Abbott won’t sweat over climate in Obama talks

OzOped 12.06.2014. Illustration: Eric Lobbecke.

BARACK Obama is in no position to lecture anybody, including Tony Abbott, for not doing enough to tackle climate change.

Abbott can’t say it, the journalists won’t write it, Labor recites its climate change mantra, as if repetition will calm the forces of nature, and looks to Obama for sustenance, while the Greens sniff a vast right-wing conspiracy to destroy the planet. There is no fun for anybody in playing down a potential conflict between an alluring liberal president and an embarrassingly conservative prime minister. However the fact is Obama, unlike Labor and the Greens, has been forced to get real.

Obama talks a beautiful talk, which changes from year to year, then when it comes to walking the walk, politics and the economy have a habit of getting in the way.

Six years ago, on June 3, 2008, when he won the Democrat nomination for the presidency, Obama promised people would look back and see “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”.

Three years after that, on September 21, 2011, he revealed it was a tad harder than he expected to stop the waters rising or even part them a fraction: “We’ve got enough challenges. It is technically difficult to figure out how we are going to deal with climate change — not impossible, but difficult.”

Now, with time running out, not for the planet but for himself, Obama finally announced something dramatic, by directing that existing American power plants should reduce emissions 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 through energy efficiency and building renewable energy ­capacity. Apart from placing the major burden for delivery on the states, there is still a risk it will be blocked by congress.

Last week The New York Times quoted the chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, a Californian environmental think tank, stating the bleeding obvious about Obama’s action: “Is it enough to stop climate change? No. No political leader in the world has a serious agenda to do that.”

So suggestions that US-Australia relations are threatened by Abbott’s approach, or that Australia will be humiliated if climate change is not placed prominently on the G20 agenda are so much gaseous emissions.

The G20 began as a good idea, but has blossomed into a stairway to heaven for the world’s bureaucrats, and a hugely expensive one at that. The summit will cost Australia $450 million to stage and promises to deliver … well who knows, probably not a helluva lot, possibly a commitment to increased growth (as if they could commit to reducing it) but its principal values lies in world leaders meeting and talking, rather than hurling insults or missiles from afar.

It would be audacious for Obama to try to push Abbott to embark on a course where he has been unable to act — thanks partly to resistance from his own side.

Abbott at least is trying to keep his promise to repeal the carbon tax. Despite action pledges during two campaigns, Obama has previously made clear there will be no carbon tax under a government he leads.

On November 12, 2012, a journalist asked Obama if the political will existed in Washington to legislate “some kind of a tax on carbon”.

The short answer was no, but this is what Obama actually said: “….that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that …. we’re still trying to debate whether we can just make sure that middle-class families don’t get a tax hike.”

Abbott couldn’t have put it better himself.

Last week Obama was quoted in The New York Times as saying: “If there’s one thing I would like to see, it’d be for us to be able to price the cost of carbon emissions.” But he admitted Republicans, Democrats and American public opinion were ranged against him. While it must be a comfort to know Bill Shorten and Christine Milne are onside, it’s probably not enough to induce Obama to make it happen.

That will not silence the Abbott haters. Tanya Plibersek, who risks being labelled Nancy Nasty Streak, spurred on by carefully edited footage showing Abbott standing alone momentarily as leaders lined up for a “picfac”, tagged him Nigel No Friends, like he was a lottery winning bumbling bogan abroad.

Abbott has a long way to go to match some of his predecessors.

Some of us remember attending a press conference in London after then prime minister Bob Hawke had met his British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher. He called her Mrs Fraser. Three times.

This followed a stopover in Paris where Hawke had allowed the idea of a half Senate election to run, then canvassed the option of a luxury tax on imported goods to address a trade deficit while standing in a room at the uber expensive Hotel Meurice, adorned with red velvet wall paper. Cameras panned to the gold cherubs and crystal chandeliers dripping from the walls and ceiling. Back home, Paul Keating slapped it down.

Finally Hawke and his staff devised the London Convention, absolving the prime minister from answering questions on domestic politics while overseas.

It stopped a lot of fun. Prime Ministers get tired and make mistakes, which always makes for good copy. Sometimes they say silly things. Journos, desperate for stories and prone to mischief, do their best to provoke, then beat the crap out of every slip or trip.

Abbott’s meeting with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono showed relations with Indonesia are back on track, he behaved with dignity in Normandy and Villers-Bretonneux, stayed true to his own agenda in Canada, except he called it Canadia. Once. Big deal. He stuck to his themes in New York and it will be a revelation if he doesn’t continue in Washington. Ever so politely, naturally.

There is no reason for him to feel awed or embarrassed in the Oval Office. Sadly, it is Obama who has fallen well short of expectations, not just on climate change. Now if only things were going as smoothly for Abbott at home as they are overseas.