Politicians go cold as climate issue heats up

Date

July 17, 2013

Instead of focusing on the looming peril of climate change, Australia’s leaders have reduced the issue to counting the dollars and cents.

Digital image: Judy Green.

Climate change is a dangerous political issue. It has helped unseat three prime ministers and one opposition leader – Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Turnbull. It helped determine the outcomes of the 2007 and 2010 federal elections and is also likely to be a battleground issue this year. Attention will focus on three issues – the carbon tax, climate-budget black holes, and climate leadership.

The carbon tax debate Mark 2 is under way. Kevin Rudd’s promise to bring forward to mid-2014 Labor’s introduction of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) aims to bury the tax by reframing it as a stepping stone to the ETS. A national ETS linked to the international carbon market means the Australian price of carbon will fall from $24 a tonne to perhaps as low as $7 to $10 a tonne (the current European price). This will puncture residual criticisms of Australia’s ”high” carbon price and might possibly reduce electricity bills.

Public and industry support – or at least grudging tolerance – of the carbon price is increasing, and Abbott’s apocalyptic opposition to the ETS as a carbon tax by another name now seems overstated. The Coalition has to explain why an internationally favoured market-based mechanism is bad for Australia.

All this focuses attention on the Coalition’s alternative, the Direct Action Plan (DAP). Its ”reverse auction mechanism” and its promised boost to the uptake of renewable energy are weak on detail and look a lot like the voluntary measures that failed during the Howard era. Without a cap on emissions – the critical part of the ETS – it is unclear how the DAP could help Australia hit its weak 2020 emissions reduction target of minus 5 per cent below 2000 levels. It cannot deal with tougher targets.

Rather than reducing subsidies to fossil fuel producers, Labor has responded by cutting funding to the popular Clean Technology Investment Program (funding solar PV installation and energy-efficient lighting), the biodiversity fund and the farming support fund. A cut-price ETS weakens the incentive for abatement. These cuts weaken it further.

The Coalition’s climate budget is even more vulnerable. Abbott has promised to continue compensation to households and industry (worth $4.8 billion) and establish an Emissions Reduction Fund ($3.2 billion over four years). Moreover, ending the carbon tax before mid-2014 would require extra compensation to industry for carbon permits held. So will the promise to dishonour the contracts established by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Without the revenue of a carbon tax or ETS, the Coalition’s funding gap is at least $5.6 billion next year.

Last, the leadership issue plays into the climate space in several ways. Rudd the ”climate believer” will seek to differentiate himself from Abbott the ”climate confused”, who is on record with an exceptionally wide range of views about whether or not global warming is happening, is caused by humans, or is a problem. Abbott’s latest statement about emissions trading being ”a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one” has already been criticised as evidence of his failure to understand how cap-and-trade markets work, and suggesting a deeper level of climate denialism.

Labor will also emphasise its leadership by pointing to its policy record. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (established to invest in renewable energy programs) and the Climate Change Authority (to advise on future emissions targets and trajectories) comprise a sophisticated institutional architecture that the Coalition has promised to demolish.

It is the climate leadership issue that poses the biggest personal risk for Abbott, who has effectively staked his future on his crash-through or crash approach to ending the carbon tax. His blood oath to end the tax includes calling for a double dissolution if his repeal legislation fails in the Senate and then, if the Coalition wins, holding a joint sitting to pass the blocked legislation.

Double dissolutions are rare, expensive and politically high-risk. Forced elections are disliked by the public. They carry the added risk for the Coalition (and Labor) of increasing the Greens’ hold over the Senate. Abbott’s promise will therefore be cast as an extreme and uncertain tactic and its rashness and inflexibility used to focus on Abbott’s qualities as a leader.

The Greens are now likely to hold the balance of power in the new Senate. If so, the Coalition’s bills to end the carbon price and implement the DAP will fail, forcing Abbott’s hand. Abbott will either have to take a different parliamentary tack – leading to a new ”broken promise”. Or the Coalition will have to find another leader: Abbott may be climate politics’ fifth scalp.

The Greens are likely to be the winners if climate becomes a battleground issue. Their record in shoe-horning the carbon price into the deal that gave Labor government, and their strong climate and renewable energy targets and policies, improve their chances of securing climate-anxious voters’ first preferences in the Senate. They are likely to remain brokers with significant influence over new climate policy and legislation proposed by incoming Labor or Coalition governments.

So what is missing here? Actually, a debate about the real threat of global warming. If the climate debate follows the lines I’ve suggested, it will bore rather than frighten the punters. In Australia, debates about climate change tend to be squeezed down into a thin discussion about the hip-pocket nerve. The vast social and ecological impacts of global warming are ignored as we count the dollars and cents.

It was this consensus of silence that Rudd briefly ruptured when he talked about climate change as the ”greatest moral challenge”. Then the stifling blanket of economic micro-reform closed over his and our heads.

Australia’s current climate policies and its insufficient minus 5 per cent target contribute to a world rushing towards global warming in excess of 4 degrees, with devastating social, economic and ecological impacts for Australia in particular. This is the debate we need to have if climate is to be addressed effectively in this election. Don’t hold your breath. Neither Labor nor the Coalition is keen to go there.

Associate Professor Peter Christoff teaches climate policy at the University of Melbourne.