The Return of Heresy
As economist Dr Brian Fisher has discovered, people who dispute green zealotry quickly incur the wrath of a 'vindictive age'. By Henry Ergas.
According to Labor and the Greens, climate change is fundamentally a moral issue. That, they say, means there is no need to cost their policies, which must simply be accepted as the right thing to do.
Whether there is a moral aspect to climate change that sets it apart from other policies is debatable. But even if there were, the claim that the consequences of moral choices should not be properly analysed is patently absurd.
After all, nothing could be less moral than to take a decision without having squarely faced up to its likely effects. And nothing could be further from democratic leadership than to refuse to even assess those effects, as if it really didn’t matter whether the damage a policy causes will be great or small.
To say that is not to deny the crucial role of values in framing social ends. But just as it is the essence of demagogy to pretend that gain can be obtained without pain, so the appeal to a morality that somehow makes a careful consideration of consequences irrelevant is the hallmark of fanaticism, which invariably dismisses the damage it wreaks as mere detritus on the path to salvation.
Unfortunately, it is that combination of demagogy and fanaticism that increasingly dominates the Australian scene. Never has that been clearer than in the attacks on climate economist Brian Fisher, which began by impugning the integrity of one of Australia’s foremost environmental economists and rapidly escalated into vandalism against his home.
Fisher’s crime is that he modelled the impacts of Labor’s proposed emissions reduction targets, transparently noting the assumptions involved and the sensitivity to those assumptions of his results. He is certainly not the first to undertake an exercise of that kind: both the Rudd and Gillard governments, when they launched their carbon abatement schemes, had modelled the costs of abatement using techniques similar to those Fisher employed.
There is, of course, plenty to argue about in those modelling efforts. But much as occurred in the debates that led to the dismantling of tariffs, the discipline models impose can force the opposing sides to explicitly state the premises on which they operate, helping to convert pointless quarrels into focused disagreements.
For example, Fisher says his results depend to a significant extent on the degree to which emissions permits can be purchased overseas. Having disclosed no information at all on that issue, Labor could have responded by clarifying its position.
Yet that is hardly what Labor had in mind, much less the Greens. The Rudd and Gillard governments may have felt obliged to analyse their schemes’ costs; now, it seems, appeals to emotion are more than enough.
Viewed through the lens of those emotions, Fisher is not merely wrong: he is a heretic. And as we have seen time and again, the punishment these champions of tolerance would administer for heresy is excommunication and social death.
It is, under those circumstances, unsurprising that climate change policy has degenerated into a war of religion, contributing to a broader mood in which zealots feel justified in resorting to lawlessness and intimidation.
And it is unsurprising, too, that today’s atmosphere so closely resembles that which the great Anglican minister Richard Allestree, writing in the midst of the religious conflicts of the 17th century, called a “vindictive age”, whose distinguishing feature was that it had degraded speech from “the storehouse of relief and the aid of human society” into a mere instrument of “insulting vice”.
The immediate effect is that Labor, which still claims to act responsibly, has turned its back on reason — a term whose very origins lie in the Greek word for to count and calculate, and on the basis of counting and calculating, to think and explain.
Once those are banished as tedious obstacles to action, it is not hard to see why climate policy would be determined by whatever a 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl considers the burning moral imperative of the day.
No doubt Labor, were it to win office, would want to resurrect rational analysis, if nothing else so as to explain why it had chosen one option rather than another.
But having trumpeted its position that costs are irrelevant, it will not be easy to exhume them when the zealots clamour for more.
And clamour they will, as Britain so starkly illustrates. Setting aside the Great Depression, Britain’s carbon emissions were lower last year than at any time since 1888, before electrification and motor vehicles boosted the living standards of ordinary Britons. And with emissions already slashed to barely half the levels they reached in 1973, achieving further cuts has become increasingly costly, particularly for low-income earners.
But that hasn’t stopped the activists of the “extinction rebellion” from gluing themselves to bridges, roundabouts and trains demanding ever more drastic reductions, regardless of the damage to jobs and incomes.
However, as French president Emmanuel Macron has learned, it is one thing to promise during an election campaign that “decarbonisation” won’t hurt a bit, and another to convince the hoi polloi, when fuel prices have started to soar, that their pain is purely imaginary.
Yes, Australia doesn’t have France’s tradition of violent unrest; and yes, Bill Shorten has called for a return to political civility. But having done so much to foment the politics of anger, he should expect the confrontations of the future to be even uglier than those of the past.
Ultimately, what has gone missing from this area, as from so many others, is any sense of maturity. Democratic politics does not require saints. What it does require is an ethic that marries sincere conviction with the willingness to assess, and openly take responsibility for, foreseeable consequences.
In respect of climate change, we have neither. And while that is true globally, it is especially true in Australia. It is not difficult to understand why: there are few countries where implementing the demands of the zealots would be more costly. A politics of responsibility would honestly acknowledge those costs; instead, government after government has understated them.
Now, taking the final step, Labor has decided to entirely wish them away.
That may work in an election campaign. But it won’t appease the zealots. On the contrary, by completely severing symbolism from reality, it will reduce politics to a competition between illusions in which claims and promises can escalate without limit.
However, this, too, is certain. It is easy to ignore reality. It is impossible to force reality to ignore you. When the facts come home to roost, we’ll see if Labor has the good grace to make them welcome.