14/03/2019

Even In Its Dying Days, The Government Denies The Need For Climate Action

The Guardian - *

The reckoning for this failure will come at the next election. And it can’t come soon enough
‘While the PM will blow his foghorn on taxes and boats, it is the climate change policy failure that leaves his government condemned in the eyes of so many of its own.’ Photograph: Richard Wainwright/AAP 
For all the skittishness of Australian politics through the years of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments there’s been one factor that has been remarkably consistent.
Amid leadership coups, cultural offensives and the revolving door of energy policy acronyms, the Australian public has remained steadfast in its belief that more needs to be done to address climate change.
Whether the focus has been an ETS, an ERF, a CET or a Neg or just a big stick, the majority of the voting public has not moved from its view that meaningful action is required by government.
After the craziness of another fortnight of Coalition energy policy where our fossil-fondling PM has whipped up some new renewable buzzwords while his National party partners are baying for taxpayers to fund new coal projects, it’s worth reminding ourselves of this baseline. Because it explains so much of why this government’s condition has reached terminal status.
For the past decade the Essential poll has asked two benchmark questions when it comes to climate change. The first is around whether people believe the climate science.


Over the past decade this split has been stable. Granted, it dipped into the high 50s at the height of Tony Abbott’s attack on the Gillard government’s so-called carbon tax, but that was after Labor had spent the best part of a term faffing around on the issue.
What’s most striking in these numbers is the disconnection between the climate sceptics within the government and Coalition voters. Indeed, on the science they are much more aligned with One Nation and conservative independent voters who make up the “other” cohort of voters. As for younger voters, the Coalition comes across every bit as much a fossil as the fuel they seek to dig up.
The second question we have regularly asked is whether people believe Australia is doing enough to address climate change. Again, a majority – including one-third of Liberal voters – say they are not.


All of which makes Barnaby Joyce’s entreaty for an election fought on coal appear delusional, as some of the more tethered members of the government have felt compelled to point out in recent days. These words of moderation come too late. Joyce’s indulgence will only provide further impetus to the swathe of moderate independents challenging the Liberal heartland in more affluent areas of Sydney and Melbourne where Sky after dark does not rate.
Meanwhile, as the Coalition’s self-inflicted wounds fester, Labor simply holds its line with a commitment to 50% renewables by 2030 and aggressively promotes battery storage. Yes, there are calls for a more rapid phaseout of coal from the left, but all the pressure on policy is currently on the Coalition.
As a separate table in this week’s report shows, one of Labor’s core brand advantages over the Coalition, alongside wages and workplace conditions, is climate change.
While Scott Morrison will blow his foghorn on taxes and boats, it is the climate change policy failure that leaves his government condemned in the eyes of so many of its own.
Perhaps it’s the ultimate revenge on a government that came to power through a cynical attempt to deny the need for climate action. As the summers have got warmer and warmer, the public’s anger at the inaction has got hotter.
The failure of this government has not just been the toppling of its leaders. It’s been the reason for the topplings, which has been more than the blind pursuit of power, but power in the name of energy.
And even in its dying days, key members of the government continue in this state of denial. Not just of the science, nor the need for meaningful action, but denial that this is the sort of leadership elected governments are expected to exhibit.
The reckoning is coming and it will be harsh. And it can’t come soon enough.

*Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential and a Guardian Australia columnist

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Enough Scandalous Time-Wasting On Climate Change. Let's Get Back To The Facts

The Guardian - 

At this point of crisis we must bypass rhetoric and political posturing
Drought-affected pastures near Wyandra in Queensland. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian 
Over the past 30 years I have reported so many broken climate policy promises and quoted so much rhetoric that proved to be hollow, it is difficult to trace it back to the start.
I think it’s a faded press release from 11 October, 1990 headed “government sets targets for reductions in greenhouse gases”.
“The government recognises the greenhouse effect as one of the major environmental concerns facing the world,” said Ros Kelly, Bob Hawke’s environment minister. “This decision puts Australia at the forefront of international action to reduce emissions of all greenhouse gases.”
We knew we had to do something almost three decades ago. Children have grown to adulthood and had their own children during the time we have known, and done not very much.
We were then, apparently, going to meet our target through “no regrets” actions – things that made sense for other environmental reasons as well as climate concerns. We didn’t meet it. We haven’t ever met any of a succession of greenhouse gas reduction targets by actually reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, which continue to rise, still. No regrets? At the forefront? If only.
1990 was the year the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report made clear predictions – of higher temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns and impacts on agriculture.
They are no longer predictions. They are our reality now. We just endured the hottest summer on record. In Port Augusta the thermometer hit 49.5 degrees. Across the country more than 200 temperature records were broken. Nine of the 10 warmest years in Australia’s records have occurred since 2005. Communities have no water. Flying foxes are dropping dead from the trees. Up to a million fish have died in the parched Murray-Darling – an ongoing environmental, social and economic catastrophe. We have been warned that without urgent action, the Darling will die.
 The bushfire season is starting earlier and different kinds of forests are burning, one in Tasmania stands over 1,000 years old. Flooding is more frequent and rainfall patterns are changing. Our ecosystems are being driven to collapse.
For all those decades some politicians tried and failed to act, because others tried harder and succeeded in preventing it. For a brief moment we had a carbon price, and greenhouse emissions did fall, but then it was abolished, ostensibly in the name of reducing the price of groceries and services, which had never risen much in the first place, but mostly in the cynical interests of trying to win an election.
There were various other attempts at credible policy over the years, from across the political spectrum, as well as some spectacularly bad ones, but in the end effective policy was mostly washed away by political timidity, outright ignorance and the well-financed lobbying efforts of mining companies determined to delay the eventual phasing-out of coal.
But as the evidence of a changing climate defies denial, those who have spent careers delaying or refuting the need for action have untethered their arguments from fact.
Climate policy is no longer a real “debate” about the existential threat at the heart of the issue, and competing ideas about how to address it, but rather it has become a proxy for an ongoing war of attrition, in particular between the Coalition’s moderates and conservatives, stripped of policy meaning to become a vacuous argument about being “for” or “against” fossil fuels.
Those who would thwart action are also again resorting to that tired contention that would undermine any action by any nation on any global issue – we shouldn’t have to do anything because we are responsible for just a proportion of the problem, or put another way, we shouldn’t do anything because we can’t solve the problem on our own.
They sow uncertainty and sometimes they descend to farce, such as citing Dorothea MacKellar’s poetic reference to “droughts and flooding rains” in refutation of scientific fact or claiming that renewable energy will “kill” night sporting fixtures.
They ignore or misquote their own advice to persist with the blind belief that building new coal-fired power stations is the only way the nation can secure affordable, reliable power.
They claim, for example, that the energy market operator backs investment in coal-fired power, when in fact its modelling says the opposite. And, just for the record, as Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy has pointed out, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission didn’t recommend it either. No one has, because underwriting a coal-fired power station and indemnifying it against any future climate measures makes no economic sense.
But the government – including its resources minister – is persisting with its faith in new plants, even as the mining and power companies that have profited richly from coal fired power for years, and spent millions on secret public relations campaigns trying to prolong its use, are conceding the gig is up.
Even more bewilderingly, it is persisting with the idea even as it seeks to build credentials with an electorate increasingly concerned about global warming, informed by what they are seeing and reading about current events, and what they are experiencing in their lives.
The prime minister who once fondled a lump of coal in the parliament, is brandishing a “climate solutions package”, the contradiction most baldly evident in the fact that he is now simultaneously advocating taxpayer support for renewable projects that rely on coal-fired power stations closing, and also taxpayer support for opening new ones.
We’ve seen this eleventh hour conversion before – when John Howard reluctantly said he would introduce an emissions trading scheme in 2007, faced with rising voter concern after the millennial drought. (He later admitted he did it only because of the political pressure, and never really believed in the idea.)
At Guardian Australia, we think it is time, a long way past time, to take a breath and go back to the facts.
We’ve tried to do this all along, of course, but at this crisis point we want to take stock of what is already happening – things we know about but need to understand better, such as the crisis in the Murray-Darling – and also consequences of climate change that are less well known or just emerging. We want to look at the latest forecasts and what they mean for our lives, our communities and our environment, and – putting the political rhetoric and posturing aside – assess the policies for emission reduction and adaptation and the broader impacts and consequences.
Regret, at this point, is unavoidable: regret that Australia has been a drag on global efforts to address climate change, regret for having scrapped so long that the cost and disruption of doing what we must has risen and will be borne largely by our kids, regret for the billions of dollars wasted on half-baked policies, regret for the scandalous waste of time and effort and opportunity.
But given what’s at stake, it can’t be too late to regroup, and assess the facts, to inform the most sensible path from here.

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'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change

Fairfax - Eryk Bagshaw | Nick Bonyhady

 The Reserve Bank has warned climate change is likely to cause economic shocks and threaten Australia's financial stability unless businesses take immediate stock of the risks.
The central bank became the latest Australian regulator to tell business that they must analyse their investments on Tuesday, as the Coalition grapples with an internal battle over taxpayer-funded coal fired power and energy policy.
In a speech to the Centre for Policy Development in Sydney, the Reserve's deputy governor Guy Debelle said challenges for financial stability may arise from both physical and transition risks of climate change.
Dr Guy Debelle, deputy governor, Reserve Bank of Australia. Credit: Jessica Hromas
"What if droughts are more frequent, or cyclones happen more often?" he asked.
"The supply shock is no longer temporary but close to permanent. That situation is more challenging to assess and respond to."
Financial stability could be put at risk if businesses remained unaware of unanticipated insurance payouts, pollution driven reputational damage, legal liability and regulation changes that could cause valuable assets to become uneconomic.
"All of these consequences could precipitate sharp adjustments in asset prices, which would have consequences for financial stability," he said.
He said the current drought across large swathes of the eastern states has already reduced farm output by around 6 per cent and total economic growth by about 0.15 per cent
"We need to think in terms of trend rather than cycles in the weather. Droughts have generally been regarded as cyclical events that recur every so often. In contrast, climate change is a trend change."
That has an impact on monetary policy, Dr Debelle said, citing the temporary shock of banana prices surging after Cyclone Yasi in 2011, which in turn boosted inflation by 0.7 percentage points.
But he said future events may not be so one off, with repeated climate events and the transition of the economy likely to have a longer term impact.
"We need to be aware that decisions taken now by businesses and government may have a sizeable influence on that transition path," he said.
Dr Debelle said the transition posed challenges and opportunities.
Industries especially exposed to the consequences of changes in the climate will face lower costs if there is an early and orderly transition, some will bear greater costs from the transition to a lower carbon economy, while others such as the renewables sector, may benefit.
"There has been a marked pick-up in investment spending on renewable energy in recent years," he said.
"It has been big enough to have a noticeable impact at the macro-economic level and affect aggregate output and hence the monetary policy calculus."
In comments that are likely to be used against some pro-coal Nationals MPs urging the Coalition to build a taxpayer-funded power station, the deputy governor said the renewable sector was a good example where price signals have caused significant behavioural change.
"There has been a rapid decline in the cost of renewable energy sources," he said.
Dr Debelle said the cost of generating electricity has declined in the case of wind and solar to the point where they are now cost-effective sources of generation. He added that storage and transmission remained relevant costs.
Despite coal being one of Australia's top exports, Dr Debelle said opportunities remained as China transitioned away from coal.
"Natural gas is expected to account for a larger share of its energy mix, and Australia is well placed to help meet this demand," he said.
He endorsed comments by Australian Prudential Regulation Authority executive Geoff Summerhayes in London in January, which warned tackling climate change had become a "financial necessity".
In the speech to the UN's sustainable insurance forum, Mr Summerhayes lashed government inaction, arguing the summer's extreme weather, severe drought and floods were all fuelled by climate change, but Australia still lacked the political consensus needed to respond to the threat.

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