Out to slay a coal-fired dragon

No matter what you offer the zealots, you can bet they’ll want more. No sooner have you reached the foot of the mountain waving the goat’s severed head than they’ll tell you it was actually the ele­phant that should be slaughtered.

We should have known that the death of three coal-fired power stations was never going to be enough. Now they’re baying for the sacrifice of the other 18.

Labor wants to meet the zealots somewhere in the middle. Its proposed 2030 emissions reduct­ion target of 45 per cent will place a dozen or so coal generators on the altar.

In the process, Labor’s policy will rip a $472 billion hole in the economy, require the forfeiture of 336,000 jobs and prune wages by 8 per cent, according to independent modelling by economist Brian Fisher.

It is a safe bet that it won’t stop the finger-wagging, however. The long arc of the moral universe ­requires constant bending. There will be another crusade on which to embark, another wrong that must be righted and another testing fire to separate the righteous from the damned.

Forget Left and Right — Australian politics in 2019 is a contest ­between problem-solvers and dragon-slayers. On one side are those with a list of practical policy tasks to which they will apply themselves in government, mindful that politics is the art of the possible. On the other side are those whose commitment to the moral crusade du jour brooks no compromise, regardless of practical obstacles along the way.

The art of the possible played little part in setting Labor’s target. There was no serious attempt to examine its cost, let alone if it was a cost Australia can afford.

Labor’s excuse that a shift to ­renewable energy is cheaper is economic hogwash. The claim is based on the marginal cost of generation at the wind farm gate less the cost of intermittency.

Fisher, on the other hand, calculates the cost of abatement, which includes capital investment, the cost of backup, transmission, decommissioning and a whole lot more.

If a 0.6 per cent reduction in annual GDP growth sounds high, it’s because Labor has set itself the task of abating the best part of a billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in a short space of time.

A billion tonnes, or more precisely 949 Mt, is the amount that would spew from a Holden Commodore if you drove it for 4.3 quadrillion kilometres or half a light-year. It is three times the combined annual output of Australia’s 26 million cows or the amount generated by the manufacture of 21 million bags of cement. More saliently perhaps, it is three times the volume Australia is committed to abate under the Paris Agreement.

Under Labor, in other words, Australians will carry their share of the load and then some, while many of our international competitors will manage to shirk it.

The Coalition’s 27 per cent ­reduction target is a third as high as Labor’s, requiring the abatement of a relatively paltry 328 Mt. It will be enough to meet our international commitments with the added bonus of not wrecking the economy.

Fisher’s forecasts are just modelling, of course, and modelling can be wrong, as a commentator in The Guardian dismissively proclaimed last week. But then it was modelling forecasts that sent us scurrying down the path to a low-carbon economy in the first place.

Economic modelling on this scale is complicated, since there are many moving parts. Compared to predictions of climate trends, however, the variables are fewer in number and better under­stood, since the science of economics has a somewhat longer pedigree than the science of climatology.

Amid this heated rhetoric, the achievements of the past 14 years, eight under a Coalition government, receive scant acknowledgment. Readers of The Guardian would probably not be aware, for example, that Australia is a habitual overachiever in the carbon ­reduction stakes.

They probably will not have read that we overshot our Kyoto commitment in 2012 by 128 million tonnes or that we are on track to over-deliver on our second in 2020 by a further 240 million tonnes.

They would be unaware of the considerable contribution made by the “direct action” scheme that not only abates carbon emissions at a fraction of the cost of, say, wind turbines but improves the health of quality of soils. They certainly would not have been ­reminded that direct action was an initiative of Tony Abbott’s ­government.

Instead they would have been treated to a morality play in which gluttonous, wasteful, selfish Australians are fiddling while the planet burns.

The Guardian will almost certainly fail to report that the carbon footprint of the average Australian is 38 per cent smaller than it was in 2005 or that emissions per capita in Australia are falling ­faster than in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Europe, Japan and South Korea.

The Coalition can expect little credit for its record. For the dragon-slayers, the noble deeds of the enemy serve only to extend their fury since the crown of righteousness belongs to them alone.

Nor should the government hold its breath waiting for ­applause from the media. Journalists tend to be dragon-slayers these days. They care little for the ancient craft of explaining what, who, where, why or when in language of few syllables uncluttered with judgmental adjectives.

Fisher would hardly have been on the edge of his seat on Thursday morning waiting for a call from the producer of ABC radio’s AM, despite being the ­author of the report splashed across The Australian that morning that calculated the cost of Labor and the Coalition’s emissions reduction targets. Struggling to lay a glove on Fisher’s credentials, and baffled by the economics, the ABC’s inclination was simply to ignore his findings.

Familiarity has become the yardstick for acceptable ideas as progressives cling to the conventional wisdom.

To measure ideas in any other way, such as their ability to deal with policy challenges in line with acceptable economic realities, would seem outlandish in the ­extreme.

Nick Cater is executive director of Menzies Research Centre.