By Andy Blunden in Melbourne
It is a peculiarity of the Australian psyche that we don’t really believe anything about ourselves until we read it in the foreign press. So when the media around the world started saying: “Look at Australia! This is what climate change looks like!” even the most obstinate denialist began to reflect. With Australia’s largest city, Sydney, completely surrounded by fire, with the main highway cut off and the city engulfed in toxic smoke 11 times the safe limit for about 3 weeks, denying anthropogenic climate change was becoming untenable.
The bushfire season in South Eastern Australia generally lasts from early-January to mid-February. This fire season began in July and is still burning at the end of January, though much reduced by flooding rains last week. 60,000 square kilometres have been burnt. That is four times the area of Amazon rainforest burnt in recent fires, about equal to the area of Holland and Belgium combined.
The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere amounts to two years of Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels, over and above destroying the main means of absorbing carbon out of the atmosphere – the forests. Even rain forests which have never burnt before have been burned along with literally billions of our unique animals.
This disaster came on top of a 7-year-long drought – already 55 towns have run out of drinking water and so are ultimately uninhabitable – never mind the devastation to farms. Aboriginal people who have lived in central Australia for 65,000 years are becoming climate refugees as their land can no longer support human life – land which was described by the early explorers as “like parkland.” (See Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu). On the 7 January, the average temperature in Australia set a new record, 1oC above the previous record set the day before.
The last 10 years include 9 of the 10 hottest years in Australia’s history. You get the picture.
The politics of climate change
Large tracts of Australia are becoming unliveable and it is human-induced climate change which is causing it. And yet, while Australia was burning, the Australian government stood with Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Donald Trump of the USA to block progress at the COP25 Climate Conference in December!
Climate change is a class question in that it is the poor who will pay the price, whose land will be flooded by rising sea levels, whose houses are neither air-conditioned nor insulated, who cannot move to better places, etc., but the climate is in essence the cross-class, humanist question par excellence.
We all share the climate. Wealthy people are fooling themselves if they think they can buy their way out of the collapse of the global ecosystem like they can buy their way out of the break-down of safety on the streets and the degradation of the public health and education systems. And frankly, this is a good thing, because if it were only the poor who suffered from environmental destruction, then let’s face it, governments would let it happen – as indeed they have up till now.
Sorry history of climate politics
As John Howard’s longstanding Liberal (i.e., conservative) government went to the polls in 2007, both parties had promised to adopt an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to limit the greenhouse gas emissions. Howard has since admitted that though he personally didn’t believe in the science of climate change, the public generally did, so he matched the Labor Party (ALP) policy on this question.
Howard lost and Kevin Rudd won a safe majority in the governing Lower House and together with the Greens, a working majority in the Senate. When the Labor government put the ETS to the vote, the Greens opposed it and the then-Liberal leader, Malcolm Turnbull was supporting it, ensuring that it would become law. Turnbull was rolled in the Liberal Party room however, and the Bill failed.
In Australia, the Greens have their base in the professional middle class, as they do elsewhere, but unlike in Europe they are not a “middle of the road party” positioned between the major parties on left and right. In Australia, the Greens are to the left of the ALP, even on labour legislation, inequality and those social justice questions usually the domain of labour politics.
Also, unlike in the UK, Australia has a preferential voting system, which means that voters can cast their first vote on principle but distribute their preferences to the lesser evil. With 10-12% of the vote, the Greens get only 1 or 2 Federal Lower House seats, but about one sixth of the seats in the Senate, usually controlling the balance of power.
Financiers made a fortune trading certificates
The Greens were quite right to reject Rudd’s scheme, because it would have rewarded the biggest polluters and created a market in carbon certificates. This kind of marketisation of social problems always aggravates the problem they are meant to solve. Financiers make a fortune trading certificates while the social problem gets worse. This was the outcome when Labor introduced a water-trading scheme to solve the problem of four states fighting over water from the vast Murray-Darling river system at the cost of the environment. The result has been billions of dollars being sent to off-shore tax havens from the sale of water rights by people who used government grants to build dams to deny water to those downstream and then sell it to them at obscene prices, while millions of fish died through lack of water.
The irony is that Labor promoted the neo-liberal ETS, the conservatives promoted a social democratic system of giving money to polluters to improve their game, while the Greens promoted the socialist approach of putting a price on carbon.
In the chaos which followed, Rudd lost the Labor leadership to Julia Gillard who went to the polls committed to the ETS but faced with a Green balance of power she legislated a carbon price, and the following three years remains the only period during which Australia has reduced emissions. With the political nous of a 3-year-old, Gillard accepted the description of the carbon price as a ‘carbon tax’, despite the fact that her government used the income from the carbon price to raise the tax threshold from $8000 p.a. to $18000 – an unprecedented tax cut for the poor and a reduction in the ‘poverty trap’ impact of a low income tax threshold.
Meanwhile the new Liberal Party leader, Tony Abbott, who had brought down Turnbull on the question of Turnbull’s support for the ETS, ripped into the Gillard government, and with the help of the Murdoch press, politically destroyed her.
Policy rewarded main polluters
She was replaced by Kevin Rudd, but to no avail; Abbot was elected in a landslide, using Labor’s social platform plus “no carbon tax” and “stop the boats” (referring to refugees arriving by boat). Abbott introduced the promised climate policy, rewarding polluters for reducing emissions, which has produced not a single gram of emissions reduction in 7 years. But he also brought in a reactionary budget which completely abandoned election promises and within a year he was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull.
Turnbull survived the 2016 election by a whisker, so theoretically we had both a Government and Opposition committed to emissions reduction.
Now here’s the thing. There is only a small minority of the ruling Liberal-National Coalition which is in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry and denies the science of anthropogenic climate change. But the government would fall without the support of this rump. Now, would a small group within the government actually sink their own party if they didn’t get their own way? Remember, we are talking about people who are willing to risk the end of human life on Earth to get their own bigoted way. As a result, Turnbull was removed by his own party and replaced by the failed public relations man, Scott Morrison.
Ever since, the Australian Federal Government has had no climate policy other than a fund called the Emissions Reduction Fund in which the government subsidises innovative niche projects to reduce emissions, which survived thanks to compromise deals with the minor parties in the Senate. Our emissions continue to go up.
Current state of climate-denial
All 6 State and 2 Territory Governments, including both Labor and Coalition governments, are committed to Zero-Carbon by 2050 and have policies which more or less adequately aim to reduce emissions. In addition, the main peak bodies for business and farming also are in favour of emissions reduction.
And yet Scotty from Marketing is still in denial.
Morrison is an active member of HillSong – a US-style charismatic “happy clappy” church. The government was warned decades in advance that bushfire seasons in Australia would be “hotter and longer.” A group of ex-Fire Chiefs asked to meet him in September to warn of the already unfolding crisis, but were twice refused a meeting.
Ministers and their Labor Shadows alike castigated the Greens for saying in public that these fires are caused by anthropogenic climate change. Despite the fact that on the fire ground everyone was talking about climate change. You could not ignore it.
As the death toll rose, Morrison returned a day early from a holiday in Hawaii and has been throwing money at the issue ever since. Rural Australian fire services rely heavily on volunteer fire fighters. But how can a volunteer force fight fires when the season runs from July to March?
Murdoch press running a furious campaign
Questions really arise whether Scotty from Marketing actually understands things. For example, he says “Climate change is not the only cause of our unprecedented bush fires – there is the drought and arson as well.” But the drought is also caused by climate change, it is not an additional cause. The Murdoch press has been running a furious scare campaign suggesting an “arson crisis.” But this is a complete myth. Very few fires, and none of the really serious fires, have been caused by arson, which incidentally, has always been, a problem in Australia, and is not new.
Then there is the myth that the unprecedented fires are caused by failure of local governments to do hazard-reduction burning during the winter, allegedly due to fictitious “greenies” (the Greens do not control a single government at any level and are advocates of hazard-reduction burning). This is a fiction. Hazard-reduction has been inadequate partly due to government cuts, but mainly because these methods simply do not work any more in this climate and the period during which it is safe to do this type of burning has become shorter and shorter.
The opinion polls show that for the first time since Tony Abbott launched his attack on Julia Gillard in 2009, the Labor leader is the preferred Prime Minister. But no-one trusts the opinion polls any more. But everyone agrees that there has been a tectonic shift in opinion on this question. Climate change is hurting, and governments do need to do something. And the first things they need to do is (1) introduce a Carbon price, (2) start funding clean technology, and (3) to ask the Indigenous people how they cared for this continent for 65,000 years.
January 28, 2020
Andy Blunden is a writer living in Melbourne, Australia.
