Australia, the oldest and most infertile country in the world, is the worst-performed environmentally. This can be seen both in terms of its high number of extinct marsupial species and today with its extremely high greenhouse gas emissions and laggardly efforts to reduce these.
Popular perception has it that the young, fertile continents - Eurasia, the Americas and New Zealand - can do enough to compensate for Australia’s extremely bad performance. this is wrong, because the scarcity of land in the young, fertile “Enriched World” means that the more it regulates and taxes its population, the more the productive sectors who will birth the next generations will move to or be concentrated in Australia. Ecologically, as Tim Flannery showed in The Future Eaters, Australia can support orders of magnitude smaller populations per unit area than Eurasia or the Americas, owing to its low terrestrial and marine productivity, but fertilisers have made Australian farming the most profitable in the world.
The Enriched World and its peoples bear little responsibility for the present climate and ecological crisis. If it placed severe pressure on Australia for its exceedingly bad performance environmentally - especially where this causes major financial costs abroad - Australia might be forced to make an overdue abandonment of persistently pro-polluter taxation, energy and transport policies for a system that requires all investment to be into the most environmentally-friendly technology. Such moves in Australia would have major flow-on effects abroad: for instance if all Australia’s fossil fuel resources were placed with large protected areas, then the Enriched World would not have the same access to greenhouse-emitting coal.
