The Greens oppose the CPRS not because it is too weak, but because it will point Australia in the wrong direction with little prospect of turning it around in the timeframe within which emissions must peak, says Senator Christine Milne.
The Opposition and climate: what’s really going on
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The Nationals haven’t “turned on Turnbull” at all, contrary to claims in The Australian today. In fact, the Coalition’s positions (note the plural) on emissions trading remain the same as they’ve been for a while. Some might suggest that The Oz is running a campaign to undermine any action on climate change and Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, but I’ll leave that for what’s left of its readership to determine. Here’s what actually happening. For some time, the Liberal leadership has been resigned to the Nationals voting against any form of emissions trading. The Nats don’t believe in climate change and have developed a psychosis about emissions trading. Hell, if you slapped “ETS” on a good old-fashioned Nats-style pork barrel they’d vote against it. That this amounts to a breach by the Nationals of their election promise to introduce an ETS probably doesn’t matter a great deal given the party’s struggle for relevance anyway, but Liberals such as Christopher Pyne are only too happy to point this out. The Liberal leadership is also resigned to some Liberal backbenchers voting against it. Wilson Tuckey, obviously, but we knew that anyway. Dennis Jensen presumably will, but that, too, is hardly unexpected. Corey Bernardi, the right-winger from South Australia, is also expected to vote against it, and other senators such as Mathias Cormann are expected to as well. C’est la vie. Broad church, Liberal tradition, etc, etc. That’s not to say the Nationals — or at least the more sensible ones — aren’t involved in the drafting of the Liberals’ ETS amendments. The amendments are being drafted by a group headed by Andrew Robb, with Greg Hunt and Turnbull’s office — and with input from Nationals Senators John Williams and Fiona Nash on issues such as biosequestration, where Turnbull, Hunt and Robb still harbour ambitions to steal a march on the Government. The amendments the Liberals eventually put forward are therefore likely to be supported by at least those Nationals capable of rational thought on the issue, given they will offer incentives to farmers, even if they object to the ETS itself. This may not be that important to whether they succeed or fail in the Senate, but it will be important for ensuring the Coalition joint party room approves the amendments. It would be a disaster for Turnbull — OK, yet another disaster — if his backbench rejected the amendments, in terms of weakening his leadership and in depriving him of any basis for negotiation with the Government. In fact, it could well be fatal, something you can bet the Government is factoring in to its own calculations about if and when Turnbull’s demise might come about. The Turnbull strategy is to minimise the amount of time that headlines such as today’s keep occurring. The sooner the issue is off the agenda, which will only happen if an ETS is passed, the sooner he can get over perceptions of disunity and move the debate back onto economic policy. He doesn’t have a much stronger hand there to play against the government, but there is far less division on his own side — both among his own troops, and in the Liberal Party membership as well. Barnaby Joyce, whose primary interest is self-promotion, will doubtless find another issue to carry on about, but climate change hurts the Coalition because of a genuine community desire for change. Despite the headlines and incessant criticism from the government, Turnbull is playing a shocking hand as well as he can. Given the government’s priority is undermining his leadership rather than getting its ETS legislation passed, Turnbull has no choice. |
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10 Comments
Dr Nelson’s parting advice on carbon reduction won’t help the situation: Expediently wait and see what other countries do “on principle” rather than decide for or against “on politics”. WTF?
The irony is that Turnbull has more and broader interest in carbon abatement than Rudd does, including the highly interesting bio-char research http://www.csiro.au/resources/Biochar-Factsheet.html with potential not only to sequester carbon but to do it usefully, improving farming soil and rainfall. But his party thinks bio-char is something you put in a barbeque.
As far as I can tell from here, the Nat’s thinking goes like this: “Greens believe global warming bad. Greens always bad. Greens always wrong. So global warming must be good.”
The Nats have got a point, sorry to say. The Greens have been trying to paint primary industry as environmental vandalism second only to an oil spill. Or if I’m wrong about that, well, that’s how their advertising comes across. They’d be happy for us to have a service-based economy and we can all import our foodstuffs according to relative-advantage theory, and close down most of our farming and grazing.
I’d question whether something so critical to survival as food should ever be allowed to depend on trade over the ocean. The Europeans and Americans seem to feel the same way and show every sign of insulating their primary production from any penalties. Why wouldn’t we do the same?
Where to start? Perhaps by saying that (as far as I can tell from here), from a Green point of view, food imports are actually a bad thing - food should be produced locally, and everything else too. I’m tempted to believe that at least some Greens want us all to grow our own food and weave our own clothes.
But that’s to wander off the point.
Even if you maintain that the Greens are as reliable as a stopped clock, a stopped clock is right twice a day. The Nat’s seem to assume that the Greens are always, always wrong, and therefore Global Warming can’t be a bad thing, it just can’t be, whatever the science says.
In my opinion, it’s a pity the Greens have become involved in the Global Warming debate, because they’ve tried to load all sorts of baggage onto it, and a lot of people have assumed that because some of it is rubbish, that all of it must be rubbish, and unless a lot of people who are smarter than I are all wrong, we’re heading into a world of pain and we’re still in denial about that.
We cannot prevent Global warming. We can make it a bit worse, or a bit better, and we can prepare for it. Or not.
People like to throw around these claims about the Greens promoting “rubbish” and all that but very often specify exactly what they are referring too. In my opinion, they are the only party that is seriously interested in developing rational policy responses to what really is a crisis like no other.
that should say “can’t specify”
How about “Climate change is partly an issue about the sustainability of capitalist production. … Tackling global warming means building a radical movement that targets the system and connects up with the struggles of other movements for change.” (In fairness, that’s socialistworker, not the more mainstream Greens. http://www.socialistworker.org.au/575/single-issue-conservatism-wont-tackle-global-warming/)
Or this “The most effective way to fight the global warming crisis is to stop eating meat, eggs, and dairy products.” http://www.goveg.com/environment-globalWarming.asp
Or this ” global warming and climate change now kills the as many people every year as died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” http://www.globalwarmingblog.org/
Or this: “environmental sustainability can only ever be achieved if we get rid of this rotten capitalist system” http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/747/38650
Rasta, the nice thing about being a member of the Greens is being able to cherry-pick issues that can be made to look like good-vs-evil to the idealistic undergraduate set. Ben Aveling’s comparison to a stopped clock is brilliant, that’s exactly what the Greens are like. They don’t hold a candle up to the old Democrats who, before that party broke down, used to take on a lot of stuff that was too complex for even the major parties to respond to effectively.
I’m all for reducing carbon aggressively, far more than Rudd proposes to, because if you can’t trust the scientific experts then you might as well give up on all education and research as ways to run the world better. You might as well give up on the whole Enlightenment.
But the purpose of market-based CO2 reduction is to modify behaviour away from high-emission behaviour. Inconveniently, producing food is more high-emission than other industries like telecommunication or entertainment. If you include farming in the behaviour-modification program you have to follow that road where it leads, which is population reduction.
I’m sorry but both of those posts are just more of the same vague speculation. Those links quite obviously have nothing to do with specific Greens’ policy but I’m curious what you are trying to say about their sentiments? There is no doubt that animal food production has a huge carbon footprint and reducing consumption will be unavoidable if we are to reduce emissions to the level required. The fact about all this is that for us to reduce emissions equitably under something like the contract and converge scheme, where each individual has an equal amount of emissions allocated to them, it would require the world to become much more like the socialist ideal than anyone has ever imagined possible.
James, I’d love it if you could provide me with specific examples of issues you believe the Greens are deliberately avoiding. Obviously they don’t have the man power of the major parties or even the democrats at their peak so I don’t see how it would be to their advantage to spread themselves too thin.
Yes, official capital-G Green is increasingly mainstream and don’t-scare-the-horses. For eg, “Human induced global warming through the burning of fossil fuels is a fundamental threat to ecosystems, human societies and _economic security_”. (http://qld.greens.org.au/election/policy/climate-change-and-energy , my emphasis. Were I a cynic, I’d suggest there is in evidence a rising tide of both pragmatism and good sense.)
My point about these ‘sentiments’ is that it’s irrelevant to the Nationals what the Green’s actual policies are. The Nationals know what they think Green policies are, and based on that, they have a great dislike of the Greens, and everything associated with the Greens. To me, the Nationals appear to unthinkingly assume that, if the Greens say Global Warming is a problem, then Global Warming isn’t a problem.