05/06/2017

It's Way Past Time To Speak Truth To Climate Arguments This Stupid

The Guardian - 

It’s clearer than ever the economic interests Trump claims to defend can only be served by acting on global warming
‘To make the ridiculous case that abandoning Paris was good for the US economy, Trump didn’t just have to ignore science, but also the pleading of the US business community.’ Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
For precious decades experts have explained, over and over, that the science of climate change is incontrovertible, the consequences of blindly sticking with fossil fuels catastrophic and the costs of inaction far higher than switching to a low-emissions economy.
But these facts had no impact on the sceptics, who cling to a worldview where they find “alternative facts”, where fossil fuel power is the only path to prosperity and mounting environmental and economic evidence to the contrary is some kind of dastardly leftwing plot.
For Tony Abbott’s economic adviser Maurice Newman, global warming was a “hook” used by the United Nations to impose a new world order in opposition to “capitalism and freedom”. To Donald Trump it is a “hoax” propagated by the Chinese to undermine the US while the rest of the world rolls around laughing.
The only skerrick of positive news from sceptics’ greatest victory yet – the US president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord – is that it seems to have galvanised politicians, scientists, business leaders and economists who have grown weary from all these years talking to the hand.
Because now it is clearer than ever that the economic interests Trump claims to defend can only be served by acting on global warming. It is way past time to speak some more loud, blunt truth to arguments this stupid.
To make the ridiculous case that abandoning Paris was good for the US economy, Trump didn’t just have to ignore science, but also the pleading of the US business community he was purporting to defend – the 630 business leaders who wrote to him in January demanding that he keep Barack Obama’s climate plan and stick with the Paris deal, and the long list of businesses and business leaders who have attacked his decision, including the chief executives of Tesla, Goldman Sachs and Disney and companies including Nike, BP, IBM, Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, Morgan Stanley, Unilever and Mars.
The truth is, he has clear evidence that renewable energy jobs in the US are booming and that his campaign promises on coal industry jobs will be impossible to keep. The contentious job figures he advanced to make his case for abandoning Paris came from a study which made some highly questionable assumptions to reach its conclusions, including that it would “not take into account potential benefits from avoided emissions”.
The real-world evidence is very different. As the director of Climate Analytics, Bill Hare, points out in the Conversation: “The increase in employment in solar energy alone over the past three years is more than twice the total number of jobs in the coalmining industry in the United States (which are declining).”
Meanwhile in Australia, the mind-numbing years of climate “war” have ground us to a policy paralysis.
Malcolm Turnbull dare not make a decisive move lest he startle the sceptics and fossil fuel advocates still lurking in his own party ranks (like the visionary Craig Kelly, chair of the Coalition’s environment committee, who tweeted he had “champagne on ice” in preparation for the Trump announcement, then celebrated it by declaring: “There is a more efficient way to generate energy than using fossil fuels, it’s just that mankind hasn’t yet worked it out yet”).
And so the government continues its zigzag trajectory – quietly searching for a viable policy while periodically veering back to mouth some nonsense to calm the conservatives.
It has reaffirmed its backing for the Paris agreement but still has no policy to meet its commitments and has rejected, for raw political reasons, some of the best options available to the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, who has been charged with finding something resembling a solution.
Turnbull talks with real enthusiasm about the manifold possibilities of renewable power and pumped hydro storage, but then his treasurer fondles coal in question time.
The government carefully floats the idea of a low-emissions energy target – not dissimilar to the existing renewable energy target, which could be reasonable policy but could also be risible if the emissions benchmarks allow it to cover what the minerals’ industry PR likes to refer to as “low-emissions” coal-fired power without insisting its emissions be captured and stored.
It claims to understand the maths of the climate threat confronting the world and then (like Queensland Labor) considers massive taxpayer subsidies to help the enormous new Adani coalmine that would, on its own, contribute 0.5% of all the carbon that can be emitted before the globe exceeds 2C warming when its coal is burned.


Like Trump, politicians tout the Queensland mine as a provider of regional jobs, “tens of thousands” of them, they say, again and again. But to believe that you have to ignore Adani’s own expert witness, who admitted in court the actual jobs figure was just 1,464 direct and indirect positions.
To accept the project’s commercial viability you have to ignore the assessment of the biggest Australian banks, which have concluded they would not lend to a project of this type – or, if you are the resources minister, Matt Canavan, even try to foment a consumer revolt against them for reaching that commercial conclusion.
And to argue this is the best use of a taxpayer subsidy you have to close your eyes to the many thousands of actual jobs governments are, or could be, supporting in the renewable industry in the same general region, projects such as the Whitsunday solar farm, the Longreach solar farm, the Kidston solar farm, the Collinsville solar power station or Telstra’s $100m project announced this week at Emerald.
To insist that coal will play a long-term part in Australia’s new energy generation you have to wilfully ignore the reality of the targets we’ve set ourselves, the ones we say we will stick to, and the plummeting costs of renewables such as solar and wind.
The truth is, we really cannot walk both sides of this street. We’re either on the side of Trump and his sceptics, or on the side of the facts.

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