It’s Groundhog Day in Canberra’s tedious climate wars | Samantha Maiden
Does anyone feel like we have seen this election movie before? Over and over and over again, writes Samantha Maiden.
Perhaps, it was too much to ask that we end this tedious, existential nightmare of having politicians arguing and prattling on about whatever the pollution reduction target will be in 2072 or whatever year we are up to now at the next election.
But no, it seems both Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese are hot to trot. So, here we go again.
It almost feels like the shower scene from Psycho.
One minute you are washing your hair, the refreshing droplets are hitting your scalp and the next minute some deranged pollie has burst into the shower cubicle to start shouting about the Paris Agreement.
It’s like a terrible dream that won’t stop. Like Groundhog Day.
Today we are all Phil, the cynical TV weatherman that finds himself reliving the same day over and over again when he goes on location to the small town of Punxsutawney.
“I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life,’’ he said.
Does anyone feel like we have seen this election movie before? Over and over and over again?
So what’s been happening this week in the shower scene from Psycho loop?
In recent days Peter Dutton told the Weekend Australian that he would oppose the legislated 2030 emissions target – a 43 per cent cut compared with 2005 levels – at the next election but remain committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
He conceded that the Coalition’s commitment to introduce nuclear power in Australia would not lead to plants being built before 2040.
Nationals leader David Littleproud confirmed the Coalition’s nuclear power plants will be in Nationals electorates.
“We will be very upfront and honest. They will be in National Party seats,” he said before attacking Labor’s renewables approach to green energy.
“We’ve been very clear that they will be limited to where existing coal power stations are, so we don’t need the extra 28,000 of transmission lines to plug the renewables in which tears up the food security and pushes up the food prices.”
Critics claimed that Mr Dutton’s new position could break Australia’s 2015 commitment to the Paris agreement, under which nearly 200 countries said they would aim to limit global heating to well below 2C and attempt to limit it to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Mr Albanese then called Mr Dutton’s stance “absurd” and suggested he would be “walking away from the Paris agreement”.
Mr Dutton said this was not the case and he would not be walking away from the Paris agreement and also would not be spelling out everything before the election, thank you very much.
The Liberal leader later told 2GB radio: “It’s very hard in opposition – without all the modelling and the advice from government – to put an exact figure on the table.”
Mr Dutton also said Labor’s targets, which he previously supported, would “trash” the economy.
“I think it’s very clear that we have absolute commitment to Paris and our commitment for net zero by 2050,” he said.
“It’s important, it doesn’t need to be linear, as we’ve pointed out, and we’re not going to send the economy into freefall and families bankrupt through an ideologically based approach, which is what Anthony Albanese is doing at the moment.”
What will happen next?
It doesn’t seem completely out of the bounds that Barnaby Joyce will start banging on about $100 roasts and suggesting a single cow or lamb could cost as much as a house.
Remember that?
Around a decade ago, Senator Barnaby Joyce said that a single cow or lamb could effectively cost as much as a house, if it meant an abattoir was pushed over the edge and had to pay the carbon tax.
Delivering his signature flourish to then opposition leader Tony Abbott’s campaign against Julia Gillard’s carbon tax, Mr Joyce said consumers would not be happy “when they’re paying over $100 for a roast’’.
He then rubbished the notion that the carbon tax was helping the environment.
“Has it become remarkably colder? Are we now living in a global nirvana because we’ve brought in the carbon tax?’’ he said.
Then climate change minister Greg Combet - remember him - said that Senator Joyce’s claims of million-dollar-plus roasts were ludicrous. “Abattoirs emit methane, one of the most harmful of the greenhouse gases, from biological waste,’’ he said.
Whatever those cows are emitting, and whatever they have emitted in the intervening decade, what’s the bet that the politicians will give it a real hot go in the hot air stakes too, between now and the next election.
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