What will it take to force Australia to pursue genuine climate action? Its Paris Agreement targets are woefully inadequate to the task of preventing a significant and highly damaging rise in global temperatures, and fail to address Australia’s historical responsibility as a developed country for global temperature rise.
It abolished an effective and efficient carbon pricing scheme in 2014 and didn’t replace it with anything. It refuses to endorse a net zero carbon emissions target despite its four biggest trading partners all establishing one, or announcing their intention to.
Not even the catastrophe of last summer shifted the dial. Despite the conflagration that destroyed vast swathes of the east coast, burned billions of animals, killed 34 people directly and several hundred indirectly through smoke inhalation, Australia has actually retreated further from climate action since then, with the government embracing an absurd “gas-led recovery” that will see taxpayer funding being directed to more fossil fuel power infrastructure and discredited carbon capture and storage technology designed to enable the continuation of coal-fired power.
With more than half of Australian voters believing Australia does not do enough on climate, and more than 70% supporting a net-zero emissions target, the failure of the government to take meaningful climate action, while senior members continue to support climate denialism, appears intractable.
That reflects that the core political business model of the Coalition under Scott Morrison is to take donations in exchange for influence over, or even the right to dictate, policy. The “gas-led recovery” policy was literally dictated by current or former gas company executives representing major Coalition donors.
Labor under Anthony Albanese has a similar problem: key donors the Australian Workers Union and the mining division of the CFMEU oppose effective climate action, as do a rump of denialists and destabilisers within the party’s parliamentary ranks.
Labor is unlikely to demonstrate the policy bravery of Bill Shorten, who went to the 2016 election with a commitment to a carbon price, and to the 2019 election with Malcolm Turnbull’s national energy guarantee coupled to a higher emissions reduction target.
A significant part of the problem, as Turnbull has repeatedly pointed out, is that the foreign political party masquerading as media outlet News Corp is a vehicle for denialism that will attack anyone who deviates from a fossil-fuels-first party line.
In the absence of the removal of these structural impediments — a biased, oligopolistic media market, flawed political donations laws — it seems unlikely that Australia will end its growing status as a global climate pariah obsessed with serving the needs of a diminishing group of increasingly unviable fossil fuel companies and a foreign billionaire who floods the country with denialist propaganda.
What can force policy change? It seems only some form of international sanctions will compel Australia’s governing class to accept climate reality and the need for meaningful action.
Greens leader Adam Bandt recently urged South Korea to impose carbon tariffs on Australia to make up for the absence of a carbon price or any other form of effective climate action. That prompted acting Nationals leader and climate denialist Michael McCormack to accuse Bandt of treachery.
In fact, the case for carbon tariffs applied to Australian exports is a strong one economically and morally. Australia is a free rider on international climate efforts. While other developed countries are taking much stronger action and embracing net zero targets, Australia refuses to act, giving its exporters an unfair advantage against competitors who are taking meaningful emissions abatement action.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), not normally to be found advocating either tariffs or extreme green policies, supports the carbon tariffs under consideration by the European Union.
“A top priority should be an agreement on a carbon pricing floor among major emitting countries [which] would be a powerful means of reducing global emissions,” IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said in September.
In the absence of an agreement on carbon pricing – which would be by far preferable – applying the same carbon prices on the same products irrespective of where they are produced could help avoid shifting emissions out of the EU to countries with different standards.
Australia, with its “gas-led recovery”, corrupted political process and continuing reliance on fossil fuels for exports and energy, is moving from climate laggard to climate criminal as we head for another record warm year — possibly the warmest ever.
Global sanctions in the form of tariffs on every Australian export — not just the limited range of energy-intensive products identified by the EU — to make up for our lack of action is economically justified and morally compelling.
Should Australia face sanctions to force action on climate change? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column.
Bernard, the Federal government cant have a climate policy simply because that would undermine its election strategy. Which is 90 per cent scare campaigns.
They wont be able to run the debt and deficit scare this time, so the climate policy jobs scare will be even more essential. If Australia does face international censure, the climate scare campaign will be ramped up even further.
Morrison and co will never change on this issue. Its a matter of political survival.
Well said.
Yes, Again… Last election the LNP demanded that Labor state ‘how much their carbon emissions reduction policies would cost’ over coming decades. And Labor couldn’t handle the politics, so it worked for LNP in the electorate.
You’d think accelerating climate change would be a big scare campaign that they could honestly run with .But of course, except this time, it’s real, and they tend to run away with alt. reality.
Yes, I think it is time to fact check Scottie from marketing.
We all understand that he runs on “Alternate facts” and sometimes an “Alternate time space continuum” to the one we all inhabit.
Scotty is preparing to piviot and make it an economic issue that only the party of good economic management can manage for the betterment of the Australian people. Morrison will say anything – he is the ultimate weather vane and will go to the next election on a platform of moving forward on climate issues as central to the nations future. Meanwhile, Labor will be held hostage by a new culture war based on mining communities, and will be road kill as the LNP powers onto another decade of power.
That is so feasible I hope that there are no LNP strategists reading here.
We have George Monbiot’s ‘pollution paradox’ in play. From today’s Guardian:
“….the Pollution Paradox, a concept that I think is essential to understanding our politics. What this means is that the dirtier or more damaging an enterprise is, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s not regulated out of existence. As a result, political funding comes to be dominated by the most harmful companies and oligarchs, which then wield the greatest political influence. They crowd out their more accommodating rivals.“
So apt re here.
A rather apt description of ‘free market’ realpolitik.
Sounds like an extremely good idea to me. Morrison et al should be tried for Crimes Against Humanity IMO, since it wouldn’t take much to prove government lack of action on climate change directly contributed towards last summers shocking bushfire infernos, and the preventable deaths of 30+ people and over one billion animals. This government disgusts me, but neither major party will budge until there is total political donation reform. That’s where the rot begins and ends.
Wow. What a great summary. A bit wrong though, we’ve been climate criminals since the carbon price was dismantled. The treachery is all McCormacks and the governments, for looking after their donors and not the planet and not setting the country to prosper from the huge future of renewable energy. The states might save us but we need federal leadership.
You mean the carbon tax repeal referred to in paragraph 2? Did you skip to the comments?
No we’ve been climate criminals since the Howard government stuffed around at negotiations if the Kyoto protocol, extracting “the Australia clause”.
WAexit Now! 😉
What is going on in this country regarding Climate Change is shameful.
Why can’t voters see it for what it is and vote the Climate Change deniers out of office.
Do we have to wait another seven years.
We will probably have passed the tipping point by 2028.
Most atmospheric data suggests that tipping point of no return is already in the rear view mirror – the thawing permafrost releases methane in quantities beyond imagination and it is far more effective a greenhouse gas – ie blanket – than wimpy CO2.
A point Lovelock made twenty odd years ago. I have the MP3. He declared “it is hopelessly too late”.
I found his prediction of “a few breeding pairs of humans north of the Arctic circle” a reassuring vision of the future.
Aided by the click-bait press, it has become obligatory to become anxious (hysterical?) over everything from C-19 to climate change to BLM. The Toba eruption provides a sobering reassessment; some contradictory research, as to the fine print, notwithstanding.
It is actually no big deal to return the planet to the invertebrates. Both Sartre and Nietzsche made some profound contributions as to (human) obsessions; Camus too – come to that. Such is politics.
As to migrations across the Bering Strait (quite a different place circa 12000 years ago) the numbers were in the order of a thousand over tens of decades. Rather interesting actually.