Climate change: Abbott must get off the fence

Date

June 25, 2013

Tim Colebatch

Tim Colebatch is The Age’s economic editor.

Sooner or later Tony Abbott will have to reveal his plans to tackle climate change.

Illustration: Matt Golding

• The Pulse Live: Politics from Parliament with Stephanie Peatling

Tony Abbott never talks about climate change if he can help it. It is not a subject he is comfortable with. His goal is to position the Coalition with one foot in the climate change deniers’ camp and one foot in the climate change believers’ camp. It is not a comfortable position.

It is also not a position in which he can give leadership on an issue that will inevitably become one of the major issues facing an Abbott government.

Climate change has not gone away. Australia has just had its hottest summer on record, wedged between its fourth-warmest spring, and its seventh-warmest autumn. Yes, the British Met Office estimates that 1998 was the world’s hottest year on record, but the rest of its top 10 comprises 2001, ’02, ’03, ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07, ’09 and ’11. Ignore that at your peril.

”There is nowhere else for people to go, and no way to reset the planet’s climate system. If we are to take a prudential view of public finances, we should surely take a prudential view of something irreversible and much costlier.”

Australians are now expressing a similar view, through the less eloquent language of opinion polls. Recent polls by Essential Research, the Lowy Institute and JWS Research have found that, after Abbott’s scare campaign against carbon tax, the pendulum is swinging back.

The JWS poll found that 66 per cent of Australians think climate change is real. The JWS and Lowy polls gave opposite findings on whether people still want the carbon tax scrapped, but even the latter found that 84 per cent of Australians want action against global warming – and both Lowy and Essential found voters prefer Labor’s policy to the Coalition’s.

A price on carbon is not essential to tackling global warming, although economists make a persuasive case that it is the cheapest way. Abbott insists it won’t be his way: the one thing he wants us to know about climate change is that he will scrap the carbon tax as soon as he can.

On present polling, if Julia Gillard leads Labor at the election, the Coalition will win a Senate majority to repeal the carbon tax, either alone or with DLP senator John Madigan and maybe other minor parties. Senate seats in each state usually divide three-all between left and right, but this time Queensland, and possibly Western Australia and NSW, are likely to vote 4-2. If so, Abbott won’t need a double dissolution to get his way.

That means Australia will have to tackle global warming in other ways. Abbott as prime minister would have to keep a majority of voters onside. He will not be able to hide on climate change. If 84 per cent of Australians want action, his government will have to deliver it – and make it work.

The world is not standing still. On Tuesday night in Washington, President Obama will spell out an action plan to meet his ambitious target to cut US emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels. US carbon dioxide emissions have already plunged to 1995 levels, as gas replaces coal as the fuel of choice in power stations. Obama is expected to tighten emissions standards for power stations, to force the most polluting plants to shut down.

China has been doing that for years, with the result that last year coal use in its rapidly expanding electricity sector actually declined. It has just inaugurated the first of eight regional trials of emissions trading that by 2015 will form the world’s biggest emissions trading scheme outside the European Union.

By then, Korea’s ETS will also be in operation. California’s is already under way. An Australian National University survey of decision-makers in the electricity industry found most believe that, even if the Abbott government repeals the carbon price, by 2020 it will be reinstated.

But there are other ways, and Abbott’s team should look carefully at a report by the International Energy Agency, Redrawing the Energy Climate Map, which estimates that the world could slash its current greenhouse gas emissions by 10 per cent at no net cost by tackling four areas:

â–  Tightening energy efficiency standards, especially for heating and cooling, appliances and motor vehicles.

â–  Shutting down or reducing the load of the dirtiest coal-fired stations. (Among other things, by networks including emissions and not just price when deciding whose power to buy.)

â–  Halving the release of methane through flaring and venting at gas and oil projects.

â–  Phasing out the $US523 billion a year that governments now give people in subsidies to burn fossil fuels (such as Australia’s $6 billion a year diesel fuel tax rebate).

These decisions cost the economy nothing, because there are big benefits in reducing waste of scarce fuels (not least, lower prices). They will cost individual companies, but that is inevitable. Even Indonesia’s populist parliament has finally voted to start winding back fuel subsidies, raising petrol prices by 40 per cent.

Abbott cannot stay sitting on the fence, and it is very clear which side most Australians want him to be on. He cannot put out another policy, as in 2010, that relies on ridiculously optimistic estimates of how much carbon could be stored cheaply in the soil.

The polls show climate change is an area where the Coalition is vulnerable. It needs to respond with a policy that shows it’s tough enough to govern.

Tim Colebatch is economics editor of The Age.