Climate change: PM faces D-Day as IPCC reports on Paris targets

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change is due to report on action required to meet the Paris Agreement target. Picture: AP.

The climate change wars have cast a long shadow over the Liberal Party. They will return with a vengeance this week in an early test of Scott Morrison’s leadership. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change is due to report on action required to meet the Paris Agreement target. While the Prime Minister has rejected the national energy guarantee, he has not withdrawn Australia from the agreement. As a result, the IPCC report will have direct bearing on the Coalition’s policy. The political stakes are high.

Morrison’s mastery of energy policy will be put to the test in the coming week. After disposing of the NEG, he shifted the government’s focus from renewables to reliability. But Morrison’s new ministry is yet to produce a coherent framework for climate and energy policy. Without it, the government risks fracturing along factional lines. If Morrison fails to seize control of the energy debate this week, Labor will take the lead.

The government cannot afford to lose the battle over energy policy. Despite some media hysteria about the NEG, there is popular support for a broad, national approach to energy reform among Coalition MPs. The government’s leading principle should be national energy independence. Its national policy should be developed in response to the question of how to make Australia energy independent to drive reliability, national security, economic growth, rational conservation, investor confidence and affordability.

The national interest case for energy policy has been underplayed by successive governments. Yet, like many Western countries, Australia is experiencing a resurgence of patriotism. People are giving voice to healthy scepticism about the benefits to the free world of a globalised political order. Critics of the Paris Agreement contend it punishes the West for the benefit of the rest.

President Donald Trump made the case in his speech to withdraw the US from the Paris accord. Compliance would have cost America up to 2.7 million jobs, including 440,000 jobs in manufacturing. The economic burden would be close to $3 trillion in GDP. While weakening America’s national economy, the Paris Agreement would boost the fortunes of China and India. China would be free to build coal plants and increase emissions substantially. India would claim billions in foreign aid from developed ­nations while doubling its coal production.

We should know the price Australians are paying for the Paris Agreement, but successive governments have failed to defend energy policy in the national interest. The consequence is soaring power bills and price gouging by energy retailers. As Michael Owen reported in The Weekend Australian, summer bills are set to rise again. South Australia is likely to shoulder a heavy burden thanks to the former Labor government’s renewable energy policies. A survey has revealed that South Australians believe the biggest issue facing the state is “power supply and prices”. Morrison told The Advertiser that he was “not afraid to use a big stick on the big energy companies to stop the big rip-offs and will be making laws to do just that”. If it sounds familiar, it should. We have heard the line before, but ­prices keep rising.

Despite the evidence of harm, Labor maintains a 50 per cent renewable energy target is in the national interest. However, as this newspaper has reported, bills are likely to rise by 84 per cent under a 55 per cent target using renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar.

Confusion reigns in Australia’s energy policy. In part, the confusion arises from the technocratic nature of modern environmentalism. Much climate science is presented in academic journals that are not accessible to the general public. Expert findings are often couched in opaque terms. It is not a sound basis for informed public debate and the development of policy in the democratic tradition.

The technocratic approach to environmentalism presents problems for policymakers. At times, they are required to advise MPs without being able to test the validity of hypotheses presented in technical reports. As a result, they must rely on the scholarly objectivity and honesty of groups such as the IPCC and UN. Unfortunately, issues with bias arise. The first major allegation of IPCC bias was made in 1996 when The Wall Street Journal published a damning article by Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences. Seitz argued that the IPCC had published a report markedly different to the original peer-reviewed version. He alleged that almost all of the changes “worked to remove hints of the scepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general and on global warming in particular”. Members of the IPCC working group strenuously denied the claims.

There is much controversy surrounding the science of climate change. However, Australian policymakers will have little choice but to trust the IPCC report on limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The IPCC is sensitive to the perception that science has taken a back seat to ideology in its work. Chairman Hoesung Lee has emphasised the scientific basis of the upcoming report for policymakers. Last week, he cited UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres’s speech contending that climate change was the “great challenge of our time” whose size and nature had been revealed by science.

However, Guterres also attributed a range of weather events to climate change without providing scientific evidence to support a direct causal relationship between them. They included a monsoon, a hurricane and wildfires, along with future extinction events. It didn’t help that he opened the speech in the language one might expect from the chancellor of a Star Wars galactic republic: “Dear friends of planet Earth.”

The IPCC report will force the Liberal-led Coalition to reveal its hand. While still bound to the Paris Agreement, the government must find a way to prioritise the national interest by providing a plan to create resource independence, energy security, consumer affordability and sustainable conservation.

If Morrison fails to provide national leadership on energy policy, the Coalition will fall as a house divided. Labor will seize the day.