Economic eyes wide open!

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.”