Public opinion is shifting the ground under Trump, Abbott and the coal club

Extract from The Guardian

Peter Lewis

Trump’s rebuff of global climate action is right out of the coal club playbook, and reminds Australians of the ‘axe the tax’ Abbott campaign

‘Four years on from Tony Abbott’s climate retreat, wholesale power prices have doubled anyway, business is crying out for a coherent policy … and public mood has shifted.’ Photograph: Hamish Blair/Getty Images

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Tuesday 6 June 2017 12.51 AEST

For Australians, Donald Trump’s climate retreat is a case of “deja vu all over again”, a leader walking away from his responsibilities in a toxic cloud of self-serving populist fervour.
Trump’s rebuff of global climate action is right out of the coal club’s playbook – dismiss the science, complain that other countries will get a better deal, build fear around jobs, prices and industry to resist change.
We endured a similar set of rationalisations when we experienced our own populist moment when the Abbott government generated fear and loathing around the Gillard government’s market mechanism.

Of course, the impact of the US isolationism is on a far grander scale. The Coalition, to its credit, has not walked away from the Paris agreement, but the justifications are eerily familiar because they were created by the same vested interests.
The coal club may know the long-term game is up, but is in a desperate last-ditch battle to give itself another 30 years of profits by locking in new coal-fired generation around the globe.

Its members stalk the halls of power to spread three conceits: the science is not conclusive; that supply cannot be secure without coal and that prices will rise at unacceptable levels if meaningful action is taken.
The drum is still being banged in Australia, with the recent confected panic over South Australian renewables a textbook study in opportunism.
But four years on from Tony Abbott’s climate retreat, wholesale power prices have doubled anyway, business is crying out for a coherent policy, the government is desperate to contrive a plausibly deniable market mechanism and the public mood has shifted.
As we reported last week – acceptance of climate science is at its highest level in Australia since we started polling the issue nearly a decade ago.
And that’s not all of it: four times as many of us say Australia is not doing enough as opposed to doing too much to address climate change.

This shift in public perception has been driven by a range of factors: the lived experience of extreme weather events; exciting advances in renewable technology, most notably batteries; and the global consensus that Trump is now challenging.
But there are other factors since our populist moment that have changed up the game as well, most notably the campaign around the Great Barrier Reef (which Essential has been proud to work on).
The Fight for the Reef campaign was designed in 2014 to highlight the effects of industrialisation on the reef, the coal ships that would take their loads over pristine waters and then threaten the reef all over again when its consumption contributed to raising water temperatures that would bleach the coral.
One of the key strategies of this campaign was to build on a recurring insight – when people are asked to choose between the environment and the economy they split along predictable lines (left-right, blue collar-white collar); but when they are given propositions that align a healthy environment with a healthy economy they unite.

The reef campaign has been all about giving the Queensland tourism industry – which employs upwards of 60,000 people – a voice in the climate debate. Unlike the coal club, these are small fragmented industries – dive schools, small hotels and B&Bs, a whole ecosystem of small businesses that drive regional and national economic growth.
But even as US senator and maybe-Trump tamer John McCain was last week bemoaning the impending death of the reef as one of the “great tragedies of our time”, the Queensland government was under pressure to support the Adani coalmine with taxpayer dollars.
Back to the old coal club playbook, the arguments are all around jobs, but responses to this week’s Essential Report shows how the reframing of the jobs issue has taken hold on the reef.

When the interests of tourism workers and the jobs of those in coal industry are lined up, far more would opt to prioritise tourism. This result would not have been possible four years ago. Sustained, strategic advocacy has shifted the debate from the knee-jerk to the nuanced.
A similar dynamic is at play in Australia around power prices.

Where cost was the reference point in the days of “axe the tax”, just 28% of respondents now see this as the main game.
Our views are fragmented, but they indicate that the public has come to accept that energy transition will be about balance and priorities rather than false choices and slogans.
Trump’s Paris withdrawal will be one of the defining decisions of a presidency that is already hurtling out of control.
For Americans and for the rest of the world, the Australian experience might provide hope that such moments of populist madness can be transcended; that when the stakes are this high, such decisions will not go unchallenged