Scott Morrison should give the COP 26 gabfest in Glasgow on greenhouse gas emissions targets at the start of November a wide berth.
Stay home, Prime Minister. Don’t go near it.
It has all the political appeal of a holiday in Hawaii in bushfire season, all the upside of a guest appearance on the ABC’s Q+A with an audience of inner-city greenies.
International conferences like this almost never achieve anything. In so far as countries announce concrete plans, these have been decided long in advance.
Jamborees like Glasgow are all about confected emotion and grandiloquent faith affirmations.
And if grandiloquent climate faith affirmations could cool the planet, we’d be living through an ice age by now.
Send Angus Taylor and Marise Payne instead. Send them together and make them sing a duet.
On climate action, Morrison has actually had a strong point all along. It’s actions rather than pronouncements which count.
Australia has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by more than the OECD average, and faster than the US.
China, the biggest emitter in the world by miles and miles, will, on its own account, continue to increase its emissions until 2030.
Morrison is also right that the only conceivable way to get to serious reductions – much less the mythical net zero – is to develop low emissions energy, transport, agriculture and other technology that is reasonably cost-effective.
The developed economies are reducing their emissions. Developing economies are seeing emissions grow rapidly. They are not going to forgo development, or tax themselves into permanent poverty, in order to meet climate targets.
Nor, in the real world, is there the slightest chance that rich nations will donate so much money to poor nations that they can afford to forgo development.
It’s almost a public heresy punishable by witch-burning to say so, but Morrison has been right about technology being the only answer all along.
He also has to balance the politics. In the early part of November, much of Australia will be in the throes of reopening after savage and prolonged Covid lockdowns. This is an intensely unpredictable process.
That should be the PM’s priority and he should be here to manage it nationally, and to manage his own profile, and his government’s profile, in the process.
The politics of climate are also complicated and potentially treacherous. The PM needs to show he takes the problem seriously and Australia is making a proportionate effort.
He has to communicate that convincingly enough that politicians like Dave Sharma can hold seats like Wentworth, and the Liberals have a chance of winning back seats like Warringah.
At the same time, he also has to show people who aren’t real wealthy, who work in the physical economy and don’t get their salaries from government, that he’s not going to destroy the Australian economy in order to buttress an affirmation of faith in climate change.
The Coalition is bleeding votes mainly on its right to a raggle-taggle militia of nondescript irregulars who don’t offer solutions but do channel discontent and anger.
Finally, a media moment at Glasgow is not worth two weeks isolation when the PM gets back.
Morrison is a strong campaigner, but he can’t campaign effectively from lockdown, or from Glasgow.
If Australia is mobile by November, the PM needs to be everywhere in our nation, and nowhere in Glasgow. Leave that to Payne and Taylor – they will earn remissions in the next life from purgatory for their efforts.
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