'Absolutely Daft': How Did We End Up Getting Climate Policy So Wrong?

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

With the apparent combustion of the Turnbull government expected on Friday, the parallels with Emperor Nero supposedly playing his lyre as Rome blazed around him are unmistakable.
Having our federal political leaders consumed with the Liberal Party's infighting is precisely not what's needed for our country. Just ask agencies battling to prepare for real-life conflagrations that threaten the eastern seaboard in coming months.

Standing back and watching climate change is not going to be an option. Photo: AAP

It's certainly ironic Malcolm Turnbull's ditching of carbon emissions as a goal of the National Energy Guarantee last week precipitated the crisis that has almost certainly ended his time as Prime Minister.
What is especially disturbing is the risk his successor - whether it is Peter Dutton or Scott Morrison or Julie Bishop or whoever else - will downgrade climate action as a priority in order to secure right-wing MP support.
Rather than taking up the national interest and cutting carbon emissions - the Turnbull government effectively has no climate policy - the next PM will likely be under pressure to back new coal-fired power stations.
The move would further embed fossil fuels in an economy that must fully decarbonise - along with the rest of the world - by mid-century or soon after to avoid dangerous climate change.
Conservative MPs and pundits have been clamouring to pull Australia out of the Paris Climate Agreement, ignoring mounting evidence of the threat we face from more extreme weather, and soon.
Australia, year to date, is running at a record for maximum temperatures, according to the Bureau of Meteorology's ACORN-surface air temperature network.
Subtle shifts in temperature can be hard for people to appreciate. How many of us have thought the current winter seems annoyingly long as we awoke on yet another frosty morning?
Look out, though, for reports early next month that will confirm many of us have just experienced one of the mildest winters on record.
Visual aids, such the colour scales created by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the UK's University of Reading, can help us understand how Australia has warmed.
In Australia's case, taking mean temperatures from 1910 to 2017 and mapping the coolest year (20.7 degrees) as dark blue and the hottest (23 degrees) as dark red, it should be obvious which way the mercury is trending.

How Australia's average annual mean temperatures have changed between 1910 and 2017, with the dark blue showing the coldest at 20.7 degrees and 23.0 degrees the darkest red, according Ed Hawkins, a UK-based climate scientist. Photo: Ed Hawkins/University of Reading.

As Fairfax Media reported this week, evaporation across eastern Australia is not only at record levels for the first seven months of 2018, but there's bright, unstinting daylight between the nearest rival year when it was this bad.
Fire authorities prefer not to stir alarm but they are quietly preparing for what could be a catastrophic season of bushfires in eastern states.
NSW is entirely drought-declared and the outlook is for a drier and hotter than normal spring for many areas - all this as crews have fought dozens of fires across the state even before spring arrives.


100 per cent of New South Wales is being affected by drought, leading to crop failure and the off-loading of livestock in record numbers.

Places such as Richmond on Sydney's north-west fringe are showing vegetation moisture readings as low as the time of the last big bushfires to threaten the Harbour City.
And those readings are in late August - not December 2002 when that previous high was marked. Those conditions are true for most of the forests around Sydney.
Remember how Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg, the current environment and energy minister, told us lowering power prices had to be "the main game in town" when it came to the now defunct National Energy Guarantee?
Robyn Eckersley, an expert in climate policy at Melbourne University, is as bemused as any that a government has again foundered on global warming.
"Everyone's fascinated by the sharpening of knives - it's all very Machiavellian," she says. "But no-one is talking about the problem of climate change.
"No one is talking about the cost not to act. If you put those in the balance sheet, you'd be absolutely daft not to take anticipatory action as fast as possible."

Links

• Record evaporation rates across eastern Australia exacerbate drought
• 'It's all bad': Earliest total fire bans on record an ominous sign
• Record evaporation rates across eastern Australia exacerbate drought
• Drought worsens in Central Tablelands
• Warming stripes

US And Australia Are Dysfunctional: Hyper-Partisanship Is Killing Two Great Democracies

ABC News - Bruce Wolpe

The answer lies in enlightened leadership, or we can continue the politics of mutual assured destruction. (Facebook: Malcolm Turnbull)

 If there were a single defining moment of the leadership crisis that engulfed Malcolm Turnbull this week it was his backdown over his Government's core energy and climate legislation, the National Energy Guarantee.
The Prime Minister was forced to capitulate because he did not have the votes inside his own Coalition to pass the bill on the floor.
Paradoxically, had he forged a compromise with Labor, which was open to a deal that would settle a decade of bitter conflict on the climate wars, Mr Turnbull could have had the votes to pass the bill — easily.
But hyper-partisanship won out — again.
"We propose bills in the House when we believe we can carry them, and so at the moment we don't have, because it is a one-seat majority, and that's a fact of life — we don't have enough support to do that."
Mr Turnbull adjudged it too painful to have Labor vote for a government bill at the expense of losing some votes in his party and Coalition in the process — even if that meant a continuation of the ugly, bitter wars over energy and climate that have plagued political debate here for over a decade, a war that most voters, and certainly industry — a backbone of the conservative government — want solved with bipartisan legislation.
So the pro-coal, anti-global warming rump inside the Government could trump the majority sensibility to bring the climate wars to a close and advance the national interest.
As a result, Mr Turnbull looks likely to becoming the fourth prime minister in 11 years to lose his job.

All eyes have been on Peter Dutton, now a Liberal backbencher, in Parliament this week. (ABC: Matt Roberts)

 The Washington mantra
This hyper-partisanship is also ascendant in Washington.
For over 20 years, since Newt Gingrich, a conservative from Georgia, became Speaker of the House after leading a Republican assault on the power structure, a relentless political culture of us-versus-them has prevailed in Washington.
In their forensic study of the politics that led to the ascendance of Mr Trump, titled One Nation After Trump, scholars Norm Ornstein, EJ Dionne and Thomas Mann cite the Gingrich rule that still applies today:

"It is a war for power … Don't try to educate. That is not your job. What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority."

This became the Washington mantra.
Under the Westminster system governing Australia, the hyper-partisan power of the elected majority can work its will in Parliament, to great effect — even taking into account a recalcitrant Senate.
So a government that controls the House of Representatives controls the agenda and can apply maximum pressure to get their bills through, with little concern for the opposition and with some attention to independents in the Senate.
The governing party decides the agenda, their votes hold, the Opposition opposes — and loses. Laws are enacted. Hyper-partisanship rules.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is not giving up his leadership without a fight. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

 Rise of endless gridlock
In Washington, what has happened is that culture of Westminster hyper-partisanship has been imposed on the American constitutional system of checks and balances between three co-equal branches of government: Congress, the presidency and the judiciary.
The American system puts a premium on compromise to get things done. Indeed, to pass legislation, a supermajority — 60 votes — is required in the Senate.
The Republicans today only have 51, so only if enough Democrats agree can bills get passed.
Hyper-partisanship paralyses Congress, leading to bitter, endless gridlock. Whatever Barack Obama wanted, the Republicans in Congress were determined to stop. Whatever Mr Trump wants, the Democrats in Congress are determined to kill.
Issues that require a bipartisan solution — gun control, health care, immigration — are roadkill.
What that means is that on some of the major issues of our times, issues that beg for bipartisan work — gun control and health care in America, immigration and global warming in both countries — hyper-partisanship, by its definition and political nature, means no compromise, no consensus. No working together in the national interest.
Two great democracies dysfunctional, and in danger.

On some of the major issues of our times, issues that beg for bipartisan work, hyper-partisanship means no compromise, no consensus (Reuters: Leah Millis)

People want their leaders to work together
The answer lies in enlightened leadership — in both major parties — so some semblance of a working relationship that can tackle such vexed issues.
A recognition that, in fact, the people want their leaders to work together, and can find a way to agree on common-sense, middle-of-the-road policies, that will serve the national interest, the common interest, the public good.
Or we can continue the politics of mutual assured destruction.

*Bruce Wolpe worked with the Democrats in Congress in Barack Obama's first term as president

Links

• The Turnbull Government is all but finished. The Liberals now need to work out who they are
• Concetta Fierravanti-Wells says Turnbull, Bishop neglected concerns about China in the Pacific
• Why wouldn't the PM let Dutton's supporters quit?
• Resigned to their fate? The ministers and members who want out
• The Turnbull Government is all but finished. The Liberals now need to work out who they are
• Turnbull makes another dramatic backdown on NEG targets
• 'Groundhog Day': Business leaders slam Turnbull Government's energy backfli
• The challenges of understanding impact of climate change in Antarctica
• Modelling predicts dire consequences for all wetlands within 80 years
• Heat waves getting hotter across Australia
• Humans driving climate change 170 times faster than natural forces
• Scientists frustrated as extreme weather becomes the new norm
• Impact of climate change on Indigenous communities
• Summer heat broke 205 records
• Climate change's 'canaries in the coal mine'
• Climate change 'threatens financial system'
• Rising seas will displace millions of people — and Australia must be ready