Our six-year climate obsession left us at a standstill

SELDOM in its 58 years in television has the ABC screened anything less riveting than Saturday’s New Zealand election count.

The host, TVNZ’s Mike Hosking, could barely stay awake as we watched John Key’s drive through the sodden Wellington streets on his way to declare victory.

The speech, when it came, was singularly unarresting. “I can ­assure New Zealanders,” said Key, reaching a crescendo of sorts, “that everything will continue ticking over as usual.”

The bore-cons are back in the Beehive, and deservedly so. When Key was first elected in 2008, he looked decidedly dull alongside our own Kevin Rudd, the energetic saver of the planet.

Since then the perilous politics of climate change has seen off two Australian PMs, one of them twice, while New Zealanders have been reforming their economy.

The opportunity cost of Australia’s six-year obsession with climate change is considerable. Discussions about tax and welfare reform, streamlining public administration and reducing business costs have been shoved to one side in Canberra, but not in Wel­lington. The results speak for themselves. When Key came to power NZ was 24th in the Global Competitiveness Index, six places behind Australia. Today Australia is 22nd and New Zealand 17th.

The inescapable conclusion is that Australia’s climate obsession has sent it backwards. The carbon pollution reduction scheme was a non-starter. Its replacement, the emissions trading scheme, has been wiped from the statute book. The renewable energy target is a honey pot for speculators who insist on putting up windmills we can ill afford. Global action? Forget it.

Meanwhile in New Zealand they have being doing what they do best: turning rainwater into protein and flogging it to the world. It is a simple business plan, but they execute it well. They have not been diverted by the interminable arguments on planetary warming. The Kiwis have a carbon reduction policy that ticks the symbolic boxes without dulling their competitive edge.

In Australia, wherever one stands in the climate change debate, it has been a spectacular policy failure. If it really is, as Rudd once told us, the great moral and economic challenge of our time, Australia has squibbed it. If not, it has been a regrettable diversion from serious reform.

In a monograph published recently by the Whitlam Institute, Randal G. Stewart gives a cogent assessment of what went wrong. The implicit assumption, as one would expect from a progressive think tank, is that the planet must be saved, but Stewart concludes the cause was not helped by Rudd’s declaration that carbon reduction was a moral imperative.

“He found himself forced to thrash around with climate change, sometimes scientistic, sometimes economistic, and mostly moralistic,” says Stewart.

Civic discussion responds badly to declarations of moral absolutes. Rudd’s claim of the principled high ground implied that those who disagreed were dishonourable.

“The world split into two bifurcated coalitions,” says Stewart, “the commonsense ‘believers’ armed with an ETS in some form and the ‘sceptics’ who wanted a different emergent institution and the ‘deniers’ who were simply spoilers.”

Rudd’s problems were compounded by Ross Garnaut’s technocratic report and its recommendation for a rigid market mechanism. It looked beautiful on paper but, says Stewart, there is a disjuncture between the model and the compromise that emerges from the political process.

He cites analysis by Henry Ergas to show the flaws in governance and revenue projections. The door was thrown open for rent-seekers while the insistence to make the Garnaut model work meant “there were many policy options ignored, many paths not taken, many trade-offs rejected”.

Stewart places politicians and technocrats in an “epistemic community” — essentially the people in the know who were convinced of the case for man-made climate change. The thankless duty of this broad coalition of scientists, environmentalists, economists, public servants and politicians was to convince the rest of us that climate change is real. So far they have done an appalling job.

“The scientists betrayed their science, and fractured the ‘epistemic’ community by conflating weather with climate,” says Stewart. He accuses scientists Will Steffen, Lesley Hughes and David Karoly of falsely asserting that “all extreme weather events are influenced by climate change”.

“The issue here is whether it is wise for scientists to embrace a narrative for the purpose of building public support that they know is not substantiated by the science,” says Stewart.

“It is easy to understand the temptation … but not only does this create an unreliable narrative and raise questions of credibility, it weakens the effort of the epistemic coalition to hold together to build a new climate change institution.”

Three unresolved questions stand as barriers to broader community support.

“The first is the weather … is extreme weather caused by climate change or not? Was the drought of 2010 caused by climate change or not? Is my sweltering beach house unpleasant because of climate change or not?”

The reasoning for taxing carbon has never been fully explained nor the reason for increasing electricity prices. “Unless the environmentalists can answer these questions,” says Stewart, “support will be limited.”

The implication of Stewart’s report is that the chief saboteurs of climate change policy were not right-wing warriors and their cashed-up friends in the fossil-fuel business but the epistemic community itself: the politicians, technocrats, the media and, of course, the scientists. It is a sore point, judging from last week’s Q&A on the ABC, when five eminent scientists sat on the panel talking about everything but the warming of the planet. The show had been running for 55 minutes before the program’s producers, presumably as an afterthought, allowed Jacqui Hoepner to ask her question.

“It’s now been 25 years since the first World Climate Conference, yet the public is more divided than ever,” she said. “If winning people over with more facts and less opinions was plan A, what’s plan B?”

Brian Schmidt and Ian Chubb blamed poor education. Suzanne Cory blamed the felling of forests. Peter Doherty blamed our failure to care. Tony Jones blamed Maur­ice Newman before announcing that, sadly, that was all they had time for.

The circus is over and the caravan moves on.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.