Tony Kevin writes:
Senator Milne’s speech at the National Press Club on 17 June was magisterial. It powerfully and convincingly laid out the real climate science, and the policy challenge that this science presents to Australia’s current leadership elites as they wrestle to come up with effective mitigation policies. She spelt out, in clearer terms than by any Australian politician to date, the same message that the Obama administration is now declaring in the United States: that human-induced climate change is not some remote and distant threat to polar bears and low-lying ocean atolls, but is causing clear and major present damage to countries like the United States and Australia.
Her speech was a bracing bucket of iced water over the nonsense peddled by climate-change denialists, whose insidious influence now reaches far into Australian political, industry and trade union leadership circles.
Would that Milne’s passionate plea get through to Kevin Rudd. This Prime Minister, who claimed to understand the climate science (we may recall his strong words at the National Press Club in December 2008, when he introduced the first version of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) white paper), still thinks he can strike ‘a responsible balance’ between scientific argy-bargy and feared job losses in the old carbon economy. The spoiling activities of climate change deniers have been useful to Rudd, in leaving a public impression that there is still some degree of debate within the reputable scientific community whether continued human carbon-burning is the major cause of current and anticipated global warming.
Of course, there is no such debate. And now the chickens have come home to roost. Rudd’s CPRS has fallen between all the political stools. It has not sufficiently appeased the robber barons of the ‘Australian’ (actually, mostly foreign-owned) old coal economy, despite the millions of dollars thrown at them. Nor has it appeased the know-nothing deniers in Coalition ranks who have stymied Turnbull’s room to move. The Greens have rejected it, for reasons convincingly set out in Milne’s speech.
Rudd almost succeeded in splitting the environmental movement with his May amendments to the proposed CPRS. Now, there is confusion and disorder all round. And at the end of the day, possibly no CPRS at all.
Let us imagine a better scenario. Suppose Rudd at the last minute tried to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Suppose Milne’s powerful advocacy convinced him to change course, and go for a 40 per cent emissions reduction target by 2020 if the world agreed on ‘good’ policies (not too narrowly defined) at Copenhagen in December. Labor would then have the Greens on board, and something real to fly with internationally.
Rudd would need two more Senate votes to get this through – Senators Xenophon and Fielding. I believe that Xenophon could be convinced: his voting record shows a responsible concern for the fate of the Murray River. He knows that South Australia’s future is more bound up in avoiding the most disruptive prospective climate changes than any other state. He would support a real government policy against global warming.
Which leaves Senator Fielding as the political hinge on which all might turn. I wonder, what drives this man? As an engineer, he must know that the information offered to him recently by climate change deniers is, to put it politely, ‘crap science’. He would know better, as an engineer versed in statistics, than to see the 158-year global average temperature series produced by the UK Government Met Office at Hadley Centre, and to look only at a most recent segment of 11 years, artfully chosen by the deniers to start in an exceptionally hot year 1998.
He would see from the whole graph that, not only are there large year-to-year oscillations, but also long periods of a decade or more when the moving average trend line was falling. But the indisputable statistical fact is that from 1905 to the present, there was an overall global average temperature rise of around 0.8 degrees. This rise is explained by climate science (after other factors have been taken into account) as attributable to rising man-made carbon dioxide emissions from the coal and oil-based global economy.
It seems that Senator Fielding’s main concern is to protect jobs in the old coal-based economy. Might he be persuaded in coming days to see that, as part of a serious rapid movement top a decarbonised renewable energy-based economy, those jobs would be replaced by many thousands of new jobs in the new energy-sourced economy? The supporting data is there, in Australia as in the USA.
It is strange indeed that the fate of our children literally now rests on two men: on Kevin Rudd finding the wisdom at the last moment to leap to a real vision of Australia’s bright future beyond the coal economy, and on Steve Fielding finding the wisdom to go with Labor if it made such an epoch-making shift.
Senator Milne’s speech has laid out the real issues for all to see. We cannot hereafter say that we were not properly warned.
[Tony Kevin, Canberra writer and former diplomat, has written a book 'Crunch Time: using and abusing Keynes to fight the twin crises of our era', to be published by Scribe Publications in September 2009].
9 Comments
Fielding isn’t going to budge. Honestly. He’s not.
If he was going to budge, it wouldn’t be to support a higher target (the man thinks Heartland is a credible source, FCS!!)
So where does that leave us??
Instead of fantasizing about what might happen if certain Senators suddenly did a complete about face, I’m still looking for a realistic scenario for the Government to follow.
A ‘brave’ ETS (which is what I would like) is not going to get through the Senate. Neither is a middle of the road one. Neither is a wimpy one.
So what CAN the government do, other than the risky option of a DD?
If the greens can get their act together and mount a good enough campaign to get a big of a slice of the balance of power, then a DD would probably be a good thing in terms of getting a half decent CPRS.
Lets look at Senator Fielding. Yes Senator Fielding may have a background in engineering but he is also has one in marketing. And this is what we are seeing a marketer at work. At the end of the day he is a person who received an Australian Senate seat by 1.8% (Go Victoria) of the vote how he got into the Senate makes interesting reading on Anthony Green’s Seat Profile http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2004/results/sendVIC.htm
His voting pattern includes the following “With some backbenchers being willing to cross the floor, Fielding’s vote has been important on some of the Howard government’s more controversial legislation. His vote ensured the passage of Voluntary student unionism,[3] the overturning of civil unions legislation in the Australian Capital Territory,[4] and changes to media ownership laws.[5] Conversely, his intention to vote “no” ensured the defeat of the Howard government’s proposed tightening of asylum seeker laws.[6]” from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fielding
So like a good politician with such a marginal seat he likes stunts, with the following observations, “Steve Fielding is renowned for his publicity stunts.[11][12] Fielding joined protesting pensioners in May 2008, who brought traffic to a standstill in the Melbourne CBD, when he and others took their tops off in the style of the successful cab drivers who successfully stripped for increased cab security, to demand an increase in the Pension from the government, of an extra $70 to $100 a week.[13][14]” from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fielding
With Rudd want an early election with a double dissolution Fielding is making sure he is out in front of the public mind!!! Senator Fielding like a good engineer needs to remember politics and the even more complex issues of climate change the devil is in the detail.
Yes, but what I’m pointing out is that the premise of this article is that Rudd should get something through the Senate now and that this can be done with Fielding’s support.
This is pure fantasy and demonstrates the weakness in the argument that a higher target can be achieved given the present make up of the Senate.
You’d be better off choosing a Coalition Senator to target – there’d be a better chance (still Buckleys and none) of one of them voting with the govt on this than Fielding.
Thanks for these commrnts. Yes, I was painting an idealistic scenario here.
Nevertheless, consider what a political gamechanger it could still be if Rudd leapt to a visionary 25-40% international target package for Australia, without stating impossible-to-meet preconditions. He would certainly get the Greens and Xenophon on board. If a surge of public opinion welcomed the policy change – and I believe it would – even the erratic Fielding might come around.
It really comes back to Rudd; new possibilities would open up fpr him if he could win back the trust of Australia’s growing environmental movement whuch he has pretty much sacrificed in his appeasement of the coal lobbies. Kevin Rudd has until August now, thanks to Nick Xenophon, to think outside the envelope he has put himself in.
An excellent article, even though in places it is idealistic and somewhat unrealistic given the current political attitudes and landscape.
I really agree that a 25-40% target is absolutely nessasary in order for us to properly tackle Climate Change. Its just this (and all of the Liberal and Labor Governments) continue to listen to big business over ordinary Australians.
In twenty years time when Australia will have had a much drier and hotter climate – I have no hesitation in predicting that the worse-case scenario of NOT acting on Climate Change will be eventuating much furthur (as it already is), and people will look back and wonder why they did not give more support to the brave parliamentarians who did their best to stand up for the issue.
Sorry, please correct me if I’m wrong but does Australia currently produce 0.0% of the Earth’s greenhouse gasses?
Actually, unless it’s in the order of 10% or so I just can’t be bothered, much like most Australians.
When you can be bothered to moderate my previous comment…
And what about cattle, those methane farting buggers. Is it true that methane (a far more potent GHGas) far outweighs CO2 in Australia?
And is it true that Kim Booth (Greens) who just today was calling for King Island Beefery to propped up by the Tas Government really doesn’t care about AGW? But just, like most Greens his own seat?
And what about the 922,000,000 litres of raw sewerage the North Shore Greenies pump into the clean ocean every day?
No Joel B1, it’s 1.5 percent, or 3 if you count our coal exports. This is roughly to similar to a whole bunch of other countries. Should France not be bothered? Should Italy not be bothered? Should the UK not be bothered?
And no, Joel B1, you are not like most Australians. Most Australians support climate action.