I don't have grandchildren but I'm hoping for some, someday, so this
column is for them. I want you to know that although, in the mid-teens
of this century, Australians elected a government that wasn't genuine in
its commitment to combating the effects of climate change, and that
even abolished the main instrument economists invented for that purpose,
I never accepted this complacency.
Partly because that government's
predecessors had done such a poor job of introducing effective measures -
and even a party known as the Greens played its cards all wrong - the
nation lost its resolve and allowed its original bipartisan commitment
to decisive action to be lost.
The minority of people who doubted
the scientists' advice that the globe was warming combined with
libertarians - who, as a matter of principle, oppose almost all
arguments for intervention by government - to persuade the Liberals to
break with bipartisanship.
If the Liberals under their new leader,
Tony Abbott, had opposed action against climate change outright,
Liberal voters who accepted the need for action would have been forced
to choose between the party and their beliefs.
Instead, Abbott
focused his opposition on the Labor government's main instrument for
gradually bringing about a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gasses, an emissions trading scheme whose price would
be fixed by the government for the first year or two.
Abbott
insisted the Coalition remained committed to Australia's international
undertaking to reduce emissions by at least 5 per cent below 2000 levels
by 2020, and by 15 per cent or 25 per cent provided other countries
were taking comparable action.
The big difference was that, rather
than using Labor's "carbon tax" to achieve the target, the Coalition
would rely on "direct action", such as offering monetary incentives to
farmers and others to reduce emissions.
This left Abbott free to
run an almighty scare campaign about how Labor's "great big new tax on
everything" would greatly increase the cost of living for ordinary
Australian families and impose big costs on Australian businesses, which
would impair their ability to compete.
Abbott associated with
outright climate-change deniers and said things that seemed to brand him
as one of them, while always adding, sotto voce, that he accepted
human-caused climate change and the need to do something about it.
Apart
from attracting voters away from Labor and its frightening carbon tax,
the result of making climate change an issue of party dispute was to
give Liberal supporters a licence to stop worrying about climate change -
if the leaders of my party aren't worrying, why should I? - while
providing a fig leaf for those Liberals who retained their concern.
The
business lobby groups' initial position had been: if it's inevitable we
do something, let's get on with it and make future arrangements as
certain as possible. But with their side of politics inviting them to
put their short-term interests ahead of the economy's long-term health,
most business people found it too tempting to resist.
To be fair,
some businesses stuck with their schemes to reduce their own emissions
and some pressed on with repositioning their business for a world where
the use of fossil fuels had become prohibitively expensive as well as
socially disapproved of.
You will find this hard to believe, but
in the mid-teens, it was still common to think about "the economy" in
isolation from the natural environment which sustained it. Economists,
business people and politicians had gone for two centuries largely
ignoring the damage economic activity did to the environment.
The
idea that, eventually, the environment would hit back and do great
damage to the economy was one most people preferred not to think about.
At the time, it was fashionable to bewail the lack of action to increase
the economy's productivity. Few people joined dots to realise the
climate was in the process of dealing a blow to our productivity, one
that would significantly reduce the next generation's living standards.
At
the time, we rationalised our selfishness - our willingness to avoid a
tiny drop in our standard of living at the expense of a big drop in our
offspring's - by telling ourselves half-truths and untruths about the
global nature of climate change.
We told ourselves there was
nothing Australia could do by itself to affect climate change (true),
that at the Copenhagen conference in 2009, countries had failed to reach
a binding agreement on action to reduce emissions (true) and that the
world's two biggest polluters, China and the US, were doing nothing much
to reduce their emissions.
We had no excuse for not knowing this
was untrue because successive government reports told us the contrary.
One we got just before the carbon tax was abolished, from the Climate
Change Authority, said the two superpowers were stepping up their
actions to reduce emissions. "These measures could have a significant
impact on global emissions reductions," it concluded.
I recount
this history to explain how my generation's dereliction occurred, not to
defend or justify it. We knew what we should have done; we chose not to
do it. I never fell for any of these spurious arguments.
Did I
ever doubt that climate change represented by far the greatest threat to
Australia's future economic prosperity? Never. Should I have said this
more often, rather than chasing a thousand economic will-o'-the-wisps?
Yes.
