Labor's great climate policy shortcomings

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.