Economic eyes wide open!

In the last days of July, before his wings were clipped, Brendan Nelson was still in full didactic flight. “So far”, he said, “the argument about greenhouse has been fairly emotional … I think that is about to change”. Nelson was intent on bringing a familiar and predictable reason to the debate. It was best for Australia, he said:

… not to get too far out in front of the big guys of greenhouse gas emissions, such as India and China… As we look at the economic impact of an emissions trading scheme we need to have our economic eyes wide open. I’m not a climate change sceptic … But whatever happens has to be done in the national interest (The Australian July 28, 2008, emphasis added).

No one, on either side of politics was suggesting that climate change policy should break free of the two disciplines cleverly married and identified with such force by Nelson: commercial and national interests. He may well have made an idiot of himself in some ways but he was spot on here. His “economic eyes wide open” shone with an almost weird or, dare I say, fundamentalist intensity. Otherwise, there was nothing new or eccentric in this.

Indeed, it is a faith that all major political parties in the developed world share. These disciplines overshadowed the UN’s last climate change get together in Bali, undermining the possibility of meaningful international agreement and it will do the same in Copenhagen in the absence of a fundamental shift of some kind.

In short the dogged embrace of these forms of reason will see in the planet’s ruin (see Bali’s Roadmap to Nowhere).

Nelson’s argument was with his colleagues and the media fuss he created was not based on disagreement over these fundamentals. It was the usual cocktail of ambition and ineptitude than so often heralds a fall. He thought that everyone, Howard before him, Turnbull alongside him and Rudd on t’other side, were all insufficiently attentive to the disciplines and forms of reason he alone could protect and apply. They had or were still committing thoughtlessly to unconditional start-up dates for an Australian Emission Trading Scheme or ETS.

Eventually someone helped him to understand that he was mistaken; that an ETS not fitted with a calibrated drive mechanism (an emission reductions cap and path) meant nothing and was no breach of anything. Caps would not be set until the starter’s pistol was about to fire and would be finely tuned to make sure they were not a fraction of a per cent too high.

In the meantime, smart political players could, like Labor or as Turnbull wanted, look committed in the eyes of an increasingly anxious public. Even without Costello in the wings, Nelson will lose the leadership for forgetting that democratic politics is also about theatre.

The national interest

Despite that, his words warrant recognition. His turn of phrase (above) captures the myopic liberal orthodoxy with an almost frightening precision: “Economic eyes wide open, economic wide open …” This could be the secret password for the Adam Smith Society.

Of course his injunction contains a second appeal. If our eyes are to be directed by commercial discipline and self-interest, then our hearts belong to the jealous demands of the national interest: “Whatever happens must be done in the national interest.” “Whatever happens?” “Whatever?” Absolutely no exceptions? This is the tone and language of fundamentalist appeal.

Nelson elevates his interests to the level of general principles and positions them at the very apex of climate change policy discourse. There are no higher courts of appeal. If we are in doubt about how much of an effort to make or how urgently to act … we must, no exceptions countenanced, consult these oracles.

Some liberals might want to uncouple these interests - of the self and the nation - but it is at least worth noting that they share an important common liberal source: in the work of Thomas Hobbes, arguably the first and most influential of modern political philosophers. In the 16th century Hobbes proposed that the natural condition of humans was one of fierce competition and war, in his own words, “a warre of all against all”.

Stop and think about it for just a moment. Suppose it is your aim to subvert treaty making and to undermine structures of international co-operation developing in response to the problems of climate change. Is it possible to imagine a better formula than Nelson’s: conduct yourself self-interestedly in every way you can - both as an individual (where conflicts often lead to ill-will) or as the citizens or officials of a state (where conflicts often lead to war).

Why not, at the very least, and to cut a long story short, some contemplation of or conversation about alternative principles. Why not ecological or biophysical “eyes wide open”, for example? Or, why not global or general human in the place of particular national interests? Nelson wants reason. Why not at least identify these or other alternatives and then demonstrate why they are inferior to commercial or national interest principles in dealing with climate change? Why not explain how little more suspicion, ill will and war are just what the world needs to combat climate change?

To be sure, we have the appearance of action and debate: Nelson’s strife within the Liberal Party for example. More generally, developed nations bicker internally and busy themselves with their own emission trading schemes, renewable energy targets and so on but their heads, hearts and, let’s not forget eyes, belong to Nelson’s reason. Climate change policy argument at the international level - where it counts most - remains in large part an empty theatre.

But is it fair to imply, as I have, that Labor is as much a participant in this misguided pretence as the Liberal Party, that it too lacks perspective which it submerges in overextended conceptions of commercial and national worlds?

Labor and the politics of thin liberal commitment

Peter Garrett is the only person in either of our major political parties once thoughtful enough to have refused this liberal reconstruction and perhaps to have read the UNFCCC in preparation for what he hoped would be his portfolio. He did this shortly after the Rudd victory and while preparing to go to Bali. Perhaps he mistakenly believed that he belonged to a party filled with good Christian socialist intent. There was plenty of PR to that effect.

Be that as it may, Garrett believed that the government to which he belonged would do good climate change deeds without demanding instant return or quid pro quo from the poor in the developing world - the way Jesus might have done. Garrett either was or was expecting to become Minister for Climate Change. At that point he disqualified himself. He had proposed “violating” both disciplines. He was humiliated, forced to publicly withdraw his eccentric internationalist views on the place of generosity in politics and promptly shoved aside in favour of the cool-headed Penny Wong.

Garrett has adjusted well to party discipline since then though the main point here concerns the Labor Party. It is both ruthless and unequivocal on these questions - a position it would make clear again for world to see in Bali a few weeks later as it consistently supported regressive US proposals demanding contributions from the poor. (See, again, Bali’s Roadmap to Nowhere.)

Labor’s yet-to-be-finalised ETS hardly looks any more promising and nor does its response to Garnaut, especially that part of his Review addressing the possible architecture of international carbon trading.

Garnaut favours terms of engagement for developing world making it substantially easier for them to participate. They should, he argues, be allowed to sell unused credits but not be required to buy them should they overshoot limits. There appears to be no echo of these positions in the Rudd Government’s Green Paper. Like much else in Garnaut, this will sink like a stone.

Projects before the planet

It is Labor state governments, however, that appear to be most savagely regressive. Perhaps this is because, in terms of organisational culture, they have become clones of the business corporation springing to the defence of development projects as if these were now the real sinews of the public realm. In democracies, this is a serious confusion but that is point for another time.

Again and again, these outposts of corporate power present arguments claiming that economic development will be compromised by climate change mitigation. Profits will be undermined here, jobs lost there, the very presence of capital imperilled everywhere. Often times, this badly mutated public effort is so great that corporate power hardly needs to mount its own case.

On August 18, for example, The West Australian carried a lead story under the following banner: “Premier backs warning of ETS risk to gas deals”, followed by “Mr Carpenter yesterday added his name to the growing list of companies … calling for the protection of the LNG industry while predicting the [Federal] Government would eventually bow to pressure.”

Our state premiers now spruik for every fossil fuel God once saw fit to bury beneath the Earth as if they were endangered species! And what is their catch cry? Responsible government must resist irresponsible policy and choose projects ahead of planet. The carpet bagger’s ultimate triumph.

Official documents and action plans scattered across State Government offices pledge solemnly to combat climate change - subject to just one proviso: that the economy is not compromised (PDF 156KB) in the process.

Yes “economic eyes” are “wide open” here in the Labor camp. In part, the states fear that the federal government may still have one foot immersed in an authentic civic culture. And they are ready to begin snarling like corporate lapdogs the moment they sense something untoward - a larger than commercial interest, a planetary interest, perhaps. But they worry on no account. The federal government’s Green Paper on the forthcoming Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) makes it clear that, when push comes to shove, they are all singing from the same corporate song sheet.

Getting the design [of the proposed ETS] right requires that the scheme complement the Government’s integrated economic policy framework. In particular, the scheme design, and accompanying schemes for household and business support, need to be consistent with the Government’s fiscal strategy and the focus on expanding the productive capacity of the economy while restraining inflation.

To be sure, this is not surrender to a project. It is a strategic surrender to the general template for all projects, for vigorous commerce in its totality. Here, as a result, the planet must submit to more abstract and often mystifying disciplines deriving not this or that project but from the national economy as a whole (e.g. maintaining the conditions for low-inflation growth). And the effect of scaling up like this is actually to further uncouple the economy, both philosophically and materially speaking from biophysical disciplines of the planet. People may agree to sacrifice a project for the planet but low inflation growth? That’s more like defying God isn’t it?

In a post-denial world, liberal economies are searching for climate change policy that does not interfere with the beating heart of the growth economy. The important and powerful gather here to measure, monitor and, like Nelson, keep watch, nay “keep economic eyes wide open”.

This and not the planet’s fevered condition is the key point of reference in all official discussion, often confounding it before it event starts. The green movement, like the liberal, needs its finely calibrated basis points and the endless footage or air time their minute movement commands as tens of thousands of economist ply their trade.

In comparison with this propaganda machine or, more politely, cultural resource, the IPCC is a joke. And if the liberal economy remains ascendant in this way, the planet will die its death of a thousand cuts inflicted by the project it can never out bid in this sadly rigged argument.