Saturday’s Canberra Times ran an interesting piece on climate change, equating the problem of carbon pollution with other self-destructive behaviours like smoking or alcoholism. Canberra writer Tony Kevin opined:
Australian society accommodates similar existential contradictions in its response to climate change. Informed Australians know now that this is really happening, that it is caused by dangerously high global greenhouse gas emissions, and that our world is approaching tipping points when polar ice-melt will spiral out of control, causing inundations within two generations of large areas of low-lying land where most of the world’s (and Australia’s) people live and work. And that to have any hope of avoiding such consequences, we must urgently cut emissions’ annual upper limits to something less than 450 parts per million of CO2-equivalent.
Yet we equivocate when action is required. Why?
Getting off cigarettes or booze takes immense discipline and a commitment to re-engineering your lifestyle. In a perfect world, a world which operates rationally, recognising that you are killing yourself should be a strong enough incentive to “choose life.”
Of course, there is a feedback of loop that resonates in the mind of the addict that prolongs the behaviour. Deals are made with oneself, justifications and excuses pile up like empty stubbies or cigarette butts in an ashtray. It’s always tomorrow, next week, next year. Maybe that’s the role currently being played by folks like Paul Kelly and Heather Ridout:
Paul Kelly on ABC Television’s Insiders of September 7 says, ”the debate in Australia is now over, and anyone seeking an Australian emissions reduction target higher than 5 per cent or 10 per cent lives in a fantasy world”. Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout warns of up to one million lost jobs in Australia if Garnaut’s scaled-back target of between 5 and 10 per cent emissions reduction by 2020 is exceeded. AIG also opposes a national target of 20 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020, supporting continued dominance of coal-sourced energy.
That’s where the analogy loses some traction.
Like it or not, the problem of climate change is a problem of politics, and the problem of politics is one of complexity and compromise. While it’s important to decide to stop creating carbon pollution, it’s impossible to stop creating carbon pollution tomorrow. And that’s paralysing for pols. As Tony Kevin argues:
[Rudd] leans to the traditional politician’s approach of split-it-down-the-middle-and-see-what-happens.
For a man who rode to government at least partially on a promise to change the game on carbon emissions, it’s that hesitancy that rankles onlookers. Has a politician ever had a clearer mandate to inflict some short term pain for long term, well, survival?
