27/08/2018

At Last, Maybe A Real Choice On Climate Change

Australian Business Review - 

Newly-appointed energy minister Angus Taylor. Picture: AAP
It’s a good thing the National Energy Guarantee wouldn’t do much and doesn’t really matter, because it’s unlikely to be a big priority of the Morrison government.
The new energy minister, Angus Taylor, is a prominent anti-renewables campaigner and climate change sceptic. Appointing him, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he would be “the minister for getting prices down”.
So there seems little chance that anyone will be bothered doing the hard work needed to get the NEG across the line. In fact it would be surprising if the NEG wasn’t entirely ditched as policy pretty speedily, along with any kind of climate change policy at all.
Bring it on, I say. Then we might finally get a clear choice at the next election: action on climate change versus no action.
If so, it would be the first time in a decade that Australian voters would have been told the truth about climate change policies, instead of getting the lie of broad agreement about the need to reduce emissions, with the two sides only disagreeing about how much, and how to do it.
It would have been far better for the country if a clear choice had been on offer in 2010, 2013 and 2016. We might have got some kind of energy policy.
Instead, at each of those elections, the Coalition pretended to have a policy intended to reduce emissions and then, when elected, did nothing (except not abolish the Howard Government’s Renewable Energy Target).
As a result, Australians have never had the chance to tell the nation’s politicians clearly what they actually want.
In 2013, Tony Abbott campaigned ferociously on abolishing Labor’s “carbon tax”, but the two sides’ policies were essentially the same – to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by 5 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020. The difference involved how to achieve it: Labor proposed emissions trading, the Coalition had “direct action”, since abandoned.
Australians thought they were voting for action on climate change when they put “1” next to a Coalition candidate, but the policy was a lie.
At the 2016 election, after the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015, a difference opened up between the two sides’ emissions reduction targets for the first time: the Turnbull-led Coalition went with the Paris target of 26-28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 – Tony Abbott had actually signed that deal before being sacked – while Labor went with the Climate Change Authority’s recommended target of 45 per cent, after putting it through a six-month consultation process.
Once again, Australian voters were not offered a truthful choice.
It was pretty clear to close observers that most of the Coalition MP’s hearts weren’t in it, that they were only doing it because the polls told them had to in order to win the election, and it was obvious that “direct action” wouldn’t go anywhere near the target agreed in Paris. It was soon ditched.
But still, the formal policy position at the 2016 election was that both sides were climate change believers and only differed at the margin.
Since then Alan Finkel’s “Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market” came and went and his compromise proposal called the Clean Energy Target flared briefly, sputtered and died, strangled by Coalition conservatives.
In desperation, the COAG Energy Council asked the Energy Security Board to come up with a more compromised compromise.
So the ESB invented the NEG as the mildest possible nod to a climate change policy in the hope that it might get past the now-fully unveiled sceptics in the Coalition - led by backbencher (and thus free to tell the truth) Tony Abbott and his true believers in the media - while allowing the ALP to agree to it before the election and still keep its emissions reduction target of 45 per cent.
That is, to agree to the NEG, Labor would have to think – and more importantly, say – that the NEG could be adapted to its own emissions reduction target, which is what the ESB designed it to do.
Future Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg diligently began the task of selling it, and for a while it looked promising.
But of course history will show that the NEG collapsed last Monday when the Abbott sceptics promised to cross the floor to vote against any attempt to reduce emissions.
That started an avalanche that ended on Friday with Malcolm Turnbull replaced as Prime Minister by a man who had brought a lump of coal into Parliament in February shouting: “This is coal. Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared,” before launching into a tirade about the “coalophobia” of those opposite.
He has now appointed a climate change sceptic and anti-renewables campaigner to replace Frydenberg as energy minister.
This is excellent news.
In my view, Morrison should now go all the way with President Trump and pull Australia out of the Paris agreement, giving up all pretence of wanting to reduce carbon emissions. Australians would then finally get a clear, truthful election, and could make a proper choice.
But of course, it won’t happen because the Libs’ pollsters will tell Scott Morrison that if he does that, he will definitely lose the election. The Coalition, the polls will say, needs to go back to lying.
This time, though, it won’t wash.

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