On climate change politics, Australia is slowly crawling out of the cave.
To mix up the cave metaphor, we moved on to the troglodyte peak.
The light pierced the darkness. The troglodytes are always growling and watching, but those who ignore or deny science have waning power.
Skeptical language still shapes climate politics. Yet the troglodyte effect has less impact in this election year than it has had for 15 years.
The exploration of the cave reflects changes on the political spectrum. Render this spectrum ranging from denial and skepticism to the central position of acceptance of science. Beyond acceptance, the spectrum reaches into belief and action.
Deniers think global warming is not happening or simply ignore it, while skeptics always want more convincing evidence.
Denier-skeptical forces have pushed Australia into the political cavern with versions of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s 2009 line that climate change is ‘absolute crap’. Warming could be good for us, Abbott wrote in battle lines, and there is no point in imposing “certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future”.
Note that the formal position of Australian political parties has always been to accept science on global warming. In politics, however, accepting a political position does not confer priority or action.
Our problem has been the step beyond the tick and nod of acceptance to the step of belief. Achieving belief means that understanding becomes a truth that defines reality. In politics, belief rearranges priorities, changes politics, and demands money: action happens.
The action hurts because it is a thorny issue, made worse by the push of the mining industry and the noise of the Murdoch media empire.
We have been stuck in the cave of ignorance and denial because Australia is an emissions superpower, standing with Russia and Saudi Arabia among the biggest exporters of fossil fuels.
The resource blessing can be a “coal curse”. The cave is comfortable because the fossil fuel industry seeks to “capture Australian hearts and minds”. Mining has muscles to match its riches – throwing its weight against Kevin Rudd and his mining tax in 2010 and killing the Hawke government’s land rights legislation in the 1980s.
Miners, our most powerful industry, rarely have to make an overt entry into the political ring; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia is there every day.
News Corp’s defining voice is the national broadsheet, The Australian, while the capital’s tabloids do the yapping and Sky News do the televised rantings. Empire has reach, setting up an echo chamber that touches the ears of every politician. The rest of Australia can take it or leave it The Australianbut for Canberra it’s constant reading in the same way the ABC is constant soundtrack.
The Australian editorializes that he accepts the science of global warming. As Murdoch has long argued, “the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt.”
Just as regularly, what he publishes amounts to a skepticism that treats scientists and environmentalists as enemies. The tag “secret denial” was pinned on The Australian by Robert Manne in 2011 and still corresponds to the facts.
the australian weekend January 15-16 shows how secret denial works. On page 8, an AFP article by a Washington correspondent states that the nine years spanning 2013-2021 rank among the 10 hottest on record:
The impacts have been increasingly felt in recent years, including record-breaking wildfires in Australia and Siberia, a once-in-1,000-year heat wave in North America, and extreme rainfall that caused massive flooding in Asia, Africa, United States and Europe.
Heavy evidence, certainly, but the newspaper knows how to raise the temperature. Look to the editorials published in the ‘Inquirer’ section for the change of tone.
On the front page, environment editor Graham Lloyd has the lead story on how Australia is weathering the climate storm: ‘Australia has benefited from the effects of two La Nina years, much to the chagrin climate catastrophists”. These catastrophists, Lloyd argues in his opening paragraph, have been faced with “an inconvenient set of realities” because weather systems have plunged Australia’s average temperatures in 2021 to the lowest levels in a decade.
In the third paragraph, things get lyrical: “[N]Nature is not broken, natural cycles continue to operate and this resilience persists on land and at sea.
Deeper in the article, Lloyd cites the US study that made headlines, noting the finding that average global temperatures last year were 1.1°C warmer than the average for the late 19th century, at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Such science takes a cold shower when you turn the page to find a title on “50 Years of Climate Panic”, by Bjorn Lomborg, whose latest book is False alarm: how the climate change panic is costing us billions, hurting the poor and not fixing the planet.
Lomborg, too, begins by scorning those who fear ‘climate catastrophe’, mocking the ‘panic and poor policies’ that are fueled by ‘exaggerated predictions and emotional forecasts’ about the planet’s ‘last chance’. . Its opening paragraph puts quotation marks around “climate disaster” and “catastrophic,” but they indicate not so much irony or sarcasm as defining the target to be hit. Classic stuff from The Australianfavorite ‘skeptical environmentalist’, who has been writing variations on the same column for two decades: don’t worry, be smart, spend on adaptation and innovation.
Australia is coming out of the cave for many reasons. Even News Corp made an editorial campaign last year to achieve zero emissions. Murdoch’s editor called it an ‘evolution’ of politics, but there was a my culpa tint.
The Murdoch Empire is catching up with the rest of Australia, as Lowy Institute polls show growing climate concern. Expect covert denial to decrease. May be.
After 15 years of argy-bargy, our main government parties, the Liberals and Labor, are closer on climate policy than they have been since the 2007 election, when they stood agreement on the need for an emissions trading system. (A counterfactual is that if John Howard had taken his seat and run the government in 2007, we would have gotten the ETS and not gone so deep into the cave.)
Scott Morrison convinced the coalition to agree to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Governments get little credit for what doesn’t happen (especially in-government disasters), so that the prime minister doesn’t have much cachet for edging the Libs and Nationals out of the cave. More than a political pirouette, ScoMo demined while hurtling down the mountain on a ski.
Morrison said the policy passed the Nats’ party hall by just two votes. So only two votes away from blowing up the coalition. “I had to put it online,” notes the Prime Minister, “and it was very close.” The National Party is shaken but crudely reconciled, notably by promises of cash rewards for the bush.
Australia is about to cram two political years into one.
The first “year” will end with the budget on March 29 and the federal election in May. Morrison needs every day he can get, so I’m sticking to the prediction that the election will be on May 21, the last possible day for a half-senate and the House of Representatives.
The Liberals cannot corner Labor on climate policy like they did in the 2019 election. The two sides are too close to each other.
Labor has long suffered the agony of having its vote eaten away from the left by the Greens. Now the Libs face a similar test in nominally safe seats, attacked by independents. The government says the independents come from the left, but on climate they reflect the center of public opinion.
Whether it’s Scott Morrison or Anthony Albanese, Labor or the Liberals, the government that gets to work in June will have to do more than accept the science – it will have to believe and act.
