Barack Obama gives PM a climate headache

TONY Abbott has been blindsided in political terms by Barack Obama, who grasps the aspirational and gesture nature of climate change politics. But the US President’s new position creates fresh problems both for the Prime Minister and Bill Shorten.

Obama’s critique of Abbott’s policies, delivered on Australian soil, has its real impact not in the Brisbane G20 meeting but at next year’s Paris conference, when the world will decide on new long-run climate change targets.

Abbott, along with Joe Hockey, scored an impressive success at the G20 summit with an agreement based on practical pledges to boost global growth by 2 per cent-plus — with the potential to improve the lives of millions of people. Yet that success on the prime agenda has been partly obscured by the optics and tactics of the calculated Obama drive on climate change.

The Abbott-Obama gulf on global warming is now on graphic display. The US President’s condemnation of Abbott’s policy was met by a direct dose of Abbott realism yesterday, when the Prime Minister said 1.3 billion people on the planet still had no access to electricity and that “coal is going to be an important part” of that answer for decades. It was a highly pertinent remark at a summit seeking to improve growth, jobs and living standards.

The Obama campaign and the new US-China agreement escalate the global pressures for more ambitious targets at Paris, a point reflected in the G20 communiqué. Yet recent climate change history in Australia shows higher targets come with bucketloads of dangers for the Coalition and Labor.

Abbott and the Opposition Leader know this. Their caution proves it. Yet both will have to move as Australia must shift with the US-China-Europe tide. Obama says his new target can be achieved without new measures from congress. Those who say the US and China may not be able to deliver their new pledges miss the point: these executive decisions from the US and China will shape the global debate.

At home, every critic of the Abbott global warming agenda, notably Labor and the Greens, will now invoke Obama’s words in depicting the PM as negative and resistant. Abbott’s future challenge is twofold: to table new targets showing he recognises the climate change problem yet modest enough to preserve Australia’s economic competitiveness. It will not be easy.

Shorten mocks Abbott as stubborn, an isolationist and an ideologue. Yet Shorten has the same target as Abbott — a 5 per cent emission reduction target by 2020. Labor cannot live much longer with this contradiction: it mocks Abbott’s caution yet loves the political security of the same caution.

Labor, as Shorten signalled yesterday, must increase its target. He said Abbott “needs to do more”, yet that comment applies equally to Labor. Shorten affirmed that Labor’s “fallback’’ position was still operative: to go to a 15 per cent reduction if the world moved. And the world, of course, is moving.

The problem for Labor lies in the text of the US-China agreement. It lists many initiatives. But it does not mention carbon pricing or an emissions trading scheme, yet a national ETS is what Labor will take to the 2016 election. The risk for Labor is that the world is moving away from economy wide, “one size fits all’’ ETS schemes as legislated by the former Gillard government. Shorten’s 2016 problem is that he will champion a national ETS that does not exist in the US, a powerful negative for him.

Labor’s ETS policy also means the higher the target, the higher the price. And the higher the carbon price, the more lethal will be Abbott’s attack.

On the other hand, Abbott’s problem is obvious. His Direct Action policy can probably suffice in terms of the 5 per cent 2020 reduction target but will require significant modifications to deliver more ambitious targets.

It is obvious that at this G20 summit Abbott should have given climate change more exposure. He looked too defensive and he was caught out. The PM needs to get the balance right — showing that his response to the problem is serious and substantive, yet
also ensuring that green ideology will not sacrifice Australia’s economic prospects.