The cabal of Coalition denialists calling the shots are still impervious to facts. But it’s not yet time to despair
It’s time to face a dreadful truth. If this bushfire crisis, this nation-wide trauma, can’t loosen the denialists’ grip on Coalition climate policy, then maybe nothing will.
That would mean everyone sifting through Scott Morrison’s verbiage for signs that he might really be intending to change direction is searching in vain, because he’s just trying to talk himself out of political trouble.
It would mean everyone patiently pointing out that the prime minister could quite easily “evolve” his current policies into something that actually reduced Australia’s greenhouse emissions could save their breath, because that isn’t the kind of evolution he is considering.
And it would mean there’s no point reprising the facts, that Australia’s emissions are flatlining, not falling, that we could seize an economic advantage in a low-carbon world and at the same time help the globe avoid the all too obvious costs of inaction. The Coalition cabal who apparently still call the shots thinks climate science is “voodoo”. They’re impervious to facts. They are already threatening, via anonymous quotes to the Australian, to “blow the place up”. Again. Just like they’ve been blowing up national climate action for more than a decade.
And as this week’s Guardian Essential poll showed,
despite the widespread sense that the fires are a tipping point,
despite global outrage at the self-defeating stupidity of our policies, despite the world’s largest fund manager ditching thermal coal,
despite the wave of grief and anger from around the world – even from
James Murdoch – it’s still not clear that Australian public opinion will
force this government to change.That would mean everyone sifting through Scott Morrison’s verbiage for signs that he might really be intending to change direction is searching in vain, because he’s just trying to talk himself out of political trouble.
It would mean everyone patiently pointing out that the prime minister could quite easily “evolve” his current policies into something that actually reduced Australia’s greenhouse emissions could save their breath, because that isn’t the kind of evolution he is considering.
And it would mean there’s no point reprising the facts, that Australia’s emissions are flatlining, not falling, that we could seize an economic advantage in a low-carbon world and at the same time help the globe avoid the all too obvious costs of inaction. The Coalition cabal who apparently still call the shots thinks climate science is “voodoo”. They’re impervious to facts. They are already threatening, via anonymous quotes to the Australian, to “blow the place up”. Again. Just like they’ve been blowing up national climate action for more than a decade.
Sure, Morrison’s mishandling of this crisis has cost him. His overall approval ratings have dived but his numbers have held fairly steady in his base. The strategists – who always pay more heed to those numbers than to other benchmarks, like, say, a country in ashes – no doubt believe that, with enough confusing obfuscation about “meeting and beating” targets, enough revising of the figures, enough serious practical efforts to help burnt-out communities, and just enough rhetoric conceding the reality of global heating, all will be well in time, without promising to do anything about it. All will be well for the poll numbers that is. Not for the nation.
This is not, repeat not, an argument for abandoning the arguments in favour of climate action. It is not a counsel to cop out in despair. The federal government has a responsibility to the country, and to its international commitments, to enact policies to reduce Australia’s emissions to net zero by 2050. That job gets harder the longer it delays. Every concerned citizen, and every frustrated investor, and every heartbroken lover of Australian nature, and every worried parent or grandparent, and every justifiably furious child should maintain that rage.
But we are also running out of time. So perhaps we should simultaneously consider a plan B – solutions that bypass the federal government. Not ideal, but needs must.
Maybe the many Liberals who understand climate science will persuade Morrison to act. Maybe the majority of federal politicians across all parties will take the former Labor minister Greg Combet’s advice and unite on this one issue, in the national interest. Maybe they will support the bill introduced by the independent Zali Steggall.
Many of the drivers of greenhouse emissions are actually the responsibility of the states – urban transport, land use, electricity generation and transmission. And most of the states have already accepted that emissions need to reach net zero by 2050 and are in the process of deciding on interim targets and policies to meet them.
If they collaborated, the states could go a long way to enacting the Turnbull government’s national energy guarantee – the one that Morrison as treasurer whole-heartedly supported – and which also had the support of Australian business and pretty much every stakeholder.
After Morrison overthrew Malcolm Turnbull and ditched the Neg, the Business Council of Australia, desperate for someone to do something, was actually canvassing how companies could “go it alone” , agree on on framework to just start getting on with it, and that idea is still under discussion in business circles.
A bunch of billionaires are backing massive renewable energy export policies despite the lack of a coherent climate and energy policy.
It would obviously be better for the federal government to fulfil its responsibilities, to do its job, but maybe it’s time to concede that may never happen, and for the states, and the business community, to look for ways to work around it.
We’ve actually been in this position before.
In the late 2000s, despairing in the face of an intransigent Howard government, the New South Wales government introduced one of the world’s first mandatory greenhouse emission trading schemes and the premiers set up a taskforce to collaborate on turning it into a national system.
But then, trailing in the polls and watching community concern mount as the millennial drought dragged on, John Howard dramatically reversed his government’s long-standing sceptical stance and, in June 2007, announced details of a carbon trading scheme he would introduce if re-elected. “Being among the first movers on carbon trading in this region will present new opportunities for Australia. And we intend to grasp them,” he said, and many people believed him.
But, long out of office, in 2013 he admitted his shift had been purely opportunistic. His government had hit a “perfect storm”, because of the drought, the ground-breaking report by Sir Nicholas Stern and the Inconvenient Truth movie by the former US vice-president Al Gore, but he didn’t really think there was anything “significant” or “damaging” about greenhouse emissions, and concern about global warming was really just a “substitute religion”.
As we know, Labor won the 2007 election and eventually, after much political pain, introduced a carbon price, at which point the NSW government closed its scheme, but then the Abbott government repealed the carbon price (it called it a tax, although Tony Abbott’s chief of staff later admitted this was just another piece of political opportunism) and replaced it with, well, with nothing much at all. And that’s where we sit, stalled, as the climate emergency happens around us.
Maybe, under the current political pressure, something will give. But we’ve been fooled before and there’s no time to be fooled again. So that means it’s time to think of ways around the federal Coalition’s intransigence, because those deniers will never be swayed, and we can’t allow them to dictate our future.
- Lenore Taylor is editor of Guardian Australia
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