
The rankings come as political leaders meet in Lima, Peru for preliminary talks leading up to the much-feted Paris 2015 climate change conference, which hopefully will be the last time we all get together to say “so climate change hey, gee, what a puzzler” before pissing off and not doing anything. Our delegation to the conference consists of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who had to go over Tony Abbott’s head to even be allowed to attend in the first place, and Trade Minister Andrew Robb, the guy whose climate-change-denying stance was instrumental in bringing down the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull in 2009 and whose mess we’ll be cleaning up a good 25 years after he’s dead.
Here’s a map of the CCPI-ranked countries in aesthetically-pleasing map form. Note all the soothing red.
