With Westpac joining the growing list of corporations that are questioning the climate policy stance of the Business Council of Australia (BCA), it seems that major companies that take climate change seriously have sussed out the strategy of one of Australia’s most toxic denialist lobby groups.
The Business Council, denialist? Surely this is the business group that, according to its website, supports “action on climate change” and supports our Paris Agreement commitments? The reason the BCA is one of Australia’s most dangerous denialist groups is because its strategy is to accept climate change and the need for climate action, but aggressively sabotage any actual policies designed to address it. That’s what ultimately serves the interest of a number of its high-profile multinational members: ExxonMobil, the world’s fifth-biggest greenhouse gas emitter, Shell, the ninth biggest, BP, the 11th, Chevron, 12th, BHP, 20th — not to mention local greenhouse champions like Woodside and owners of coal-fired power stations, and denialist advocate News Corp.
The BCA’s strategy for over a decade has thus been to publicly support climate action and even a carbon price, then savage any serious policies to implement them. In June 2007, with even the Howard government embracing a carbon trading scheme, the BCA said it supported efforts to “link sensible and credible emissions reduction targets to a long-term, well designed national emissions trading scheme”.
At the same time, it also opposed the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. And while the council continued to insist “the best way for Australia to transition to a low-emissions economy is through a market-based emissions trading scheme”, it claimed the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme would “exacerbate the impact of the economic downturn or unduly slow the recovery in economic growth”.
It also attacked Rudd’s unambitious emissions reduction targets, demanded the complete watering down of the CPRS and the protection of coal mining, and wanted the scheme delayed as well. And in what would be a continuing theme in the BCA’s campaign to block climate action, it would piously call for both sides of politics to work together, even when the Coalition fragmented and a denialist rump in the Liberals blocked any action of any kind.
It got worse after the election of the Gillard government and the introduction of a carbon pricing scheme. As always, the BCA “supports a market-based mechanism” to reduce emissions. But that government’s scheme “presents considerable risks to Australia’s long term” and, when it was legislated, the BCA claimed it would “significantly increase risks to Australia’s economic growth and competitiveness” and was “extremely disappointing”.
The Gillard government scheme would see a significant downward trend in Australia’s emissions at minimal cost to the economy, with impacts even below the modest forecasts of Treasury. But when the Abbott government repealed it (ushering in five years of rising emissions and continuing higher electricity prices), the Business Council was overjoyed, joining other business groups to “welcome today’s repeal of the carbon tax”. For good measure, the BCA demanded the axing of the Renewable Energy Target as well.
Of course, the BCA has continued since then to pay lip service to the need for climate action, although it saw the Abbott government’s low-ball Paris emissions target more as an opportunity to call for lower company tax. When that government briefly flirted with an actual safeguard mechanism as part of its bizarre “soil magic” program, which might have actually regulated companies that increased their emissions intensity, the BCA was quick to demand that any safeguard mechanism not impose any burden on industry.
When Labor committed to a carbon price ahead of the 2016 election, with the detail to worked out following the election, the BCA was happy enough (it always likes to be told business will be consulted), but attacked the one actual detail in Labor’s policy, a higher emissions reduction target. It also attacked Victoria for its renewable energy target — any state-level climate policy is opposed by the BCA, even in the absence of Commonwealth action. By 2018, Labor’s science-based commitment to the Climate Change Authority’s 45% emissions reduction target was “economy wrecking” and the BCA’s Jennifer Westacott was coordinating with the Liberal Party to run a campaign against Labor on it.
It’s a pretty simple strategy: lip service to climate action, resolute hostility to even the most trivial policies that stand a chance of being implemented. That the BCA even thought the Coalition’s risible safeguards mechanism had to be watered down to homeopathic levels illustrates that the BCA will tolerate no climate action policies of any kind.
At least bodies like the Minerals Council have been open about their climate denialism. However selfish and resistant to science, they’ve been honest participants in the debate: they oppose climate action because it will hurt their members. The BCA has, for more than a decade, pursued a more malicious and dishonest approach: endorsing the need for action, but acting as saboteurs the moment anyone — and it’s usually Labor — has sought to do it. At least some members are starting to see this for what it is.
That sort of mendacity should see people like Westacott facing some kind of prosecution for false and misleading behaviour – a short stint at her majesty’s pleasure would serve her right.
A good serve from Crikey is probably the worst she will suffer, but I hope her conscience gives her some problems at night.
Good expose. However, what use is it? These people clearly run the show with their ability to sway enough voters with lies, obfuscation, and misinformation, aided and abetted by a huge, almost monolithic, mainstream media which is now completely in their favour. I don’t see Labor winning any election in future except by fluke.
Let’s not get too enamoured with the ALP’s credentials, totaram.
Yes, one side of the policy they took to the recent election involved lifts in various targets.
The other side of their policy, the ‘compensation’ if you like, for outfits such as the BCA, was to propose fracking the bejesus out of the Beetaloo Basin in the NT.
That was alongside waving on through the Adani coal mine in the Carmichael – ‘If it meets all the approvals’, said Wee Billy and Co.
And, Adani was more ‘Trojan Horse’, than mine, with the likes of Clive ‘Nickel Refinery’ Palmer, and ‘Rinehart the Hideous’ waiting in the wings with their mining applications for the Carmichael. How might Wee Billy and Co have withstood the challenge beginning with; ‘But, you let an Indian mine the Carmichael, what about we Orzie ‘entrepreneurs’?’
For Wee Billy and Co, you can never have enough “Carbon Bombs”.
Expose ? Pull the other one. Anyone who thinks the BCA is anything other than an avowedly climate denialist outfit is in another form of denial.
To those phantasists who believe, against clear evidence, that “Labor” will ever do anything meaningful, in general but specifically, regarding climate policies – bear in mind what the Great Equivocator, Albumin Agonistes, spluttered yesterday about “Labor” needing to get closer to the business community (WTF is that?) and have regard for its concerns.
Not a shredded cig paper between T1 & T2, even in meaningless rhetoric.
There’s your corporate worm-hole right there :- “link sensible and credible emissions reduction targets to a long-term, well designed national emissions trading scheme” = “sensible” and “credible” ….. according to the BCA’s interpretations?
When you think about it their faux magnanimity lip-service strategy is similar to Murdoch’s “freedom of the press” strategy – while attacking the ABC for airing what Limited News wishes wasn’t = “Freedom of the press – as long as it’s on Rupert’s terms, to use the medium to present BS as fact and propagandise from behind a tissue of altruism”.
Sure, BK…but really, the BCA is mostly now just irrelevant on CC, no? The global economy and investment community made decisions about CC, energy and emissions about a decade ago. So – most importantly – did the international risk insurance industry. The BCA ‘rebels’ are those companies led by men and women who, bluntly, just don’t want to be left behind by the grown-ups, to be stuck in anti-capitalism nerd town with reactionary old bores like Rupert, Clive, Gina – and the toff sprog twerps of the IPA. Who can blame them? No smart, ambitious executive wants to be a member of the D*ckheads Who Missed The Boat club.
So sure, professional gobs like Westacott et al, and our thicker coal-pollies, still make a lot of annoying noise. But really, the CC stoush is all over, now. Serious strategic money won (as always). All that remains of mild interest to the rest of the world – tho’ urgent interest to us, obv – is whether Australia will become a politely-shunned, asset-stranded, third-world service/client sub-economy…or slip through the rapidly closing new energy window, to secure a re-tooled place in the fast-evolving next iteration of international capitalism.
Y’re right Jack. Things have moved on. Westcott and crew are almost irrelevant.
Munich Re & Zurich Re made the relevant decisions several years ago.
Our biz genii, like the diplodocus with tiny brains at a distance from their motor control system, just haven’t noticed that they are dead, hence the continued, apparent, movement (though most of that is due to the necrotic worms feasting).
You mean :-
“Have the ply-wood caravan that is this R&D averse government, their foreign owned and fossilised benefactors, embrace R&D that could turn a profit from CC mitigation : rather than have foreign owned entities do the R&D so that we can pay to import the technology”?
And even ‘…or, better (worse) still, train our local brilliant youngsters to come up with brilliant CC mitigating and new energy ideas, aaaaand…then force them to head away overseas, and hand said brilliance to said foreign-owned entities, who we then pay to re-import…etc etc…’
Yah. Never let it be said we aren’t world class in capitalist ineptitude, klews. How good is Orstraya?!
How good? Enough-of-us-elected-this-denialist-frog-boiling-government good.
Yagoddalaff?
“You vote for the return of a government in the hope that they, and thus “things”, get better” : they get returned and interpret that as a mandate to go harder and deeper on the plebs that voted for them?
In a world trying to wean itself odd coal, financial bodies divesting themselves of coal shares, coal miners in mining electorates voting for “pro-coal” parties – when new mines are going to close the mines those miners work in and reduce the value of their homes to those of “transportable” value?