The program showcased the simplistic, incurious and deceptive way the ABC covers climate change. It opened with horrific bushfire vision accompanied by dramatic music to exploit our Black Summer’s tenuous link to global warming.
Reporter Michael Brissenden noted it was “one of the longest and most widespread fire seasons in our history” without, apparently, pondering the significance of the words “one of”, before then adding it was “fuelled by a changing climate”.
“What climate policy? It’s incoherent and has been for a decade.†The story of how brutal politics derailed climate policy in Australia. ‘Climate Wars’ is next on #4Corners pic.twitter.com/ANf4MeDEZa
— Sally Neighbour (@neighbour_s) May 14, 2020
Still, the program made no attempt to interrogate scientific issues beyond Brissenden’s laughable insistence that this year will be a climate “tipping point”.
How many of them have we had now?
The program recounted the history of what it called the nation’s climate policy over the past decade or so. In fact, it examined machinations around attempts to implement an emissions trading scheme. Despite crucial errors of omission — such as not mentioning how the destruction of global consensus at Copenhagen in 2009 changed the national mood and policy imperative — it did a reasonable job of retelling this history. Critical of the Greens for voting down Kevin Rudd’s emissions scheme, it did not make enough of Rudd’s cowardice in not taking it to a double-dissolution election.
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But the central premise of the program — that the inability to entrench an ETS was a national failure — was never demonstrated. “What climate policy?” mused Martin Parkinson, who headed the departments of Climate Change, Treasury and Prime Minister and Cabinet. “I mean, it’s basically … a mess. It’s incoherent and has been for a decade.”
Up to a point he is correct, although it is far from clear whether this has been detrimental.
Four Corners was not interested in that debate. Its starting assumption was that a price on carbon is a “reform” we need. The program ignored significant areas of bipartisan climate policy consensus. Australia signed the Kyoto Protocol, eventually ratified it and met its emissions reduction targets (one of only 36 nations to do so), while also introducing, implementing and expanding the renewable energy target, and then ratifying the Paris climate agreement and a new emissions target of at least 26 per cent by 2030.
These are not small developments. Surely they demand consideration in any climate policy assessment. Four Corners also ignored the actual outcomes. If you argue it is a monumental failure not to have an ETS to cut emissions, then surely an examination of emissions is mandatory.
“Australia’s emissions for the year to September 2019 have declined 15.4 per cent since the peak in the year to June 2007 and were 1.0 per cent below emissions in 2000 and 13.1 per cent below emissions in 2005,” says the latest National Greenhouse Inventory.
“In the year to September 2019, emissions per capita and the emissions intensity of the economy were at their lowest levels in 29 years,” the inventory adds.
Tonight at 8.30. Climate Wars by @m_brisso. https://t.co/wFSb1CdmMv
— 4corners (@4corners) May 18, 2020
It betrays much about the ABC agenda that none of this was examined. Four Corners and the ABC view the imposition of a price on carbon as an end in itself. “We have failed, no doubt about that … we’ve all failed … I still feel gutted,” lamented another former Treasury secretary, Ken Henry. “The reason I feel angry about it is that I feel angry about what Australia has lost.” But Four Corners failed to consider what Australia lost.
We know we are one of relatively few nations that has met its global undertakings and reduced emissions. We also know — although, in perhaps its gravest omission, this was never mentioned by Four Corners — that global greenhouse emissions have grown dramatically over the past decade.
In other words, we have lost nothing, certainly environmentally, and probably economically.
If a global consensus emerges, we have time to adjust our policies; and if, as some argue, we need deeper reductions, they will hardly matter until global emissions stop growing.
Despite these realities, Four Corners and the ABC insinuate a big lie: that Australian inaction can and has had an impact on our climate. This is an illogical and scientifically unsustainable proposition, yet it is repeatedly made as natural disasters are appropriated into an ideological and partisan campaign for a price on carbon.
"It's been coming. We've been told.......yet somehow for some reason, our political class is incapable of grappling with this." @4corners https://t.co/IApvpOCaoa
— michael brissenden (@m_brisso) May 18, 2020
Four Corners also raised tired old media conspiracies, allowing Malcolm Turnbull to again portray himself as a climate martyr at the hands of News Corp and others. Brissenden put Julia Gillard’s demise down to the same nonsense: “Gillard was punished by some sections of the media and slumped badly in the polls.”
With no mention of how Gillard lost control of Australia’s borders and finances, Four Corners went with the pretence that she suffered only from the Coalition unfairly labelling her carbon price as a tax. This omits the pertinent fact that it was Gillard herself who did that — on the ABC. “With this carbon tax, you do concede it’s a carbon tax, do you not?” asked Heather Ewart on 7.30 in February 2011. “Oh look, I’m happy to use the word tax, Heather,” she said.
It was a staggering and costly political error. An own goal that opened up Gillard and Labor to a fierce political attack from Tony Abbott for the next two years.
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The internal ABC emails detailed in this column last Monday demonstrated the organisation’s obsession with climate change, as well as some of the ignorance around the topic. That night, the national broadcaster’s premier current affairs program, Four Corners, amplified these faults.