Cool heads will prevail

Our commitment to pragmatic climate solutions is what sets Australia apart from other countries who are better at drumming up fear than answering the question of how to actually get to zero emissions. By Nick Cater.

Leo Tolstoy told the story of War and Peace in 1250 pages. The International Panel on Climate Change kept going until the final foot note, Zscheischler, J et al, on page 3949. Summarising the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Review in 280 characters or fewer is hard to say the least, but Labor’s climate spokesman managed to do so with 49 characters to spare.

“There is a climate and nature emergency,” Chris Bowen tweeted within hours of the report’s release. “This report is just the latest reminder of how important and urgent action is. And the Morrison government just shrugs its shoulders and can’t even agree on the most minimal required action.” Bowen’s final 111 characters might seem gratuitous from the spokesman of a party that threw away its old 2030 target and has not bothered to set a new one. Which is a pity, since the rich-nation consensus is that we need to get our skates on.

John Kerry, Joe Biden’s special envoy to an aching planet, said last week: “All major economies must commit to aggressive climate action during this critical decade.” Boris Johnson agreed “the next decade is going to be pivotal” while Emmanuel Macron gave a heartfelt cry for “un accord à la hauteur de l’urgence!” when leaders meet in Glasgow in November.

As our friends at The Guardian never tire of reminding us, Scott Morrison is out of step with the rest of the world, judging by his measured and practical response to the IPCC’s latest house brick. The Coalition’s record on carbon management is not unimpressive. Between 2005 and 2019, our emissions fell faster than in Canada, New Zealand, Japan or the US.

The Europeans who want to slap a sin-tax on Australian beef have the hide of Brahmans given their own hypocrisy. It is easy to be green if you outsource your heavy industry to China, as Europe has been doing for more than 20 years. The EU’s share of world steel production has more than halved this century from 20 per cent to 9 per cent, while China’s has risen from 20 per cent to almost half. Australia’s steel production capacity has also fallen, by the way, from 0.003 per cent of global capacity to 0.002 per cent. The deindustrialisation card is not one a resource-based economy can play.

Last week’s unseemly scramble for virtue among rich-world leaders was matched in the media, where the prize for the most outrageous headline belonged to The Guardian: “IPCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell”.

Rhetorical inflation has been a feature of climate coverage since the first UN environment summit in Stockholm almost half a century ago. The crucial-decade meme may still work in politics, but it doesn’t cut it any more in the media where embellishment breeds constantly with a gestation faster than a bandicoot.

The superficial response to the IPCC report from people who clearly hadn’t read it was a grave disservice to the teams of scientists who condensed as much evidence as they could into a couple of million words. An attempt to review a store of scientific literature as extensive as this one is bound to be open to accusations of subconscious distortion and groupthink. The scientists were not responsible for the Summary for Policy Makers, which is where the simplification and overreach begins. This is a problem, since it is the only part that gets seriously read, or more likely skimmed, since it runs to 150 pages.

In these circumstances, we should not be surprised that the public debate is driven by sentiment rather than science. It largely reflects what politicians and journalists feel about what they imagine the IPCC is trying to say rather than a grown-up analysis of the report itself. It is only by staying out of the weeds that they can pronounce on the subject with seeming authority.

Neither should we be surprised that the debate becomes emotional, since it is founded on little else but emotion, and the overwhelming sentiment is fear. Scaring the population witless about a common enemy that only the state has the power to fight is the oldest and most ignoble trick in the political playbook.

Rhetoric matters greatly if we are looking for practical ways to meet, and perhaps beat, our greenhouse gas commitments and are not just here for an argument. As Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Balancing benefits with costs is all but impossible in an atmosphere of catastrophe, as we are learning in the pandemic.

The Glasgow meeting is shaping up to be another panic-fest of rich-world hand-wringing while the developing world seeks exemptions that will accelerate emissions and hasten the redistribution of wealth from the rest of the world to India and China.

Australia looks like the odd country out, not because of a lack of achievement or ambition. It looks different because we have a government that tries to answer the question of how we get to zero emissions rather than merely trying to frighten us into believing that we should. Unlike so many of their international counterparts, Morrison and his Energy Minister, Angus Taylor, have not walked past two inescapable facts. First, we don’t yet have scalable technology to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050, but we will have if we commit to find them and don’t get distracted, just as we have done in developing a coronavirus vaccine. Second, bringing our economy to a shuddering halt won’t help. The OECD’s share of global emissions is down to a third and shrinking further every year. If China and other industrialising countries refuse to do the heavy lifting in the next round we might as well give up.

In truth, Australia will have many more supporters behind the scenes in Glasgow than is apparent from outside. Its focus on practical solutions will win it friends in unlikely places.

The prospect of being cast as the scapegoat to atone for the miserable failure of the UN framework must not deter us, since to deviate from our path would be catastrophic for a country like Australia. Instead, the Prime Minister should draw comfort from the words of CS Lewis: “When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”