Henry doubts humans can save their environment | The Australian

Treasury secretary Ken Henry questions the "mental competence" of the human species to rationally deal with environmental degradation.

The rationalist Productivity Commission yesterday found that too much taxpayers' money -- nearly $9 billion -- has been earmarked to wean irrigators off the excess water they have drained from Australia's biggest river system. Economists typically blame global warming, extinction of species and over-exploitation of natural resources on free-riders.

Because no one owns clean air, people over-pollute, producing the "tragedy of the commons". The billion-dollar water buybacks and irrigator infrastructure handouts are designed to politically buy off irrigators for being given their water property rights too cheaply.

But Henry goes much further in suggesting that "homo economicus" is too often "irrational and emotional" in assessing the costs of environmental damage.

Disinclined to suffer fools, he says the human brain is "primitive". It has produced Australia's "shameful" record on a host of environmental issues, from the culling of kangaroos to dustbowl over-grazing of sheep to the excess siphoning of water from the Murray-Darling.

"Frankly, it's time we stopped kidding ourselves," says the Rudd government's chief economic adviser. Henry attracted attention when he used his annual leave to help revive a threatened colony. But last weekend he was speaking as patron of the Weereewa festival of Lake George, the often dry lake that people driving from Sydney skirt just before entering Canberra. For Henry, the economics of the environment taps into his childhood experiences. The north coast NSW dairy farm his parents share-farmed went bust in the early 1960s drought, forcing his father to return to cutting railway sleepers. Even at primary school, Henry was troubled by how his social studies teachers placed man at the centre of environmental issues. At the same time, he saw trees on his grandfather's 260ha block of rainforest replaced by bracken fern and lantana, while soil washed into creeks where native fish had been exploited to extinction.

The problem was that Henry's grandfather was told he would have to return his soldier settlement block to the Crown if he failed to clear the rainforest by a certain amount each year.....

WHAT KIND OF ADVICE IS THAT?

Henry doubts humans can save their environment The Australian