Mark Kenny | Intergenerational Report's warning on lost productivity a side-issue in climate crisis

Like the mix of shock and inevitability after leaving the mortgage unpaid for months. You know where it ends. Suddenly one morning the bank is at the door. Foreclosure, eviction, bankruptcy - all of it, right now and non-negotiable.

This is how humanity should feel as Greece became the latest country to experience its worst wildfire emergency on record, following infernos in Spain, Portugal, Canada, the US, Australia, and on it goes. Just last year, a third of Pakistan was submerged causing colossal loss of life, the worst flood globally since the south Asian floods became the costliest natural disaster in modern history, only two years before.

Last week, southern California copped its most severe tropical storm since September 25, 1939. The state's Death Valley National Park received its annual rainfall in a day - breaking a record set just the previous year.

In May it was the Emilia-Romagna region which received six months' rain in one go - Italy's worst flooding in a century. These instalments of cumulative disaster are coming so fast now it is hard to keep up.

But that gut-punch? It was the story that countless thousands of emperor penguin chicks had perished when the sea ice on which they were born broke up too early amid warmer conditions. Still carrying their downy feathers, the juveniles drowned. Or froze.

Four of five colonies - basically a whole generation - in an area called the Bellingshausen Sea, wiped out in a "catastrophic breeding failure". It is utterly sickening.

The cruellest of ironies is that the Antarctic Peninsula is so remote that these birds may never have seen humans. Yet we've killed them as surely as if we'd formed a shooting party. Bankruptcy is right, moral bankruptcy.

But what about self-interest? Surely that can be relied on?

Wild weather events fed by global heating are a clear and present danger to nation states, food security, social cohesion, insurable risk, and economic function. Of course, we already know this.

Yet that knowledge did not stop us wasting crucial decades treating the problem variously as a myth, and an arena for advantage taking. We would make any necessary adjustments at some later point, without pain or sacrifice. It is not just politicians who think this way. Take a look at the roads. Cars are bigger and heavier than ever. It is everyone's over-consumption but our own.

Nobody in the major parties addresses this rapacious exceptionalism because there are no votes in such truths. Governments tinker. The Intergenerational Report released on Thursday lists global heating - "changes in temperature, precipitation and natural hazards" - as a serious risk to future prosperity and productivity but rather too eagerly pivots to the opportunities and competitive advantages Australia enjoys. It is as if global heating were not "global".

There are some frank admissions though: "Floods, bushfires and other extreme weather events are expected to increase in frequency and severity, causing major disruptions to local economic activity and ultimately hindering overall economic output. From 1960 to 2018, climate disasters reduced annual labour productivity in the year they occurred by about 0.5 per cent in advanced economies.

However, for severe climate disasters labour productivity is estimated to be around 7 per cent lower after three years".

This is among the reasons why projected growth has been wound down from previous intergenerational reports and the rate of personal wealth accumulation with it. Earlier reports projected a near doubling of living standards over 40 years, whereas this one has improvement closer to half.

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Traumatised by its previous climate war losses, Labor has crafted a workable political position on emissions but it falls short of what the physics demands.

"We're not moving fast enough" said economist and former Treasury secretary Ken Henry who helped write previous intergenerational reports and laments that Australia had led the world with the best climate policy before the Abbott government dismantled it.

Now it is among the worst policy responses in the democratic world, he says.

Henry wants a new mindset of urgency with policy defaulting to a "nature positive" outcome rather than the "nature negative" stance taken to date.

That would include rules that do not merely limit the extent of environmental damage, but which mandate net gains in habitat restoration, revived biodiversity, and species recovery. But Henry says we need to get serious.

"The new Labor government has ambition in this space but the instruments that they are working with to try to address climate change in Australia are a set of instruments that nobody in their right mind would apply to a challenge of this enormity".

How big? In lost labour productivity from unsafe heat and associated calamity, the Intergenerational Report floats gargantuan figures climbing as high as $423 billion over four decades.

"If global temperatures were to increase by up to three, or over 4, degrees Celsius, without adaptive changes to current ways of working, Australia's aggregate labour productivity levels could decrease by 0.2 to 0.8 per cent by 2063."

This must surely be an underestimation.

Mind you, at that level of heating, labour productivity becomes a side-issue. The world would have cooked.

No habitat anywhere would remain unchanged. Emperor penguins will be long gone. Foreclosure, eviction, bankruptcy. This time on global scale. And permanent.