In The Daily Fix, Crikey taps into the wisdom of experts and community leaders to find solutions to problems. Today: climate change.
If the prime minister wanted to take serious action on climate change — and, more importantly, encourage other levels of government, businesses and individuals to take action — he would simply say that it is real, that it’s caused by burning fossil fuels, and that it’s one of the biggest threats to our national sovereignty, security, prosperity and environmental wellbeing.
He would insist that those members of his backbench who question the science or the need to act are as entitled to their view as he is entitled to ignore them.
From a policy point of view he would commit to transitioning away from fossil fuels as soon as possible. He would ban the construction of new coal oil and gas production. He would reassure people that this in no way will lead to “shutting down the energy system overnight”. It will simply be the first step towards a transition to a world that burns less fossil fuels.
He would stop the subsidies for fossil fuel construction and consumption and redirect the tens of billions of dollars per year currently spent on subsidies towards helping regions and industries to adapt.
This would be far more help than we gave the car industry, or the textile industry, or the call centre industry when free trade deals cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. But it’s a small price to pay to fairly facilitate the rapid transition we need.
He would set renewable energy targets and storage targets that give industry the confidence to invest. And he would introduce efficiency standards for cars, trucks, houses and commercial buildings. A carbon price would help provide even more incentive.
Tackling climate change isn’t an economic or engineering challenge. It’s a political one.
Richard Denniss is the chief economist of The Australia Institute.
He would also need to do one other, unpalatable, thing, Richard. He’d have to say he’d got it wrong earlier and apologies for the wasted time and petty debates leading us to this new seminal moment. That would allow us (those disenchanted souls who vividly recall that childish, pointless, nasty episode) to delete the images we have of him holding a lump of coal in the parliament. Otherwise, we (the disenchanted) won’t be able to let that moment go. I’m sure there’s a biblical story somewhere that could help make the need for that mea culpa clear to Scott.
Proverbs 28:13
Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.
and
Timothy 2:5 …instructing his opponents with gentleness. Perhaps God will grant them repentance leading them to the knowledge of the truth.
But Scomo is a fake.
The article starts out boldly. “The Prime Minister should… simply say that it is real, that it’s caused by burning fossil fuels…” Obvious to any school kid, the Prime Minister should then replace the fossil fuels with non-fossil fuels. If that isn’t obvious to you, try saying it into a mirror.
With crumbling rectitude, the article dissembles with a cowardly recommendation, that we “transition to a world that burns less fossil fuels”. The kiddies should boo that one off stage. We need to decarbonise completely. There is no room to burn less, when we must rapidly transition to a world that burns no fossil fuels at all. The minesites must be filled in. The gas wells must be blown up. The pipelines bulldozed away.
Neither would setting “renewable energy targets and storage targets” give industry any confidence at all, because industry has its engineers who know that there is no storage technology capable of delivering energy across a single day let alone an average year, or an unexpectedly bad year. Renewable energy will always remain no more than camouflage for a continuing fossil fuel industry.
Go to a cave and stay there.
A 100 years from now we’ll be using 100 times more energy than today.
E=MC2 – energy is near limitless in this universe and step by step we’ll figure out how to unleash so much power from that energy that we’ll reterraform this planet before doing the same to Mars and more.
The future will be messy – just as the past was messy. But the end times are not coming. So go read your little red book and get first dibs on the best cave.
That climate change action is a ‘political issue’ is exactly why our response has been lamentable. It is an existential issue and until we collectively see it as that, visionless politics will ensure armageddon.
Whether Border Generalissimo-MP or Treasurer for Stopping the Social Services or head of government, morrison has always relished a profound inhumanity. Yet like the subversive power of the Murdock media, no-one in power ever mentions seeing it. Presumably it has assisted his rise to the top, so why would he change?
So to morrison the brutality of nursing homes or the increased child-care fees he drove are as completely someone else’s problem as the mental illness he worked so hard to instil in Australia’s concentration camp system.
Now, he is focussed on “a threat to the future of mining … from a new breed of radical activism” and signalled criminalisation not of nursing home neglect but of those targeting businesses that provide services to the transnational resources industry. Such are morrison the ex-Border Generalissimo-MP’s true scale of values. Would any refugee doubt it?
Him act on global heating? Climate Change Denial is what he sees as having taken him to the top.
He would fast track the planting of trees (by drone ?) and ban All land clearing & subsidise soil regeneration Australia wide (Soilkee P/L) ALL CAN BE DONE IMMEDIATELY