I just finished reading Marian Wilkinson's The Carbon Club. It was horrific and depressing. You should read it too. Then afterwards you should read something nice and hopeful to cleanse your mind.
She tells the story of how Australia's climate policy was scuttled by the fossil fuel lobby, working through its friends in the Liberal and National Parties. I don't need to rehearse the whole story, and it would take too long. If you really want to hear it you can read the book yourself. Let me just tell you six things I learned from the book which seem to me highly pertinent to our current perilous climate situation.
1. Much of the Australian campaign against climate action was imported directly from the US.
Back in the mid 1990s, when the IPCC was releasing its initial reports and the world was gearing up for the Kyoto climate summit, a number of giant US corporations - Exxon Mobil, Texaco, GM, Ford, Koch Enterprises and so forth - got organised. They set up a group called the Cooler Heads Coalition and worked through various think-tanks such as the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute and others to spread doubt about climate science and alarm about the economic impacts of emissions reduction programs. Their playbook involved sponsoring and promoting the small coterie of scientists who questioned the science, and talking up the cost and damage to the economy. They also played political hard-ball, aided by allies in the right wing of the Republican Party, and framed the Clinton regime's proposals in the leadup to and aftermath of Kyoto as a 'giant tax', eventually preventing Congress from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and ushering in the Bush regime with former oil industry executive Dick Cheney as Vice President.
It wasn't just that the Australian industry and conservatives looked at what was happening in the US and borrowed ideas - there were strong personal and organisational links between the two. Cory Bernardi, as a Liberal backbencher, travelled to the US and spent time with various think-tanks and Republican politicians He formed a close bond with former Liberal Party activist Tim Andrews who did a Koch Brothers internship in the US and then worked for various US think-tanks. The result of this and similar visits is that there was a lot of reciprocal activity. US bodies co-sponsored conferences and speaking tours for climate skeptics, and during the campaign against the Rudd and Gillard carbon pricing schemes Andrews played a key coordinating role from his US base. Australia, as ever, was a loyal lieutenant to the US on international issues.
2. The campaign was well planned, well funded and coordinated.
This is not to say, of course, that Bernardi and co here in Australia were merely US stooges. Like the US, Australia has a powerful fossil fuel industry and like their US counterparts they were prepared to use their clout to block climate action. Hugh Morgan, CEO of Western Mining, and his offsider and one-time speechwriter Ray Evans led the charge. They were backed by other wealthy executives like Gina Reinhardt and initially Chip Goodyear from BHP Billiton among many others. These players worked themselves into key positions on bodies like the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group and maneuvered these organisations around to their side. Like their US counterparts they also funded and worked with their pet think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (of which Evans became CEO) and bankrolled and promoted their own coterie of home-grown skeptical scientists.
On cue the campaign rolled out in much the same way the US campaign took shape. Scientific skepticism was mixed with apocalyptic predictions of the economic impacts of emissions reduction. Liberal politicians, taking their cue from Bernardi's US lessons, talked about the emissions reduction fund as a 'big new tax on everything'. The messages were well honed and consistent, backed by a friendly media and resources that dwarfed anything the environment movement could muster. And they had been preparing the ground, building a base of support. Liberal politicians claimed, during the negotiations over the Rudd governments emissions trading scheme, that they were inundated with calls from constituents telling them to oppose it. Of course they were, because Bernardi, Andrews and their team were whipping up their carefully groomed supporters to do just that.
3. Most of the Liberal and National Party politicians were and are willing participants.
There were some Liberals who didn't fall for the line and tried to get their party to act. Most famously, of course, there was Malcolm Turnbull, but before him there was Robert Hill who was Environment Minister in the Howard Government in the leadup to the Kyoto conference. Hill worked hard with his senior bureaucrats to develop a modest but genuine emissions reduction policy. However, he found himself sidelined by Howard and the more hard-line Liberals who neither accepted the science, nor were willing to cross the fossil fuel industries. The National Party were, if anything, more rabidly pro-coal, especially as Barnaby Joyce worked his way from maverick back-bencher to deputy leader and then leader. Many of the Nationals from both Queensland and NSW represented electorates with substantial coal and gas mines, and they and their communities were prime targets for industry lobbying.
I'm sure that some of them were genuine skeptics, but it was also politically convenient. Not only did their hard line stance secure them support and donations from the fossil fuel companies, it also suited their political agendas. It enabled them firstly to gain control of their own party, providing the focus for their campaign to oust Turnbull, and then to mount a vicious and sustained attack on the Labor Party over its two terms in office. Once in government, they then felt bound to follow through, but there was no reluctance. They were driven on by the fossil fuel figures who had by then installed themselves as political advisors, fund-raisers and key donors in the very heart of the Liberal and National Parties. Once you sell your soul to the devil he will not hand it back easily, as Turnbull discovered in his second stint as party leader.
4. The Labor Party were woefully unprepared to counter it, and got run over.
To their credit, you will rarely if ever come across a Labor politician who denies the science, and Labor has consistently argued for a solid if unambitious emissions reduction policy. Unfortunately, they were blindsided by the industry campaign in a number of ways.
First of all, they were wedged to some degree. The various unions which had members working in fossil fuel industries, including the powerful AWU and CFMEU, wanted Labor to go soft on emissions reduction. Yet Labor also relied on the support of the environment movement, which wanted them to go hard. They never managed to reconcile these two constituencies, and ended up caught between them.
Then the fierceness of the campaign seemed to take them by surprise, and they were slow to respond. When the Rudd Government moved to introduce its emissions trading scheme they negotiated in detail with the Turnbull-led Coalition to get it through the Senate. In the process they froze out the Greens and alienated supporters in the environment movement who saw compromise after compromise to appease fossil fuel interests, industry and farmers. When the industry campaign and its allies in the Liberal Right succeeded in replacing Turnbull with Abbott as Liberal leader, and Abbot shifted his party into outright opposition, the government found itself friendless. The Greens opposed the legislation in the Senate as they saw it as too weak, killing any chances of passing it with a couple of Liberal defections. The country's key environment groups sympathised with this position, having been largely sidelined themselves as industry got its way.
Yet Labor never learned from this mistake, never became better prepared. When Gillard, as a condition of support from the Greens, introduced a carbon price in 2011 she fell straight into the trap, saying she was fine with it being called a tax. This left her open both to the accusation that she had broken a clear promise (how many times have we seen that recording of her saying, 'there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'?) and to two years of relentless campaigning to 'axe the tax' by Abbot, Bernardi, Morgan, Reinhardt and co. They did little to counter this negative view and almost nothing to prosecute the case for the measure. I remember reviewing the 20-page booklet promoting the scheme dropped in every letterbox in 2011 and being baffled and amazed. It barely mentioned climate change, said nothing about how a carbon price would reduce emissions, and went on for pages and pages about all the financial compensation households would receive.
Even in 2019, leading in the polls against a government now on its third Prime Minister in six years, Bill Shorten still managed to fluff his lines. He seemed unprepared for the 100% predictable question about how much Labor's proposed emissions reduction target would cost. He looked like he didn't know what he was doing and barely cared, and a Morrison-led coalition squeaked to an unlikely victory.
5. It's like deja vu all over again.
Or, perhaps, Groundhog Day. If you read this book, you will read the debates, subterfuges and ideas that go around and around today in the mouths of politicians ever since Howard and Beazley.
For instance, Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor have repeatedly refused to nominate an emissions reduction target beyond 2030, but have just released a 'technology roadmap' which leads to some unspecified but presumably more or less fossil-fuel-friendly destination. Guess what? When George W Bush formally withdrew the USA from the Kyoto Protocol, with the Howard Government hard on his heels, the two governments instead released a Technology Strategy.
Morrison and Taylor are fond of saying they won't set a target unless they can tell the Australian people how much it will cost to get there (while making no effort to work this out). Back in the 1990s Howard stressed that any government policy on climate had to be 'No Regrets' - in other words, there had to be no economic downside to the action, particularly not for the fossil fuel industries.
Howard spent most of his time as Prime Minister doubting the science of climate change, was forced by public pressure to acknowledge it during the Millennium Drought, then reverted to denial after he lost office. They are still talking out of both sides of their mouth to this day, but now they are far more agile. Morrison will say he accepts the science, then in the same breath suggest that our recent bushfires may not have been connected to climate change, only to change his story again after the public outcry. Slippery as eels.
Meanwhile the Labor Party is still working out how to straddle its urban green supporters and its regional coal seats. Hence we have Joel Fitzgibbon, who represents the coal-rich communities of the Hunter, threatening to leave the party if it sets ambitious climate targets, and Albanese committing to net zero by 2050 and then, as if he hadn't just said that, heading off to don a hard hat and talk up the importance of coal mining in the regions. Sure enough, back in 2008 we say AWU Secretary Paul Howes bashing the Labor government over the head and threatening to withdraw his union from the party over carbon pricing.
The more things change...
6. The ground is shifting, and there is still hope.
However, some things have changed, and this allows us to go on hoping. While the Liberal Party is still on the same track it has been on for a quarter of a century, and still has a tent full of fossil fuel-spruiking climate skeptics, they are increasingly isolated. The business coalition which drove them into that position is disintegrating before our eyes. The National Farmers Federation, the Australian Industry Group and the Business Council of Australia have all called on the government to adopt a 'net zero by 2050' target. Even some of the fossil fuel companies, most notably BHP and BP, have broken ranks and are pressuring even the Resources Council to dial back its opposition. None of our major banks will fund new coal projects. Even the Queensland Liberal National Party, in the leadup to the State Election at the end of this month, have stopped supporting a publicly funded coal generator in Central Queensland.
Change is coming, one way or another. Back in the 1990s it was still possible to talk about climate change as something that might happen in the distant future. That is not an option in 2020 for anyone reasonably connected with reality. Climate change is all around us, from the catastrophic bushfires of 2019-20 and the crippling drought that preceded them, to the monthly roll-call of falling temperature records, to the Jacarandas flowering a month earlier than they used to and the magpies hatching almost before spring has begun.
There is no longer an option to avoid climate change but that was never really the question. The question is, how bad will we let it get? Our current government's answer to date is still 'we're happy to risk catastrophe'. They have fewer and fewer supporters in this as reality begins to bite. The policy will change sooner than we might think. Let us pray that it will not be too late.
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