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Climate action after Rudd

By Tony Kevin - posted Monday, 10 May 2010


Kevin Rudd's decision to shelve until 2013 his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills invites two questions. Is the Prime Minister still serious about Australia contributing to urgently-needed global action against the gathering climate crisis? If not, how should concerned Australians now respond?

The scientific prognosis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has been generally understood and accepted by an overwhelming majority of world scientists now for about 30 years (for the best citizen explanation, see climate scientist James Hansen's masterly 2010 book, Storms of my Grandchildren). Climate crisis denialism, still rampant in Australia, is best understood as a cognitive disorder not amenable to reasoned discourse.

Labor came to office 29 months ago promising serious policies on climate change. Remarkably, every one of its announced policies has now 'turned to dust', in Senator Eric Abetz's contemptuous valediction. Kevin Rudd casually informed Australians, almost as a by-the-way after the Anzac long weekend, that the centrepiece of his climate crisis policy, the CPRS, is off the agenda at least until his second term and until the political climate improves.

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Kevin Rudd is technically correct that this is the opposition parties' fault: the Coalition and Greens parties rejected the Government's CPRS bills. But in most ways that matter, the buck stops with Rudd's deeply disappointing climate policy leadership since becoming PM. For almost everything that this government has said and done on the climate crisis since taking office in December 2007 has encouraged indifference, complacency and scepticism.

Labor has methodically massaged down the public appreciation - which was high in 2007 - of the imminence and seriousness of the crisis of AGW, to the point where it is now fairly politically painless to announce the inner cabinet's decision to shelve the CPRS bills for at least three more years, and perhaps indefinitely. Rudd has, it seems, seen off the climate crisis as an election issue - at least for now.

During 2008 Ross Garnaut expertly reported on the scale of the coming crisis and the needed national emergency response. He proposed a bold emission trading scheme, aiming for around a 20 per cent national emission reduction target by 2020 and a 60 per cent cut by 2050. Under political pressure from industry lobbies, Rudd during 2009 pared down the 2020 target to 10 per cent and later to a laughable 5 per cent.

In an emissions trading scheme rendered impotent by massive handouts to heavy industry, Rudd proposed to achieve this minor cut, not by reducing carbon emissions in the expanding Australian economy, but by buying green carbon credits from poor countries. Rudd dressed up this essentially phony ETS with minor feel-good spending initiatives: home solar and insulation subsidies and cheap loans; solar and coal carbon capture and storage "flagship" power station programs which still have not materialised; and a complex and weak incentives program for infant renewable energy industries.

Meanwhile, Rudd stroked the growth lobby and economic nationalist sentiments. He stressed the difficulty of international negotiations and assured that Australia would not get out ahead of any other countries' offered sacrifices. He welcomed the prospect of unconstrained economic growth, growth in coal output, and a rapidly growing Australian population.

Rudd's refusal to integrate a true policy response to Australia's climate crisis into real-time national economic management and budget-making encouraged public perceptions of the climate crisis as something distant and unreal. The gains in public understanding made during the later Howard years were eroding, but Labor did not seem to care. Foolish climate change denialism, and a justified scepticism as to the value of the highly disruptive and compromised ETS, fed off each other.

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More and more, the question was asked, did Rudd really believe in his own words on the climate crisis, or was this just a constituency he was feeding with gesture politics, to the extent necessary to stay in power?

Tony Abbott's coup in late 2009 shocked Rudd into realising how much ground he had lost. Even the ABC was now infected with climate crisis denialism at the most senior level, with a prominent board member demanding "balance" between science and anti-science.

Belatedly, Rudd tried to reclaim the truth of the climate crisis. He made a strong speech at the Lowy Institute - using phrases that will come back to haunt him - roundly condemning the follies of denialism and delay. The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology stepped up their public education efforts. But it was too late: too much public ground had already been lost.

Crucially, Rudd has never as Prime Minister offered any positive vision of a responsibly decarbonised Australian energy economy, built around non-fossil fuel energy sources. He has always compromised the credibility of his own rhetoric on AGW's clear and present threat to human security, by his refusal seriously to spell out the possibility and affordability of a rapid replacement of coal by renewable-based (and possibly including nuclear) energy. Such things were always for Rudd somewhere off in the vague future - not part of his practical day-to-day politics.

Moreover, "fair" international task-sharing (whatever "fair" means on this existential challenge) has always seemed to Kevin Rudd more important than the overall goal of rapid emissions reduction to safe levels.

Australia contributed to the failure of the UN at Copenhagen in 2009. It had already lost (at Poznan) its brief moment of glory in Bali in December 2007 as an honest international broker. Now it was recognised as a self-interested player, concerned mainly to protect the interests of its coal industry in any agreed international program. The widespread international perception of Copenhagen as a failure, and the expectation of a similar outcome at the next UN meeting in Cancun this year, further nurtured public moods of growing indifference and denialism in Australia.

When James Hansen visited Australia in March 2010, no one much could be bothered to hear or meet him. Most of the Australian environmental organisation leaderships were by now deeply enmeshed in the government's compromised climate change gesture politics. They felt threatened by Hansen's stark messages that a simple carbon tax would work far better than over-complicated and corrupt market trading in emissions permits, and that nuclear energy should not be ruled out as part of a balanced decarbonisation solution.

No one from the Government or major environmental organisations met Hansen.

Rudd has never been a real leader in the gathering climate crisis - he has in fact drained and squandered the public trust and potential for real leadership that was invested in him in 2007. He has let himself be driven by the most powerful interest groups around him.

To date, these voices have been defenders of the status quo. Unlike climate crisis activists, who will have to do the hard and emotionally painful work of agreeing on a program of agenda and priorities if they want to achieve real changes, defenders of the status quo do not have to do anything. Simply in articulating their own individual social and economic interests and prejudices, they are collectively defending the net outcome, which is the present status quo.

So it is hard to find villains or conspiracies in Australia's failure to respond to the climate crisis. The enemy is most of us, behaving normally. Some might point fingers at polarising figures like Ian Plimer or Andrew Bolt or the pseudonymous website host JoNova. Far more significant are the multifarious "common-sense" voices in public life, who project messages of soothing indifference to what climate science warns. These are the voices Rudd hears, and in his own cabinet as well.

Is Rudd then himself a climate crisis denier? Not in words but, we may now conclude, certainly in deeds. This seems to be another variety of the cognitive dysfunction inherent in denialism - Rudd has managed to sequester his knowledge of the climate crisis safely away in another part of his brain. He is too intelligent a man to deny the science, but he has found a way to shrug it off. For as long as he wants to go on being Prime Minister, he will protect himself in this way: and all our children and grandchildren will suffer consequences.

So what can concerned people do now? Conventional Australian parliamentary politics has failed us in the imminent climate crisis. No wisdom can any longer be expected from either major party, and the minority Greens lack both the prospect of early power and the necessary concentrated policy focus on the climate crisis. Vote Green by all means if you wish, but it is now necessary also to find the courage to support and take part in mass direct non-violent public action - at sites for new coalmines, new coal railway infrastructure, new coal power stations. This movement will have legal martyrs, and they will need expert pro bono public defenders.

The model must be Vietnam War protest (and refugee protest in the Howard years). When conventional politics failed, huge numbers of mostly young Australians took to the streets, to drive home to society and politicians the message that sending our young sons to kill and die in Indochina as part of cold-war alliance politics was intolerably wrong.

Environmental organisations now need to find the courage to disengage from government, to free themselves from compromising entanglements for the fights that must come, and in which if they are at all serious about their role, they will have to engage and lead. They, as well as young people, will need to find that courage - and older Australians such as myself will need to do our homework on the issues, so that we may understand and support them when things get ugly.

Kevin Rudd's announcement last week actually offers a public policy turning point. Will we recognise this moment of decision for what it is? 

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This article was first published in www.eurekastreet.com.au on May 4, 2010.



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About the Author

Tony Kevin holds degrees in civil engineering, and in economics and political science. He retired from the Australian foreign service in 1998, after a 30-year career during which he served in the Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister’s departments, and was Australia’s ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. He is currently an honorary visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in Canberra. He has written extensively on Australian foreign, national security, and refugee policies in Australia’s national print media, and is the author of the award-winning books A Certain Maritime Incident – the Sinking of SIEV X, and Walking the Camino: a modern pilgrimage to Santiago. His third book on the global climate crisis, Crunch Time: Using and abusing Keynes to fight the twin crises of our era was published by Scribe in September 2009.

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