Climate Wars

By Mark Butler

As the consequences of climate change become perilously close to the point of no-return, time-wasting wars over what to do distract us from taking real action.

Mark Butler, the opposition minister for climate change and energy, makes a forceful case for using less and cleaner energy as part of global action to save the planet. Doing so will also make Australia attractive for the massive global market of investors and create new jobs in clean energy.

Climate Wars argues that only Labor, the party with a proven track record for national reform, has the plan and the will to ensure bold action before it is too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780522871692

Book preview

Index

Prologue

In March 2017, the global superstar Adele played to 70 000 fans at the Adelaide Oval. Halfway through her show, part of the sound system stopped working. Adele quickly told her audience (which included my daughter) that a plug had been pulled from the socket by the movement of her revolving stage. An undoubtedly flustered roadie managed to put the plug back in and the show got underway again within a few minutes – all pretty unremarkable, you’d think! But News Limited journalists rushed onto social media to present the dislodged plug as yet more evidence of the unreliability of South Australia’s electricity system. A columnist for The Australian, Chris Kenny, even told his viewers on Sky TV that ‘there was a power blackout’ in Adelaide that had interrupted the concert. Welcome to the bizarre world of climate and energy policy in Australia.

Over the course of the history of Australian politics, there has always been a deep, defining fault line that separates the Right from the Left. While political debate swirls around the contests of a particular day, the issue that represents that fault line during a given period becomes totemic – or, as we say nowadays, part of the culture war. Over the past decade, the defining fault line in Australian politics has been climate change. More than any other issue over that period, one’s identification with the Left or Right of politics has been linked to one’s attitude to climate change. And the dispute isn’t only about the best policy response to the phenomenon – it extends to a contest over the actual science or, as many on the Right describe it, the ‘so-called science’.

In 2011, the Gillard Government succeeded in passing comprehensive climate change laws, but an unrelenting campaign from Opposition leader Tony Abbott and his supporters in business and the media saw those laws operate for just two years. Abbott’s claims about the impact of the so-called ‘carbon tax’ were ridiculous. Australians were warned about the cost of a lamb roast soaring to $100, that the South Australian industrial town of Whyalla (among others) would be ‘wiped off the map’, and that the laws would act as a ‘wrecking ball through the Australian economy’ – never mind that Australia added 160 000 jobs in the first year of the Clean Energy Act, Whyalla survived and the price of lamb (and other meat products) didn’t shift one bit!

The campaign against the Gillard Government’s laws bordered on hysteria, bringing in players who should have known better, and who should have been arguing the case that Australia needed to build a credible response to climate change, even if they took issue with the detail of Labor’s reforms. Instead, Tony Abbott won the 2013 election on a platform of tearing down the Clean Energy Act in its entirety. More than that, the campaign waged by so many on the Right of politics, in business and the media, drove a broader case that climate change was not a serious challenge and should be expunged from the national policy agenda.

The Liberal Party’s insistence on trashing all of Labor’s policies on climate change has had entirely predictable consequences. Tony Abbott’s Direct Action policy was designed, as Malcolm Turnbull once so accurately put it, as ‘an environmental fig leaf to cover a determination to do nothing’. The Liberal policy is working precisely as Abbott intended. Carbon pollution, after coming down by 10 per cent during the Labor Government, has started to rise again in Australia. Direct Action is failing to constrain, let alone reduce, our pollution levels, making Australia pretty much the only major advanced economy in the world whose pollution levels are not falling. The Turnbull Government’s latest official greenhouse data indicate that pollution levels will continue to rise under Direct Action. And renewable energy investment remains flat under a Government that has consistently attacked that industry and has no plan for renewables beyond 2020.

That’s not to say that Labor hasn’t made missteps in this area of policy over the past decade. At times, we’ve made mistakes in both the design of our policies and their presentation. Kevin Rudd has admitted that his decision in 2010 to drop his Government’s Emissions Trading Scheme – at least in the way he did – was a serious misjudgment. Equally, Labor has been frank about the faults made around the presentation of the Gillard Government’s reforms and the consequences of underestimating the power of Abbott’s attack on Julia Gillard’s commitment about a ‘carbon tax’ made during the 2010 election campaign. In hindsight, it’s also clear to most that the carbon price introduced under the Clean Energy Act was too high, especially compared to prices operating in other countries.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of the past decade, though, is that Australia will not be able to make serious progress without an end to the deep, often toxic, divisions that have characterised this policy area since Malcolm Turnbull was deposed as Liberal leader by Tony Abbott in late 2009. That is not a uniquely Australian challenge. Looking around the world, democracies are taking serious action on climate change only where that action is underpinned by a strong level of consensus between the major parties.

Climate change poses a serious threat to the living standards of future generations and to the quality of our natural environment. And the longer we delay action to combat climate change, the more serious those threats will be for our children and grandchildren to manage. The past decade featured a rear-guard movement across the globe by politicians and groups committed to stymieing any action – indeed, committed to de-legitimising the basis for any such action altogether. The time for indulging such campaigns is past. Most governments, communities and corporate boardrooms around the world are no longer debating whether they should take action on climate change – they’re now debating what action they should take, and how quickly.

Australian households and businesses are paying the price for ten years of political warfare over climate and energy policy. The lack of a national plan to renew our energy system is driving up electricity prices and damaging the system’s reliability. And one in every three jobs in the renewable energy sector has disappeared since the election of the Coalition in 2013. Meanwhile, jobs in low-carbon industries around the world are soaring.

Australia cannot afford to continue on this path. In Climate Wars, I set out Labor’s plan to get Australia back on track – a plan that discharges the responsibilities we hold to future generations, and harnesses the enormous opportunities of a low-carbon economy.

ONE

Making Sense of Climate Change

Back in 2014, it was Australia’s turn to chair the G20 – the forum that brings together the world’s twenty largest economies. The annual leaders’ meeting was scheduled in Brisbane for November, and a number of G20 nations – led by the United States – had signalled an intention to use the meeting to build momentum towards a successful climate conference in Paris the following year.

President Barack Obama arranged to speak at the University of Queensland before the leaders’ meeting opened. He issued a clarion call for action on climate change, focusing attention on the threat to ‘the incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef’. He pointed out:

I have not had time to go to the Great Barrier Reef – and I want to come back … I want my daughters to be able to come back, and I want them to be able to bring their [children] to visit. And I want [the Reef] there fifty years from now.

The Great Barrier Reef is Australia’s most important environmental icon – one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World – and climate change poses a grave threat to its survival.

An increase in average ocean temperatures means that it is far more exposed to the risk of mass bleaching events, which already occur. Warmer temperatures also foster the growth of additional algae on the Reef, which inhibits coral growth. And about one-third of the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed into the oceans, creating carbonic acid. This extra acid in the oceans (or acidification) inhibits healthy coral growth by weakening the coral structures. All of this undermines the Reef’s resilience to natural events (like cyclones) and the pressure placed on the Reef through agricultural run-off along the Queensland coast. According to the best ocean and reef scientists in the world (many of whom work in Australia), the Great Barrier Reef will not survive an increase in average temperatures above two degrees Celsius – and, according to some, is in mortal danger at just 1.5 degrees. The Reef is obviously worth protecting just for its own sake. But it’s also an incredibly important part of the Queensland economy – worth about $6 billion annually and supporting more than 69 000 jobs associated with Reef tourism.

As Chair of the G20 meeting, Australia was responsible for preparing the agenda for the leaders’ meeting. The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, was determined to block discussion about climate change. But his attempts to rally opposition to the insistence by the American and Chinese leaders, among others, that global climate policy be discussed failed dismally. Conservative leaders from Germany, the United Kingdom and New Zealand distanced themselves from Abbott.

Barely a year after Obama’s speech, the Reef experienced its worst ever mass bleaching event. That bleaching coincided with the two hottest years on record – 2015 and 2016 – and a substantial El Niño event in the Pacific. Coral becomes distressed or bleached when seawater becomes too warm – if the water doesn’t return to a cooler temperature within several weeks, the coral dies.

The 2016 event saw as much as two-thirds of the northern section of the Reef (north from Port Douglas) die. Some reefs in that 700-kilometre-long section are almost entirely dead and will take many years to be replaced. Fortunately, the central and southern sections of the Reef were much less affected – but the northern section was by far the most pristine part of the Reef, so its damage is especially significant.

This damage is happening on our watch.

The Science of Climate Change

Climate change describes the range of impacts that flow from an increase in average global temperatures caused by the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide), which trap heat. It’s now clear that the dominant source of those greenhouse gases is human activity since the Industrial Revolution. The proposition that human activity is the main cause of climate change is described by all major scientific bodies as a ‘consensus’ position. More than 97 per cent of scientists who work and publish in the field of climate science subscribe to the consensus, ascribing the same level of certainty to the proposition as medical scientists ascribe to the connection between tobacco use and lung cancer. Up until 1950 or so, about half of the carbon dioxide released through human activity was released through changes in land use – particularly deforestation. The other half was released through the burning of fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – and various industrial processes, such as cement making. Since 1950, though, all of the growth in the release of greenhouse gases has come from the burning of fossil fuels and industrial processes.

The release of carbon dioxide, in particular, has increased dramatically over the course of the past century. Annual emissions of carbon dioxide have quadrupled since 1950 and doubled since 1970. Since 2013, though, carbon dioxide emissions have been flat. About 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide released through human activity has been absorbed in the oceans. Another 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide has been absorbed by land vegetation, with the remaining 40 per cent stored in the atmosphere. The additional greenhouses gases stored in the atmosphere increase the amount of heat that is trapped, creating the greenhouse effect. Already, the greenhouse effect has led to an increase in average surface temperature of around one degree Celsius since 1910.

Climate science is a phenomenally complex discipline. As climate change was beginning to come to the attention of policy-makers in the late 1980s, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, lent her strong support to the establishment of a global expert panel of scientists to provide governments and communities with independent advice about this complex area. As a qualified scientist herself, Thatcher understood the importance of a process that would establish the highest possible degree of consensus to inform the deliberations of policy-makers in an area that was likely to be highly contested. This led to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has provided the most authoritative scientific advice for more than two decades. In addition to the regular reports of the IPCC, dozens of national and international scientific agencies, including NASA, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, all provide regular advice as it develops. Still, climate science is regularly caught up in political arguments.

When Science and Politics Clash

In October 2013, the Blue Mountains west of Sydney experienced devastating bushfires that destroyed hundreds of homes and buildings, and caused two deaths. The fires followed the warmest September in New South Wales on record, drying out a lot of fuel. Although the bushfire season officially starts in October in New South Wales, such devastating fires in spring are highly unusual. The Greens Party MP, Adam Bandt, unwisely published a series of tweets while the fires were still raging, connecting Tony Abbott’s climate change policies to the risk of more fires ‘like this’. There’s been a protocol for a long time now in Australia that, while emergencies are underway and people remain at risk, politicians refrain from political argument, especially about the causes of the emergency. Bandt was justifiably criticised for this breach of protocol. The lesson appeared to have been lost on Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce three years later, though, when he launched an extraordinary attack on South Australia’s renewable energy policies while that state was still experiencing a severe storm and flooding event with emergency services personnel deployed in the field.

While the Blue Mountains fires were still burning, the head of the United Nations climate change programs, Christiana Figueres, also weighed into the debate. Figueres described the bushfire footage as a window into the ‘doom and gloom’ the world would face without strong action on climate change. Although Figueres conceded that ‘the World Meteorological Organization has not established the direct link between this wildfire and climate change yet’, she pointed to scientific research demonstrating an increase in heatwaves likely to increase bushfire risk. Prime Minister Tony Abbott responded that Figueres was ‘talking through her hat’ and suggested that bushfires are ‘not a function of climate change, they are just a function of life in Australia’.

Abbott’s reassurance that there was nothing new about the Blue Mountains bushfires was loyally backed by his Environment Minister, Greg Hunt. Interviewed by the BBC, Hunt told overseas listeners that he had ‘looked up what Wikipedia’ said about bushfires in Australia, and that his research had confirmed that fires occurred frequently before European settlement. John Howard chipped in to point out in a speech to the UK climate-sceptic group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, that there had been a very big bushfire in Victoria in 1851.

This episode is just one example of how messy a discussion about serious events can become when it’s connected to the politics of climate change. Of course it’s true that Australia has always experienced bushfires. And scientists readily accept that it’s extremely difficult to link any single event directly to climate change. Obviously, bushfires are directly caused by humans intentionally or accidentally lighting them, or through a natural spark like a lightning strike. But the extent to which that results in a catastrophic or manageable fire depends on a whole range of variables that are affected by the climate: high heat, strong winds, and the existence of dry fuel for the fire. None of this, it seems to me, is really open to debate.

In his 2013 State of the Union, President Obama dealt with the American equivalent of this stoush.

Now it’s true that no single event makes a trend, but the fact is the hottest twelve years on record have all come in the past fifteen. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that super-storm Sandy [in New York City] and the most severe drought in decades and the worst wildfires that some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we