VALUES TO VALUE: To paraphrase his wryness and wit, best-selling non-fiction author Bill Bryson once wrote that “Australia and America are 90 per cent the same, but that the 10 per cent difference is huge”.
The thought that we may be zeroing in on 95 per cent the same, with the remaining 5 per cent difference diminishing rapidly, fills me with Game of Thrones-style “winter is coming” foreboding.
I’m hoping that it doesn’t end up being a nuclear winter.
However, in this case, I’m more worried that what’s coming is a real climate crisis, not a metaphorical one. With heat waves, prolonged and intensified droughts, catastrophic bushfires, record-breaking storms and floods, and a mounting social, economic and environmental burden of weather-related natural disasters.
Pretty much what Australia and the world have been experiencing for years now, only getting much worse.
At a political level, the sharp end of the climate action backlash now unfolding, again, is not just the Americanisation of Australian politics and policymaking, but more particularly the Trumpisation.
The here and now focal point for this alarming trend is the federal Opposition and its reactionary approach to climate and energy policy.
I don’t want to cast this slur as a broad generalisation and then move on to other rhetorical flourishes. So let’s dig in.
On climate and energy policy, of all things, the Opposition is “doing a Trump”, in his wrecker in chief mode, campaigning deliberately to undermine a renewables-led energy transition whether they win their way back into government anytime soon or not.
A quick recap. In May 2022, the Albanese Labor team swept the Morrison Liberal-National coalition aside after nearly a decade in power.
Just as Trump denied the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election, which he lost to now President Joe Biden, the coalition is refusing to accept the outcome of the last election, at least in this one critical policy area.
Like it or not, Labor was very clear about its climate and energy policies and targets before the 2022 election, most importantly, 82 per cent renewable energy and 43 per cent net zero (against 2005 baselines) by 2030.
Any traditional Australian democratic interpretation of this election outcome supports Labor having won a mandate to implement its policies.
That’s why the mainstream media went around reporting that a decade or more of political “climate wars” were over.
Because not only had climate action-friendly Labor won majority government at a so-called “climate election”, but the Greens had made further inroads too, and a new political force, the community-based and climate-driven Teal Independents, had won a swag of metropolitan Liberal seats.
The main democratic check-and-balance on this is simple. Labor will have to face the electorate again, by May 2025 at the latest, and win government again, whether in majority or minority, in order to keep going on a renewables-led energy transition substantially done by 2030, with another election in 2028.
The alternative to that traditional democratic process is now increasingly clear. The coalition is unilaterally declaring Labor’s targets unachievable, over six years ahead of time, and is vowing then to substitute its own new ones, which it won’t reveal until after the next election.
It’s also sabotaging its progress wherever possible, fanning the flames of community opposition in the bush and on the beaches, and spreading investment uncertainty with threats to rip up contracts and shutdown incentive schemes.
Then, if the coalition wins, it will claim a mandate to implement a very different “energy transition”, but will only reveal the “fine detail”, such as its revised 2030 and ongoing five-yearly emissions reduction targets, after the election.
Of course we know the rough outline already. They will slow or stop large-scale renewables and, over extended time, switch retiring coal sites to nuclear power stations, or at least they claim this with no clarity on how it will be funded, especially in the absence of a price on carbon.
Then they’ll plug the 15-20 year gap in the coal-to-nuclear switcheroo by doing a lot more with fossil fuel gas, they say, backed by carbon capture and storage (CCS), although that’s as technologically uncertain as the hope for cost-effective small modular reactors (SMRs).
With language that is as Orwellian as it is Trumpian, the Opposition leaders are now saying they are taking a “non-linear pathway” to keeping faith with the UN Paris Agreement.
They appear to interpret this as net zero by 2050, not a minute sooner, with no need to deliver “linear” progress with five-year targets that steadily ratchet up from 2030 onwards. A plain English interpretation of this is that emissions will go up a lot in the 2020s and 2030s and then somehow come down late in the 2040s.
And go up they will, given the plan to go big with gas backed by CCS. As the slide below – which comes from the pro-nuclear lobby – clearly shows, gas with CCS is by far the most carbon-intensive “firmed” energy generation option of all.
Although there will be no end of arguments about all of the numbers in the slide above, including the low-ball one ascribed to nuclear, it’s clear that gas with CCS is all out on its own in terms of carbon intensity.
But no problem for the coalition because they are taking the non-linear pathway, and none of their current crop of political aspirants will be around in 2050 to be held accountable anyway. If only they could win the next election, the hellish climate future they’ll be making in Australia can look after itself!
Renewables and hydrogen mega-investor Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, speaking on ABC Radio National on Monday morning, said in response to a Patrician Karvelas question about the coalition’s new plans that, “It tells me that we have a very poor transmission of the truth”.
Of course, with echoes of Trump, the coalition regularly attacks Forrest and other high-wealth pro-climate action figures like Mike Cannon-Brookes and Simon Holmes à Court over their business and community advocacy.
This might all sound like the normal cut and thrust of politics, pseudo-American style, but there’s another piece of the puzzle that’s Trumpian too. In the sense of shadowy ultra-right influencers lurking behind what passes for Liberal-National coalition policy, in the form of the conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).
The IPA is essentially an Australian version of the Heritage Foundation in the US, which is shaping the agenda for a second Trump Presidency over the next four years.
As we revealed in the first instalment of The Fifth Estate’s current series, The Nuclear Files, the IPA has shaped an alternative energy transition plan for Australia, although it calls it energy security, and it’s one that bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s “non-linear pathway”, as the slide below shows.
Heads up, the “huge” 10 per cent difference between Australia and America is getting smaller by the day.