Liberals playing politics with pretence Australia can change global climate
The Coalition cannot properly attack the teal independents, Labor or the Greens because it has signed up to the same meaningless emissions targets.
It is no accident that the most prominent voices in the climate change policy debate are millionaires and billionaires, nor is it surprising that they find the most receptive audiences for their prognostications in the wealthiest postcodes. Think climate advocacy in Australia and we think of Simon Holmes a Court, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Allegra Spender, Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd.
These are not people who have lost their jobs because of the expensive transition to renewable energy – well, except for Turnbull and Rudd. Rather than fall victim to closed factories or skyrocketing power prices, these people have added to their wealth thanks to the taxpayer-subsidised renewable energy boom.
Indulge your hobby, make money, win adoration from the green left and adopt the saintly disposition of a crusader saving the planet – what a doddle. The financial pain is felt elsewhere – by families who cannot afford solar panels and batteries, by sheet-metal workers, dairy farmers, coalminers and small-business owners forced to the wall.
Wentworth is the wealthiest electorate in the country, Cannon-Brookes paid $100 million for his place on the Double Bay foreshore and Turnbull has a $40 million harbourside mansion, so I guess rising oceans are a front-of-mind issue. It is my neck of the woods too (in the cheaper seats away from the water), having moved there to work for Turnbull 13 years ago, and with highly sought-after real estate, iconic beaches, Sydney Harbour, wonderful parklands, and some of the best shopping and eating strips in the nation, it must be hard for politicians to pinpoint what they can promise at election time.
Spender’s campaign posters promise a “better climate for Wentworth”. I guess this must be what you give the voters who have everything.
But political grandstanding and virtue signalling must crash into reality eventually. Is it possible that functioning, educated adults could cast their votes based on the priority of saving the planet, even though they know the candidates and policies they endorse can do nothing of the sort? Are they mistaken about the facts or simply more interested in identifying with the cause?
Both major parties are committed to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, they differ only on the interim target for 2030, with the Coalition promising 28 per cent and Labor 43 per cent. The main point of difference from the so-called teal independents is to push for 60 per cent by 2030.
None of this – not one promise, target or time frame – matters a jot. Regardless of which of these targets is met (and let us make the courageous assumption that all of them are achievable) it will not make the slightest difference to our climate, for good or ill. That is just a fact, the science.
Global greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise beyond 2030 whatever Australia does, so fiddling with our 1.2 per cent of anthropogenic global emissions will be meaningless from an environmental point of view. And by 2050 our emissions will have long since sunken to well below 1 per cent of the global total, so any deleterious or beneficial impact on the environment will be in the hands of China, Indonesia, the US, India and other parts of Asia and Africa. Our emissions will not be a scientifically relevant factor.
Australia’s annual 433 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions are dwarfed 25 times over by China’s 11,500 million tonnes. Our annual emissions represent just a fortnight’s worth of China’s or a month of emissions from the US – and they are falling.
Over each of the past two years, just the growth in China’s emissions has been roughly equivalent to our total annual emissions. So, think about the implications of this; even if we had shut our entire country down for two years, the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere would not have fallen, year on year, because China’s growth would have made up for our contribution.
But a bunch of people in teal T-shirts in the wealthy suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne are going to save the planet. This is perhaps the most idiotic policy promise ever foisted on our political system.
Yet few people call it out; the major parties, most of the media, and academe, all constrain the debate within absurd boundaries of make believe – they all pretend our climate policies matter.
Mine is not an argument for doing nothing – a global push towards net zero might well make sense – but because of our size, our energy profile and our impotence when it come to global impacts, we ought to be cautious.
We should be exhausting the working lives of our coal-fired power generators and building a domestic nuclear energy industry to deliver maximum reliability with minimum emissions. But instead we play a fashionable and risky renewable game.
Choice is everything in democracy, and the teals and any other candidates have every right to run, of course. People might want to vote for them to change the government, lash out at the major parties or simply because they like them. But anyone who votes for them under the misapprehension it is going to improve the environment or save the planet is either incredibly stupid or drastically misled.
A survey this week by Compass Polling tested what percentage of global emissions people thought could be directly attributed to Australia. Astonishingly, the average answer was 10 per cent – 10 times higher than the reality. Half of all respondents put the figure at 10 per cent or higher. More than 10 per cent of respondents said Australia contributed 20 per cent or more of global emissions. And a slightly lower proportion got it right at around 1 per cent.
This level of ignorance is reprehensible when you consider the media, political and educational fixation with climate change over the past two decades. People are obviously being misinformed about both the extent of this nation’s culpability and the import of our actions.
This goes a long way towards explaining why some people are so preoccupied with our climate policies; in defiance of the science and the facts, they actually seem to believe our policies will make a difference to the state of the planet. This is a deliberate deception.
This insanity only underscores how unwise the Coalition has been to acquiesce on the net-zero pledge. Especially given our meagre global contribution, the target represents an act of economic recklessness, and in political terms it robbed the government of a central area of policy differentiation that has worked strongly in its favour for the past four elections.
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the energy crisis in Europe underscored the vulnerability of nations transitioning to renewables. Power shortages and rising costs were causing enormous pain before the national security issues around sovereign energy self-reliance came into play.
France and Britain are expanding nuclear energy, and Germany and Britain are rethinking their antipathy towards coal. Yet Australia, sitting atop almost inexhaustible supplies of coal, gas and uranium, eschews the use of all three in favour of silencing the protests from activist millionaires and their political supplicants. We have been prepared to sacrifice our economic wellbeing and energy security to please Twitter, the ABC, the environmental, social and governance goals of corporate investors, and the UN. If Scott Morrison had been brave enough to continue the battle against this madness, the events in Europe this year would have made him look prescient and strong.
Instead, the Coalition cannot even properly attack the teal independents, Labor or the Greens because it has signed up to the same fundamental objective. Most of the political/media class pretend that droughts will be less severe, floods less common, storms less damaging and bushfires less horrendous because of the policies adopted in this country. It is a farce.
Never in the history of this country has so much been spent and so many opportunities been squandered on something so nonsensical. There cannot be any discernible dividend from this, it is all dogma and politics, and it can result only in pain without gain.
Like flying into a political Venus flytrap, the moderate Liberal MPs have tried to appease the climate crusaders, only to be entrapped by the Labor, Greens and fake independent wings. Instead of taking on their opponents, the moderate Liberals tried to win their favour, and now they cannot properly argue against them because they have conceded all the major arguments.
What a sorry mess. The Liberal Party is reduced to having one of its most left-wing figures, NSW Treasurer Matt Kean, write to people in the teal independent battlegrounds urging them not to vote for the teals, who espouse policies he believes in, but to stick with comparatively green Liberals, lest the party be left in the thrall of MPs who are unashamedly right of centre.
It is a convoluted and depressing situation, and it is brought about by politicians surrendering conviction and practical policies in favour of playing politics. Standing up for what makes sense, or what you believe in, is always a more sensible option. That way you either get to do what is right or you lose trying.
The Liberal Party is going through convulsions because it has decided to pretend, for base political motives, that Australia can change the global climate. Apart from anything else, this treats voters like fools. Not so long ago that would have been fatal, but I am no longer so certain.
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