How to transition to zero emissions is daunting – but the answer is not to put up a white flag
This week was a pretty big one for climate change, the drought and the ALP, and they were all somewhat intertwined.
On Wednesday an article published in the journal BioScience, co-signed by 11,000 scientists, warned “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency”.
The authors noted that, despite 40 years of solid scientific research pointing to the dangers of climate change, “greenhouse gas emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth’s climate”, and that “an immense increase of scale in endeavours to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis.”
This of course is pretty horrific news but at least there was some
good news here in Australia, because the next day, for the first time
ever, the national energy market produced more than half of its electricity via renewable sources.On Wednesday an article published in the journal BioScience, co-signed by 11,000 scientists, warned “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency”.
The authors noted that, despite 40 years of solid scientific research pointing to the dangers of climate change, “greenhouse gas emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth’s climate”, and that “an immense increase of scale in endeavours to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis.”
Of course no one in the government thought it worthy of celebrating or even mentioning – mostly because it happened in spite of the government’s policies, not because of them.
And it is possible to come up with effective national, bipartisan policy on climate change.
We saw it this week when on Thursday New Zealand passed legislation committing the nation to achieving zero net carbon emission by 2050.
That same day our Department of Agriculture released a report into droughts by the coordinator-general for drought, Major General Stephen Day. It was pretty upfront about what is happening.
The fourth paragraph of the forward stated: “As a consequence of climate change, drought is likely to be longer and more severe in some regions and over broader areas. It means that farmers and communities in some regions are likely to see drought more often”.
And just in case you needed it underlined, it continued: “ultimately, the nation could see some areas of Australia become more marginal and/or unproductive”.
That very same day (it really was a busy Thursday) the prime minister and the leader of the Nationals released the government’s drought package. At no stage during the press conference was climate change raised once. That was despite Day’s report finding “climate change, and the increased frequency and severity of drought in some regions, is considered the most serious threat to land management”.
And just to top it all off, also released that same day was the ALP’s review into its election loss, in which the politics of climate-change policy was given a very strong focus.
This in effect is politics in Australia – the LNP is at best expected to pretend to look like it cares, while receiving barely any heat for doing nothing, while the ALP is expected to actually come up with a real policy and at the same time receive all the heat for attempting to do something.
Last week Katharine Murphy and Adam Morton revealed the government had quietly appointed an expert panel to come up with a climate change policy that will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
It would be nice to have some hope that this might actually lead to a policy that does something substantial, but watching LNP climate change policy over the past 30 years forces one to assume the result will be a policy that looks like the government is doing something while in reality it is just another lie that somehow greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced without any economic pain to anyone.
Meanwhile the ALP report noted that the Coalition sought to “assert Labor’s climate change policy was not costed”. And that “Labor’s inability to respond effectively played into the Coalition’s characterisation of Labor as a risk”.
This is true to an extent. The assertion that it was not costed was false, but the reality was the media in large parts fell for the Liberal party line. And the reason they fell for it was an underlying assumption that we could (nay, should!) somehow compare the costs of a 45% cut in emissions as recommended by scientists with the cost of a 24% cut in emissions which once carryover credits were included was really closer to a 15% cut.
It meant that the ALP needed (and as the report noted, largely failed) to “effectively discuss the cost of not acting on climate change.”
This is hard enough to do alone, it is nigh on impossible when few in the media are bothering to challenge the LNP with those costs as well.
Instead we remain trapped in a cycle where we find yet another drought assistance package presented all the while the government’s own documents state climate change will cause more of them.
And it means we’re trapped in a cycle where effectively promising to keep doing the short-term response indefinitely is viewed as a long-term policy.
Murphy was right to note that the crucial element of the ALP’s review is squaring the often countervailing forces of traditional blue-collar workers and wealthier inner-city-dwelling progressives.
The answer is not to put up the white flag on climate change, and the report makes that clear, noting: “a modern Labor party cannot deny or neglect human-induced climate change. To do so would be wrong, it would cause enormous internal instability and it would be a massive electoral liability”.
It also notes the need to focus on the employment and economic positives of the change.
This is absolutely a must.
The transition to zero emissions will be tough – if it wasn’t we would already have done it. But it needs to be enticing, exciting and desired.
The US Democratic party has its Green New Deal, and the UK Labour under Corbyn has very much linked the switch to renewables with jobs.
It really is a no-brainer for Australia to be a world leader in renewable production and technology.
Anthony Albanese has rightly set off on this path – his speech in Perth a week ago made this a key issue. But it will need more than just a few speeches. It is going to need a policy and a campaign that inspires people, because that is what great progressive policy does.
And as with other progressive policies such as Medicare it also shames the conservatives into supporting it.
This will be tough because, as we have long seen, the conservatives in this country have no shame when it comes to ignoring climate change. But it needs to be done.
• Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia
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