Climate a tale of two parleys

THIS week is a tale of two conferences. In a few days, the Labor Party's national conference will begin in Sydney. There will be political chest-beating and plenty of crowing about a year of decision and delivery by the Gillard minority government.

The carbon tax? Signed, sealed and delivered. Mining tax? Almost there. Immigration? Two out of three isn't bad. The Prime Minister and her government are betting that the fury over the Julia Gillard-Bob Brown carbon tax will now start to wane. Thousands of miles away, a different conference, which began on Monday, explains why carbon tax anger won't fade away any time soon.

Thousands of government apparatchiks, NGO activists, UN bureaucrats and other global-warming hangers-on are in Durban, South Africa, for their latest climate change shindig. Having already had their dog-eared passports stamped in Bali, Copenhagen and Cancun with no discernible legally binding agreement reached in those exotic locations, they jetted in for another taxpayer-funded gabfest where nothing much will happen. There is no chest-beating here. No repeat of the high hopes that filled the hearts of many as they descended on Copenhagen in 2009. Even Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said there would be no "big bang" agreement between the 194 member nations of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Durban confab looks like just another UN junket filled with talk about targets.

To be sure, in Copenhagen, all major countries made unilateral pledges to cut their emissions. But targets are not actions. Against that background, Australia is steaming ahead with a high-priced carbon tax, all part of Gillard's strategy to brand herself as a "decisions-and-delivery" leader. Gillard's gamble that voter angst over the carbon tax will subside is high stakes. Consider the cards stacked against her.

President Barack Obama's Moses-style promise that his 2008 election marked "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal" has fallen off the silliness scale. Not even the most mellifluous Obama speech can soften the harsh reality that the US will not agree to a cap-and-trade scheme.

Likewise, no number of pleasant-sounding paragraphs drawn up by UN drafters in Durban can hide the fact that Russia, Japan, Canada and the US will not agree to signing a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding agreement, which expires next year. Or that Europe will sign on to a post-Kyoto agreement only if other countries agree to do so. Or reports that Britain, the EU, the US and other developed countries were opposed to any agreement that started before 2020.

Closer to home, no amount of Canberra spin can hide the consequences of slugging Australian businesses with a fixed-price $23 a tonne carbon tax from July next year when the EU carbon price seems to be on a continuous slide.

Indeed, Europe and the US are too busy trying to rescue their economies to commit to an agreement to cut emissions.

Not even a dazzling Gillard speech at Labor's national conference will conceal the reality that the debate about Australia's carbon tax is far from over. Consider what has transpired these past few weeks on that score.

To coincide with the Durban conference, another cache of hacked emails has been released, exposing more trickery from climate change scientists. In a 2004 email, researcher for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report Ricardo Villalba wrote to other researchers: "The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what's included and what's left out."

With perfect timing, a new report published that same week by the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation found that IPCC reports were undermined by bias and conflicted processes.

In "What is Wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for Radical Reform", Ross McKitrick found the IPCC bodies were skewed with advocates who reviewed their own work and that dissenting views were routinely ignored. Any perception that the grand-sounding IPCC followed a rigorous process was false, he wrote.

Gillard's gamble that voters will accept the carbon tax, just as they came to grips with the GST after its introduction on July 1, 2000, comes up against other hurdles too. The IPCC's November 19 summary report on extreme weather is much more cautious in its language when it comes to predicting the consequences of climate change, finding that the impacts are largely uncertain.

While Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is still being played to Australian schoolchildren, the global warming fearmongers are fast losing credibility in this debate. The hypocrisy of activists doesn't help Gillard. Voters recall Tim Flannery warning us that anyone with a coastal view from our home was "in grave danger". They also recall the same palaeontologist buying a home next to the water at Coba Point in NSW.

Hubris from Greens will hurt Gillard's gamble, too. Almost as soon as the $23 carbon tax was announced, the Greens signalled this was just the opening gambit in their wider agenda to fundamentally change our lifestyles. A day after voting for the carbon tax, Greens MPs demanded Australia abandon non-renewable energy sources and suggested we could move to 100 per cent renewables within a decade if politicians mustered the "political will" to do it.

Most devastating for Gillard's carbon tax gamble is her definitive promise at the 2010 election that there would be no carbon tax under a government she led. Broken promises are not easy forgotten. Also, when it comes to policy implementation, Gillard is closely associated with the policy failures of the Rudd government: think pink batts and the mismanaged Building the Education Revolution. To that dud hand, add her own policy mistakes as PM: her still-born East Timor solution, her now defunct Malaysia Solution, her knee-jerk shutdown of live cattle exports, not to mention the dog's breakfast known as a mining tax.

That Gillard can bed down the carbon tax with success is a dubious proposition, especially against a background of a collapsing emissions trading system in Europe. Last week, a report by UBS Investment Research described the European ETS as having "limited benefits and embarrassing consequences".

The world's largest carbon trading system, which delivered windfall profits to traders, has had "almost zero impact" on reducing emissions, it concluded. Little wonder Gillard's gamble looks more and more unlikely to succeed by the day.