Labor's great climate policy shortcomings

Federal Labor in Australia, following Nicholas Stern’s report, has unofficially adopted a 3C target for its climate change policy. We defer understanding the implications of this strategic decision at our peril: 3C cannot be a target, only a sign-post to catastrophe.

The US Government's climate science chief, James Hansen, says that if global warming becomes larger than 1.7C above the pre- industrial level "all bets are off ... We either keep the warming small or it is likely to be quite large". Many times Hansen has warned that 2-3C would produce a planet without Arctic sea ice, a catastrophic sea level rise in the pipeline, and super-drought in the American west, southern Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. "Such a scenario threatens even greater calamity, because it could unleash positive feedbacks such as melting of frozen methane in the Arctic, as occurred 55 million years ago, when more than 90 per cent of species on Earth went extinct."

Yet policy-makers are fast adopting 3C as the new target, the relative safety of the 2C or less put aside. In his 2006 report, Nicholas Stern declared keeping the rise to 2C as "already nearly out of reach" because it meant emissions "peaking in the next five years or so and dropping fast", which he judged to be neither politically likely nor economically desirable.

Three degrees was a more practical target, and Stern nominated the appropriate emissions reduction plan to be a limit on atmospheric greenhouse gas levels of 550ppm of CO2. Following in his 3C footsteps are Labor leader Kevin Rudd and economist Ross Garnaut, appointed by Rudd to do a similar report for Australia. But Garnaut is saddled with an answer before he has researched the question.

Ex-ABARE chief Dr Brian Fisher, Australia's lead delegate to the May 2007 IPCC meeting, says the 2C target, with emissions peaking by 2015, "is exceedingly unlikely to occur ... global emissions are growing very strongly ... On the current trajectories you would have to say plus 3C is looking more likely". The shift is plain in the most recent IPCC report, where research on mitigation has also largely shifted focus from 2C.

Today, at less than 1C we are close to the tipping point when the Greenland ice sheet will start its irreversible melting that will lift sea levels by five to seven metres, in as little as a century, according to Hansen. At 2C over a third of species will be committed to extinction. The research suggests that in a 3C-world the Amazon rainforest will have gone and the carbon cycle will be thrown into reverse so that vegetation and soils start a net release of carbon dioxide, boosting global warming by another 1.5C. Three degrees becomes 4-5C.

Yet there has been no discussion of Labor's 3C target.

Should it be said, as Hansen does, that 3C means the end of the planet as we know it, the loss of a fair proportion of the human population and most species? The general climate advocacy position of the major green organisations seems to be that Howard must go, Rudd will be significantly better (to date more faith than fact), and nothing should be done to jeopardise getting rid of the coalition, so criticism of Labor policy should be muted.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has decided to weld itself onto Labor, and is whispering quiet on Labor's great climate policy shortcomings. There is a revolving door between the ACF and Labor's front-bench offices, and the ACF conspicuously failed to sign off on the peak-green election manifesto "Turning Down the Heat", or the web- centred The Big Switch campaign.

The ACF's climate stance is soft: it advocates targets lower than the other peak greens and contrary to that which the science demands. The ACF and its website are very low-key on coal, seeming, like their former president Peter Garrett, not to oppose increased coal exports. The ACF's just-launched whoonearthcares.com is celebrity-driven greenwash, lacking any climate change information, science or policy analysis.

ACF is positioning itself to be close to Rudd in power, but is the approach one of hope and trust that Labor will repay their charity by doing "the right thing" (no public evidence so far) or are there substantial, private assurances? Will ACF's soft-pedalling succeed in drawing a reasonable climate change policy out of Labor, or will its tactic simply dovetail with Rudd's small-target strategy, its silence interpreted as consent to a policy of climate catastrophe?

The election focus for most peak green groups is represented by the website, thebigswitch.org.au. The messaging is soft (the banner reads "... make simple lifestyle changes. Urge politicians to lead with vision ... ") but it appears to try to do too many things rather than effectively message one or two key issues.

Labor's refusal to adopt a 2C target isn't mentioned, but it is straight-forward in elaborating Labor's lack of commitment on key issues. A diverse range of election demands lacks the capacity to nail candidates, who can simply duck and weave; an outcome that may be inherent in schemes to rate politicians by given them numerical scores in answer to a show-bag of questions. For example, while Labor is rated 1.75 out of 5, it would be hard for an ALP backbencher not to score an easy pass without seriously crossing the party leader's position. A canny politician can rate more than 30 out of a possible 50 while being opposed to any legislated minimum emission reductions by 2020, being opposed to any legislated renewable energy target by 2020, supporting new coal-fired power stations and opposing the phasing out of the coal industry. It's an odd message to be sending.

It's a far cry from British Labor's environment (now foreign) minister, David Miliband, who says that "essentially by 2050 we need all activities outside agriculture to be near zero carbon emitting if we are to stop carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere growing", an evident fact beyond the imagination of Labor ministers here, or it seems that of peak green lobbyists.

There is always an election around the corner somewhere in Australia, so there is always an argument for tactical pragmatism in climate change advocacy. But a terrible price will be paid for soft-pedalling. As Thomas Homer-Dixon argues in his just-published The Upside of Down, climate change politics is caught somewhere between denial and reluctant managerialism, and far from creative thinking about the new strategies that it demands. Like Homer-Dixon, Philip Sutton of the Greenleap Strategic Institute argues that the corollary of acknowledging that we face a new, catastrophic situation, is that we also acknowledge the need to actively work out a new politics or paradigm.

It is not difficult to make the case that:

• climate change is getting worse quickly: emissions are rising at an increasing rate, and are now tracking worse than "business-as-usual", the most pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios;
• the present political momentum is too little, too late and there are no signs of it picking up sufficient speed. Hansen warns that another decade of "business as usual" and it will be too late to stop at 2C;
• fast and dramatic action is required, a "crash emissions program", unprecedented in contemporary political economy;
• we are facing a global emergency that requires an emergency response, as with other "natural" emergencies, where the normal workings of the society are suspended and extra resources applied to the extend necessary to deal with it;
• it seems inconceivable that politics "as usual" and business "as usual" (the neo-liberal deregulated economy) have the capacity to drive our emissions to near-zero by 2050; because
• it is practically impossible to rely on market mechanisms (a price on carbon) and micro-economic regulation to achieve the transition to the low-carbon economy deeply and quickly enough.

What political and economic means can achieve a crash emissions program?

There has been some discussion and research on carbon rationing and personal carbon allowances, not such a way-out idea since former New South Wales premier Bob Carr told an audience earlier this year that “Individual carbon rationing with penalties for those who exceeded their quotas was one of a number of radical measures that might be needed to tackle climate change”.

And on his last day as Victoria's deputy premier and environment minister, John Thwaites raised the idea "of a personal carbon allowance which would involve a quota being put on the level of emissions an individual or household could use in a year".

In the UK and elsewhere researchers have pointed to the 1939-45 war economy, where very quickly economic production was redirected in the service of the great emergency that was the fight against fascism. There are many examples of rapid transformation: the Manhattan Project; the growth of the Asian Tiger economies and China; and the transformation of the economy of Cuba after Soviet oil was cut off, are all examples.

We need to study such transitions and rapid structural and social adjustments, because without a similar scale of change our world as we know it will not survive. How can we gather widespread political support for a fast, sustainability-driven economic transformation?

What new political strategies can deal with the unprecedented implications of the full sustainability emergency? The problem of developing new strategies is very challenging, but there is a growing acknowledgement that the current climate action political strategies are obsolete, that there is a need together to find a pathway to the development of new strategies that can fully deal with the impending climate catastrophe.

That task, of innovating and thinking and creating the means to fully respond to the looming climate crisis, should be at the heart of political discussion in the path to the election, but many players have reasons not to put it on the table.