Opinion
Climate change

The Liberal party’s biggest con was the idea that reducing emissions could be done without pain and at little cost

This week came the news from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that we are screwed. I wish I could be more optimistic. I wish I could hold out some hope that things are about to improve. But I look at actions by governments around the world, and the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments, and I find the ability to retain a positive outlook smothered in the face of feckless indifference and wilful ignorance.
The IPCC report is not actually, as some would have you think, a prophecy of doom – it is a call for action. Rather than talking of what will happen if the planet warms by 2C above industrial levels, its focus is on how much lower the risks are if we limit it to 1.5C.
And the good news is this can actually be done.
The bad news is we need to do it by 2030 and it is going to cost, on average, about US$2.4tn every year until 2035 – equivalent to 2.5% of the world GDP.
For Australia, that translates to around $46bn – the same amount the government spends on the aged pension. Even if we argue that as we only contribute about 1% of total global emissions we should only contribute 1% of the US$2.4tn cost, we are chipping in $33bn a year in Australian dollars – or equivalent to the combined amount spent this year on the NDIS, Newstart and the childcare subsidy.
But keeping temperatures at 1.5C reduces the risk of, for example, all of the Great Barrier Reef dying (we’re still likely to lose 70% to 90%). Our farmers would certainly notice the difference as the reports suggests that biome shifts in Australia (which would see our arid, temperate and tropical regions shift) “would be avoided by constraining warming to 1.5C as compared with 2C”.
In a pure dollars sense, the report notes that “the economic damage in the United States from climate change” is around 1.2% of GDP per 1C increase.
So it is pretty clear that limiting the temperature rise to 1.5C is worth it. The problem is it is harder to achieve. It requires, for example, reducing emissions to zero by 2050 rather than 2075.
And that is tough to do, especially when you have governments like our own that are already fudging their ability to reduce emissions by much lower amounts than what would be required.
As we saw earlier this month, the government tried its best to hide the latest greenhouse gas emissions data and, since then, has done nothing but try to con voters that all is well.
On Monday, the environment minister, Melissa Price, in an excruciating interview on the ABC’s AM program, refused to say she thought the IPCC report was reliable and boasted that “emissions per capita were at their lowest level in 28 years”.
This was repeated by the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, who took it further by bragging that “what we’ve done on climate is seen that emissions on a per capita and GDP basis have come down to their lowest level in 28 years. That’s the record.”

"The reality of the IPCC report is that we can limit the damage from climate change but it is going to be hard and it is going to be expensive."

Every government every year since 1990 has been able to say that emissions per GDP are at their lowest level – they haven’t gone up once! Bragging about having reduced emissions per GDP is like boasting that today you are the oldest you have ever been.
Reducing emissions per capita (or per GDP) has never been the issue. The only reason people look at that figure (as I did a few years back) is to compare it across nations to contrast greenhouse gas dependency and efficiency.
In 2016, Australia had the fifth-highest total emissions in the OECD – behind the US, Japan, Germany and Canada. But, on a per capita basis, guess what? We’re No 1.
So if Frydenberg, Price and the prime minister want to talk about emissions per capita, talk about that. Or maybe they can brag about the fact that in 2014 our emissions per capita were 5.5% higher than that of the US but in 2016 they were 12.6% higher.
The problem is our government, like the Trump White House and Republican party in the US, consists of two types of people – climate change deniers who are so ignorant they truly do think it is all a UN hoax and those who are willing to enable the deniers for political gain.
A choice between the ignorant and the feckless.
And it really doesn’t matter which category the prime minster, treasurer or environment minister are in, the end result is the same – climate change policy cons that will not deliver what they say they will.
Take the prime minister’s line that we will reach our Paris targets “in a canter”. How, pray tell, will we do this? Well, he told ABC’s Sabra Lane that “this is the advice that we’re working through as a government. But what it’s based on also is we’ve crossed a threshold point, Sabra. No longer in order to see large investment in renewable technologies do you need these heavy subsidies, because it’s now making economic sense all on its own.”
In other words, he would have us believe that nothing more needs to be done, it will all happen because of market forces. Even more laughably, Morrison suggested that we would meet our commitments because “we’ve still got the small-scale RET and the large-scale RET programs, they remain in place”.
Yes they remain in place but, as the minister for energy, Angus Taylor, recently told parliament, “the truth of the matter is that the renewable energy target is going to wind down from 2020. The target reaches a peak in 2020 and we will not be replacing that with anything.”
But, you know, trust him! Morrison “believes” that “we’re going to meet those targets comfortably”. Faith can move mountains and now apparently also reduce emissions.
The reality of the IPCC report is that we can limit the damage from climate change but it is going to be hard and it is going to be expensive.
That has always been the biggest con from the Liberal party since Tony Abbott took over – the suggestion that reducing emissions can be done without any pain and little cost.
If that were the case, no one would be worrying about it – it would have already have been done. But the con artist always tries to sell the line that the difficult can be done with ease – just trust him, you can get something for nothing. And all the while something nags you, because you think it sounds too good to be true – and it is.
The IPCC report makes clear that this government’s con job on climate change must stop, and that not only is the time running out to do something about emissions but that the time to put up with climate-change deniers and their enablers in governments around the world is over.
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