As world wakes up to climate realism, ALP peddles con job
We’re told it will opt for a cut of between 65 and 75 per cent. If the Australian public were as committed to emissions austerity as many assert, this would be an occasion for national celebration. But as poll after poll has shown, this is not the case.
While a solid minority of the community are clamouring for larger emissions cuts, a majority either oppose them or have no strong opinion on the matter. If our energy bills weren’t subsidised, the public view would be even more hostile.
The government is acutely aware of the inch-deep support for its climate crusade. That is why it published its national climate risk assessment (and national adaptation plan) on Monday. This document purports to be a sober, expert analysis, but its goal is to frighten the daylights out of the community, softening them up for further climate policy pain.
It is straight out of the discredited playbook we saw during the pandemic and in the lead-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, where risks were catastrophised to justify highly contentious, pre-cooked policy strategies, which in retrospect did not stand up to critical scrutiny.
According to Energy Minister Chris Bowen, the assessment finds climate risks “will be cascading, compounding and concurrent”, with floods, cyclones, heatwaves, droughts and bushfires to occur “more frequently, more severely and often at the same time”.
To add local colour to this dystopian vision, Bowen even provides a collection of case studies.
In a warming planet, where temperatures are 3C higher, we’re told the number of “severe and extreme” heatwaves in western Sydney will more than triple; the Victorian wheatbelt could be in drought for two years in every decade; and floods will affect the far north Queensland coast for 150 days each year. Tim Flannery must feel vindicated!
Contrast this with the conclusions of an expert study recently published by the US Energy Department, which was co-authored by Steven Koonin, president Barack Obama’s chief climate adviser.
This document, which does not deny human-generated climate change, found “data aggregated over the continental US show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events” and that climate models “provide limited guidance on the climate’s response to rising carbon dioxide levels”.
While Bowen’s disaster porn is bad enough – and will be lapped up by many in the media – it is not the most objectionable feature of his pitch to the public.
After all, it is one thing to exaggerate a risk that everyone accepts needs to be managed, but it is quite another to dupe the public with a three-card trick.
To understand what the government is up to, we need to focus not on the hyperventilated risks, but on the action, we are told, they warrant. There are two types of climate change action: mitigation and adaptation.
The former refers to cutting global emissions, with Australia’s unilateral efforts constituting a small (just over 1 per cent) part of that. The latter refers to the practical steps we can take to minimise the adverse consequences of climate change and other weather events, including flood and bushfire prevention. While climate change adaptation is sensible and commands wide community support, climate change mitigation is highly controversial and immensely costly.
The swifty the government is pulling here is to conflate adaptation and mitigation.
It does this by claiming that, by rationing our emissions, we can reduce our exposure to adverse climate risks, even though – in the absence of the US, China and India taking parallel action – they can have no discernible effect on them.
This blatant lie, which so few are prepared to call out, underpins the government’s whole case for emissions austerity. In his press release on the government’s adaptation strategy, Bowen spells it out in black and white when he says: “Every action we take today towards our goal of net zero by 2050 will help avoid the worst impacts on Australian communities and businesses.”
It won’t and can’t. We are not the world, but a very small part of it. Indeed, by putting the clamps on economic growth and lowering living standards (relative to where they would be otherwise), our policy of cutting emissions is weakening rather than strengthening our defences against future crises, whether economic, military or environmental.
True national resilience requires that we have a flexible, competitive and market-based economy, a lesson we learnt in the 1980s but have since forgotten.
While climate realism is gaining traction in the rest of the world, our government insults the community’s intelligence with its Greta Thunberg-inspired catastrophism and its pretence that Australian emissions austerity – on its own – can alter our climate. Far better to flick the switch to vaudeville, it seems, than to treat Australians as adults.
While this political tactic pays short-term dividends, it eventually backfires. The question is not if, but when. If the federal Coalition is prepared to expose Bowen’s pea-and-thimble tricks, it might be sooner rather than later.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.
This week, the Albanese government will announce its 2035 emissions reduction target. Even though its 2030 target – which requires our emissions to fall by 43 per cent relative to its 2005 level – is proving far more difficult and economically costly to achieve than first thought, it’s expected to lift this by a big margin.