Don’t sacrifice workers on altar of climate change

Gregg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institution has written extensively on climate change issues. He is a greenhouse believer who thinks the case is closed on man-made global warming. Yet he is no fan of Kyoto. “This is the Big Thought that’s missing from the global warming debate”, writes Easterbrook. “There may be an optimistic path that involves affordable reforms that do not stifle prosperity. Greenhouse gases are an air pollution problem, and all previous air pollution problems have been addressed much faster than expected, at much lower cost than projected.” In short, “the Kyoto Protocol might not have been right for the United States, but a mandatory program of greenhouse reduction is”.

As Stern concedes, governments can simply mandate the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and other technologies as they come on stream. The incessant cry that we can’t wait that long is meaningless when Australia’s contribution to global emissions is minuscule. True, some argue the real measure of this contribution should include emissions by foreign economies burning Australian coal. Given half the chance, they would shut down our coal industry. This all flows from the false assumption, however, that if we stopped exporting coal, those foreign markets would evaporate. In fact they will be supplied by other, less scrupulous, suppliers.

On the one hand environmentalists exaggerate Australia’s importance as an emitter, while on the other they seek to destroy what little importance we have as a solution. Any real influence Australia can exert comes from our position as the world’s largest coal supplier, accounting for 29 per cent of global exports. This is our platform for attaching conditions to the purchase of Australian coal and for promoting the dissemination of CCS and other technologies as they emerge. As Labor’s resources spokesman Martin Ferguson says, this means “more than a thousand climate change conferences”.

What is needed is a national plan, and perhaps a national body, to co-ordinate the right mixture of tax breaks, concessions and subsidies with a phased timetable for the mandatory adoption of technological improvements. Whether our prime minister, addicted as he is to short-term opportunism, can carry this off is open to question.

For its part, Labor should think again about Kyoto. Otherwise this faltering agenda will loom as large a threat to working families as the dreaded WorkChoices.