Evidence of seemingly immovable obstruction isn’t hard to find. Oil and gas companies have resumed investment in exploration on the assumption that internal-combustion vehicles and gas-fired electricity generation will be around for some time to come. Everywhere the expansion of solar and wind power is being obstructed by NIMBY objections to new transmission lines, complex permitting procedures, and grids designed to distribute power generated by coal and gas. Higher interest rates have added to the obstacles facing solar and wind projects.

Against this seemingly immovable resistance is ranged the irresistible force of massive reductions in the cost of solar photovoltaics, or PV, and, to a lesser extent, wind. The result has been a huge expansion in production capacity, estimated at 650 gigawatts a year in China alone. Geopolitical concerns have meanwhile driven the United States and other countries to reduce reliance on China through “friendshoring,” the expansion of production capacity outside China.

The International Energy Agency estimates that global solar PV manufacturing capacity will reach almost 1000 gigawatts in 2024. This exceeds current projections of demand so much that the IEA warns “the industry is rushing headlong into a supply glut.”

That warning implies that stocks of unsold inventory will build up, as is already occurring. As the growth of stocks becomes unsustainable, prices will fall to a point where demand and supply are brought back into balance. Where will that equilibrium be found?

It is easier to look at the supply side first. Solar module prices have fallen to historically low levels of US$0.14 per watt, a decline of nearly 40 per cent since the beginning of 2023. These are stunningly low prices. In the absence of soft costs, and assuming 7 per cent interest, and 2000 hours of operation per year, the cost of electricity from such a module would be a mere 0.5 cents per kilowatt hour. Even at these prices, though, solar PV producers are rushing to invest in new production capacity.

The decline has been accelerated by a fall in the price of polysilicon, the raw material for a solar cell, as well as reductions in the amount required for a cell with given capacity. Solar cells now require only two to three grams of polysilicon per watt of capacity. With polysilicon prices now below US$10 per kilogram, that’s no more than 3 cents per watt.

The next big input to the production of solar cells is electricity itself. Solar PV manufacturing has tended to be located in coal-intensive provinces of China, notably Xinjiang and Jiangsu. But as the glut of solar modules develops, manufacturers will find it more economical to “eat their own dogfood,” using surplus modules to supply the electricity to produce new ones at ever lower costs.

Improvements in the efficiency of solar cells along with increases in the surface area of modules translate into reductions in installation costs. With solar cells now very cheap, manufacturers have an incentive to focus on design changes that produce lighter and more flexible modules, further reducing costs.

In other words, even a severe glut seems unlikely to result in sustained reductions in output. Rather, manufacturers will accept lower profit margins and seek ways to cut costs even further.

The demand for energy is growing and nearly all of this demand can be met by electricity in one way or another. As solar generation capacity increases, the benefits of using solar PV to meet the growing demand will become more and more evident. Battery storage is expanding rapidly too, threatening the role of gas-fired electricity as a source of “dispatchable” electricity — electricity that can be turned on or off at short notice.

What happens when such an unstoppable flood of generation capacity runs into the seemingly immovable barriers of entrenched interests and political resistance? The outcome will undoubtedly be messy, but one way or another the flood will find its way around, over or perhaps under the barriers.

The problem of transmission lines provides one example. New solar generation is now commonly sited near where coal-fired power plants have been shut down, thereby taking advantage of already-installed transmission lines. But once solar costs fall enough, it becomes economically sensible to buy and demolish coal plants in order to use their transmission capacity for solar. That’s increasingly true even when the plants are nowhere near the end of their operational life.

Rooftop solar provides another way of avoiding constraints on transmission capacity. It’s politically popular, so regulators have shied away from onerous permit requirements in most jurisdictions. Thanks to the incentives provided by the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme, as well as its sunny climate, Australia has been a world leader in rooftop solar. That will only accelerate as the cost of solar modules drops. In fact, the cost reduction associated with that decline is so great that, even in the absence of government incentives, rooftop solar will soon be an attractive option in any sunny climate.

Another possible path is the production of “green hydrogen” using electrolysis to split water into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. The low price of electricity implied by a severe glut of solar PV would make electrolysis competitive with coal-based technologies. Replacing these polluting technologies with electrolysis to meet existing demand for hydrogen would use about 2300 terawatt hours, or nearly twice the global total solar PV generation for 2022.

The shift to hydrogen would be constrained by the massively increased need for electrolysers, which are currently produced on a much smaller scale than would be needed. Nevertheless, production of even a modest share of current hydrogen demand would absorb any glut in solar PV production. And the prospect is that demand will increase sharply, most notably in steel production.

One way or another, the force of massively increased solar production capacity and ever lower costs will breach the “immovable barriers.” But compared with an efficient and orderly transition, the process will be slower than is needed, and the costs will be much greater. •

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As surprising as the announcement might have seemed, a long history lay behind it. Until the first meeting of signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, in 1995, Canberra was largely seen as being on the same page as other Pacific nations (outwardly, at least) on climate change concerns. Then, at a tense South Pacific Forum meeting in 1997, prime minister John Howard refused to sign up to binding targets for emissions reductions. Other Pacific leaders eventually relented, agreeing instead that nations would “adopt different approaches” at the upcoming Kyoto talks.

Has prime minister Anthony Albanese finally repaired the “climate rift” with Australia’s Pacific neighbours? Although Tuvaluan critics of the Falepili Union treaty are rightly sceptical of Canberra’s commitment to climate justice, Mr Albanese was among the leaders who assented to the Forum Communiqué’s aspiration for what it labelled “a Just and Equitable Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific.” In doing so, they echoed the Port Vila Call for a Just Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific made by six Pacific countries, including Tuvalu, in March this year.

That call reflects an international effort to negotiate a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty inspired by the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Advocates argue that such a treaty — unlike the Paris climate agreement, which doesn’t explicitly name coal, oil and gas — would directly target their phasing out and outline a plan for a fair transition to clean energy.

If the phrase “a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific” rings a bell, you’re not mistaken — the phrase gestures to the campaign for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific that began in the mid 1970s. In 1985, with France continuing its nuclear weapons testing on Mururoa atoll and anxieties deepening about US military installations on Australian soil, those efforts culminated in the declaration of the South Pacific as a Nuclear Free Zone in the Treaty of Rarotonga. The French had bombed the Rainbow Warrior just a month earlier.

But the link between nuclear weapons and climate change goes well beyond inspiration. Historians have excavated how nuclear weapons testing shaped the US cold war–era science that shed light on the mechanisms of global warming. Likewise, the scientific debate over a nuclear winter helped to convey the possibility of widespread human-induced destruction on such a scale that even non-combatant nations would be affected. A nuclear war would have no winners.

Climate change was now seen as an issue the world’s governments should tackle multilaterally. As concerns about ozone depletion and acid rain had shown, the atmosphere respects no territorial borders.

This message was articulated clearly in the statement arising from June 1988’s Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security conference in Toronto. “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war,” agreed the largest such gathering of scientists and policymakers to date. Participants called for a global convention to coordinate scientific research and spell out concrete measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Nearly four decades later, security returned to centrestage in Chris Bowen’s annual parliamentary climate change statement last month. “The currently identified national security threats from climate change already present serious risks to Australia and the region, but they will become more severe and more frequent the further warming targets are exceeded,” the climate change and energy minister argued. “Climate change is an existential national security risk to our Pacific partners and presents unprecedented challenges for our region. It is likely to accentuate economic factors already fuelling political instability, including risks to water security across the globe.”

The implication of rising temperatures for the world’s coastal areas — home to half of humanity — was an early concern of scientists and policymakers responding to climate change. This vulnerability was especially clear in the Maldives, where storm surges in early 1987 had flooded the capital, Malé. After president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom raised the issue at that year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and then at the UN General Assembly, the Commonwealth Secretariat commenced its own study of the likely effects of climate change on its member nations, which in turn commissioned studies of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tonga.

With Malta prepared to raise climate change at the General Assembly in late 1988, the South Pacific Forum discussed the issue at its October meeting in Tonga. It joined other pressing concerns for the region, including fisheries exploitation, political upheaval and telecommunications. Subsequent gatherings of Pacific and other island nations in the Marshall Islands and the Maldives reiterated the existential threat that rising sea levels posed to their countries.

A 1989 booklet, A Climate of Crisis: Global Warming and the Island South Pacific, described the looming threat as a “climate bomb” that “threatens the physical and cultural survival of several Pacific societies. They are the innocent victims of the northern hemisphere’s 300-year orgy of fossil fuels.” Announcing Australian funding for a regional network of sea level monitoring stations in August 1989, prime minister Bob Hawke explained that it would help “ensure that we are well aware of what the region is in for.” Pacific concerns were reiterated at that October’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malaysia, where leaders responded to the Commonwealth Secretariat’s report with the Langkawi Declaration.

Australia’s own scientific research on climate change meant Canberra was well aware of its implications for the Pacific. Following Malta’s call for the “Conservation of Climate as part of the Common Heritage of Mankind” in October 1988, Australia’s representative at the UN General Assembly, Michael Costello, expressed Canberra’s concern about the “potential for climate change to cause serious economic and social disruption in countries of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.”

The following year Tuvaluan prime minister Tomasi Puapua described to an Australian parliamentary committee the “possible impact of the greenhouse effect on his country,” which was “one of Tuvalu’s major security concerns.” Climate change represented a “potentially catastrophic” threat to the “very existence” of atoll states like Tuvalu, the committee reported. “In the worst scenario the entire populations of these small states may end up as environmental refugees, seeking resettlement in countries such as Australia.”

Canberra’s framing of Pacific island vulnerability as a security issue reflected almost a decade of assessing the prospects of newly independent and decolonising neighbours like Tuvalu. Nor had the Soviet Union’s recent efforts to extend its influence in the region gone unnoticed. “Environmental problems, if unchecked could threaten our security,” warned Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans, pointing to the “devastating effect [of rising sea levels] on the small island countries of the South Pacific.”

Echoing concerns voiced in the United States and Britain, Evans anticipated hundreds of thousands of “environmental refugees” “who would look mainly to Australia for resettlement.” “In short,” he argued, “quite apart from the cost in human misery and dislocation to the island communities, which of course are ample reasons in themselves for our concern, it would jeopardise vital Australian national interests.”

Puapua’s successor as Tuvalu’s prime minister, Bikenibeu Paeniu, continued to assert the vulnerability of island nations on the world stage. In the wake of Cyclone Ofa and early meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he told the Second World Climate Conference in late 1990 that it would be “an injustice should we in Tuvalu and the island nations, be denied our right to live in our homeland.” He continued: “We contribute little or nothing to the problem and yet we will be the first to suffer. Our survival is at stake.”

Although the island nations were ultimately disappointed with the climate conference’s pared-back ministerial statement, they came away from Geneva having formally organised themselves as the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS. With the legal support of the recently formed British group, the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development, the island nations understood that their interests might be better served collectively as a UN bloc in the upcoming negotiations of the UNFCCC.

Australian negotiators were quietly sceptical of the motives of larger developing nations, which they believed to be more interested in a renewal of the New International Economic Order. But they acknowledged the difficulties facing small island nations. After a meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee of the UNFCCC in late 1991, they reported to Canberra that AOSIS members were “genuinely worried about the adverse consequences for them.” As the small island states had stressed during the negotiations, “The very existence of low-coastal and small vulnerable island countries is placed at risk by the consequences of climate change.” Although AOSIS sought more ambitious provisions, the final text of the UNFCCC would go on to explicitly acknowledge their particular vulnerability to the “adverse effects of climate change.”

Australia was one of the first signatories to the UNFCCC at the Rio Earth Summit in mid 1992. The AOSIS nations followed soon after, including Nauru, Tuvalu and Kiribati, which were not yet UN members. Upon signing what they saw as a weak treaty without targets or timetables for emissions reductions, that trio joined with Fiji to expressly declare that were not renouncing their rights under international law concerning state responsibility for the adverse effects of climate change.

The Earth Summit offered Prime Minister Paeniu an opportunity to share Tuvalu’s position with a much broader audience. Thanks to the promotional efforts of Greenpeace, he addressed a full press conference on the implications of rising sea levels for his country. “There would be no land left for us,” he said. “There cannot be any other home for Tuvalu. Even if we were offered 10,000 acres in Australia, it won’t be the same Tuvalu.”

This was the scenario to which the leaders assembled at the recent Pacific Islands Forum returned. Having made a declaration on the preservation of their maritime zones in 2021, they now called for the preservation of their statehood and cultural heritage in the face of climate change–related sea level rise. Fearing the worst, Tuvalu had already set out to become the First Digital Nation — a project Funafuti hopes “will allow Tuvalu to retain its identity and continue to function as a state, even after its physical land is gone.”

Despite the existential threat that climate change poses, successive COPs have demonstrated the challenge of making manifest a planetary ethic for real global climate action. As in the late 1980s, however, asserting the security implications of climate change continues to allow for the alignment of territorial interests with atmospheric concerns that don’t recognise political borders.

Those territorial interests are really what’s at stake when government negotiators descend on cities like Paris and Dubai for what have become annual climate talks. For all the hot air those talks produce, there remains room for hope: regardless of territorial size or emissions, every party has a single vote on the future. •

The post Changing atmosphere appeared first on Inside Story.

During the preceding two days an agreement had by no means been guaranteed. After two weeks of negotiation, the core issue, on the future of fossil fuels, was deadlocked. On the one side were around one hundred small island states, developing countries and EU members, plus Australia, insisting that fossil fuels must ultimately be phased out. Anything less would be “signing our death certificate,” as Samoan natural resources and environment minister Cedric Schuster put it. On the other side were the petrostates and China. Rallied by an instruction from the secretary-general of OPEC, subsequently leaked, they were determined to hold out against any language committing the world to ending fossil fuel production. This would spell, they claimed, their own economic demise.

There are three ways for negotiators to overcome polarised conflict of this kind, and all three were duly used in the final text.

First, find another verb. If “phased out” is not acceptable to one side and “phased down” to the other, the negotiators will have tried alternatives. “Eliminate,” “end the use of,” “take urgent and rapid action towards the alternative”… Ultimately, it was “transition away from” that proved acceptable to all sides. The key sentence in the final agreement reads:

28 (d): Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.

Linguistic style is not a COP concern.

Second, include several subtly different paragraphs covering the same topics. That way the different sides can each find some text to suit their needs. Immediately before the clause above is this one, which makes essentially the same point, but not quite:

28 (c): Accelerating efforts globally towards net zero emission energy systems, utilizing zero- and low-carbon fuels well before or by around mid-century.

And a little later:

29: Recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.

In UN-speak, “transitional fuel” means gas, so this clause gives comfort to the gas producers, whatever else is included about transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Third, employ “constructive ambiguity.” Find terms that can mean different things to different audiences, allowing each to claim that it says what they want it to. The key term here is “energy systems.” This is ambiguous: does it just cover power, heating and cooling, which is what most people would say constitutes a country’s “energy system”? Or does it include energy used in transport?

The uncertainty is critical, because if transport is not included, this is not a fossil fuel phase-out. In particular, it would let the oil producers off the hook, since oil is the primary transport fuel. Expect the petrostates to argue that that is indeed what it means — and they will point to a separate clause about transport to support their case. (Why have one of those if this already includes transport? But see point two above.) Meanwhile the advocates of phase-out will say that this is evident nonsense.

If the agreed text can be read in different ways, what does it mean? There isn’t in fact much doubt about this, as the Saudi minister’s expression revealed. The UNFCCC’s official press release spelled it out: the agreement “signals the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” The petrostates had their interpretable clauses — “a litany of loopholes,” said the Alliance of Small Island States — but Team Phase-out had definitely won.

Does it matter, though? There’s a good case for saying no. This text is not binding on anyone. It is the outcome of the Global Stocktake, or GST, an assessment process mandated by the 2015 Paris agreement to guide the national targets and plans that will actually do the emissions cutting. On the Paris five-year cycle, these Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, must be delivered in 2025. The GST text is meant to be heeded when countries set out those plans, but in truth it can be ignored if they so wish. The new NDCs will be for 2035 and 2040, some time before phase-out is meant to happen.

But there’s another way to look at it. Odd as it sounds, this is the first time that any UNFCCC text has mentioned fossil fuels. They’ve been the effective elephant in the room. Every other kind of goal has been used: a temperature limit (2°C above pre-industrial times, then 1.5°C); an emissions target (net zero by 2050); a renewable energy aspiration (the COP28 text specifies a tripling by 2030). COP26, two years ago, finally managed to single out (unabated) coal, and called for its phase-down. But the petrostates had always resisted the naming of fossil fuels as a whole.

This really is where the rubber hits the road. It simply isn’t possible to limit warming to 1.5°C, or cut emissions to net zero, without more or less eliminating the production and consumption of all fossil fuels. It’s only “more or less” because some can be abated through carbon capture and storage technologies, or biological sequestration, or — though we don’t know how to do this at scale yet — the direct drawing down of carbon from the air. But the essential point stands: a safe climate means pretty much phasing out fossil fuels.

In this sense the real impact of the COP28 agreement will not be so much on the immediate behaviour of fossil fuel producers as on the longer-term global debate about energy policy. It will become harder, in short, to argue for an expansion of fossil fuel exploration and mining. If the world has agreed to phase out fossil fuels, how can a new coalmine, or a set of new oil and gas drilling licences, be justified?

Phasing out may not mean the immediate abandonment of fossil fuel production — on the contrary, the COP28 call is for a “just, orderly and equitable” transition — but it surely cannot mean finding and extracting more of the stuff. As the International Energy Agency has made clear, currently exploited reserves hold more than enough carbon to meet the global carbon budget allowable for a 1.5°C world. There is no space for any more.

Of course, changing the debate doesn’t guarantee that the case will be won. But UN textual agreements could never do that. The Paris agreement itself can’t do that — it is founded on the principle of national sovereignty over climate policy. (That’s why there is an “emissions gap” between the aggregate of national emissions commitments and the total that would be needed to limit warming to 1.5°C.) But the terms of the debate do matter. Before 2013 there was no articulated concept of “net zero” emissions. But within eight years every major economy was committed to a net zero target. In very few major countries can an electable politician say they’re not in favour of reaching net zero. In time, the phase-out of fossil fuels may come to have the same political power. And that will then change how fossil fuel policies are made.

The focus in Dubai was all on the production side because the producers were in the room. Fossil fuel phase-out is going to be genuinely difficult for many countries, particularly those highly dependent on coal, oil and gas for export revenue. Australia provides a case in point. Poorer countries in this group — Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique — will demand that the developed world help them make the transition; they were angry there was not more in the COP28 text obliging this. But the real work of phase-out is going to be done on the demand side. Consumers are going to require less.

This is already happening. From the start of the Industrial Revolution, Britain spent nearly 250 years burning coal; today it has more or less been eliminated from the UK power grid. Around 80 per cent of all global investment in electricity production now goes to renewables, grids and storage. In Europe electric heat pumps are beginning to make inroads into gas-based heating systems. On a lifetime basis electric vehicles will be cheaper than petrol and diesel ones within two or three years. The first ships to run on green hydrogen and ammonia are now in production. It’s only really in aviation, where biofuels are not yet viable at scale, that it is hard to see how demand for fossil fuels will fall. The transition has already started.

And we know how it works. Scientists and engineers develop new green technologies. They start out being very expensive, so governments subsidise them. As more are produced, innovation and scale reduce their costs. Governments then mandate a proportion of total supply to take a green form. This creates increased demand for the technology, leading to more innovation and economies of scale and a further reduction in costs. As costs fall, government targets can be raised. Gradually a tipping point is hit where the green technology is cheaper than its fossil rival, and the subsidies become unnecessary. As the capital stock gradually turns over, the green transition becomes complete.

This is precisely the story we have seen in solar and wind power and batteries, where since 2010 costs have fallen around 85 per cent, 55 per cent and 85 per cent respectively. A similar fall in costs can be seen in electric vehicles, and heat pumps will follow. There is a virtuous circle connecting policy, innovation and scale.

The real question, however, is of speed. Had the world started acting seriously on climate change when it was first understood in the 1990s (the initial assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in 1990), a gradual path could have been followed to a low-carbon future. But it has really only been since 2008–10 that climate policy around the world has become serious. Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are therefore much higher than they would otherwise have been, and we need to get to net zero more quickly.

This tardiness has made the required trajectory of emissions reduction very steep: the IPCC calculates that, for a 1.5°C pathway, emissions in 2030 need to be cut to around half of their 2019 levels. In turn this has made the politics of transition much more difficult. It would have been hard to replace a coal, oil or gas industry over a period of fifty years. Doing it over twenty-five will stretch governments to the maximum. Many will surely baulk at the prospect.

This then is what the next two years will be about. COP28 has provided the guidance. COP30 in 2025 is when governments must publish their targets and plans. There will of course be a COP between the two: there always is. COP29 will be in the even more improbable location of Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, another oil producer. But it won’t have very much to do. The real focus turns to the city of Belém in northeastern Brazil, gateway to the Amazon, in November 2025. The beginning of the end has begun. •

The post The beginning of the end appeared first on Inside Story.

For Edelman, the global public relations company hired by the United Arab Emirates to support its COP28 presidency, the answer is sixty-four. That’s the size of the company’s team at the UN climate conference, now into its second week in Dubai. (Thirty per cent by 2030 is the UAE’s modest new “clean energy” target.) But the host country is taking no chances: it has also hired communications firm BCW, whose COP team is twenty-five-strong. Yet even these eighty-nine communications specialists were not enough to prevent a PR disaster dominating the media coverage of the COP’s first week.

Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE’s controversial choice to chair the conference — his other job is chief executive of the country’s giant oil company ADNOC — was seen in a leaked video denying that climate science required an end to fossil fuels. In a conversation with former Irish president Mary Robinson, as revealed by the Guardian, Al Jaber lost his cool when questioned about the future of the oil and gas industry. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there,” he said tetchily, “that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.”

Unfortunately for Al Jaber, plenty of scientific scenarios say exactly that. In its last global assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, analysed hundreds of results from economic climate models in which global warming is limited to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. When they use realistic assumptions about the proportion of carbon that might be captured and stored or removed directly from the atmosphere, they show that on average coal, oil and gas consumption will have to be cut from 2020 levels by 99 per cent, 70 per cent and 84 per cent respectively by 2050.

Al Jaber’s comments attracted immediate criticism from climate scientists. They were “verging on climate denial,” said Bill Hare, veteran Australian IPCC author and COP-watcher. Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, acknowledged that a 70 per cent reduction in oil production didn’t mean bringing it to an end altogether, but stressed the importance of clear messaging: “I cannot see scientifically there being any other communication than that we need to phase out fossil fuels.”

Messaging was indeed Al Jaber’s problem, for the central point of contention at COP28 is precisely what language should be used in respect of fossil fuels. “Phasing out” is the demand of the most climate-vulnerable countries, supported by the European Union. “Phasing down” is the weaker alternative preferred by China, India and Saudi Arabia. (John Kerry, the US climate envoy, was trying “largely phased out.”) As the neutral chair of the conference, Al Jaber is meant to be mediating between these positions, not supporting one of them.

This should have been the point at which the PR people earned their fees. Edelman’s website boasts that crisis management is one of its specialities. But either they’re kidding themselves, or Al Jaber didn’t take their advice. In a hastily convened press conference the following day, the COP president put on another ill-tempered show. Flanked by the chair of the IPCC, Professor Jim Skea — looking decidedly uncomfortable — Al Jaber insisted that “we very much believe and respect the science.” But he could not help himself also attacking his critics. “I am quite surprised,” he said, “with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency.”

Al Jaber’s ill-judged remarks and thin political skin are the result of not having to face a free media in his own country. They probably won’t derail the final outcome of the conference, where the search is now on for other forms of words (neither phasing out nor down, but another verb altogether) that can reconcile the opposing positions on the future of fossil fuels. But the episode in many ways exemplified the wider problem at this and recent COPs.

The problem is the focus on glossy announcements that satisfy the PR people but often do little to clarify what countries and companies are actually doing to bring down their emissions or support developing countries to become more climate-resilient.

In the first week of the COP the UAE announced no fewer than ten official declarations, pledges and coalitions in which various combinations of countries and companies signed up to various degrees of commitment to action on climate. These covered Agriculture, Food and Climate, endorsed by 146 countries; Climate and Health, 133 countries; Renewables and Energy Efficiency, 128 countries; Climate Relief, Recovery and Peace, seventy-five; Gender-Responsive Just Transitions, seventy-four; Cooling, sixty-six; Hydrogen, thirty-seven; Climate Finance, a disappointing thirteen; along with an Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter (fifty-two companies) and a Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships pledge (sixty-five countries).

This was not all. Strangely absent from the official website but much vaunted on the day of launch was a Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy by 2050 endorsed by twenty countries. And alongside all these the UAE has also announced a raft of other new initiatives: a Global Decarbonisation Accelerator, an Industrial Transition Accelerator, a Coal Transition Accelerator (joining the existing Powering Past Coal Alliance), a Global Education Solutions Accelerator, a Net Zero Mobilization Charter, an Innovate for Climate Tech Coalition, a Charter on Finance for Managing Risk, a Net Zero Export Credit Agencies Alliance, a Roadmap for Islamic Sustainable Finance, an African Green Industrialisation Initiative, a Global Electric Cooling Coalition, a Waste to Zero Coalition, a Buildings and Cement Breakthrough, and a Global Youth Statement.

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. It’s clear that for the UAE this welter of announcements has been a major focus of the overall PR effort. Every day four or five new press releases have landed in the inboxes of the 4000 journalists attending the COP, overwhelming them with new pledges, targets, carefully honed quotes from government and business leaders, and triumphant group photos in front of giant declaratory backdrops. The impression given is undoubtedly impressive, a reflection of a busy year of coalition-building and commitment-cajoling by Al Jaber and his team. Yet at the same time it is almost impossible to know how many of these pledges — particularly the government ones — will actually lead to new policies or spending in the countries that have signed up to them.

The nuclear pledge provides a case in point. The press release trumpeted the commitment to tripling nuclear energy capacity. Both France and Britain signed up. But France’s electricity system is 72 per cent nuclear already, so clearly tripling does not mean “in France.” Britain has nine nuclear power stations but has been struggling since 2007 to build a tenth, which is now due to come onstream in 2027. So tripling is not on the cards there either. It turns out that what these countries have signed up to is an aspiration for other countries to triple their nuclear capacity: not quite as much of a commitment as it looked at first sight.

The financial pledges attached to the announcements are even more obscure. The UAE website boasts a dazzling array of new financial pledges announced at COP: a total of US$6.8 billion for energy, US$8.5 billion for lives and livelihoods, US$1.2 billion for inclusion, and a puzzling US$61.8 billion for “finance.” But whether these sums are really new money or a recycling of old commitments is impossible to know. Forensic examination by NGOs has shown that much “climate finance” is only tangentially related to climate, and internationally comparable accounting is woeful. It is doubtful that most of these COP announcements will buck the trend.

Yet wholesale cynicism would also be misplaced. The reason there are so many initiatives in the UAE’s list is that climate mitigation and resilience are needed in every industrial sector, and there are a lot of sectors. What’s been striking at this year’s COP is the much deeper level of engagement of many business representatives than previously.

In the past many business-led events were largely exercises in self-promotion. There’s been a fair amount of that in Dubai, but also many more events and conference sessions genuinely exploring the challenges of decarbonisation and adaptation in different sectors and countries. Green technologies are advancing rapidly — there have been multiple sessions on the potential of artificial intelligence to support climate action — and investors are pouring in money.

In effect there’s been a parallel conference going on here — while the UN negotiators do their increasingly abstruse thing in the formal sessions, the real world has broken in and is taking over the space. It’s messy, it’s not properly accountable, it’s all still largely voluntary rather than regulated. But it reflects a sea change in the scale and seriousness of business action on climate around the world.

All round the COP conference venue the PR people have put up little slogans and homilies to inspire the delegates. “Let’s lead change.” “The urgency of the climate challenge demands courage, not caution.” “Action inspires hope.” Strangely enough, they might be right. •

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We need to bring some historical discrimination to debates about what was new about the Black Summer. In particular we need to look at the history of firestorms, the distinctive fatal fires of southeastern Australia that culminated in named days of terror: Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Sunday 1926, Black Friday 1939, Black Tuesday 1967, Ash Wednesday 1983 and Black Saturday 2009. How did the summer of 2019–20 relate to this grim lineage?

Black Thursday, 1851

The British colonists of Australia came to “this continent of smoke” from a green, wet land where fire was cosseted and coddled. They had rarely, if ever, seen free-ranging fire at home for it had been suppressed and domesticated over generations. They had so tamed fire that they had literally internalised it in the “internal combustion” of the steam engine.

These representatives of the industrial revolution brought to Australia many new sources of ignition, yet they also introduced houses, cattle, sheep, fences and all kinds of material belongings that made them fear wild fire. And they found themselves in a land that nature and human culture had sculpted with fire over millennia, a land hungry for fire and widowed of its stewards by the European invasion. It was an explosive combination. They did not know what the bush could do.

The foundational firestorm of Australian settler history occurred a few months after the residents of the Port Phillip District heard the news that British approval had been given for their “separation” from New South Wales. The impending creation of a distinct colony, soon to be called Victoria, was a cause for much celebration in Melbourne in November 1850, and a five-day holiday was declared.

Three months later, on Thursday the sixth of February 1851, in the soaring heat of a scorching summer, terrifying fires swept across the forests, woodlands and farms of the southeast. “Separation” had been celebrated with hilltop bonfires and now it was sealed by a scarifying firestorm. It was right that fire should forge the political identity of the most dangerous fire region on the planet.

“Black Thursday,” wrote the visiting British writer William Howitt, who arrived the year after the fire, “is one of the most remarkable days in the annals of Australia.” “The whole country, for a time, was a furious furnace,” he reported, “and, what was the most singular, the greatest part of the mischief was done in one single day.” He then went on to make some startling parallels. “It is a day as frequently referred to by the people in this colony as that of the Revolution of 1688 in England, of the first Revolution in France, or of the establishment of Independence in the United States of America.” In Australia, Howitt seemed to be suggesting, it was nature more than politics that would shape our identity.

Black Thursday, “the Great Bush Fire,” was a revolution of a kind. It was the first of the Black Days to be named by Europeans, the first recorded firestorm to shock and humble the colonists. Although the newcomers had quickly learned to expect bushfires, this was something else; its magnitude and ferocity terrified all who experienced and survived it.

At first the Melbourne Argus could hardly credit the reports from the bush, but then the breathless testimony kept tumbling in. Drought, high temperatures and ferocious northerly winds fanned the flames into a giant conflagration. People rushed to fight with green boughs “as in ordinary bushfires,” but all were forced to flee. Flames leaped from tree to tree like lightning; the fire careered “at the rate of a horse at full gallop”; sheep, cattle, horses, kangaroos and smaller native animals hurtled before it and hosts of birds were swept up in it: “the destruction of the wild creatures of the woods, which were roasted alive in their holes and haunts, was something fearful to contemplate.” People “went to bed, or lay down (for many did not dare go to bed), in a state of the greatest suspense and doubt as to whether they should see daylight next morning.”

Four days after the fire, Frances Perry, wife of the Bishop of Melbourne, recorded that “in some parts of the country the people are completely panic-struck. They thought, and well they might, that the world was coming to an end.”

The words of survivors painted a picture strikingly similar to the grand panorama of Black Thursday (1864) by artist William Strutt. For his imagery he drew on reportage as well as his own experience of the heat, smoke and fear of the day. Over three metres in breadth, the painting depicts what Strutt called “a stampede for life,” where people and animals, eyes wild with panic, flee southwards in terror.

Stampede for life: William Strutt’s Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (1864). Click here to enlarge. State Library of Victoria

The “Great Bush Fire” of 1851 was the first large-scale firestorm to terrorise the British colonists. It wreaked its havoc just a decade and a half after British pastoralists invaded the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. Sheep, cattle and people had swiftly moved into the grasslands of the southeastern corner of the continent, but in 1851 the invaders had only recently outnumbered Aboriginal peoples and Indigenous burning regimes persisted in some places.

Because of its timing on the cusp of this change, Black Thursday was an intriguing amalgam of old and new Australia. It was an event embedded in the unravelling ecological and cultural rhythms of the southeastern corner of the continent. But Black Thursday was also an outrageous outbreak of disorder, the first schism in the new antipodean fire regime, a portent of things to come.

Red Tuesday, 1898

European settlers feared and suppressed fire near their properties and towns, and misjudged its power in the bush. But it did not take them long to begin to use fire for their own purposes, even if clumsily and dangerously. “The whole Australian race,” declared one bushman, has “a weakness for burning.” The language the bush workers used — “burning to clean up the country” — was uncannily like that of Aboriginal peoples.

In the drier forests of the ranges (but generally not the wet mountain ash forests, which had less grass), graziers used fire as Aboriginal peoples had done: to keep the forest open, to clean up the scrub, to encourage a “green pick,” and to protect themselves and their stock from dangerous bushfire. But, unlike Aboriginal peoples, the newcomers were prepared to burn in any season. And the legislative imperative for settlers was to “improve” the land they had colonised — and “improvement” first meant clearing. The Australian settler or “pioneer” was a heroic figure depicted as battling the land and especially the trees.

This fight with the forest assumed theatrical dimensions in South Gippsland, where each summer neighbours gathered to watch the giant burns that, they hoped, would turn last year’s fallen and ring-barked forest into this year’s clearing. They needed to establish pastures as quickly and cheaply as possible. Small trees were chopped, undergrowth was slashed, and sometimes large trees were felled so as to demolish smaller timber that had previously been “nicked,” thereby creating, as one settler put it, “a vast, crashing, smashing, splintering, roaring and thundering avalanche of falling timber!” The slashed forest was left to dry until the weather was hot enough for the annual burn, the frightening climax of the pioneer’s year.

In the mostly wet sclerophyll forest of the South Gippsland ranges, some of it mountain ash, it was often hard to get a “good burn” because of the heavy rainfall and the thick scrub’s resistance to wind. Farmers therefore chose the hottest summer days for these burns, “the windier and hotter the day the better for our purpose.” These settlers of the world’s most fire-prone forests awaited the most fatal days.

A “good burn” could so easily become a firestorm and in Gippsland in 1898 it did. “Red Tuesday” (1 February) was the most terrifying day of the “Great Fires” that year, a whole summer of fear and peril. Intense clearing fires had accompanied ringbarking, ploughing, sowing and road-making in Gippsland for two decades, but settlers were still shocked by the Great Fires, which were like nothing they had ever experienced. Although they were stunned by the speed and violence of the firestorm, the new farmers understood that it was a product of their mode of settlement. Their principal pioneering weapon had run amok. As farmers burned their clearings into the encircling edges of the wet, green forest, they might have guessed that soon the fires would link up and overwhelm them.

Just as Black Thursday was memorialised in a great painting so was Red Tuesday captured in a grand work of art. When historian Stephen Pyne surveyed fire art around the world, he found Australian paintings to be exceptional for their gravitas, their capacity to speak to cultural identity or moral drama. “Bushfires did not simply illuminate the landscape like a bonfire or a corroboree,” he wrote, “they were the landscape.”

This is vividly true of John Longstaff’s depiction of Gippsland, Sunday Night, February 20th, 1898. Longstaff was born on the Victorian goldfields a decade after Black Thursday and travelled to Warragul to witness the long tail of the 1898 fires. Whereas Strutt’s painting was intimate in its terror and chaos, showing us the whites of the eyes of people and animals, Longstaff evoked the drama through its magisterial setting. Human figures are dwarfed by towering mountain ash trees and the immensity of the bush at night, and appear encircled and illuminated by fire. Flames lick at the edge of the clearing and a leaping firestorm races towards us from a high, distant horizon.

Longstaff exhibited his grand painting in his Melbourne studio in August of that year, lit by a flickering row of kerosene-lamp footlights. Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 is a painting of a landscape, and it focuses on the forest as much as the fire and the settlers. “The Great Scrub,” the enemy of the settlers, is a powerful presence in the panorama; it inspires as much awe as the flames. The people in the painting, who are seeking to “settle” this fearful forest, are enclosed and entrapped by its vast darkness. The erupting bushfire is both a threat and a promise.

Burning off

Firestorms became more frequent in the twentieth century, as sawmilling and settlement moved more deeply into the mountain forests of Victoria. The greatest of them came on Friday 13 January 1939, the grim climax of a week of horror and a summer of fire across New South Wales, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. In that week, 1.4 million hectares of Victoria burned, whole settlements were incinerated, and seventy-one people died. Sixty-nine timber mills were engulfed, “steel girders and machinery were twisted by heat as if they had been of fine wire,” and the whole state seemed to be alight.

Judge Leonard Stretton, who presided over the royal commission into the causes of the fires, pitied the innocence of the bush workers, immigrants in a land whose natural rhythms they did not yet understand:

Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough. The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen.

Stretton investigated the settlers’ culture of burning, taking his commission to bush townships and holding hearings in temperatures over 100°F (38°C). His shocking finding was that “These fires were lit by the hand of man.” Yet rarely were they malevolent arsonists. Mostly they were farmers and bush workers, and their fire lighting was casual and selfish, sometimes systematic and sensible, and increasingly clandestine and rebellious. They were settlers burning to clear land and graziers firing the forest floor to promote new grass. Burning was a rite — and a right. They were landowners who, when they saw smoke on the horizon, threw a match into their home paddock.

Settlers felt “burning off” helped to keep them and their neighbours safe. Travellers to the Yarra Valley in the first decades of the twentieth century wouldn’t have been surprised to see “half a dozen fires on the sides of mountains.”

When the Forests Commission of Victoria was founded in 1918, it assumed control of the state forests and forced graziers out if they did not stop burning their leases. Forest officers, charged with conservation of timber, tried to suppress fire, but farmers and graziers believed that their burning kept the forest safe from fire by keeping fuel loads down. George Purvis, a storekeeper and grazier at Moe in Gippsland, explained to the 1939 royal commission that everybody used to burn off many years ago: “We could meet a few of our neighbours and say ‘What about a fire’… Nowadays, if we want a fire we nick out in the dark, light it, and let it go. We are afraid to tell even our next door neighbour because the Forests Commission is so definitely opposed to fires anywhere, that we are afraid to admit that we have anything to do with them.”

As a result, Purvis explained, the bulk of farmers did not burn their land as much as they wished. And so, as fires gathered force in the week before Black Friday, people desperately burned to save their property and their lives. It was considered better to burn late than never, and these fires (indeed “lit by the hand of man”) “went back into the forest where they all met in one huge fire.”

Perhaps fire was so much a part of the Australian landscape and character that it could never be eliminated or suppressed. It had to be accepted and used, and perhaps it could be controlled. The 1939 royal commission signalled a new direction. In his recommendations, Stretton gave official recognition to a folk reality and tried to give focus and discipline to the widespread popular practice of burning to keep the forest safe. He recommended that the best protection against fire was regular light burning of undergrowth at times other than summer. Only fire could beat fire.

Vivid word-picture: the report of the 1939 royal commission.

As Stephen Pyne observed, this “Australian strategy” was in defiant counterpoise to the North American model of total fire suppression. The strategy was reinforced by another royal commission, this one following the 1961 Dwellingup fires in Western Australia, which endorsed systematic, expansive, hazard-reduction burning of the jarrah forests of the southwest.

It took time for official “controlled burning” to supplant unofficial “burning off.” In 1967, a Tasmanian firestorm provided dramatic evidence of the persistence of rural traditions of burning. On 7 February, which became known as Black Tuesday, a “fire hurricane” stormed through bushland and invaded Hobart’s suburbs, coming within two kilometres of the CBD. The fire caused the largest loss of life and property on any single day in Australia to that time.

Black Tuesday had strong elements of Black Friday 1939 embedded within it. Of the 110 fires burning on that Tuesday, ninety started prior to the day and seventy were uncontrolled on the morning of the 7th. Significantly, only twenty-two of the 110 fires were started accidentally; eighty-eight were deliberately lit. In other words, bushfires were common, deliberate and allowed to burn unchecked. “No one worried about them too much,” reflected Tasmanian fire officer John Gledhill, echoing Stretton.

Tasmania’s 1967 Black Tuesday fire, with its heart in the expanding suburbs of Hobart, signalled a new type of firestorm in Australian history. The bush had come to town. But the town had also come to the bush, insinuating its commuters and their homes among the gums. This event initiated an era of fires that would invade the growing urban interface with the bush: Ash Wednesday 1983 (Adelaide and Melbourne); Sydney 1994; Canberra 2003, when more than 500 suburban homes were destroyed in the nation’s capital; and Black Saturday 2009, when only a wind change prevented the Kilmore East fire from ploughing into Melbourne’s densely populated eastern suburbs.

During the second half of the twentieth century, casual rural fire lighting gradually became criminalised. The law was enforced more strongly and public acceptance of open flame declined. Fire was gradually eliminated from normal daily experience as electricity took over from candles, kerosene and, eventually, even wood stoves. Firewood for the home became more recreational. “Smoke nights” — once part of the fabric of social life and an especially masculine ritual — went into decline as smoking itself became a health issue. Instead of being a social accompaniment and enhancement, smoking was pushed to the margins of social life, even becoming antisocial.

It had been different in the interwar years: in 1939 the Red Cross, “concerned about the health of the bush fire refugees,” appealed to the public for “gifts of tobacco.” Even for victims of fire, smoke was then considered a balm. On Black Sunday 1926, Harry King, a young survivor at Worrley’s Mill where fourteen people died, crawled scorched and half-blinded for four kilometres through the smoking forest to tell his story in gasps. At the end of his breathless account, he opened one badly burned eye and whispered: “I’m dying for a smoke, dig.”

The ferocity of “the flume”

The years of the most fatal firestorms were burned into the memories of bush dwellers: 1851, 1898, 1926, 1939, 1967, 1983, 2002–03 and 2009. Stretton’s vivid word-picture of Black Friday 1939, which became a prescribed text in Victorian Matriculation English, joined the paintings by Strutt and Longstaff in forming a lineage of luminous fire art.

The most frightening and fatal firestorms have all roared out of the “fire flume.” That’s what historian Stephen Pyne called the region where hot northerly winds sweep scorching air from the central deserts into the forested ranges of Victoria and Tasmania. In the flume, bushfires strike every year, firestorms every few decades. Firestorms are generated when spot fires ahead of the flaming front coalesce and intensify, even creating their own weather. They entrap and surround. Firestorms are bushfires of a different order of magnitude; they cannot be fought; they rampage and kill. Their timing, however, can be predicted. They come at the end of long droughts, in prolonged heatwaves, on days of high temperatures, low humidity and fierce northerly winds.

The firestorms are intensified by particular species of trees — the mountain ash and the alpine ash — that conspire to create a raging crown fire that kills and then reproduces the whole forest en masse. These tall ash-type eucalypts need a hot, fast-moving crown fire, upon which their regeneration uniquely depends, to crack open their seeds. The ecology of the forest depends on firestorms, so we know they also happened under Aboriginal ecological management.

In the last 200 years, the clearing, burning and intensive logging of the new settlers exaggerated and intensified the existing rhythm. In many remaining forest districts firestorms have come too frequently for the young ash saplings to grow seed, and so towering trees have given way to scrubby bracken and acacia. Those two colonial paintings captured the fatal, colliding elements of the Victorian firestorm: the peril, horror and panic of the people, and the indifferent magnificence of the tall, fire-hungry trees.

In 2009, I resisted use of the word “unprecedented” to describe Black Saturday because it was the familiarity of the firestorm that horrified me. Although the event was probably exacerbated by climate change, the recurrent realities were more haunting. As I wrote in Inside Story at the time, “the 2009 bushfires were 1939 all over again, laced with 1983. The same images, the same stories, the same words and phrases, and the same frightening and awesome natural force that we find so hard to remember and perhaps unconsciously strive to forget.” As a historian of the fire flume, I was disturbed by Black Saturday’s revelation that we had still not come to terms with what we had already experienced.

In the months following Black Saturday (2009), I was invited to assist the small community of Steels Creek in the Yarra Valley to capture stories of their traumatic experience. Working with historians Christine Hansen, Moira Fahy and Peter Stanley, I wrote a history of fire for the community that presented the ubiquity and sheer repetitive predictability of the phenomenon in that valley. One bushfire after another, year in year out. As we set out this rhythm, a deeper pattern emerged, which was the distinction in this region between bushfires and firestorms. The ferocity of the firestorms was generated not necessarily by trees near a settlement but by forests more than ten kilometres away, perhaps thirty or forty kilometres away. Survival in summer is not just a matter of clearing the gutter but also knowing what forests live in your region.

It has proven too tempting and too easy for Australians to overlook or deny the deep local history of the Victorian firestorm. Sometimes Aboriginal mosaic burning, which was applied to so many drier woodlands across the continent, is assumed to have been used in the wet ash forests too. For example, in his book Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe argued that “a mosaic pattern of low-level burns” was used in mountain ash forests and suggested that wild fires in the forests affected by Black Saturday “were largely unknown before the arrival of Europeans.” But this cannot have been the case, for when Europeans arrived they found mature, even-aged ash forests, the very existence of which was evidence of historical, powerful crown fires.

For example, botanist David Ashton identified one old stand of mountain ash at Wallaby Creek as dating from a firestorm in 1730. Furthermore, ash forests would have been destroyed by frequent fires, and low-level burns are not feasible in such a wet ecosystem. Aboriginal peoples would have used low-level cool burns to manage the drier foothill forests but not the ash forests themselves, for mature mountain ash trees can easily be killed (without germinating seed) by light surface fire. Woiwurrung, Daungwurrung and Gunaikurnai peoples used the tall forests seasonally and probably burned their margins, maintaining clearings and pathways along river flats and ridgetops. They were familiar with the forest’s firestorms and would have foreseen and avoided the dangerous days.

Even six generations after Black Thursday 1851, we stubbornly resist acknowledging the ecological and historical distinctiveness of the Victorian firestorm. It is astonishing that the Black Saturday royal commission cranked through 155 days of testimony but failed to provide a vegetation map in either its interim or final report. In one of my submissions to the inquiry, I drew the commission’s attention to this absence in their interim report, but it was not remedied. Senior counsel Rachel Doyle was more interested in pursuing the former Victorian police chief Christine Nixon about her haircut on 7 February than in directing the commission’s attention to the unusually combustible forests through which the fires stormed.

The royal commission went some way towards being more discriminating about the variety of bushfire, weather, topography and ecology, but not far enough. Forests featured in the commission’s report mostly as “fuel.” “The natural environment,” the commissioners explained in opaque bureaucratic language, “was heavily impacted.”

Thus the firestorm’s origin in the ecology of the forest was ignored even by a royal commission. Or people explained it away by interpreting such outbreaks as entirely new, as products of either the cessation of Aboriginal burning or of anthropogenic climate change. Indigenous fire and global warming are highly significant cultural factors in the making of fire regimes, but both work with the biological imperative. It is clearly hard for humanity to accept the innate power of nature.

The same tendency led Victorians up the garden path of fire policy. The most shocking fact about Black Saturday 2009 was that people died where they thought they were safest, where they were told they would be safest. Of the 173 people killed on Black Saturday, two-thirds of them died in their own homes. Of those, a quarter died sheltering in the bath.

As I wrote in Inside Story in 2009 and 2012, the “Stay or Go” policy was a death sentence in Victorian mountain communities in firestorm weather. Although the policy guided people well in many areas of Australia and had demonstrably saved lives and homes elsewhere, it misled people in this distinctively deadly fire region to believe that they could defend an ordinary home in the face of an atomic force. And it was this confidence in the defensibility of the home and denial of the difference of the firestorm (coupled with a faith in modern firefighting capacity) that underpinned the lack of warnings issued by authorities to local residents about the movement of the fire front on Black Saturday.

For much of the history of these forests, including their long Aboriginal history, no one believed their homes were safe in a firestorm. Evacuation was the norm. Sometimes the elderly and vulnerable were extracted by force from their homes by caring relatives and friends. Most people fled of their own accord. A “safe place” was a creek, a bare or ploughed paddock, a safely prepared or quickly excavated dug-out, a mining adit or railway tunnel, or just somewhere else. If you were trapped at home, there was an art to abandoning it at the right moment. The acknowledged vulnerability of homes made it essential for those caught in them to get out. And people in those earlier times were more inclined to look out the window, go outside and watch the horizon, sniff the air.

In 2009, the internet was a killer. The private, domestic computer screen with its illusion of omniscience and instant communication compounded the vulnerability of the home.

The Black Summer

The fire season of 2019–20 was completely different in character from Black Thursday (1851) and its successors. It might be compared best with the alpine fires of 2002–03, which were also mostly started by lightning in remote terrain and burned for months.

Coming after severe drought and more record heatwaves, the summer of 2019–20 tipped fire patterns into widespread rogue behaviour. It is not unusual for Australians to have smoke in their eyes and lungs over summer — the Great Fires of our history are remembered not only for their death tolls but also for their weeks of smoke and dread. But in the summer of 2019–20 the smoke was worse, more widespread and more enduring, the fires were more extensive and also more intense, NSW fires started behaving more like Victorian ones, and the endless “border fire” symbolically erased the boundary anyway.

Australia was burning from the end of winter to the end of summer, from Queensland to Western Australia, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, from the NSW south coast to Kangaroo Island, from the Great Western Woodlands to Tasmania. Everywhere, suddenly, bushfire was tipping into something new.

As spring edged into summer and the fires worked their way down the Great Dividing Range and turned the corner into Victoria, people who remembered Ash Wednesday (1983) and Black Saturday (2009) braced themselves. January and February are traditionally the most dangerous months in the southern forests. But this time central Victoria’s good winter rainfall and wetter, cooler February prevented the flume from ripping into full gear.

Therefore an unusual aspect of the fire season of 2019–20 was that these Great Fires did not explode out of the firestorm forests of Victoria and Tasmania. It was one reason why the death toll for such extensive and enduring fires was relatively low; they did not break out in the most fatal forests. Another reason was that Black Saturday had led to a new survival policy: to leave early rather than to stay and defend. Early evacuation thus became the enforced strategy of authorities well beyond the firestorm forests. Again, a regional and ecologically specific strategy became generalised as a universal policy. But at least this time it erred on the side of caution and surely saved lives.

The sheer range, scale, length and enduring ferocity of these fires made them unprecedented. The blackness of the named days of Australia’s fire history describe the aftermath of the sudden, shocking violence of a firestorm; it evokes mourning, grief and the funereal silence of the burned, empty forests. Black and still.

But when the fires burn for months, a single Black Day morphs into a Black Summer. There seemed never to be a black day-after; instead the days, the weeks, the months were relentlessly red. Red and restless. The colour of danger, of ever-lurking flame, of acrid orange smoke and pyrocumuli of peril. The smoke killed ten times more people than the flames. The threat was always there; it was not over until the season itself turned — and only then was it declared black. But the enduring image is of people cowering on beaches in a red-orange glow, awaiting evacuation. I think of it as the Red Summer.

Living with fire

A long historical perspective can help us come to terms with “disasters” and even ameliorate them, but most significantly it can also enable us to see beyond the idea of fire as disaster. There will be more Black Days and, under the influence of climate change, longer Red Summers. We have to accept and plan for them, like drought and flood. We should aim to survive them, even if we can’t hope to prevent or control them. We must acknowledge the role of global climate change in accelerating bushfire and urgently reduce carbon emissions. And we should celebrate, as I think we are already beginning to do, the stimulus that bushfire can give to community and culture.

In the quest for how to live with fire, Indigenous cultural burning philosophies and practices have much to offer all Australians. Sometimes we can even see a fired landscape (of the right intensity and frequency) as beautiful or “clean,” as Aboriginal peoples do. We are slowly learning to respect cultural burning and its capacity to put good fire back into a land that needs fire. But we must go further and actually allow Indigenous fire practitioners to take the lead again.

Victor Steffensen, a Tagalaka descendant from North Queensland, has written a humble and hopeful book, Fire Country (2020), which is as much about negotiating the bureaucratic hierarchies of fire power as it is about fire itself. As his mentor, Tommy George, declared in frustration, “Those bloody national park rangers, they should be learning from us.”

But cultural burning is not the same as prescribed burning. Sensitive controlled burning might, in some ecosystems, render the land safer for habitation, although it has proven difficult to achieve required levels in a warming world. And in a landscape of transformed ecologies, greatly increased population and rapidly changing climate, it is unreasonable and dangerous to expect Indigenous peoples to make the land safe for the proliferating newcomers; it would again set vulnerable people up to fail. Anthropologist Tim Neale has argued that the settler “dream of control” places an “impossible burden” on Aboriginal peoples, trapping them again within an idealised expectation of unchanging ancient behaviour.

Renewing and reviving Indigenous fire practices is important, first and foremost, for human rights, native title and the health, wellbeing and self-esteem of First Nations communities. We are fortunate that an additional opportunity presents itself: for a rapprochement between the exercise of Indigenous responsibility to Country and modern Australia’s need for labour-intensive and ecologically sensitive fire management on the ground. There is much creative promise in that partnership, and developing it will take time, patience and respect.

Throughout 2019, fire experts pleaded with the federal government to hold a bushfire summit to prepare for the dreaded summer, but the prime minister refused, fearing that acknowledging the crisis would give credence to climate action. Yet at the end of the summer he established another retrospective bushfire inquiry, the fifty-eighth since 1939. Many of the sensible, urgent recommendations of those earlier commissions have been ignored and await enactment. Rather than spending millions of dollars on lawyers after the flames, the nation would do better to spend a few thousand on environmental historians to distil and interpret existing, hard-earned wisdom.

Australian scholars of fire need to work on at least three temporal scales. First, there is the deep-time environmental and cultural history of the continent and its management over millennia. Second, there is the century-scale history of invasion, documenting the changes wrought by the collision of a naive fire people with the fire continent. And third, there is the long future of climate-changed nature and society. Black Thursday was the first firestorm after the invasion, an ancient ecological cycle with new social dimensions. Red Tuesday, Black Sunday and Black Friday were exaggerated by settlement and rampant exploitation. Black Saturday was more like the past than the future, a frighteningly familiar and fatal amalgam of nature and culture. But the Red Summer of 2019–20 was a scary shift to something new, fast-forwarding Australians into a new Fire Age. •

This is an abridged version of “The Fires: A Long Historical Perspective,” Tom Griffiths’s contribution to The Fires Next Time: Understanding Australia’s Black Summer, edited by Peter Christoff (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023).

The post Continent of fire appeared first on Inside Story.

This year, though, the series would have to be pitched as a documentary. COP28 opened on Wednesday in the improbable location of Dubai, where futuristic glass towers and a palm-shaped luxury resort raised from the sea cater for the world’s gas-guzzling classes. Dubai is the principal city of the United Arab Emirates, the world’s eighth-biggest oil producer. The head of the UAE’s state-owned oil giant ADNOC, Sultan Al Jaber, is the person its government has appointed to be president of the UN climate conference. And last week the BBC published leaked briefing notes for Al Jaber’s meetings with twenty-seven countries over the past year revealing that, as well as discussing the COP negotiations, he was pursuing energy investment deals for ADNOC and another UAE investment company he heads, Masdar.

For the climate NGOs this was merely confirmation that the UAE should not have been made host of the COP in the first place, and that Al Jaber was a completely inappropriate person to preside over it. “A brazen conflict of interest,” said Amnesty International, calling for him to resign.

But there was never any chance of that, and most of the country delegates in Dubai have reacted to the revelations with a world-weary shrug. “So the UAE is pursuing its oil interests?” said one. “And your point is…?”

The UAE’s energy interests overseas are large. The Financial Times estimates that it has invested almost US$200 billion in energy projects in the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe in the last year alone. Around half of this is in oil and gas, including for a major expansion of new drilling. This blatantly ignores the International Energy Agency’s warning that meeting the agreed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial times effectively means no more fossil fuel exploration. The UAE’s plans alone will blow the global “carbon budget” out of the water.

The UAE argues that the finger of blame is being pointed in the wrong direction: it is merely responding to demand. On all realistic projections, countries will still be using oil and gas till well into the mid-century, and the UAE’s is the cheapest and among the least polluting.

And look at the other half of the UAE’s energy deals, adds Al Jaber: huge new solar, wind and geothermal investments helping provide power and air conditioning to developing and emerging economies from Azerbaijan to Zambia, China to Turkey. For many poorer countries, the UAE’s investments are critical — and far larger than anything they receive from Western governments or private sector companies. You don’t hear many developing country delegates criticising the UAE here.

Yet the revelations about Al Jaber’s Janus-like activities in the run-up to COP28 can’t be wholly dismissed. The UN rules are clear: the COP president must be neutral and impartial, and must not act to further their own interests. In Dubai over the next two weeks probably the single most contentious issue on the agenda will be the future of fossil fuels.

A distinctive feature of this year’s COP will be the “global stocktake.” This is one of the key processes set out in the landmark Paris climate agreement of 2015. Every five years, the agreement says, countries must take stock of their progress, or otherwise, over the last five, and set out global ambitions for the future. In this way the stocktake should inform the Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, countries must make two years later, in which they must each set out new and stronger emissions reduction targets. The next round of NDCs is due in 2025.

Over the past year the global stocktake negotiations have been fraught. Climate scientists have made it very clear that collectively the world is not remotely on track to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5°C. In its annual report on the emissions gap, the UN Environment Programme observes that the difference between the emissions trajectory the world needs to be on for 1.5°C and the one it actually is on has widened rather than narrowed.

Last year it looked as if countries’ plans would take the world to around 2.6°C of warming; today it is probably 2.9°C. At that level much of the world’s agricultural output and water supplies will be at serious risk of failing, the incidence of extreme weather events regularly catastrophic, and large numbers of species would be wiped out. Countries’ current plans for emissions in 2030, UNEP says, need to be cut by another 42 per cent to be on a 1.5°C-compatible pathway.

The stocktake negotiators have focused on the future rather than dwelling on past and present failures. Everyone agrees there should be more investment in renewable energy: COP28 is likely to set a new goal of tripling global renewables capacity by 2030. That will not be easy: solar and wind power are being installed around the world at record rates, but market forecasts currently expect capacity only to double by then.

The COP will also agree on a doubling in the rate of energy efficiency improvements. Energy efficiency has long been the cheapest way of cutting emissions — the International Energy Agency describes it as the “first fuel” — but has always been something of the Cinderella of energy policy, requiring regulatory tightening in many different sectors. Doubling the rate of global improvement will require accelerated innovation in heat pumps, vehicles, consumer goods and industrial processes.

COP28 may well also reach an agreement on methane. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, more powerful as a cause of warming than carbon dioxide. It is produced by livestock, by waste disposal and as a by-product of fossil fuel production. Here the UAE is playing up its status as an oil giant. Only a country like his, says Al Jaber, can bring the global oil and gas sector to the COP table. Expect a historic announcement of a new tough methane target for 2030, and the major oil and gas companies — traditional opponents of climate policy, and enemies of the climate movement — pledging their support.

As ever, though, it won’t be the things that everyone can agree on, however important, that will dominate negotiations. The major battle this year will be over what the COP says about the future of the fossil fuel industry itself.

The small island states and other nations most vulnerable to climate impacts are insisting on the science. The goal of 1.5°C means reducing carbon emissions to net zero by sometime before 2050. That means ending fossil fuel use more or less entirely. (“Net” zero allows some residual emissions, but only if they are captured and stored, either by increased vegetation or geologically.) So COP28 should agree that fossil fuels must be phased out.

The European Union, with its strong pro-climate-action lobby, is sympathetic. But for China, India, the United States and Saudi Arabia it is a step much too far. They want the text to say merely that fossil fuels should be “phased down,” not out. They also want this to cover only “unabated” fossil fuels: if coal, oil and gas plants are fitted with carbon capture and storage technology to capture the emissions and bury them underground, then they should be exempt from the phase-down.

With the two groups of countries so far apart, agreeing on the text will be very difficult. So the question being asked is: will the UAE be a neutral and impartial chair of the negotiations on this crucial issue? Many observers think it is hard to believe so. Al Jaber is only COP president for a year; he will be chief executive of ADNOC for much longer. The interests of the UAE are not exactly a secret. So expect another bruising conclusion to the conference, we are told, with NGOs crying foul, and the negotiations running acrimoniously into extra time, as they so often do (last year by nearly two whole days).

But there’s another possibility. Al Jaber is a deal-maker. That’s what he does in the day job, and what he’s been doing at those meetings over the last year. He wants to show that this is what you get with a serious player from a serious oil state. So he’ll find some clever new wording to bridge the gap between “phasing out” and “phasing down,” acknowledging that the use of fossil fuels will no doubt come to an end, eventually, but in the meantime they are needed to help the world’s poor escape their poverty. And then he’ll bring the gavel down on a successful COP before, not after, the scheduled end.

In fact, he’s shown what he can do already. The first day of a COP normally manages to do no more than agree on the agenda — and that often takes hours of wrangling in itself. But the first day of COP28 on Wednesday ended with an unprecedented agreement on one of the most significant issues of the entire two weeks.

Developing countries have been arguing for years for a fund to compensate them for the “loss and damage” climate change is now inflicting on their economies. Last year they won the fund — but it had no money in it, and everyone expected the negotiations about how it was to be organised to last several more years. Yesterday, though, the UAE pulled a remarkable rabbit out of the conference hat. Not just an agreement on the arrangements for the fund, but US$440 million of financial pledges to it — including US$100 million from the UAE itself.

Curmudgeons noted that these sums are not nearly enough — the economic costs of loss and damage already run into the billions, and with the UAE’s oil revenues having soared last year to almost US$100 billion a group of former world leaders led by Gordon Brown urged it only this week to provide US$3 billion for climate change. In comparison, US$100 million is small beer.

But Al Jaber didn’t look too worried at the press conference closing the day. He had pulled off a stunning coup, developed and developing nations alike expressed themselves delighted, and the UAE was in its rightful place. •

The post Big deal in Dubai appeared first on Inside Story.

Curtin’s famous statement came in late December — and I will quote it because it is meet and right so to do. The prime minister said: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with Britain.”

With those carefully chosen words — “inhibitions,” “pangs” and “kinship” — Curtin acknowledged that this geopolitical pivot carried an emotional cost for Australians. The population was still overwhelmingly of British descent and “home” was Britain, even for many of those born here. Curtin’s words therefore implied a national coming of age, a relinquishment of childhood dependence, a step into maturity. A British dominion was asserting an independent foreign policy. Australia, facing peril, was insisting on a direct, unmediated relationship with the United States of America.

When we think of Curtin, it is so often this declaration that comes to mind for it represents a cool Australian assessment of geopolitical realities at a moment of existential threat for the nation. My predecessors as lecturers in this series have often revisited this declaration too. They have analysed the geopolitical world of Curtin and its transformation through the decades that followed: superpower rivalry and the cold war, the reconstruction of postwar society, the strengthening American alliance, the rise of China, empire and decolonisation, the reckoning with a settler nation’s colonial past, Australia’s defence and security in a globalised world. These are all extrapolations of the world Curtin knew; he either played a part in bringing them about or might reasonably have foreseen them. His words echo down the years with enduring meaning.

But there is a dimension of the future that he could not possibly see or even imagine. Indeed, it has blindsided us all. That is my subject tonight.

When John Curtin died in office in 1945, his legendary status was confirmed and his words gained even more weight. The year of his death became another turning point: the loss of a revered prime minister, the end of the second world war, a new era of social reconstruction in which Curtin had invested, the beginning of a long economic boom such as Australia had not known since the 1880s, and the unleashing of the atomic bomb.

The atomic era was born eleven days after Curtin’s death. On 16 July, the world’s first nuclear device was exploded at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Stratigraphers identify geological eras by residues in rocks, and 1945 is marked in sediment by the abrupt global geological signature of nuclear fallout.

Curtin was acutely conscious of Australia’s place in the world. “World-mindedness” was a common phrase in the 1940s, expressing an aspiration for peace and understanding after decades of war. Curtin also thought globally, for he was a citizen of an empire that spanned the Earth, a pacifist and a politician keenly aware of the international labour movement. He was conscious that a land at the bottom of the globe could not isolate itself from an increasingly connected world. He revived and extended immigration and joined international negotiations leading to global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His colleague, Dr Evatt, would later serve as president of the United Nations General Assembly.

So there was world-mindedness and there were global social and political perspectives, but did Curtin ever think in terms of the planet, a living, breathing, vulnerable Earth? Probably not. This requires environmental thinking in deep time and deep space, a consciousness that has evolved in our own lifetimes. It’s a perspective and an understanding that Curtin and his contemporary leaders could not have foreseen or even imagined.

John Edwards writes beautifully in the first volume of his book, John Curtin’s War (2007), of Curtin’s sense of time and space. Edwards reconstructs Curtin’s regular commute across the Nullarbor — his crossing of the vast treeless plain by train from Perth to Canberra, a journey that took him five nights and four days on six different trains with five changes of gauge. He describes Curtin and his fellow passengers smelling “the faint dry fragrance” of saltbush and mallee scrub “as it had been for millions of years.” When stretching their legs during the stops, they walked the bed of an ancient sea and “crunched fossils of sea creatures underfoot.” Edwards reminds us that “In its entire length the Trans-Australian track did not cross a single permanent stream of water.”

What a path to the parliament! There were 500 kilometres of “precisely straight track” surrounded by desert where Curtin “could see the circle of the plain around him from horizon to horizon.” At night through the right-hand windows he could pick out the points of the Southern Cross. He preferred not to fly, and anyway, the air services were neither frequent nor comfortable. But later during wartime, when he was forced to fly the Atlantic, Curtin told his secretary that he placed his hopes of making the crossing in the skill of the pilot, the rotation of Earth, and God Almighty. That is, human ingenuity, the steady old reliable planet, and God.

It is that view of the steady old reliable planet, the unchanging Earth, that has been disrupted in our lifetimes. How has our understanding of the world — the planet — changed since John Curtin’s death?

In the first decades of the twenty-first century we are living in “uncanny times,” weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them. The modern history of the Western world — the Renaissance, the expansion of European peoples across the globe, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dawning of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution — these are chiefly stories of the separation of culture from nature; indeed, they are stories of the mastery of culture over nature. Now in our own time we find nature and culture collapsing into one another all around us. No wonder it feels uncanny.

The Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). For him, the word “uncanny” captures our experience of what he calls “the urgent proximity of non-human presences.” He’s referring to other creatures, insects, animals, plants, biota, the very elements themselves — water, earth, air, fire — and our renewed and long-forgotten sense of dependence upon them.

The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the Great Derangement,” a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, when we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: that we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. To understand the implications of the present, we have to learn to think in deep time.

It’s very hard for us humans to comprehend or even imagine deep time. If you think of Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, that is, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand, then one stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases all of human history. The discussion of deep time is full of these sorts of metaphors — human history as the last inch of the cosmic mile, the last few seconds before midnight, the skin of paint atop the Eiffel Tower. Metaphor is possibly the only level on which we can comprehend such immensities of time.

In the last couple of decades we have developed three powerful historical metaphors for making sense of the ecological crisis we inhabit. One is that we live in the Sixth Extinction. Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century. Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. This is an extinction rate a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature.

There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth, five of them sudden shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting — and causing — the Sixth Extinction? In 2014 the American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an influential book called The Sixth Extinction, and she subtitled it An Unnatural History. It is unnatural because the Sixth Extinction involves, to some extent, our consciousness and intent.

Another metaphor for the extraordinary character of our times is the idea of the Anthropocene. This is the insight that we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of Earth and have now left behind the 12,000 years of the relatively stable epoch known as the Holocene, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch of the Anthropocene recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy. It places humans on a par with variations in Earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes, asteroid strikes and other geophysical forces.

There is debate about exactly when the Anthropocene began, but one definition is that we were first jolted into the new epoch by the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, when we began digging up and burning fossil fuels. That brilliant and profligate exploitation of a finite, buried resource underpinned population growth and economic expansion — and it also unleashed carbon on a massive and accelerating scale and began changing the atmosphere of the planet.

Another date given for the beginning of the Anthropocene is around 1945, the year of Curtin’s death. It was, as we’ve seen, the beginning of the atomic era. It also initiated an exponential shift in the impact of humans on the planet. In the mid twentieth century, the human enterprise exploded dramatically in population and energy use and rapidly began to outstrip its planetary support systems. World population, water use, tropical forest loss, ocean acidification, species extinction, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, fertiliser consumption and so on, all soared after 1950. This turning point is known as the Great Acceleration.

So I’ve talked about the Sixth Extinction and the Anthropocene. And there is a third potent metaphor for the moment we inhabit. It concerns the history and future of fire. It suggests that we are entering not just the Anthropocene but also a fire age that historian Stephen Pyne has called the Pyrocene. The planet is heating due to human greenhouse gas emissions and it is heating so quickly that it threatens to tip Earth into an escalating cycle of fire. In other words, we are entering an extended fire age that is comparable to past ice ages.

Let’s take a moment to think about those ice ages.

Some 2.6 million years ago, Earth entered a period of rhythmical ice ages — a geological epoch called the Pleistocene — and during this epoch average global temperatures dropped 6–10°C and ice sheets at the poles extended dramatically across Eurasia and North America. These repeated glaciations were harsh and demanded innovation and versatility; they were a selective pressure on evolution and promoted the emergence of humanity on Earth. Throughout the Pleistocene, the ice ages were punctuated by brief warmer periods known as interglacials, which generally lasted about 10,000 years.

We are living in an interglacial right now; geologists have separated it off from the Pleistocene and called it the Holocene, which means “recent.” But it is really part of the same rhythmic pattern that has prevailed since we evolved. We humans are creatures of the ice. The Pyrocene — the fire age — is something we’ve never seen before. The Pyrocene threatens to knock Earth out of the steady planetary rhythm that has seen the birth of our own species.

How do we know about these ancient rhythmic ice ages? By reading the rocks, of course, but now also by studying the ice itself. I’m fortunate to have visited both of Earth’s ice caps, and the most awesome one is definitely ours, the southern one, Antarctica. I twice voyaged south with the Australian Antarctic Division, on the second occasion at the invitation of the Australian government to mark the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14. After a long wait for a break in the weather, we held a ceremony on the ice at the historic huts, the place Mawson called “the home of the blizzard.” Through the years of Curtin’s political life, Antarctica was becoming a primary site for Australia’s world-mindedness, and in 1959 our nation was one of the original twelve signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, which was effectively the first disarmament treaty of the nuclear age.

Antarctica is where nine-tenths of the world’s land ice resides. Seventy per cent of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in that ice cap. That’s a discovery humans made in my lifetime. Antarctica is not only the coldest and windiest continent; it is also paradoxically the driest — and it is the highest. It has the highest average height of any continent because it is a great dome of ice four or five kilometres thick that has built up over millions of years. In the 1950s we discovered that the driest of all continents is actually a vast elevated plateau of frozen water. The implications of that discovery are immense: it means that world sea levels are principally controlled by the state of the Antarctic ice sheet. If the southern ice cap melted, oceans would rise by more than sixty metres.

As we enter the Pyrocene, Antarctica is vulnerable and fragile, more brittle than we expected. This year the expanse of winter sea ice around Antarctica diminished dramatically below its average by the size of Western Australia. The continent of ice is a precious glistening jewel that holds the key to our future and to our past. It’s a giant white fossil, a luminous relic, a clue to lost ages: it enables us to travel through time to the Pleistocene Earth. The ice is an amazing archive. Embedded in an ice cap are tiny air bubbles from hundreds of thousands of years ago. When you drill into an ice cap kilometres thick, you can extract a core that is layered year by year, a precious archive of deep time. I think of ice cores as the holy scripts, the sacred scrolls of our age.

The deepest Antarctic cores currently retrieve 800,000 years of climate history. Right now, the search is on for the first million-year ice core, and Australia is involved in the quest.

In the 1990s, a long 400,000-year Antarctic ice core was extracted from the inland ice sheet. It produced a rhythmic, sawtooth graph of past ice ages, revealing the heartbeat of the planet. The brief peaks on the graph represented warmer interglacials; the extended troughs were the cold ice ages. The ice core charted four full cycles of glacial and interglacial periods and established that the carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in the atmosphere moved in lockstep with the ice sheets and the temperature. It’s the barometer of the planet’s health — a graph of its nervous system — through hundreds of thousands of years.

Ice cores also revealed that present-day levels of greenhouse gases are unprecedented during the past 800,000 years. The level of carbon dioxide in the historical air bubbles has leapt since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since 1950. So, before Antarctica was even seen by humans, it was recording our impact. And it was this glimpse of the deep past as revealed in the archive of ice that shocked people into a real sense of urgency about the climate crisis.

These three metaphors — the Sixth Extinction, the Anthropocene and the Pyrocene — are historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture in our own time. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. It may even be too late to hang onto the Pleistocene, the long epoch that birthed our species. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into an uncertain future; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller. We have to use our awesome power wisely.

The metaphors of deep time that we’ve been considering have some visual counterparts in deep space that have also emerged in the last half-century. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, out and across the void and into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped:

Bill Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!

Frank Borman: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and Earthrise became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the twentieth century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Frank Borman said, “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” And Bill Anders declared, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

A few years later, in 1972, a photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission and known as The Blue Marble became one of the most reproduced pictures in the world, showing Earth as a luminous breathing garden in the dark void. Earthrise and The Blue Marble had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities.

Within a few years, the American scientists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. During the years of the Moon missions, British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth, revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and enormously influential report The Limits to Growth, which sold more than thirteen million copies and went into more than thirty translations. Authors Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Two decades later, on Valentine’s Day 1990, the Voyager spacecraft was tracking beyond Saturn, six billion kilometres away, when it unexpectedly glanced over its shoulder. Again, Voyager was not programmed to look behind as it journeyed into the unknown, but scientists decided to take a risk and commanded the spacecraft to look back. And so we have a picture of Earth as a mere speck of dust in space, an image that astronomer Carl Sagan called Pale Blue Dot. “Look again at that dot,” wrote Sagan. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

These images from outer space of the unity, finiteness and loneliness of Earth helped escalate planetary thinking. From a colossal integration of Earth systems data came a keen understanding of planetary boundaries — thresholds in planetary ecology — and the extent to which the human enterprise is threatening or exceeding them. Three identified thresholds have already been crossed: changes in climate, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle. At least we now understand our predicament even if we are perilously slow to act. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon now endanger our civilisation.

Now let’s bring this story back home to our place on this Earth. Australia is uniquely exposed to the grim, rough edges of these new world narratives. Shockingly, we are leading the world into the Sixth Extinction. Modern Australian history is like a giant experiment in ecological crisis and management. Ecologists working in Australia today often feel like they are ambulance drivers arriving at the scene of an accident. The southwest of Western Australia, for example, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and it is experiencing an exceptional loss of habitat. It is the site of what literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has called a “radical disappearance,” “an extinction event on a grand scale.”

And we inhabit the continent of fire, the driest inhabited continent, a land of drought and flooding rains that is held in the grip of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which means that Australia is on the frontline of the Pyrocene. Southwest Western Australia, with its sudden 30 per cent decline in rainfall since the 1970s, is one of the first places to experience the climatic shift expected with global warming. The Black Summer fires — when more than twenty-four million hectares of Australia’s southern and eastern forests burnt, including a million hectares of the Great Western Woodlands — were a symptom of our condition and became a planetary event. Smoke from those fires encircled the globe.

Furthermore, our modern history is a by-product of the Anthropocene. The British invasion of Australia was part of the age of empire and took place as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in England. Thus ancient Australia’s transformation into a colony coincided with the start of the fossil fuel era. The Endeavour was a repurposed coal ship. The new nation became highly dependent on fossil fuels, especially on coal, and in recent decades it drew world attention by persisting with the political denial of climate change. Modern Australia, we have to remember, was built on denial: the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty and cultural sophistication, the denial of frontier violence and warfare. At the recent referendum about the Voice, we witnessed a further national expression of denial.

But we have many opportunities here too. Our robust democracy, our active citizenship, our capacity for creativity and innovation, our impressive community leaders (many of them young, most of them women), our unique and inspiring environment, our destiny as a renewable energy superpower. And the continent’s deep Indigenous human history. In just a generation we have turned upside down the way we understand the history of Australia.

When I was in primary school, the history of this country was told as a footnote to the story of the British empire. In my classroom, the book we used was A Short History of Australia, written in 1916 by Professor Ernest Scott. It began with what he declared was “a blank space on the map” and it ended with “a new name on the map” — that of Anzac. So the story of Australia climaxed with a national sacrifice on a beach on the other side of the world. Australia at that time was seen as a new, transplanted society with a short and derivative history, a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. Aboriginal peoples, depicted as non-literate, non-agricultural, non-urban and non-national, could have no “history” and did not constitute a “civilisation” — thus they could find no place in the national polity or the national story or even as citizens of the Commonwealth.

But in the half-century that followed, Australians realised that the New World they thought they’d discovered was actually the Old, and that the true “nomads” were themselves, the colonisers who had come in ships. From the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: that Australia’s human history went back eons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age, earlier than Europe’s. The timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just thirty years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

We now recognise the first Australians as the most adventurous of all humans, pioneer sea-voyagers who, over 60,000 years ago, saw the beckoning, burning continent of eucalypts glowing over the horizon of the ocean. The island continent girt by sea was transformed into a complex jigsaw of beloved and inhabited Aboriginal Countries and ecologies. Aboriginal societies were — and are — diverse, innovative and adaptive; over 300 languages flourished here. Now our histories of Australia strive, as the Uluru Statement puts it, to let “this ancient sovereignty… shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.” This challenge is not going away, no matter how many toddler tantrums the nation has. Reckoning with our colonial history is a daily responsibility of living on this continent.

Therefore we can now see more clearly that, on Australian beaches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm — and now those extremes are intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience. The history of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia takes humans back, if not into the ice, then certainly into the ice age, into the depths of the last glacial maximum of 20,000 years ago and beyond, into and through periods of average temperature change of 5°C and more, such as those we might now face.

When Europeans and North Americans look for cultural beginnings, they are often prompted to tell you that humans and their civilisations are products of the Holocene and that we are all children of this recent spring of cultural creativity over the last 10,000 years. By contrast, an Australian history of the world takes us back to humanity’s first deep sea navigators and to the experience of people surviving cold ice-age droughts even in the central Australian deserts. It brings us visions of people living along fast-retreating coastlines as they cope with the dramatic rising of the seas.

Human civilisation here was sustained in the face of massive climate change. This is a story that modern Australians have only just discovered, and now perhaps it offers a parable for the world. The continent of fire will lead the world into the new age of fire. But it also carries human wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. We can now see that the modern Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that Australia is facing a new existential threat, quite different from that which Curtin addressed in 1941. We are embroiled in a climate emergency and biodiversity crisis that threaten to destroy our security and way of life.

It’s not just a threat; it’s actually going to happen unless we act swiftly and decisively. It is a planetary event, but Australia and its region are especially vulnerable to its effects. National security assessments and reports from Australian defence chiefs have acknowledged our predicament, identifying the climate crisis as “this clear and present danger,” “the greatest threat to the security and future of Australians” and “the Hundred Year War” for which we are seriously unprepared. To meet the challenge, we will need to recognise that we do indeed face a crisis, an emergency, and that we will be required to mobilise with a grave sense of urgency as if in a war.

In that December 1941 address to the people, Curtin sought to wean Australians off a subconscious cultural reflex to trust to luck, isolation and Britain. “I demand,” he said, “that Australians everywhere realise that Australia is now inside the firing lines.” He spoke of the need to shake citizens out of false assumptions of security; he talked of awakening “the somewhat lackadaisical Australian mind” and of the “reshaping, in fact revolutionising, of the Australian way of life until a war footing is attained quickly, efficiently and without question.” “We can and we will,” he promised.

What would a brave but realistic geopolitical pivot look like in our own time? What would constitute a Curtinesque act of visionary leadership now?

I think it would entail a recognition that, because of our extreme ecological and economic vulnerability in this escalating crisis, Australia needs to lead the world into the energy transition. Not to drag its feet, not to wait for other nations, but actually to demonstrate the path to zero emissions. To provide global direction and inspiration. And to do so out of intelligent national self-interest as well as out of “world-mindedness.”

Australia needs to grasp its opportunity as a renewable energy superpower. It needs to wean itself swiftly off its fossil fuel dependency, not cling to old, polluting forms of power and vested interests. A Western Australian like John Curtin would have to take on that challenge in the mining state, reminding constituents of the long-term significance of minerals in the renewable future. Of course it will be difficult and fraught. But that is what leadership is about: stepping wisely into the future that is coming for you.

Yes, it will be difficult but it is also simple. The physics of the planet are simple and we know what we have to do and what will happen if we don’t. The enemies of action are either ignorant and short-sighted or selfish and greedy. The pathway to electrification has been laid down clearly. The technologies are there or fast developing, as is the business momentum.

But the free market can’t move fast enough and government must lead. Even funding for the transition is readily available in the form of massive government fossil fuel subsidies that can be diverted, and windfall profits to the oil and gas industry that demand to be taxed. The economic, social and environmental benefits to the nation will be immense. I believe that the people are ahead of government on this and that they will welcome bold leadership. To paraphrase John Curtin, we should step into that future now, quite clearly, without any inhibitions of any kind, and free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with coal, oil, gas, Murdoch and Rinehart. •

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It is the eighth annual China Auto Forum, in April 2019, and a mere three months after the US electric car company Tesla began constructing a factory in Shanghai. The focus is on the transformation of an industry that is turning towards electrification. The executives are aware that what Wan says here can change the fortunes of their companies.

Many have tried to create a mass market for electric vehicles over the past 140 years, but all have failed. The widely held belief is that if anyone can succeed, it will be Elon Musk, the eccentric, ambitious and obscenely wealthy CEO of Tesla. But when the history of electric vehicles is written, it might be Wan Gang who will stand tallest.

The Musk–Tesla story is lore. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in Silicon Valley, Tesla struggled to get off the ground. Elon Musk, who had become wealthy on the back of startups like PayPal, began investing in the company in 2004 and took an active role in product design. After Eberhard was ousted following internal conflicts, Musk took over as CEO in 2008 just after the company began selling its first model, the Roadster.

Tesla sold about 2500 units of the electric sports car, but Musk’s stated goal was to make a mass-market electric vehicle. With every iteration, the car models got cheaper and sales grew — turning Tesla into the world’s most recognisable electric car brand and the world’s most valuable car maker. As of 2022, the company was selling more than 1 million cars annually. Still, the cheapest Model 3 — one that Musk promised would be the affordable car — costs well above US$35,000.

Wan Gang’s story is mostly unknown. His rise in the electric vehicle world started at about the same time as Musk’s. The car engineer by training was appointed China’s minister of science and technology in 2007. In the country’s top-down economic system, Wan’s policies incentivised the creation of hundreds of Chinese companies tied to making electric vehicles. The country now sells more than six million electric vehicles each year. That includes not just expensive cars but the complete range, with the cheapest selling for less than US$10,000.

Wan’s policies have also created some of the world’s largest and most valuable companies selling electric vehicles and lithium ion batteries. And the choices he has influenced haven’t only affected already established Chinese car companies; all big car manufacturers in the world for whom the largest market remains China have been affected.

While Musk fought Wall Street’s scepticism and benefited from waves of government subsidies to keep Tesla afloat through turbulent periods, Wan has shown how policy done right can drive technological disruption not just in China but worldwide. Both men are at the forefront of the global project to propel the world from the current economic age into the next — yet it is the lesser known of the two who has had the bigger impact.

In the mid 1960s teenager Wan found himself in the middle of a violent disruption of Chinese society. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution pitted rich against poor and urban elites against rural commoners. The Red Guard, a paramilitary force controlled by Mao, subjected those in the higher classes of society, such as Wan’s family, to humiliation, beatings and persecution. The Communist Party shuttered universities and sent students to villages for “re-education.” That’s how Wan, a city kid from Shanghai, found himself in Dongguo, a village in Jilin province near the North Korean border, working with other city teenagers to build basic infrastructure.

His work ethic caught the attention of local party members, and in 1974 he was unanimously elected as a team leader. Worried that because his parents were counter-revolutionaries he shouldn’t have been promoted, Wan spoke to the head of the local party branch. “Keep at it,” he recalled being told. “One day your parents will be heroes again.”

After Mao’s death, in 1976, universities were reopened and Wan studied physics at Northeast Forestry University in Harbin and then mechanical engineering at Tongji University in Shanghai, one of China’s most prestigious educational institutions. He excelled there and won a scholarship from the World Bank to pursue a PhD in Germany. For his doctorate at the Clausthal University of Technology he studied ways to reduce the noise made by internal combustion engines — the type of engine that powers all fossil fuel vehicles in the world.

In hindsight, his decision to study cutting-edge automotive engineering in Germany was perfectly timed. Following the oil crises of the 1970s, the global car industry was undergoing a period of major change. The German car industry wanted to stay ahead of growing competition from the United States and Japan, and was crying out for engineers like Wan.

He received job offers from six car companies, from Volkswagen to Mercedes. In 1991 he chose to join Audi, the smallest of the German majors at the time, reasoning that it presented him with the greatest opportunity to rise through the ranks.

Wan began in Audi’s car development division, helping to solve technical issues in design and manufacturing. After five years he realised that in order to climb the corporate ladder at Audi, engineers had to show success in more than one department. He duly moved to production, where he focused on car paint and was soon made head of a division with more than 2000 employees.

To effectively manage them all, he deployed techniques he had learned during his years in Dongguo. On an employee’s birthday, for example, he would carry two bottles of beer to the workshop floor and spend time getting to know them. The effort paid off, and Audi eventually promoted him to its central planning division, giving him oversight of a manufacturing process that produced a car every sixty seconds.

Wan also kept a keen eye on his home country. Deng Xiaoping, who took over as the country’s leader after Mao’s death in 1976, called the Cultural Revolution a “grave blunder.” In the late 1980s he set about reforming China’s economy, including the country’s almost non-existent car industry. He welcomed foreign companies — for example Germany’s Volkswagen and France’s Peugeot and Citroën — to build factories in joint ventures with domestic players. If foreign companies were worried that their Chinese partners would steal their technology, it seemed like a cost worth paying for access to the country’s vast untapped market.

By the 1990s the Audi brand had become a favourite of China’s elite; government officials were often seen being chauffeured around in black Audi saloons. As one of the car maker’s top Chinese-born executives, Wan led many company visits to China, at a time when the country’s car industry was expanding.

On these visits he noticed how the industry’s rapid growth was increasing air pollution and exacerbating China’s reliance on oil imports. If his home country was to go the way of its Western counterparts, as its leaders hoped, then these problems would become intractable. At the beginning of the twenty-first century China was consuming one barrel of oil per person per year, whereas in Germany the figure was twelve and in the United States it was twenty.

Wan wanted his fellow Chinese to have the quality of life he enjoyed as an immigrant in Germany, but given China’s large population, he realised that this might not be possible. It was quite likely that the country couldn’t afford the bill from importing all the oil, even if that much oil could be extracted somewhere, which itself wasn’t guaranteed. Fossil fuels are finite. The way out was to develop cars that could be powered by something other than oil.

In 2000 Wan got a chance to share his ideas with Chinese government leaders. Zhu Lilan, the country’s science minister at the time, visited Audi’s headquarters and factory in Ingolstadt, Germany. During the trip — designed to showcase what state-of-the-art car makers look like — he proposed to her that, rather than continuing to tinker with the internal combustion engine, China could leapfrog the West by using a completely different technology.

At the time, the United States produced some fifteen million cars each year while China produced only 700,000. But international car companies like BMW, General Motors and Toyota were starting to work on electric cars — powered by batteries or hydrogen — that produced no particulate pollution and reduced the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. And Wan was convinced this form of transport would be the future of the passenger car. If China were to become a leader in electric cars within the next decade or two, Wan told Zhu, the country could become the electric car hub of the world.

Zhu invited Wan to come back to China and make his case to the State Council, the country’s highest ruling body. Wan knew that if he succeeded then he could alter China’s history. He found support from Li Lanqing, then vice-premier of China, who in 1952 had started China’s first major homegrown car maker, First Automobile Works. Chinese cities were starting to struggle with the problem of smog. But more importantly, if Wan was right, China could become a technology leader and avoid the humiliation of having to rely on Western countries to bring modernity to its people.

A few months later Wan moved back to China. Under the auspices of Tongji University, which gave him a professorship, he began working as the lead scientist on a secret government program for advanced vehicle technologies. Along the way he played a key role in convincing important members of the State Council to set up policies that would encourage the development of alternative fuel transport, and in 2009 he launched a new- energy vehicle program that would reshape China’s car industry.

Wan’s political acumen was essential. “The automobile’s importance to growth, trade, innovation, military technology, and the environment is, for practical purposes, immeasurable. The industry is a point of national pride,” wrote Levi Tillemann in The Great Race in 2015. “Since the time of Henry Ford, no automobile industry in the world has ever become internationally competitive without that kind of government intervention.”

In the 1930s the US government paid for the construction of more than 100,000 miles of roads under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. It later set up research programs to push for more fuel-efficient engines and established improved safety regulations. In the same decade the Japanese government provided cheap loans to domestic car makers, funded technology programs and undermined US players through tariffs to protect domestic companies. In other words, China’s industrial policy approach, which would rely on subsidies and regulations, was a tried-and-tested method to boost the car industry.

Wan’s plans were bigger still. The car makers he would unleash wouldn’t just serve Chinese customers but would make the sorts of cars that would dominate the future of the car industry — by throwing away internal combustion engines and placing all the country’s bets on zero-emissions transportation.

Wan’s appointment as China’s minister of science and technology came one year before China was due to hold the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. An image-conscious Communist Party spared no expense to show off what it was capable of. This would be the first “green” Olympics, the party declared, as it announced the closure of coal-fired power stations and factories for weeks, returning blue skies to the smog-choked capital. It also promised to plant enough trees to offset the emissions caused by athletes’ air travel.

Wan had been on a deadline ever since being put in charge of China’s advanced vehicle program back in 2000: to produce electric buses and cars in time for the 2008 Olympics. It wasn’t the first time electric vehicles had been launched at an Olympics. BMW had produced two prototype lead-acid battery-powered electric cars for the 1972 games in Munich. But China’s plan was far more ambitious: to have 1000 electric buses and cars ready for the Beijing games.

By 2007 Wan Gang had many research institutes and industrial partners, including state-owned car makers BAIC, SAIC, Dongfeng and Chery, working on the project. But China still hadn’t mastered the technologies required to make effective electric vehicles: efficient motors powered by advanced batteries and controlled by sophisticated software. Though it had produced and even successfully tested prototypes, China did not possess the manufacturing capability to make 1000 such vehicles. Rather than admit defeat, the government scaled back its ambitions; a BAIC subsidiary would produce fifty electric buses and Chery would make fifty hybrid electric cars.

Chery had to hire Ricardo, a British engineering consultancy, to help meet the deadline, according to Levi Tillemann’s research. After many long hours the new team had developed a system, which could be bolted on to the Chery A5, a compact car, that allowed it to automatically switch between a petrol-powered engine and an electric motor.

But work on the computer algorithms that enabled the switching had begun late in the process. That meant Chery had to specifically train drivers for the hybrids who could manually switch between electric and internal combustion engine modes. The BAIC buses seemed to work well but were retired within three years because their batteries quickly degraded.

None of this came out during the Olympics, and the spectacle had the world enthralled. “Blockbuster,” wrote the New York Times. “Astonishing,” wrote the Guardian. “The world may never witness a ceremony of the magnitude and ingenuity,” said the Sydney Morning Herald.

After the Olympians went home, the industries restarted and restrictions on car use were lifted. Unsurprisingly, smog returned to Beijing. Within months, in 2009, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest market for cars, selling thirteen million gas-guzzlers. That meant even more particulate pollution — tiny particles capable of entering the human bloodstream and leading to breathing problems. The pollution can cause cancer or stroke, and the higher the number of particles belched out, the greater the harm caused.

The Chinese leadership could see the problem from the windows of its Beijing offices. That is why, even though China’s electric vehicle industry was clearly lagging, the government’s support for Wan’s ideas to electrify transport did not wane.

Despite the disappointing delivery of electric vehicles at the Beijing Olympics, Wan was able to get approval for a bigger rollout of new-energy vehicles with a hefty subsidy for each new car purchased. The bet was technology neutral, encouraging car makers to make battery-powered cars, plug-in hybrids (large battery and a combustion engine), and fuel-cell cars (consuming hydrogen fuel to produce only water as exhaust).

The program aimed to sell 1000 new-energy vehicles in each of the ten largest Chinese cities by 2012, and the government was prepared to provide as much as US$10,000 per car in direct subsidies to incentivise people to buy them. It would also give indirect subsidies to car companies and battery makers in the form of tax cuts and cheap land for factories. The government bill for all that ran into the billions of dollars.

With continued support, the plan eventually began to work. BYD, a Shenzhen-based battery company, launched the plug-in hybrid F3DM — it looked like a carbon copy of the Toyota Corolla — months after the 2008 Olympics. Thanks to the subsidies, there were 10,000 of them on China’s roads by 2011.

Even as electric vehicles began appearing on the streets of Chinese cities, the number of fossil fuel cars sold in China continued to increase. In 2012 the country sold fifteen million passenger cars. Predictably, pollution worsened, and the figures were available for all to see with the government beginning to openly share air-quality data.

Publication of these figures was a surprise. It would almost certainly make the government look bad. But it was a calculated move. In 2014 China’s Premier Li Keqiang used the data as the basis for a declaration of war against pollution at the annual gathering of the National People’s Congress.

The government had provided a carrot, in the form of direct and indirect subsidies for electric vehicle makers. Now it had a stick. Wan Gang’s ministry was directed to work with local governments to introduce regulations to control the number of new cars on the roads each year. If city residents wanted a licence plate for a fossil fuel car, they needed to either enter a lottery or bid in an auction. Sometimes the amount they would have to pay for the new licence was higher than the cost of the car itself. For new-energy vehicles, it was first come, first served.

In 2011 the country sold about 1000 battery-powered cars and plug-in hybrids. By 2022 that number stood at nearly seven million and China had become the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles. In some years, the annual rate of growth was 300 per cent. As a fraction of all cars sold, electric vehicles now make up more than 25 per cent of total sales — a figure that is already higher than the government target of 20 per cent for 2025 sales. It’s clear the future of cars in China is electric, and the country’s push has accelerated the electrification of transport globally.

In 2018 Wang Zhigang succeeded Wan Gang as minister of science and technology. Since then Wan has remained a key player in the country’s electrification efforts, but his impact was clear even before he left his government job. Between 2009 and 2017 the Chinese government spent more than US$60 billion on electric cars, according to a study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. To put that figure in perspective, it is more than the market cap of General Motors, which produces some eight million cars each year.

Wan’s push also created industrial jewels such as BYD, the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles, which counts Warren Buffett as one of its biggest shareholders. It doesn’t just sell electric cars around the world; it also sells electric buses. It operates electric bus factories in California and Ontario that have the capacity to build more than 1000 buses each year.

In that sense, the money the Communist Party spent has already paid dividends. Today, China doesn’t just have factories that can produce electric cars; it has an entire supply chain, from the globally mined metals that are used to make batteries to the complex software installed in electric cars. Crucially, the country also has people who can run every level of the supply chain. Though most of this talent is domestic, many Chinese electric car firms are now wealthy enough to poach staff from international companies.

Other countries are trying to play catch-up. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — the largest injection of cash from a US government in climate-oriented investments — includes some US$100 billion worth of incentives for electrification of transport in the United States. Similarly, bullish plans for electric vehicles have been hatched in Europe, where strict emissions criteria have forced car makers to pivot to selling only electric vehicles within the next decade.

During Wan’s time as China’s minister of science and technology, all the countries in the world signed the 2015 Paris agreement. Electric cars are a crucial climate solution, and China has shown it is possible to scale the technology quickly. That’s led to many countries banning the sale of new fossil fuel cars by 2040 or earlier. Markets covering more than 20 per cent of car sales globally now have a mandate to fully phase out internal combustion engine vehicles.

What Wan Gang, with China’s backing, has shown is that succeeding in scaling a green technology requires supportive government policies, substantial public and private investment, and empowering entrepreneurs. Done right, it can also give a country a commanding technological lead over the rest of the world. For “climate capitalism” to work, all three are required to ensure technologies can scale within a few decades to get the world to zero emissions. •

This is an edited extract from Akshat Rathi’s Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, released in Australia this month.

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After this year’s startling rises in global temperatures and climate-related disasters, we may need to move the goalposts. Scientists at the European Union’s Copernicus Centre estimate that Earth’s average surface temperature was already 1.23°C higher by August 2023 than in pre-industrial times. At that rate, the temperature anomaly will top 1.5°C by 2035.

By chance, 2035 is also the next milestone year for which all countries must put forward new targets under the Paris agreement. And last week the International Energy Agency, the OECD’s energy counterpart, warned that current policy settings mean the world is on course for temperatures to be 2.4°C warmer by 2100 than in days of old.

The IEA is funded by Western governments, including Australia. It advocates a rapid “clean energy transition” to net zero emissions — but it knows that success ultimately depends on support from key developing countries, especially China and India. So its pitch is diplomatic; where activists see climate disaster ahead, the IEA sees a glass half full. Before the 2015 conference in Paris, the agency notes, its equivalent modelling found global warming would lift average temperatures in 2100 by 3.5 degrees.

The IEA’s latest report, Net Zero Roadmap: A Global Pathway to Keep the 1.5°C Goal in Reach, updates its 2021 Roadmap ahead of the coming COP28 ministerial meeting on climate in Dubai. Essentially, it’s a blueprint for ministers and their governments: if you’re serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, something like this is what you should be aiming for.

Its advice is pitched at countries in general: it offers no specific recommendations to any of them. But on one key question in the Australian debate — is it right to expand coal and gas fields for exports? — the IEA’s stance puts it clearly in line with the Greens and against the two major parties.

“There is no need for investment in new oil and gas projects,” the IEA’s executive director, Turkish energy economist Fatih Birol, declared at the report’s launch in Paris. A few countries would still use oil and gas in a world of net zero emissions, or NZE, but the IEA estimates global demand for fossil fuels will peak in this decade and then fall precipitously. That makes new investments a risky proposition.

If the IEA’s roadmap to NZE is followed, which is unlikely, global oil consumption will be just 7 per cent of today’s levels by 2050, gas consumption just 5 per cent, and consumption of coal just 2 per cent. But, as the report keeps pointing out, we’re not there yet.

Laura Cozzi, the IEA’s director of sustainability, technology and outlooks, pointed out that global emissions in the energy sector hit a new record level last year despite significant falls from 2019 levels in advanced economies. Certain unnamed countries, she noted, are still building new coal-fired power stations, expanding fossil fuel projects and heavily subsidising fossil fuels. She summed up the world’s prospects of keeping global warming to 1.5°C: “Not. Good.”

And yet the IEA’s key message is that it’s still possible. “While the global pathway to net zero by 2050 has narrowed, it is still achievable,” Dr Birol concluded. “It is too soon to give up on 1.5°C.”

Why? Partly, perhaps, because if the IEA gave up on that goal then governments would be free to do so as well. But partly, too, because the transition is going very well in some respects — and if governments and business bring the same focus to where they’re lagging, they could dramatically change the global trajectory.

First, the good news. In some key areas, the world is moving fast enough to meet the milestones set out in the 2021 roadmap. In two of them, it’s on track to do better than that. All this is bending the curve of our trajectory from fossil fuels to renewables, but governments have to maintain momentum by progressively tightening that curve.

For example: the decline in future global warming under current policies from the 3.5°C the IEA estimated in 2015 is not enough, but it is a dramatic start. It reflects significant shifts in government policies, business costs, technological development and investment decisions.

Back in 2015, the report implies, the IEA was expecting the global energy sector to be emitting about 42.5 gigatonnes (Gt, or billion tonnes) of greenhouse gases by 2030. Eight years later, it now expects the same sector to be emitting 35 Gt, a drop of 7.5 Gt, or 18 per cent, in just eight years.

Okay, numerous factors are involved in that. They include reduced economic growth as a result of Covid, technological breakthroughs in many areas, and the IEA’s past underestimation of the scale of the shift to solar. That aside, though, government, business and people have changed their priorities in some areas to abandon unsustainable ways of doing things in favour of sustainable ones.

The IEA report estimates that almost half of that 7.5 Gt difference in its new and old forecasts of the energy sector’s 2030 emissions has come from breakthroughs in just one sector: solar energy. It kept expecting solar energy’s dazzling growth to fizzle out, but got that very wrong; instead, solar’s price kept falling, demand kept rising, and month by month it has been replacing coal and gas power. The report estimates that by 2030, under existing policies, solar and wind will each generate roughly 15 per cent of the world’s electricity.

In Australia, solar already has that share of the market, wind slightly less. Our problem lies in creating the storage and transmission capacity to operate a system based on intermittent power sources. Australia is the world’s number one in per capita use of solar, but its transmission network was built for another age, and it has a charming tradition of allowing its farmers to be the world’s number one NIMBYs.

The IEA’s report unfortunately sheds no light on how we should fix these problems. But it does tell us that solar energy use is growing even faster than its 2021 report hoped for, and wind almost as fast, and their combined growth has provided 5 Gt of the 7.5 Gt saving in 2030 emissions.

Another 1 Gt comes from another renewable (or potentially renewable) source: electric vehicles. Here too, like everyone else, the IEA was caught by surprise. In 2015 it expected that electric cars would make up 2.5 per cent of the global car market by 2030. Now it predicts they will make up almost 40 per cent — or more if policies and research moves to bring them on faster, especially for trucks and commercial vehicles.

Some of their growth is due to policy shifts. Governments in the European Union and the United States stared down the car manufacturers, imposing tough emissions standards that forced them to switch strategy to focus on making electric cars. India and some other developing countries rolled out financial incentives and charging stations to replace the masses of tuk-tuks (two-/three-wheelers) on their roads. And, like the boom in solar, the boom in electric cars was made possible by China’s goal of creating new global industries it can dominate (though that has its own problems).

On some issues, some governments are getting serious about trying to stop global warming. And if they’re not, business is doing it for them. The IEA reports that in the last two years business investment in low-emissions energy grew by 40 per cent to US$1.8 trillion, more than Australia’s entire annual output. That’s just as well, because from 2022 to 2030, on the IEA’s roadmap, it will need to grow to US$4.5 trillion.

“We now estimate that global manufacturing capacities for solar PV and electric vehicle batteries would be sufficient to meet projected demand in 2030 in the updated NZE Scenario, if announced projects proceed,” the report concludes. “This progress reflects cost reductions for key clean energy technologies — solar PV [photovoltaic], wind, heat pumps and batteries — which fell by close to 80 per cent… between 2010 and 2022.”

The glass is half full. Unfortunately, it is also half empty.

The IEA’s roadmap to NZE has not changed much since 2021, but its presentation has. Reading it, you’re struck by the repeated entreaties for “fair and effective international cooperation” to help developing countries other than China to “unlock clean energy investment” so their economic growth will not require emissions growth.

You’re also struck by statistics showing that different countries are on very different paths. From 2019 to 2022, the IEA estimates, energy sectors in the European Union and the United States cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 4.5 per cent. But despite its world-leading roles in developing solar, wind and electric cars, China increased its emissions by 7.5 per cent, while emissions in other developing economies rose by 4.5 per cent.

You might think that’s because Westerners pump out far more emissions than China. Not so. The IEA report doesn’t analyse the issue, but its statistics tell us that the combined emissions from energy sectors in the European Union and the United States are 7.5 Gt a year. That’s just 20 per cent of the world total.

If the advanced economies meet their upgraded targets under the Paris agreement — a big if, as British politics shows — their emissions in 2030 would be 5.5 tonnes of greenhouse gases per head, whereas China emits 7.5 tonnes per head and growing. (Australia is an outlier, its total emissions being roughly 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases per head if you exclude the big discount it claims for stopping land clearing.) “The policies currently in place are inadequate to meet [countries’] stated national commitments, let alone longer-term net zero emissions pledges,” the IEA concludes.

Europe has led the way in reducing emissions, but the cynicism with which British prime minister Rishi Sunak has now reversed course to try to win re-election suggests that public support for that role is fragile. The Biden administration has made the United States another global leader, but if the Republicans win back the White House next year, then that too will go into reverse.

Xi Jinping doesn’t have to worry about re-election, and global net zero emissions would be unthinkable without China’s leadership in developing low-cost solar power technology and componentry for wind turbines, electric cars and heat pumps. But China under Xi has also built most of the world’s new coal-fired power stations; it now has 71 per cent of all coal-fired plants in the global pipeline.

However urgent the need for action, there is nothing inevitable about the world achieving net zero emissions within a generation. The European Union and rich countries on this side of the Pacific have written their net zero pledges into law, but few developing countries have followed. And, of course, the United States can no longer make bipartisan commitments.

But as I pointed out in reporting the IEA’s 2021 roadmap, the developing countries are the ones that matter most. They will be generating most of the world’s economic growth from here to 2050, and they will decide how to power it. Not only China and India, Indonesia and Brazil, but Africa too. In general, they’ve been cautious about what they commit to, and with good reason. They claim the West has kept promising financial help to develop clean energy, but has sometimes failed to deliver.

The IEA report frequently alludes to this, emphasising the developing world’s needs for financial and technological support. It suggests that the West bring forward its net zero target date from 2050 to 2045, China advance its deadline from 2060 to 2050, and other developing countries (most of whom are relatively minor emitters) take their time. The cause needs them on board.

The IEA’s milestones are challenging. In 2022, the world generated 61 per cent of its electricity by burning coal, gas and oil. (In Australia it was 68 per cent.) The IEA wants that dependence swept away, cutting fossil fuels’ share to 29 per cent by 2030 and just 9 per cent by 2035. Australia has set itself an even more ambitious target to cut fossil fuels to just 18 per cent of electricity generation by 2030, but there’s a growing consensus that we won’t make it.

The IEA wants 70 per cent of new vehicles sold globally by 2030 to be electric, up from 13 per cent in 2022, and then 98 per cent by 2035. By 2030 it proposes that space heating and cooling systems in all new buildings use energy-efficient heat pumps (or split systems), a huge change from less than 1 per cent in 2022.

It sounds dramatic, but the IEA argues that electric cars and heat pumps will save the customer money in the long term — just as solar and wind energy are cheaper than burning coal and gas. That’s why these four cheap, mature technologies are its priorities for action now.

The report skates over the problems that Australia and other countries are experiencing as solar and wind energy make coal-fired power uneconomic in daylight hours, yet it remains a necessity at night. Its recent report on Australia acknowledged the problem, but offered no solution except a sort of “try harder.”

But much in the report is relevant to Australia. It implicitly rejects Labor’s policy of phasing out fossil fuels at home while expanding exports for others to burn. If our goal is to stop global warming, you can’t do it by transferring emissions from power stations here to power stations in Asia. You can argue the detail of how the transition to renewables should be managed, but the IEA insists that fossil fuels must be phased out throughout the world. As Dr Birol explains, “What matters is emissions, regardless of which country produces them.”

Reducing the destructive methane emissions caused by mining fossil fuels is another of the IEA’s key priorities. Often, it says, it would be far cheaper for miners to capture the escaping gas and use it. Australia was a late signatory to the global pledge to try to reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. They have become the fastest-growing source of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The climate debate here focuses on renewables vs fossil fuels, but the IEA’s focus is on “low-emissions sources of electricity.” That includes nuclear power and carbon capture, usage and storage. Both are outcasts in Australian debates — the Howard government even banned nuclear power stations — but remain in the IEA’s toolkit, albeit for use only in rare cases.

It’s safe to assume that the Coalition’s new campaign for nuclear power in Australia is primarily aimed at renewing the climate wars; nuclear would be an expensive way to provide backup power at nights and on gloomy days. Even the IEA, as strong an advocate as any, sees nuclear providing just 2.7 per cent of the new “low-emissions” capacity it advocates for the world.

Rather, its emphasis is on the potential savings the world could make by focusing on energy efficiency: in homes, offices, shops and factories, cars, planes, ships, everywhere. As an example, redesigning new fridges and air conditioners could cut their electricity consumption almost in half by 2035.

Nothing would score better in human welfare than a global campaign to give every household in the developing world access to clean cooking technology to replace their deadly old indoor wood fires. If this could be done by 2030, the IEA estimates, it would remove 1.5 Gt a year of greenhouse gas emissions and save 3.6 million premature deaths. And that would cost just 1 per cent of the world’s annual energy investment.

But these changes require political or business decisions. The IEA offers only nonpartisan expertise — something that governments here and elsewhere don’t value as much as they should. The agency has to keep its mouth zipped, especially on how to solve the problems it exposes. Take energy efficiency. The obvious way to increase efficiency is a carbon price: make it more expensive to waste energy, and people will find ways to cut its use. But to many on the right, a new tax is taboo. So the IEA has to tiptoe around by suggesting second-best solutions.

The Albanese government is in danger of overpromising on targets while underdelivering on policies to achieve them. Its carbon price is limited to 200-odd companies, it is walking both sides of the street on fossil fuels, and most of the reviews it has launched have yet to produce outcomes. This is what happens when you allow the political staff to take charge of policy. •

The post Half empty and half full? appeared first on Inside Story.

We learned his answer last week. You abandon and attack climate change policy, invent unpopular measures you claim your opponents support, and pledge you will never force such monstrous burdens on hard-working voters.

To the dismay of many in his own Conservative Party but the joy of the right-wing press, Sunak has come out fighting on the territory his predecessors had been careful to avoid. Climate change policy has been the subject of consensus among all of Britain’s major political parties for nearly two decades, giving the United Kingdom an enviable reputation as a global leader not just in emissions reduction but also in making climate policy with public consent.

Sunak has decided to rip all that up. The government is still committed to achieving its statutory target of net zero emissions by 2050, he said in his much-anticipated speech last week, but it isn’t willing to impose “unacceptable costs” on ordinary households to achieve it. It would therefore reverse three key policies introduced by previous Conservative administrations. The ban on new petrol and diesel cars would be pushed back from 2030 to 2035. The ban on new gas boilers (to be replaced by heat pumps and biofuels) would be pushed back to the same date and would no longer apply to poorer households. And landlords would not be required to insulate tenants’ homes. Sunak also took the opportunity to rule out four other policies: taxes on meat, higher taxes on flying, the compulsory separation of household waste into seven different recycling bins, and compulsory car sharing.

As intended, Sunak’s speech caused an immediate uproar. Environmentally minded MPs in his own party condemned the decisions. Green groups proclaimed themselves appalled. Business groups decried the ad hoc changes to regulatory frameworks and warned that investment would fall in sectors generating rising numbers of green jobs.

At the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, meanwhile, there were celebrations. Their collective view was expressed in a triumphant Mail editorial congratulating Sunak for finally “shatter[ing] the cosy consensus, which has let an out-of-touch Westminster elite think it can bully a compliant public into footing a mind-blowing climate bill… This motley assortment of eco-zealots, the liberal Left and posh Tory rebels — egged on, of course, by the BBC — are invariably comfortably enough off to be able to swallow such costs. But for hard-working and practical-minded voters… Mr Sunak’s rethink will make life less tough, less cold and less poor.”

Sunak’s election strategists didn’t write the Mail’s leader, but they might as well have done. The prime minister’s purpose is transparent. He wants to create a clear dividing line between his government and the Labour Party, which has made strong climate policy a central plank of its platform, and in doing so to present the opposition as an out-of-touch elite and his own party as the defenders of ordinary people. He has, in short, decided to drag climate change into a culture-war battle and make that war the foundation of his election strategy.

If this sounds somewhat Australian, it is. Sunak’s chief election strategist is Isaac Levido, protégé of famed Liberal Party election guru Lynton Crosby and architect of Scott Morrison’s 2019 election victory. His strategy for Sunak comes straight from the Crosby playbook: use culture-war framing to drive a wedge between your opponents and their own supporters, forcing them to defend unpopular policies on your favoured territory. And don’t worry too much if this requires a measure of blatant dishonesty.

As many commentators observed — and as a BBC interview with Sunak expertly highlighted — it was the dishonesty that most marked out the prime minister’s speech. Every single policy Sunak claimed to have overturned was falsely described.

Neither the ban on new petrol and diesel cars nor the prohibition on gas boilers would have required consumers to fork out “£5000, £10,000, £15,000” more on their alternatives, as Sunak claimed. Innovation in battery technology has so rapidly reduced their cost that electric cars are expected to be cheaper than their fossil fuel competitors as soon as 2027. In practice, postponing the petrol and diesel ban will have very little effect on consumers’ decisions. In any case, 80 per cent of cars bought each year are second hand, to which the ban would not apply.

Heat pump costs are also falling rapidly — driven by the government’s phase-out plans. Consumers also get generous subsidies to install them, making their actual costs to households far less than Sunak claimed. And the requirement to insulate their homes was not on all property owners, as Sunak implied. It was only on private landlords. So, far from saving money for ordinary households, its abolition will actually leave tenants facing higher energy bills.

As for the four other measures Sunak claimed to have scrapped — from taxes on meat to compulsory car sharing — not one of them was government policy, or had even been considered. Nor are any of them Labour policy. They are all mythic inventions of the tabloid press designed to whip up public anger at the general notion of stronger climate policy. The claim to have got rid of them was pure Crosby/Levido: imply that these “extremist” absurdities are supported by your opponents and only you can save voters from them. Within minutes of Sunak finishing his speech Tory central office had put out social media messages highlighting these apparently abolished policies and linking them to Labour’s green spending plans.

(Within another few minutes a whole series of memes had appeared ridiculing Sunak’s remarks and listing a variety of other policies Sunak had saved a grateful public from, including compulsory badger-racing and limits on the number of invisible friends children would be allowed.)

Rishi Sunak’s new strategy has finally revealed his political character, and it is not what his supporters claimed it would be when Conservative MPs made him — without a contest or a vote — Britain’s fifth prime minister in five years last November. He was intended to represent a return to normality, a sensible hand on the tiller who could steady the country’s rocking ship of state.

After David Cameron (who called an unnecessary referendum on Brexit and lost it), Theresa May (who called an unnecessary general election, lost her majority in the House of Commons and failed to get Brexit through parliament), Boris Johnson (who illegally suspended parliament, oversaw 180,000 Covid deaths, associated with Russian spies, failed to disclose personal loans from party donors, promoted corrupt government procurement, lied to parliament about lockdown parties, tried to overturn rules on MPs’ standards of behaviour, and promoted supporters accused of bullying and sexual harassment) and Liz Truss (who introduced a budget that crashed the pound and sent interest rates soaring, and was forced to resign by her own MPs after only forty-nine days in the job), it was generally agreed that British politics needed something a little more stable. Though he had only been an MP since 2015, the smooth, very rich and apparently sensible former hedge-fund manager Sunak seemed to fit the bill.

But he has struggled to keep the Tories’ heads above water. On the five modest priorities he spelt out at the beginning of the year, he has so far failed to make any progress. Economic growth has been anaemic, with the economy teetering all year on the edge of recession. Inflation has fallen from 11 per cent to just under 7 per cent, but only after fourteen straight rises in interest rates (from 0.1 to 5.25 per cent) which have led to huge increases in monthly mortgage costs for householders. Sunak pledged to bring down National Health Service waiting lists, but instead they have reached a record high, with more than seven and a half million people now waiting for treatment in England, over three million of them for more than eighteen weeks.

Sunak’s most high-profile pledge, to reduce the number of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats, has also been his most conspicuous failure. Not only have the numbers continued to increase, but each of the measures aimed at tackling the problem (or, to be more precise, aimed at appearing to tackle the problem) has hit the rocks. The courts have prevented anyone at all from being deported to Rwanda, as the government wanted, to seek asylum there. And the hired-in barge moored off a south-coast port, intended to house 500 asylum seekers, had to be closed after a week when Legionella was found in its water supply.

Meanwhile Britain’s privatised water companies have been discharging raw sewage into the country’s rivers and seas, schools have been forced to shut because they contain dangerously unsafe concrete, and the country’s air-traffic control system was closed down by an error in a single flight plan. Callers to radio phone-in programs and newspaper columnists alike lament that nothing in Britain works anymore and the country has gone to the dogs.

All of which has duly been reflected in Sunak’s polling numbers. Labour has been fifteen to twenty points ahead of the Conservatives in national polling for a year now, sufficient to return it to government with a comfortable majority. Sunak’s approval ratings have fallen to minus 30 per cent, with Labour leader Keir Starmer ahead on almost every leadership quality listed by pollsters. Voters now say they trust Labour over the Conservatives on every major issue.

A general election doesn’t have to be called until January 2025, but May or October next year are seen as the likeliest dates. That gives Sunak a year or less to turn his dire fortunes around. After this week’s relaunch and with Levido in charge, we know how he will seek to do it. Reinforced by relentless tabloid attacks on Labour in general and Starmer in particular, the culture-war framing will be used to try to separate the opposition from its traditional working-class base.

This was how the Brexit referendum was won, and it was how Boris Johnson increased the Conservatives’ majority in the general election of 2019. Labour’s heartland voters in towns and cities across the Midlands and North of England were told that the party they and their families had always supported had become detached from their concerns: pro-EU, insufficiently patriotic, too supportive of immigration, soft on crime, uninterested in the armed services, and too London-centric (read, culturally liberal).

With Labour having governed while the post-2000 globalisation was creating an economic boom in London and the affluent southeast, but largely leaving old industrial areas behind, and having then presided over the great financial crash, many of these voters proved ripe to change their allegiance. Johnson’s stunning election victory in 2019 included a whole swathe of former Labour seats thought to be unwinnable by the Tories. That was why, despite everything, Johnson was tolerated for so long by Tory MPs and members: he had won in areas of the country that had not for years, if ever, returned a Tory MP.

It is these “red wall” seats that Sunak must retain in order to have any chance of winning the next election — and equally that Labour must win back if it is to do so. Both parties are focused laser-like on this task. From now until he calls the election we can confidently expect Sunak to attack Labour for its profligate tax and spending plans and economic recklessness, for wanting to rejoin the EU single market, for trying to reduce prison numbers while the Tories want to lock more criminals up, for wanting higher immigration and less defence spending, and — because the party has been taken over by the woke trans-rights brigade — for being unable to define a woman. This week’s climate row-back was just the start.

Will Labour take the bait? On all but one of those issues, it won’t. Over the past year Keir Starmer — also explicitly influenced by the Australian example — has adopted a classic small-target strategy. If you’re this far ahead in the polls, his reasoning goes, and the Tories keep spectacularly demonstrating their own incompetence, don’t blow it by giving your opponents easy wins.

Like a Roman phalanx curling itself into a tight circle with its shields on the outside, Labour has been busy closing off any available lines of attack from the Tories and their media spear-bearers.

On fiscal policy, Labour’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves has insisted that Labour will cut government borrowing and only increase spending if it can identify a way of paying for it. And she has since ruled out almost any tax rise, including higher-rate income taxes, the capital gains tax and a wealth tax, that Labour supporters had hoped might allow some spending commitments to be made.

On defence policy, on crime, on immigration and asylum seekers, Labour has attacked the Tory record but has not committed to any significant changes to government policy. On trans rights, Labour has ruled out gender self-identification without a medical diagnosis.

All eyes were therefore on Starmer for his reaction to Sunak’s anti-climate policy speech. Would he take the same approach he had on all the other wedges the Tories had been trying to hammer between him and his voter base? Would he again cleave close to Tory policy and refuse to allow a gap to open up through which he could be attacked?

Signs suggested he might. Reeves had already watered down Labour’s “climate investment plan” to spend £28 billion a year on green infrastructure and innovation: facing rising borrowing costs, she announced that a Labour government would now only get spending to £28 billion by the end of the parliament.

When the party then lost a by-election in London it had been expected to win, amid widespread voter opposition to the (Labour) mayor’s plans to extend a charge on polluting cars, Starmer had a very public wobble, openly questioning the policy. The Tories took their by-election victory as evidence that green policies imposing costs on voters are unpopular and ripe for attack, and Starmer seemed to be drawing the same conclusion. The environmental movement — inside and beyond the party — was alarmed.

They need not have worried. Starmer’s response to Sunak’s anti-green speech was subtle. Refusing to fall into the trap of a debate about the costs of climate policy to ordinary households, he made no public comment at all on the speech apart from a couple of tweets emphasising that Labour’s renewable energy strategy would create jobs, reduce bills and improve energy security. He left it to his shadow climate minister, former party leader Ed Miliband, to castigate Sunak for “not giving a damn” about climate change, describing the PM as “rattled, chaotic and out of his depth.”

Labour would retain the petrol and diesel ban by 2030 and the responsibility of landlords to insulate their tenants’ homes, Miliband said, both of which would cut ordinary households’ costs. (He notably didn’t promise to restore the ban on gas boilers.) As for the four fictional policies Sunak said he was scrapping, Miliband was scathing. Not only had the Labour Party never proposed a tax on meat, he said, but it was not even the policy of the Vegan Society.

Miliband is well known as strongly committed to climate action. Yet it was not he but shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who was the decisive figure in Labour’s choice to pick up the climate gauntlet Sunak had thrown down. Reeves, who has been assiduously wooing business leaders over the past year, has been struck not merely by how fed up with Tory incompetence they have become, but also by how green they are.

With US president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act driving record investment into environmental technologies and sectors in the United States, and the European Union’s Green Deal following suit, Labour has made “green prosperity” the centrepiece of its economic and industrial strategies. It will have been delighted at the furious reaction of business leaders to Sunak’s speech. Why get Starmer to attack Sunak when the UK head of Ford will do it for you?

For party members and activists, Labour’s response will have come as a relief. The leadership’s small-target positioning has been deeply frustrating for those who believe the party needs radical policies to tackle the legacy of thirteen years of Tory rule. Starmer’s bland persona and extreme policy caution have left both members and many political commentators despairing that Labour was not offering the public a positive reason to vote for it but rather merely relying on the Tories to mess up. With the NHS, social care, schools, policing and local government all in crisis, but Labour not promising to spend significant money on any of them, they fear the party will succeed in the general election but fail in government.

In this context Miliband’s climate policy platform has offered a ray of hope. He has managed to persuade Starmer and Reeves to support a bold plan to achieve 100 per cent renewable power by 2030, create a new publicly owned energy company, and insulate nineteen million homes over ten years, generating a claimed 200,000 new jobs across the country. Most radically of all, Labour has pledged to end new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea fields, which would make Britain the first major economy to do so.

Labour hasn’t committed to these policies in the hope that the public supports them. It knows the public does: it is one of the consequences of the eighteen-year cross-party consensus on climate policy. Climate change is now ranked third when voters are asked about the biggest issues facing Britain, behind only the economy and inflation. Over half of voters want to see the government take stronger action, with a quarter happy with current policies and fewer than 20 per cent believing the government is moving too fast. These numbers vary little across Labour and Tory supporters and different parts of the country. Red wall voters are as green as people in the rest of Britain.

Tory strategists think these numbers are soft. They point out that the majorities in favour of tougher climate policy fall when voters are reminded that this might involve them, not just other people, paying more. Levido is convinced that continuous campaigning on the cost of achieving net zero for ordinary households will reduce public support even further. If this means making fictitious claims about those costs, or about Labour policy, so be it. He believes the Tories can peel enough voters away from Labour to make the election competitive.

He may be right. And this is what dismays moderate Tories the most about Sunak’s new stance. They know that their own voters care about climate change, and that strong policies will attract business investment and jobs in the new global green economy. But they also know, from Australia, the United States and elsewhere, that mendacious culture wars can be remarkably effective means of undermining voter confidence in political parties and policies of all kinds.

Britain has been spared this kind of social and political division up to now. But it is about to find out what happens when concerns about the future of the planet are sacrificed on the altar of election strategy. •

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The episode rather neatly demonstrated the balancing act Lula is trying to perform on the world stage. He has been assiduously positioning Brazil as an independent global power, seeking to act as a mediator in Ukraine rather than condemning Russia as demanded by the United States and Europe, promoting the non-Western BRICS club of major economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and flying to Cuba to reiterate Brazil’s role as a leader of the G77 grouping of developing countries.

But he has also just signed a joint declaration with the United States proclaiming the G20 group of large economies the principal forum for multilateral diplomacy and declares himself a global champion of democracy, warning of the perils of authoritarian populism promoting racism and civil violence. (Brazil had its own “invasion of Congress” events in January this year when supporters of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro stormed parliament and the Supreme Court in an attempt to overthrow Lula’s election victory, a deliberate echo of the events of 6 January 2021 in Washington, DC.)

The jury may be out on whether this balancing act can work, but no one could accuse Lula of passivity in foreign policy. In the past few weeks he has attended the Global Financing Pact summit in Paris, the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, the G20 summit in Delhi, the G77 summit in Havana and the UN General Assembly and Climate Ambition and Sustainable Development summits in New York, and convened his own Amazon summit in Brazil’s northeastern city of Belem. This year Brazil chairs the Latin American trade partnership Mercosur. Next year it will hold the presidency of the G20. In 2025 it will lead the BRICS and will also host the critical UN climate summit COP30.

To appreciate what Lula is seeking to achieve from this feverish activity it helps to understand the man. Now seventy-seven, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula” was an early nickname he later formally incorporated into his official name) has not had the usual politician’s life. Born to poor parents who migrated from Brazil’s northeast to São Paulo in search of work, Lula didn’t learn to read until he was ten. Starting out as a metalworker in the automobile industry, he became a trade unionist, was elected leader of the Metalworkers’ Union at the age of thirty, and then led major strikes and democratic protests against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s.

In 1980, increasingly identifying as a socialist — neither a communist nor a moderate social democrat — Lula helped form a new political party, the Workers’ Party. Though he was widely mocked for his poor Portuguese, his electrifying rhetoric and brilliant organising skills marked him out. He was elected to Congress in 1986 and subsequently stood as the party’s presidential candidate three times before finally winning in 2002.

In office, Lula immediately set about fulfilling his election promise to attack poverty, establishing the Bolsa Familia system under which mothers received welfare payments conditional on their children staying in school and being vaccinated. Aided by an economic boom, he raised the minimum wage, and expanded primary education and healthcare. Poverty in Brazil fell by more than a quarter in his first term alone. Re-elected in 2006, he turned his attention to the Amazon, succeeding in slowing deforestation for the first time. Brazil’s economy grew and its public debt fell.

When he left office after two terms in 2010 Lula had popular approval ratings of over 80 per cent and the undying enmity of Brazil’s conservative political elite. When the Trumpian populist Jair Bolsonaro became president in 2016, no one was surprised when he used a compromised judicial system to put Lula in jail.

Defeating Bolsonaro in last year’s election was redemption for Lula. But in a deeply divided country — the parallels with the United States are remarkably close — the margin was tiny: 50.9 per cent versus 49.1 per cent in the run-off vote. In the Brazilian Congress, which he does not control, Lula has had to cobble together an unstable multiparty coalition, making his legislative task much harder this time round.

Nevertheless, he has high ambitions. His Ecological Transformation Plan is meant to be a comprehensive economic strategy aimed at greening the country’s industrial structure. He wants to raise agricultural productivity to expand food production while conserving the country’s abundant natural resources. He has committed to ending hunger by extending Brazil’s welfare system, and to ending the illegal incursions into the Amazon forest by miners and loggers that routinely lead to violence against indigenous people. Deforestation is already down by over 40 per cent in less than a year.

Lula’s remarkable ability to build pragmatic political alliances makes it likely that he will achieve much more of his program than his congressional numbers would suggest. But it is on the world beyond Brazil that Lula’s political gaze is now increasingly fixed.

It is not too much to say that Lula wants to redesign the global order. In his speech to the UN General Assembly this week, Lula railed against the increasing inequality of a global economy in which, as he pointed out, the ten richest billionaires have greater combined wealth than 40 per cent of the world’s population, and 735 million people go hungry. He noted that the richest tenth of the world’s population are responsible for almost half of all carbon emissions, but also insisted that developing countries did not want to follow the same economic model. And he decried the erosion of multilateralism — “the principle of sovereign equality between nations” — in global affairs.

Lula’s rhetoric has always been grandiose, even utopian. But he has a remarkable record of making things happen. At the end of this year’s G20 summit in New Delhi, Lula set out his plans for next year’s presidency. Under Brazil, he said, the G20 would focus on reducing global inequality, poverty and hunger; on making the global growth model more environmentally sustainable, in terms of both climate change and nature conservation; and on reform of the way international institutions are governed.

Because he believes it is what will unlock the others, it is the last of these goals that is really in Lula’s sights. Like almost all leaders from the global South, Lula looks at how multilateral institutions work and sees both historical obsolescence and profound injustice.

Almost all the major institutions of global governance have remained unchanged since they were established at the end of the second world war. Eighty years later, despite new economic and regional powers emerging — notably the European Union, Germany, Japan, India and Brazil — the UN Security Council still has only five permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China), the great powers that had prevailed in the war. And the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are still governed by their largest shareholders, an even narrower group of Western countries dominated by the United States and the other economies of the G7 (Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada).

All members of the World Trade Organization have equal decision-making power, but partly for that reason it has increasingly been bypassed in recent years by regional and bilateral trade agreements promoted by the United States, China and the European Union. The world’s premier economic advisory body, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, remains in thrall to the free-market orthodoxies of the Western countries that run it.

And the single most powerful institution in the world economy is arguably the dollar, in which a huge amount of global trade and investment is denominated. But this means much of the world is deeply vulnerable to changes in its value, as the last two years of simultaneously rising dollar and US interest rates have shown. The dollar is not even governed by postwar international arrangements: its master is the US Federal Reserve, whose mandate is entirely focused on the US economy.

Lula wants all this changed. This is why he has loudly pursued the development of the BRICS grouping, even going so far as to suggest that it could seek to replace the dollar as a global trading currency. Lula sees the BRICS as a non-Western power bloc to counter the G7, whose cohesion in the decision-making forums of the G20, World Bank and IMF starkly contrasts with differences among the major countries of the global South.

At its recent summit in South Africa, the BRICS group admitted several new members, including the wealthy and increasingly assertive Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, with the aim of extending its reach and influence. But most Western commentators are dismissive. They note that BRICS, unlike the G7, is made up of countries whose economic and political systems are not only fundamentally different from one another but also subject to major tensions and conflicts, especially in the case of superpower rivals China and India. Nevertheless, it is a signal of Lula’s intent that he wants to strengthen an alternative alliance through which to pursue his reform agenda.

Lula’s public statements on Russia and the war in Ukraine should be seen in this light. Like most countries in the global South, Brazil regards the UN Security Council as the proper arbiter of international conflict. If the Security Council assesses and then condemns one country’s aggression, Brazil will also do so. But it has never done so when the Security Council has not come to a judgement — as in the case of Ukraine, because Russia has exercised its permanent member veto.

Talking to Brazilian foreign policy experts in Brasilia and Rio I detected no illusions about Russia’s responsibility for the war in Ukraine. They note simply that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, supported by almost all other Western states, was also illegal under UN law. And they observe that the West can apparently find fiscally unconstrained sums of money to defend Ukraine while simultaneously claiming it has no money to expand development aid or climate assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable countries elsewhere in the world. “And what did you do during Covid?” one asked me. “When the world cried out for vaccines, you hoarded even your surplus ones.”

Brazilians are enjoying the country’s new prominence on the global stage. Lula gets notably less criticism for his numerous foreign trips than leaders in most other countries. Along the way, he won’t hesitate to criticise the West for its moral failures. But he will also seize the chance to work with it. “Brazil is back!” the president likes to say. Preparing to assume the chairmanship of the largest powers at the G20, he doesn’t intend to waste the opportunity. •

The post The second coming of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appeared first on Inside Story.

In his provocative new book, Russia Against Modernity, Alexander Etkind argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a single, broad historical pattern. It is the last gasp of a failing, kleptocratic petrostate for which external aggression is a natural move. Rather than the Ukraine war itself, Etkind is interested in the conditions within Russia that have culminated so calamitously.

In what is more a pamphlet than a treatise, Etkind combines brevity and playfulness with a degree of erudition that other works covering the Russia–Ukraine conflict seldom manage, melding political economy, history, demography, social theory and social psychology. That range reflects Etkind’s eclectic polymathy: a native of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), he grew up in the Soviet Union, completed two degrees in psychology at Leningrad State University before earning a PhD in Slavonic cultural history in Helsinki, and has variously taught and researched — in faculties of sociology, political science, languages, history and international relations — in St Petersburg, New York, Cambridge, Florence and Vienna.

This smorgasbord of disciplines is reflected in his previous books: an analysis of Russia’s practice of imperialism and internal colonisation; a history of psychoanalysis in Russia; memory studies of the Soviet gulag and the second world war; and Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources. The latter, which foreshadows a central theme of Russia Against Modernity, argues that the drive to accumulate resources has long had a corrosive effect on societies, and on the planet.

Etkind’s big-picture approach means this is not a book to read for a detailed narrative or analysis of the events that led up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022. Nor will you find much discussion of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, NATO, Russia–Ukraine relations or Ukrainian history, or of the course of the war itself.

Most explanations of the Ukraine war tend to give primacy to either external or internal factors. The “externalists,” for want of a better word, include those who claim the war is a natural outcome of unwise/reckless NATO expansion. Going further, some even buy the Kremlin line — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the West’s fundamental, if unstated, goal is to weaken or destroy Russia.

At the other end of the externalist spectrum are those, including many Ukrainians and East Europeans, who believe an inherent imperialism is demonstrated by Russia’s aggression towards former territories. Some attribute this to the size of the country, its innate political culture, the “Russian psyche” or, in its crudest renderings, a kind of Russian DNA.

“Internalists” emphasise the domestic drivers of the war — notably an authoritarian state’s need to legitimise itself through nationalist and revanchist propaganda. In this view, the Ukraine war and other militaristic posturing or adventures are cynically deployed to further the interests of the elite. For some, Ukraine presented a threat to the Kremlin because it offered a democratic alternative. A handful on the left claim that the war’s roots lie in the ambitions of Russian oligarchs vying to capture Ukraine’s valuable natural and other resources.

Some analysts, of course, combine or reconcile internal and external elements in explaining the war, but Etkind is rare in drawing together multiple threads and focusing on general trends. It isn’t always clear whether he wants us to take the picture he presents as Constable-like realism, an Impressionist canvas or even a satirical cartoon. In parts, the book feels like a Dali-style exploration of deeper, unconscious truths, leaving the reader feeling that Etkind is getting at something without being clear quite what.

Etkind’s main idea is that the Russian state and society is an exemplar of “paleomodernity,” following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in championing “grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature.” For Etkind, Putin’s war is not only a “special operation” against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture; it is also “a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.”

If paleomodernity — a conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder — reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, then its twenty-first-century antithesis is “gaiamodernity,” a higher form of civilisation where small, sustainable, democratic and feminine are beautiful, and racial, sexual and intellectual diversity are cherished. Etkind seems to see this nightmarish scenario for Tucker Carlson or Sky After Dark’s pundits as both a utopia to be dreamed of and a kind of immanent social order, destined to emerge, echoing Hegel’s and Marx’s systems of thought.

Etkind’s key take is that the “oiligarchs” and bureaucrats running Russia saw this “advance of history” as an existential threat to its oil and gas exports, which make up a third of Russia’s GDP, two-thirds of its exports and half the state budget. The money was crucial to the stability of Russia’s currency, crucial for its military spending and crucial for maintaining the elite’s luxurious lifestyle. It was also the chief driver of corruption, inequality and declining social and demographic indicators. All of this fed popular disillusionment, growing authoritarianism and elite paranoia and the ideologies supporting aggression.

As an archetypal petrostate, Etkind argues, Russia is afflicted by the resource curse, whereby an economy as a whole underperforms because a single commodity is so dominant. Initially, in the 2000s, rising oil prices underpinned Putin’s success in restoring economic growth. The populace gained a welcome sense of stability after the economic and political turmoil of the “wild nineties,” leading many to accept the gradual erosion of civil liberties.

By the 2010s, however, not only were Russian incomes falling but so were a range of social and economic metrics. By 2021, life expectancy had fallen to 105th globally, per-capita health spending to 104th and education spending to 125th. Russia had the fourth-highest carbon emissions globally and among the highest rates of suicides, abortions, road deaths and industrial accidents.

Thanks largely to embezzlement, post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality ever recorded. Its income inequality was among the world’s highest and by 2021 it led all major countries in inequality of wealth: 58 per cent of national wealth belonging to the top 1 per cent, well above Brazil (49 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). More than a fifth of Russia’s citizens, meanwhile, lived on less than US$10 a day, and the middle class had been hollowed out.

In excess of three trillion dollars had been stolen and squirrelled away abroad — more than the total financial assets legally owned by Russian households. “Economists from Harvard and Moscow alike believed that economic growth would be the source of all good in Russia, that accumulated wealth would trickle down to the poor, that the rising tide would lift all boats,” writes Etkind. “In fact, it lifted only the yachts of the rich. The boats of the poor leaked, and they drowned in the tide.”

The wealth gained from being the world’s biggest exporter of energy funded an enormous state machine, particularly a military, security and law-enforcement apparatus accounting for fully one-third of the budget. Russian military spending increased by a factor of seven between 2000 and 2020, compared with a factor of two in Germany and 2.5 in the United States. In the end, though, corruption has hobbled the Russian war effort in Ukraine and sanctions have stranded assets held abroad, including the mind-boggling superyachts of Putin, his top officials and Russia’s tycoons.

Etkind doesn’t really explain why the military–security sector became so bloated, beyond its being a very big trough for corrupt snouts. Most observers would point to Putin’s own reliance on and favouritism towards cronies from the sector — the so-called siloviki, or people of force — on top of his belief in restoring Russian greatness and the need for a strong repressive apparatus to quash dissent.

Etkind treats war as more or less a natural outcome of Russia’s political economy. The more a “parasitic state” relies on natural resources, the less it invests in human capital. The lower the human capital, the greater the state’s dependence on resource extraction. It accumulates gold, limits internal consumption, pursues domestic oppression and, sooner or later, launches a war of aggression. Yet this is only part of the picture, and doesn’t hold true for Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Qatar or other petrostates.

Some of Etkind’s most interesting, albeit speculative, chapters deal with the interplay between Russia’s political economy, its demographic decline and issues like gender inequality and homophobia. The latter have become a common theme of state-sponsored propaganda: TV pundits talk about fighting a degenerate West where genders proliferate; patriarchs and priests equate the war on Ukraine with fighting those Satanic “gay parades.”

Partly because of very high divorce rates, children are raised by only one parent, usually the mother, in one in three Russian families. Etkind pushes the envelope when he posits the growth of “fatherlessness” as a cause of authoritarian tendencies, as some postwar German theorists did in the case of Nazi Germany. High rates of domestic violence — which was actually decriminalised in 2017 in a nod to patriarchal opinion — have been another symptom of social dysfunction.

Etkind also highlights “granny power” as another bulwark against modernity: the heightened role of babushki (grandmothers) in many three-generation households, he says, imbues children with backward-looking and authoritarian ideas and attitudes. The three-generation household, with overburdened mothers and absent fathers, is a product of the inadequate incomes, housing, childcare and pensions generated by the parasitic petrostate, as well as men’s much lower life expectancy (sixty-five years, compared with women’s seventy-seven).

Etkind points to other elements of Russia’s demographic catastrophe — world-leading abortion rates, high rates of emigration among the young and educated — as signs of lack of trust and faith in a future governed by a corrupt and authoritarian state. “The birth rate,” he writes, “was the ultimate manifestation of public opinion.” A lot of these demographic problems were also present in the Soviet years, serving as a kind of canary in the mine presaging the Soviet Union’s decline.

Perhaps more telling, and more of a blow to male egos among the Russian elite, is Etkind’s suggestion that the homophobia prevalent in officially sponsored propaganda stems from the practice of bullying (dedovshchina, or the grandfather rule), often involving rape, in the military. And these super-wealthy grandfathers in the Kremlin, who Etkind notes are a generation older than Zelensky’s leadership circle in Ukraine, are natural allies of the impoverished grandmothers of the Russian suburbs, sharing the inherent conservatism of the three-generation family.

Etkind coins the term “stopmodernism” to describe Russia’s “special operation” against gaiamodernity. The war in Ukraine is just one weapon in its arsenal, alongside climate denial, election interference and others. Decarbonisation represents a huge challenge to Russia’s interests, and although Putin’s regime has played along at times with moves towards curbing emissions, it has also played a spoiler role. The biggest “gaiamodern” threat to the wealth of Russia’s elite have been the moves towards zero emissions by the European Union, its chief market for gas and oil, including the Transborder Carbon Tax announced in 2021.

Etkind also suggests that the 2009 Climategate hacks of emails, which purported to show climate change to be a conspiracy among scientists, was of a piece with Russia’s more recent hacking and online-disinformation efforts (including via Prigozhin’s infamous troll factories) to support right-wing politicians in the United States and Europe.

Etkind’s brushwork becomes a bit Dali-like in drawing lines between the petrostate’s political economy and motivations for the war, yet he makes some plausible points. He argues that rampant inequality led the elite to create fables to explain its privileged position and place blame elsewhere. He says that the kind of mystical nationalism encountered more and more frequently among the elite, including Putin, is a reworking of the idea of a chosen people to explain the fateful chance that endows some countries with an abundance of natural wealth.

The idea that Russia has a special, even divine, historical role is far from new — it featured in tsarist and Soviet times — but Etkind would no doubt argue that current conditions have given it greater appeal and currency.

For Etkind, conspiracy theories are a key part of the myth-making. He seems convinced they are a psychopathology and not just the cynical outpourings of a well-funded propaganda machine. Whatever its cause, the propaganda and media machine have become increasingly anti-American, Eurosceptic and homophobic, with “stopmodernism” encrypted into news channels, reality shows, sporting events and beauty contests. The very same people you might meet on a weekend in a posh Mediterranean hotel spend their working hours cursing “gay Europe” in Moscow TV studios.

Etkind paints Putin’s speech justifying the February 2022 invasion not just as an apotheosis of myth-making and conspiracy peddling, but also as a deadly rationale for genocide. For Putin, he writes,

Russians and Ukrainians are essentially the same, but some Ukrainians are Nazis and therefore different. The Americans had turned [Russia’s] Ukrainian friends into Nazis, the opposite of the Russians, who defeated Nazism and disliked the Americans… Putin was effectively declaring war against the US and its allies, not against Ukraine. Ukraine was not even a proxy: it did not exist, it was a terra nullius.

Ultimately, however, despite all these systemic factors, Etkind comes close to surrendering to a different kind of analysis by putting the onus on the personal: namely, Putin got bored and started a war. “A wiser tyrant would have deferred his inevitable end for another few years, even a decade. Impatient and bored, Putin was the unexpected nemesis of Putinism.”

A richer canvas might also have coloured in links between the authoritarian and corrupt Putinist system and his hubristic miscalculations about Ukrainian strength and resolve, Western unity and Russian military strength. This broader account might also help explain why a petrostate that in 2021 sent three-quarters of its gas exports and two-thirds of its oil exports to the European Union decided to risk all with the invasion.

Russia Against Modernity ends with a picture of the future: Russia will inevitably lose the war and begin a process of defederation. Its constituent national minorities, indigenous peoples and diverse regions will at last — after a long but hopefully not bloody transition period — gain real autonomy and democracy and move towards a gaiamodern world, leaving behind the petrostate that has exploited them. One can’t help feeling that this is more utopian dream than sober analysis, however much we might hope elements of it come true.

Sceptics may ask whether Russia is really so different from some or many developed capitalist societies in terms of the evils and dysfunctions Etkind outlines. I suspect he would say that they/we all cling to elements of paleomodernity to differing degrees, exemplified in different political and social forces competing with the gaiamodern. He would add that, as a petrostate, Russia is a more extreme and different kind of polity in terms of its interest in thwarting gaiamodernity.

Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As I have argued elsewhere, while we can debate the wisdom or morality of these actions, none represented a serious threat to Russia. And Etkind is right to see Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers and other internal issues as more of a “fetish” among the Russian elite, as he puts it, rather than a serious factor.

Etkind’s work is also valuable because he is a Russian with an intimate understanding of the country and broad international experience who brings to bear serious intellectual firepower. In one section, “The Unbearable Lightness of Western Pundits,” he beautifully skewers so-called experts like Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze who pointed to Ukrainian weaknesses and the inevitability of Russian victory just before the 2022 invasion. Another target is international relations guru John Mearsheimer, who more or less justified the invasion by saying that, if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would suffer “existentially.” Russia now has both Sweden and Finland rushing to join NATO, while Ukraine, of course, had no near-term prospect of membership.

One thing common to these generalist historians, economists and foreign policy wonks is a lack of real expertise in Russian or Ukrainian history and politics. That’s why it is vital to listen to independent Russian (and Ukrainian!) voices on the war, as well as real Western specialists. Only a few of the latter make excuses for Putin’s regime and many would see merit in the broad thrust of Etkind’s argument.

Likewise, the Russian democratic opposition almost unanimously sees the war as generated by systemic internal problems. They would agree with Aleksei Navalny, whom Etkind lauds as the champion of exposing corruption, in blaming the war on Russia’s “endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.” •

Russia Against Modernity
By Alexander Etkind | Polity Press | $30.95 | 176 pages

The post Russia’s war with the future appeared first on Inside Story.

A few days later president Joe Biden and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi tried a different approach. Modi was given the full state visit treatment: marching troops on the south lawn of the White House, a glitzy (vegetarian) dinner, lengthy talks and a special address to both houses of Congress. The two leaders signed a series of strategic business deals in key fields such as semi-conductors and space technology, and held a joint press conference. (Though if anyone was in any doubt who Modi’s primary audience was, the fact that he spoke in Hindi may have been a clue.)

The Biden–Modi summit communiqué, covering myriad arenas of cooperation and every major global issue, ran to fifty-eight numbered paragraphs: this was clearly not the product of the meeting itself, but of months of prior negotiation by the two countries’ diplomats.

Hard on the heels of these two summits came a third, on Thursday and Friday this week, this time involving not just two leaders but more than forty. Hosted by French president Emmanuel Macron, the “Summit for a New Global Financing Pact” brought together ministers from around eighty countries at the imposing Napoleonic Palais Brongniart in central Paris. And unlike the others, this encounter wasn’t largely for the photographs: over two days the meeting saw substantive and unexpected progress made on a range of issues to do with the financing of sustainable economic development in the global South.

The summit was an ad hoc event, not part of the United Nations, G20 or other regular governance mechanisms. It was proposed by Macron last November following discussions with the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, on her “Bridgetown Initiative” for global financial reform. Mottley’s plans, first articulated at the COP26 climate conference in 2021, aim to mobilise hundreds of billions of dollars in new public and private financing for climate-related investment.

Unusually, Mottley’s ideas got traction both with developed country heads like Macron and EU president Ursula von der Leyen, and with governments in Africa and among the “V20” group of climate-vulnerable nations. A remarkable consensus has arisen: on the eve of this week’s summit thirteen leaders from across the world issued a jointly written article calling for an urgent scaling-up of financial flows.

The summit filled out some of the detail. In a set of round tables on different topics on the Thursday, followed by an evening dinner for heads of government and two hours of talks on Friday morning, a number of specific proposals were presented and agreed. Well, sort of agreed: with the summit having no formal ability to make binding decisions, the French hosts asked countries to indicate which of the proposals they could support, and then set out in the final communiqué what had been discussed and how it would be taken forward. It was a clever way of preventing the biggest countries exercising veto powers and thereby generating a weak, lowest-common-denominator agreement.

The most significant announcement was that the richest countries had met their promise to reallocate US$100 billion of Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, to pay for poverty reduction and climate adaptation measures in developing countries. SDRs are the reserve currency used by the International Monetary Fund in times of financial trouble. In 2021, a huge US$650 billion of SDRs were issued to help countries through the Covid pandemic. But the problem was that the IMF constitution requires that SDRs go to countries in proportion to their shareholdings in the IMF, so the vast majority went to the richest countries who needed them least. In October 2021 they promised to give US$100 billion back, to be spent in the poorest countries — but up to now they had not done so.

After months of determined persuasion of his fellow leaders, Macron was able to announce in Paris that the figure had been reached. Only the most churlish of observers pointed out that the American contribution had still to be ratified by Congress, which might never happen.

You wait a long time for US$100 billion, and then two come along at once. Macron was also able to say that the US$100 billion in finance for climate change first promised by the developed world in 2009, and again in the Paris agreement of 2015, was also going to be achieved this year. A long time overdue, it was nevertheless a welcome statement that the developed world would (eventually) keep its promises. As several emerging economy leaders noted, those countries’ previous failure to do so has been a trust-depleting blight upon international relations for a long time.

Four issues dominated this week’s summit discussions. The first was reform of the World Bank and its regional counterparts, including the Asian, African and Inter-American Development Banks. Using capital provided by the richest countries, these banks provide low-interest (“concessional”) and commercial loans to emerging and developing economies, aimed especially at poverty reduction. But in recent years the banks have been heavily criticised as too slow and cumbersome, applying too many conditions and making overly cautious decisions, especially in comparison with the huge scale of lending now being undertaken by China.

Perhaps surprisingly, the United States has led the calls for reform. In Paris, treasury secretary Janet Yellen repeated her demand that the World Bank “evolve,” particularly by providing more money for climate investment. She found a willing partner in the bank’s new president, former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga, whose commitment to reform has been widely welcomed. Banga’s new definition of the World Bank’s purpose — “eliminating poverty on a liveable planet” — provided a neat acknowledgement that climate change and wider environmental sustainability must now be incorporated into everything it and the other multilateral development banks do.

But this was not enough for the African leaders present. Noting that the World Bank’s lending to the poorest countries will fall this year because much of it was “front-loaded” to deal with the crises of the last two, they called for an immediate increase in contributions from the developed nations. In pointed asides, several noted that when it came to Ukraine, the West has been able to find apparently unlimited sums of money for arms and aid without any budgetary constraints. Why not similarly for Africa?

In response, Yellen did promise new funds from the United States, and Banga said the World Bank would seek to squeeze more out of its balance sheet. But the kind of quantum leap in funding demanded by Africa will only come through a recapitalisation of the bank: that is, an injection of new equity by its major shareholders. The United States won’t commit to that now. But the word on the grapevine is that Biden is open to the idea if Banga can prove he can deliver reform.

And that in turn would open up another front: reform of the bank’s governance structure. Today, Western developed countries own just above 50 per cent of its shares, thereby maintaining control of an institution they have long regarded as theirs. But a new capital injection would also bring in more money from China and India, and thereby tip the balance of shareholding away from Western control. This is of course precisely what the global South would like to see, and equally precisely what makes the US most nervous. So we can expect some serious negotiation about this over the next year.

The second major agenda item was debt. The IMF estimates that around two-thirds of the lowest-income countries are now in “debt distress” or at risk of it, meaning that they are close to defaulting on the international loans they have received from richer countries, international institutions and private lenders. The rise in US interest rates over the last year has seen many of them spending over half of their government revenues on debt service payments, with devastating impacts on health and education budgets. It is clear that their debts need relieving, but talks with the most affected have failed to yield much progress over the last two years.

So it was welcome news that two of the most heavily indebted countries, Ghana and Zambia, had now reached agreement on debt restructuring packages. Separately, the Ivory Coast and France announced a “debt reduction and development contract” to convert a portion of the former’s debts into grants for poverty reduction and education.

At the same time, a number of countries and multilateral development banks announced that they would start using “natural disaster clauses” in their debt contracts. Pioneered by Grenada and Barbados, such clauses allow debt service payments to be suspended for two years when a borrowing country is hit by an extreme weather event such as a hurricane or major flooding, thereby releasing much-needed cash for clean-up and reconstruction efforts. With such events occurring ever more frequently, the widespread use of these clauses could prevent billions of dollars leaving vulnerable countries just when they most need the money.

Another initiative emerged during the summit when presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia and William Ruto of Kenya proposed the establishment of an expert review of the relationship between debt, nature and climate. The two leaders expressed concern that debt repayments were forcing countries to destroy rainforests and other biodiverse habitats. The review will examine proposals such as “debt for nature” swaps, in which creditors cancel debt in return for verifiable conservation efforts, and debt linked specifically to the achievement of climate action plans.

The third main issue was climate finance. In preparing the summit, France had called for a number of taxes to be considered as new sources of funding. But in the pre-summit negotiations, taxes on aviation, fossil fuels and financial transactions were ruled out. This left just one new tax on the table, a proposed levy on carbon emissions from shipping. Countries agreed to ask the International Maritime Organization to examine how such a levy could work. To the disappointment of some, though, the text failed to mention the possibility that some of the revenues could be used to compensate countries for the climate-related loss and damage they are experiencing. With the last round of climate talks having agreed a fund for this purpose but no money, this idea is likely to gather increasing support over the next year.

Fourth, the summit discussed how more funds can be provided by the private sector. For many years the holy grail in this field has been the mobilisation of private capital for clean energy and environmental conservation. With government budgets highly constrained, this was felt to be the only way in which the dollars flowing to developing countries could rise “from billions to trillions.” But these sums have so far proved elusive: asset managers have perceived the risks as too high and the rewards too few.

So in Paris countries welcomed an idea developed by Barbados’s economic adviser, Avinash Persaud. Persaud proposed a special facility to insure foreign investors against the risk that the returns they make could fall if the local currency declines in value. He pointed out that such risk can often be the difference between a renewable energy or agricultural project in an emerging economy looking profitable or not; he estimates that his proposed scheme could release tens of billions of new investment.

These discussions proved the value of summits in which leaders don’t turn up mainly for show but actually engage with the substance. Negotiations on the final communiqué had, of course, been taking place behind the scenes for several weeks. But they continued long after the meeting was due to close, as developing country leaders insisted that the wording on the urgency and scale of the funds required should be strengthened, and developed ones sought to limit the commitments they were being pushed into making.

It was not till late on Friday that the French government issued the final documents. They included, in addition to a statement of principles and decisions, a detailed roadmap setting out how each of the policy proposals discussed could be taken forward over the next eighteen months, at future meetings such as September’s G20 Summit in India, the World Bank Annual Meetings in October and the climate COP28 in Dubai in November–December.

No one came away from Paris thinking the job was finished. By 2030 the world will need to invest around US$2.4 trillion every year in sustainable development, of which around US$1 trillion will have to come from international flows. The world is still well short of such figures. But there was also little doubt that the summit had given new momentum to these efforts. This was perhaps best symbolised by an announcement on the sidelines of the event that a new Just Energy Transition Partnership, or JET-P, had been agreed between a range of Western countries and the government of Senegal, led by president Macky Sall.

JET-Ps are the new hope for development and climate financing: national plans for clean energy and industrial development backed by new public and private investment, both domestic and international. Three JET-Ps were announced last year, in South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam, all committing to phasing out the use of coal-fired power. In Senegal the plan involves — controversially — exploiting new gas reserves, but for the first time that will happen under an explicit commitment that these will subsequently need to be phased out again as the country aims for net-zero emissions.

In the long term this will be the real test of whether the summit was worth it. Can enough money be invested to give developing countries a new path to prosperity, one that doesn’t involve trashing their natural environments as the now-rich countries largely did at the same stage of development? Will financing partnerships like JET-Ps see emerging economies find a role supplying minerals and goods for the green industrial transitions that are now a central aim of economic policy in the United States, the European Union and China?

We shall discover the answers over the next decade. In the meantime attention will shift across the Atlantic. Under its new, outspoken president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil will host next year’s G20 Summit, where the decisions made in Paris will be brought back for a progress report and new commitments. Fittingly, this will coincide with the eightieth anniversary of the Bretton Woods summit in 1944, when the present global financial system was designed.

That meeting set a high bar. The usual summit handshakes and photo opportunities make it easy to be cynical. But sometimes meetings like these do actually change the world. •

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Taking place in the airy World Conference Centre in the former West German capital, the official title of the conference is the fifty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, and the fifty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation, both of them subsets of the better-known UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The delegates’ task is to take forward the agreements made at the twenty-seventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties, COP27, which took place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November last year, and prepare the 28th meeting, scheduled for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates this coming December.

If all this sound complicated, that’s not the half of it. The conference agenda sets out the many different negotiating tracks that previous COPs have set in train. It is a bewildering array of numbers, concepts, processes and former host cities.

Along with the second Glasgow Dialogue on Loss and Damage, there’s a meeting on matters relating to the Santiago Network under the Warsaw International Mechanism, also covering loss and damage; the seventh meeting of the Paris Committee on Capacity Building; the eighth meeting of the Katowice Committee on Impacts; a workshop under the Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh Work Programme on the Global Goal on Adaptation; not to mention a meeting on the as-yet-unlocated “rules, modalities and procedures for the mechanism established by Article 6, paragraph 4, of the Paris Agreement and referred to in decision 3/CMA.3.”

It is easy to be cynical, of course. But the negotiating agenda is not simply a make-work scheme for government officials. It reflects the reality that tackling climate change is a complex and multifaceted task involving not just every country in the world but also many different kinds of policy.

Debate in developed countries focuses mainly on climate “mitigation” — how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by decarbonising energy, transport, industry and agriculture. But the primary issues are different for poorer countries experiencing devastating floods, droughts and hurricanes, and changes to food production and water availability from rising temperatures. They are more interested in how to adapt to the changing climate and whether they will be compensated for the loss and damage they suffer — with both issues requiring the rich world to make good on its promise of financial and technical assistance. A complicated negotiating agenda is a small price to pay if it leads to any of that support being delivered.

Yet the question remains whether it will be. Although the Bonn conference continues the official UN process, it is in many ways not even the most important climate negotiation at the moment. Just two weeks ago the richest countries, meeting at the G7 summit in Japan, declared that this year they would finally reach the US$100 billion in annual climate financing they first promised at COP15 in Copenhagen fourteen years ago. And in two weeks’ time French president Emmanuel Macron will host an even more significant summit in Paris.

Macron’s aim is to establish a new financial pact between the global North and South to guarantee finance for environmentally sustainable and climate-compatible development. In Bonn, government officials are discussing processes and modalities intended to govern finance and other forms of assistance to countries in the global South. But in Paris, heads of government will be agreeing on actual money for renewable energy, adaptation and disaster prevention, potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars, via bilateral aid, World Bank lending and private sector finance. You could be forgiven for thinking that the official UN talks are a bit of a sideshow.

Not that controversy will be absent in Bonn. The fact that this year’s COP will be held in a Gulf oil state is the main focus for climate activists. With the UAE having helped water down COP27’s position on the phasing out of fossil fuels, the appointment of the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company as president of COP28 looked to many like a deliberate provocation. Sultan Al Jaber is in fact an experienced climate negotiator who, as former head of UAE’s investment fund Masdar, developed the country’s extensive global portfolio in renewable energy. But it was inevitable that his appointment to chair the UN climate talks would attract criticism.

Pointing out that Al Jaber’s company is hugely expanding its oil and gas production, the campaigning group Oil Change International has described his appointment as “a truly breathtaking conflict of interest… tantamount to putting the head of a tobacco company in charge of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.” More than 130 members of the US Congress and European Parliament have signed an open letter calling on him to be removed as COP28 president. His presence, they said, reflected the “undue influence” of fossil fuel companies over UN climate talks and “risks undermining the negotiations.” The fact that a UAE official was recently found to have edited Al Jaber’s Wikipedia page to remove such criticisms has only added fuel to the fire.

Al Jaber himself will brush off the controversy: as a close ally of the ruling family his position isn’t in jeopardy. But other countries will hope the furore embarrasses the UAE sufficiently to provoke some compensating action. The country has been making huge windfall profits from higher global energy prices in the past two years. What better way to demonstrate its commitment to the climate than by providing a few tens of billions of dollars in financing for the most vulnerable countries?

Elsewhere there is talk about reforming COPs themselves — not least in the United Nations, where the gulf between the linguistic complexity of the negotiating agenda and the practical requirements of dealing with climate change has not gone unnoticed. In quiet meetings behind the scenes this year the organisation has been canvassing views on how to bridge the gap.

It is not as if the rest of the world is absent from UN climate meetings. On the contrary: nearly 50,000 people are estimated to have attended COP27 last year, most of them representatives of businesses, investors, international organisations, NGOs and research institutes. These people come to the annual COPs to participate in a global climate conference and expo, with literally thousands of events and meetings alongside the formal negotiations.

Most of these attendees are focused on how to make progress in the real world: the new technologies being developed to cut emissions, the policies required to incentivise them, the financing available for investment, the research and data needed to monitor both the climate and climate actions, and the political campaigning to pressure corporations and politicians.

It’s in these spheres and among these kinds of players that climate action is really occurring, not in UN negotiations. The Paris Climate Agreement has been signed, and its detailed rulebook completed. Important issues are still to be resolved, not least on finance. But observers generally acknowledge that the focus of attention at COPs should really be on the real-world action, not the talks.

Up to a point, the UN already recognises this. Alongside the negotiations it convenes a wide range of partnerships between companies, countries, cities and researchers to develop and disseminate climate solutions. These cover technologies, business models and policies in a range of nine fields from energy to oceans, transport to land restoration. The question being posed for COP28 is whether this so-called Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action could move closer to centrestage.

Could a parallel conference be organised, alongside the negotiations, to present and discuss climate progress in the real world? Might this provide a forum where some of the major industries, companies and financial institutions that have made ambitious-sounding climate commitments over recent years — commitments critics often describe as little more than “greenwashing” — are called to account? As several observers have noted, this would be particularly appropriate for COP28, which will feature a “global stocktake” of action and inaction over the past eight years.

Typically, the question of whether COPs could be made more relevant to the real world won’t be on the negotiating agenda in Bonn over the next two weeks. But as ever in these thirty-year-old talks, it is as much what goes on in the corridors and during the time-outs that matters. There are six months still to go before the world reassembles in Dubai. It’s still possible that when it does so, it will find itself at a somewhat more useful gathering. •

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A closer look reveals grounds for optimism in relation to coal, the most polluting of all carbon-based fuels. With the important exception of China, construction of coal-fired power stations has virtually ceased. Coal-fired power is already in decline in most developed countries, notably including the United States. The brief bounce in Europe following the closing of Russian gas pipelines has already ended.

According to the International Energy Agency, solar PV and wind are meeting nearly all of the growth in global electricity demand. Solar cell production is expected to increase, as is the installation of wind power following Europe’s removal of a variety of planning restrictions.

If new solar PV and wind supply more electricity at zero marginal cost than is needed to meet increased demand, they will inevitably displace coal and gas generation. Existing plants must either run at lower capacity or else be scrapped. Since China is pushing ahead fast on solar PV, it is likely that many of the coal plants being constructed at the moment will become stranded assets.

All this suggests that global carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation will peak soon. But electricity accounts for only around a third of all carbon dioxide emissions. Transport’s energy transition is much less advanced, and that’s particularly the case with cars. The vast majority of cars on the road rely on internal combustion engines.

Demand for road travel and for motor vehicles certainly dropped sharply during the lockdown phase of the pandemic. As with most other things, though, demand bounced back as restrictions were lifted.

But this bounce obscured the fact that sales of internal-combustion vehicles had peaked even before the pandemic. A study by Bloomberg found that sales of petrol- and diesel-fuelled cars (including sales of traditional hybrids like the Toyota Prius) peaked at eighty-six million units in 2017, a year in which only one million battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles were sold.

In 2022, by contrast, sales of internal-combustion vehicles fell to sixty-nine million but plug-in hybrids and battery electrics rose about ten million. With the cost of batteries falling steadily and more models coming on to the market, these trends are unlikely to reverse. Importantly, and unlike coal-fired power, China has been a leader in the transition to electric vehicles, which have already captured more than a quarter of the market there.

Declining sales of internal-combustion vehicles don’t translate immediately into a smaller number on the road. This will only happen when the number of new cars falls below the number being scrapped. Most of the cars being retired now were built ten to twenty years ago, when sales were still rising. It’s for this reason that Bloomberg estimates the number of internal-combustion vehicles on the road to remain roughly constant for the next few years before starting to decline in earnest from 2026 onwards.

Defenders of the internal-combustion engine point to a variety of obstacles to a rapid transition. The most notable are the higher initial cost of electric vehicles and the limited availability of charging stations. Neither of these objections stand up to scrutiny.

The lifetime cost of an electric vehicle, taking account of lower maintenance and running costs, is already below that of comparable internal-combustion vehicles. And, with battery prices falling, the initial cost differential is also declining.

As for charging, the technology is far less complex than the process of fuelling an internal-combustion vehicle. Electric vehicles don’t require the elaborate chain from oil wells to refineries to specially constructed service stations.

The simplest solution, for most users, will be to charge overnight at home or during the day at a parking lot or parking garage. Plug-in hybrids can be charged overnight with an ordinary trickle charger. A normal home EV charging station, sufficient to charge a fully electric vehicle overnight, will cost between $1000 and $3000.

Rapid charging at service stations is also technologically simple, even if somewhat more expensive. The availability of such stations will readily increase in line with the growth in the electric vehicle fleet.

Against this background, US president Joe Biden’s new target — electric vehicles making up 50 per cent of sales by 2030 — seems eminently feasible. A question for the longer term is how we can get post-2030 internal-combustion vehicles off the road in time to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Given that a large proportion of vehicles run for twenty years or more, this won’t happen automatically.

One possibility is a version of the “cash for clunkers” scheme introduced in the United States and briefly proposed by the Gillard government in Australia. The US scheme involved subsidising people who traded in old gas-guzzlers and bought more fuel-efficient alternatives. The inadequately funded scheme — undermined by a complex and arbitrary set of rules about which cars could be traded in, which replacements were eligible and how the money was disbursed — was wound up fairly quickly.

A similar scheme to get internal-combustion vehicles off the road need not face the same difficulties. Once the sale of new petrol- and diesel-driven vehicles ended, complex trade-in requirements would be unnecessary; instead, a simple cash payment would be made for old vehicles. The scheme could be self-financing, with increased registration charges or petrol taxes also raising the cost of continuing to operate an internal-combustion vehicle.

As with the energy transition in general, the technological problems of a shift to electric vehicles have mostly been solved. The remaining questions are those of policy design and political will.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what still seems to be lacking in Australia. The Labor government’s electric vehicle strategy, announced this week, included a series of small-scale initiatives but no target dates or specific goals. It committed the government to developing a fuel-efficiency target that would presumably increase demand for electric vehicles, but gave no specifics, despite already having a plan on its books prepared by the Climate Change Authority under the Turnbull government.

On this, as on many other aspects of climate policy, Australia remains an international laggard. Neither of our major political parties seems much interested in changing that.

Fortunately, the rest of the world is acting. Internal-combustion vehicles are being abandoned by most major carmakers. If government action doesn’t drive the shift to electrics, technological obsolescence will do the job sooner or later. •

The post Time to get out of the slow lane appeared first on Inside Story.

Admittedly, he would barely have had to open his mouth to be seen as an improvement on his predecessor, Trump appointee David Malpass. Never popular, Malpass made something of an ass of himself last September when he appeared to deny the existence of global warming. He lasted just five more months before resigning, a year before the end of his term.

The system under which the United States appoints the president of the World Bank while Europe gets to choose the president of the International Monetary Fund is routinely denounced by developing countries. It is a postcolonial carve-up without justification in the modern age, except for the fact that the United States and European countries are the two organisations’ largest shareholders.

Banga’s positive reception can be put down to two factors: he is a genuine financier with a solid strategic and managerial record at Mastercard, and he grew up in India, where he is still regarded as one of their own. He spoke last week at a number of public and private events on the fringe of the spring meetings of the bank and the IMF. His audiences included finance ministers from well over a hundred countries, along with businesspeople, academics and representatives of NGOs, philanthropists and the financial media.

To wander among the packed fringe meetings in Washington, as I did, was to be given an education in global development policy, with topics ranging from renewable energy to emerging market currency risk, humanitarian assistance to climate-resilient agriculture, low-income country indebtedness to girls’ education. In these fields and others, the World Bank spends around US$100 billion annually via a combination of commercial loans to middle-income countries, low-interest loans to poorer countries, and grants.

The bank is the largest in the network of “multinational development banks,” or MDBs, that lends resources from developed to developing nations: the others include the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the much more recently established Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which China is the major shareholder.

Banga is arriving just as reform of this system is in the air. Last year US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen called on the bank to prepare a “roadmap” for change, with the aim of clarifying its mission and streamlining its procedures. As a draft of the roadmap was published in advance of the spring meetings, other voices sought to widen the agenda further. On a state visit to China, French president Emmanuel Macron called for a “new global financial pact” to revise “the financial terms of international solidarity, whether it concerns debt issue or mobilisation of the World Bank and IMF, to address both inequalities and the consequences of climate change.” He confirmed that Paris would host a summit in June to pursue these issues.

Three principal problems underlie calls for reform of the World Bank and MDB system. The first relates to changing conditions since the institutions were designed in the decades after the end of the second world war to help the developing world out of poverty. This remains their core mission, but in recent years new challenges have become increasingly pressing.

As resource depletion and habitat destruction gathered pace, the banks were forced to redefine themselves as champions not merely of economic growth but of “green growth.” As continuing income and gender inequalities disfigured many countries’ development records, “inclusive growth” became the mantra. Now, accelerating climate change not only threatens to overwhelm past growth but also demands a new form of development altogether, one that is both resilient to rising temperatures, and decarbonised.

It was Malpass’s inability to grasp these challenges that eventually did for him. But the necessary reorientation of the World Bank won’t be straightforward. The poorest countries know how damaging climate change is for them, but they warn that a greater focus on tackling carbon emissions will inevitably reduce funding for education, health and other traditional anti-poverty measures. Backed by India and China, they insist that any broadening of the bank’s remit must be accompanied by an expansion of its lending resources. Developed countries, however, are not minded to provide new funds — at least until they can see reform under way.

Second, the World Bank’s operating procedures have been widely criticised. Determined to protect the triple-A credit rating that allows it to borrow at the same interest rates as Western governments, the bank follows highly risk-averse lending policies. In many countries it competes with private banks to lend to commercially safe projects, leading commentators to question its added value. In an early reform agreed to in Washington, the bank will now be able to lend out more funds relative to its shareholder capital. But this will yield only an extra US$4 billion annually.

Meanwhile the bank’s own operating procedures are notoriously slow and cumbersome. Forced by its developed-country shareholders and NGOs to apply stringent environmental and human rights safeguards, and still using paper-based processes, the bank can often take two years to reach a decision on a lending application. As one African leader observed at a fringe event, “If I want a new road, I can be driving on the one that China builds us before the bank has put it to their committee.”

Third, the MDBs are being urged to mobilise far more private-sector lending. In a world in which developing countries need to invest an estimated US$2.4 trillion annually in green infrastructure, sustainable agriculture, nature conservation and climate resilience, the funds at the banks’ own disposal are not nearly sufficient. But getting the private sector to invest at scale in emerging markets other than China has proved difficult.

Even in stable economies like India, the interest rate charged on borrowings is twice as high as in a rich-world country; in Africa it can often be a multiple of three. New, more innovative approaches are thus being urged on the banks, involving greater use of risk-sharing instruments such as government guarantees and insurance mechanisms to protect against exchange rate fluctuations.

Can the World Bank and its sister institutions respond to these demands? The latest version of the bank’s reform roadmap was widely criticised in Washington as too limited and incremental. But blame-shifting was also rife: country shareholders pin the weak draft on unimaginative management; the latter say privately that it is the shareholders who have watered down their much bolder initial proposals.

Ajay Banga thus faces both great expectations and tough challenges. He has been clear about his own priorities. Integrating climate change into everything the bank does will be one of them; mobilising private sector cash another. And he warns he will be forthright whenever the real problem is not the bank’s bureaucracy but the unwillingness of its country shareholders to agree to something new.

The elephant in the room is the make-up of the shareholders themselves. As in any bank, voting rights reflect equity. Since the last set of reforms in 2010, China has been the third-largest shareholder in the bank’s main arm, after the United States and Japan. With other emerging and developing economies it now has 47 per cent of total shares. If, as seems likely, the bank receives another injection of capital next year consequent on reform and an expansion in its remit, that figure could rise to more than 50 per cent. But the United States and its Western allies will be loath to allow China the possibility of amassing a majority voting coalition.

In this context June’s Paris Summit promises to be pivotal. Working closely with Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley, originator of the ambitious “Bridgetown Initiative” for global financial reform, and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, chair of this year’s G20, Macron has set out an ambitious agenda for world leaders.

Focused on expanding global financial flows for development, climate and environmental protection, the summit will make World Bank and MDB reform one of several priorities. Others will be a review of the system under which developing countries fall into, and might escape, unsustainable debt; new funding streams for climate “loss and damage,” such as an international levy on carbon emissions from shipping; and the reallocation of Special Drawing Rights, the reserve currency issued by the International Monetary Fund, to poverty-reduction programs. If the “3M” leaders — Macron, Modi and Mottley — succeed, each of these issues will be taken forward to detailed decisions next year.

For his part, Ajay Banga has made clear that he is up for the idea of a “new global financial pact” along these lines. He may be their nominee, but the question is whether the United States and its Western allies are up for it too. •

The post Banking on Banga  appeared first on Inside Story.

But there are some bright spots. In particular, there’s a good chance that 2023 will be the year coal use finally begins a sustained decline, and therefore the year carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation start to fall. And the transition, once it begins in earnest, will accelerate rapidly.

This is by no means a sure thing. The International Energy Agency predicts that the current equilibrium, in which nearly all new electricity demand will be met by solar PV and wind, will be sustained for several years to come. That would leave coal and gas use almost unchanged. But the IEA has a long track record of underestimating solar and wind, and there are plenty of reasons to think that this has happened again

Total electricity demand is currently a bit over 25,000 terawatt hours a year, growing at an annual rate of around 3 per cent. So, to meet the growing demand, we need to generate an additional 750 terawatt hours from solar and wind. (Other carbon-free sources, such as hydro and nuclear, have been essentially static.)

Assuming solar PV generates at full power for 2000 hours per year, each gigawatt of solar capacity generates an annual two terawatt hours of electricity. Meeting additional demand with solar alone therefore requires adding 375 gigawatts of solar PV per year, with any shortfall made up by wind.

The good news is that is already happening. BloombergNEF estimates 315 gigawatts of solar will be installed in 2023, up from 268 gigawatts in 2022. Additions of wind power have been around one hundred gigawatts a year recently, which amounts to between 250 and 300 terawatt hours per year.

Assuming the 2022 installations are already connected to global grids, we should see a reduction in carbon-based electricity generation this year, followed by steadily larger reductions. That will be true even if electricity begins to substitute for oil and gas in transport, heating, cooking and so on.

Underlying this shift is the steadily decreasing cost of wind and, even more, solar power. This trend was interrupted by the supply shocks of the pandemic and Putin’s war, which led to a big increase in the price of polysilicon as well as coal and gas. But while coal and gas prices remain high, polysilicon, though still volatile, has dropped back to more normal levels.

More importantly, new investment in solar PV is raising production capacity even further. Polysilicon output is heading for 500 gigawatts by the end of this year — which will translate fairly quickly into production and installation of solar cells — and as much as 700 gigawatts by 2025. Installations on that scale would imply a rapid shutdown of existing coal-fired and gas-fired generation.

Is this feasible? In terms of simple economics, the answer is clearly yes. Solar PV and wind have been cheaper than new coal and gas for some time. In many places they are already cheaper than existing coal and gas. And, as the example of South Australia shows, the problems of intermittent supply can be resolved with a combination of battery storage, interconnection and a modest amount of gas-fired power, in a system which now relies on wind and solar for as much as 80 per cent of its power.

The task is even simpler where pumped hydropower is available for storage, or where existing nuclear power plants can supply any remaining demand for twenty-four-hour power. (New nuclear is hopelessly uneconomic.)

And technological progress continues apace. Commercially available solar cells now routinely exceed 20 per cent efficiency; new multi-junction technologies are approaching 50 per cent.

Concerns that shortages of “critical minerals” like lithium and cobalt will constrain the process appear misplaced. Some sources of these minerals — lithium brines and cobalt mines in Africa, for instance — are indeed problematic, as is China’s dominant position as a supplier of refined ores and batteries. But there are always alternative sources.

Australia has huge resources of lithium, derived from ordinary hard-rock mining. We are now developing a refining capacity, and could easily manufacture batteries for domestic use and export. Similarly, the price of cobalt has plunged recently, partly because of competition from lithium and partly because new supplies are available as a by-product of Indonesian nickel plants.

As the urgency of ending our reliance on coal, gas and oil has become more evident, supportive policies have reduced costs. The result is that solar panels are expected to become cheaper in 2023 and beyond. In Europe, the need to respond to the cut-off of Russian gas and oil has led to the removal of some of the NIMBY obstacles to wind farms and transmission lines that have delayed the transition.

The big exception to all of this is China, where coal-fired power has resurged. Up to one hundred new coal plants have been granted permits in the last year. This doesn’t make economic or geopolitical sense for China. It does, however, make plenty of sense for regional governments desperate to keep up a flow of large projects, both to maintain employment in coal-related industries and for the corruption opportunities such projects inevitably generate. It seems likely that most of these plants, if they are completed at all, will lose money and either close early or force the early closure of competing coal-fired plants.

In our current energy system, electricity is only part of the story, accounting for around a third of energy-related emissions. But electrification, based on carbon-free sources, is the only realistic path to decarbonising transport and producing the hydrogen needed to replace coal and methane gas in industrial uses. If this is to be achieved in reasonable time, even 700 gigawatts of new solar every year won’t be enough. Production will have to shift to terawatt scale.

There’s still no sign of the urgency needed here, certainly not in Australia. But in electricity at least, progress has been faster than seemed possible ten or even five years ago. •

The post Have we reached electricity’s carbon-free tipping point? appeared first on Inside Story.

The vessel’s fifteen-strong crew had completed the trans-Atlantic round trip in six months, of which I had spent five months aboard. Throughout its virus-disrupted odyssey via the Canaries, the Caribbean, Mexico and the Azores, the Avontuur had made her way almost entirely under sail.

A week after we arrived in Hamburg the International Maritime Organization released its fourth report on the climate impact of ships. This long, highly technical document looks at how emissions from international shipping are likely to evolve over the next few decades. Despite actions already taken to reduce greenhouse emissions, the report concludes, rather frighteningly, that emissions in 2050 will be between 90 and 130 per cent of what they were in 2008. That’s a 10 per cent drop at best, a 30 per cent increase at worst.

The IMO, the United Nations agency that regulates shipping, was a late starter in the carbon-reduction stakes. Only in 2018 did it set its first-ever target to reduce the billion tonnes of emissions produced annually by shipping. That’s two decades after the Kyoto Protocol mandated the IMO to regulate the industry. Much like large ships, the industry takes a long time — far too long — to manoeuvre.

Well before the IMO accepted that ships, too, would have to ditch fossil fuels and find other means of propulsion, several people thought they’d already found the solution: sails. Surely, they thought, if colonialism, the slave trade and empires could be built with sailing ships, the technology could serve global trade today.

Captain Paul Wahlen, a previous owner of the Avontuur, kept wind-propelled cargo transport alive during the last decades of the twentieth century, well after nearly everyone — including Melbourne-born sailor Alan Villiers — had given up on it. In the late 1990s, businesswoman Di Gilpin developed a modern ship that would incorporate the century of technological progress since the heyday of sail. In 2004, sailor Brad Ives took on the challenge of providing a reliable (although not necessarily punctual) shipping route between Hawai’i, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.

The quest continued. In 2007, the Dutch shipping company Fairtransport’s Tres Hombres, a 1943 brigantine, began carting up to fifty tonnes of cargo across the Atlantic and the North Sea in its hold. Since 2015, the Avontuur has operated as a sailing cargo ship again — this time under the ownership of Cornelius Bockermann, who runs the German shipping company Timbercoast.

Can sailing vessels like the Avontuur, the Tres Hombres and the Kwai really decarbonise the shipping industry? The short answer is no.

These wind-propelled cargo vessels are so small that the potential emissions savings for the planet are negligible. If the entire shipping industry is to make up the difference between its projected emissions (90–130 per cent of 2008 levels) and its current target (50 per cent of 2008 levels) by 2050, far more than a handful of small sailing cargo ships will be needed. Never mind that a 50 per cent reduction won’t keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, which the IPCC thinks vital for human life on earth.

But does that mean the work of the “sail cargo movement” is futile? I think not.

Sailing vessels like the Avontuur may not be capable of carrying eleven billion tonnes of cargo a year emission-free. But they do have an important role: they highlight the need to rethink how we ship things and how much of those things we need to consume.

Timbercoast, the German shipping company that runs the Avontuur, aims to accomplish “mission zero” — to entirely eliminate the pollution it causes — in five steps: raise awareness about the environmental destruction caused by the shipping industry; model a clean shipping future with Avontuur; sell premium Avontuur products to support the project; establish a demand for products shipped by sail; and build a modern sail cargo fleet.

Their message echoes what Patagonia, an outdoor clothing retailer, has long advocated: buy less, because excessive consumption harms the environment. This isn’t entirely selfless, of course: Patagonia and “sail cargo” companies like Timbercoast want to increase their own sales by providing an ethical alternative that appeals to consumers who buy in to their anti-consumerist pleas.

On the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, meanwhile, Sail Cargo Inc. is building the Ceiba, a new wooden ship. This vessel is designed specifically to operate as a wind-propelled cargo ship. The company “envisions a future where the demands of a global supply chain are dictated by conscious and responsible consumerism, employing a web of carbon-neutral delivery services.”

The French company Grain de Sail operates one ship by that name between Brittany, New York and the Dominican Republic. They carry French wine to New York, humanitarian goods to the Caribbean, and cacao mass back to France. A second ship with a far greater cargo capacity is now under construction.

To date, the most ambitious wind-propelled cargo project based on a traditional design is EcoClipper. The company is raising funds to build the first EcoClipper 500, a steel replica of the Dutch clipper ship Noach, originally built in 1857. The true ambition of EcoClipper lies in the scale at which the company aims to operate. It plans a fleet of clippers on Atlantic, Pacific and global routes, following the trade winds of yesteryear.

These “sail cargo” initiatives do more than proposing an alternative propulsion technology. They engage in hands-on climate activism. By expressing their ethics in a practical manner, these companies aim to show that downsizing and slowing down is not only an abstract ideal advocated for by “degrowth” environmentalists but also a practical possibility.

I joined the Avontuur in 2020 to find out what exactly that world could look like. My plan was to spend three weeks aboard, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Tenerife to Guadeloupe. Afterwards, I would visit the Astillero Verde, the “green shipyard” where the Ceiba is under construction, in Costa Rica. But that was in 2020, so none of my travels worked out as planned.

These small-scale traditionally rigged sailing ships are not the only ones turning to wind propulsion. More ambitious still, but of a very different ilk, are the modern sailing ships currently under construction or design. The Canopée will transport parts for the Ariane 6 launcher from France to French Guyana. The Oceanbird will transport cars for Wallenius. Neoline will operate between France and North America, while Veer and Windcoop vie to operate the first wind-propelled containerships.

Di Gilpin is now working on Smart Green Shipping, a new venture that combines hardware (sails that shipowners install on existing vessels) and software (to help crews find the best routes to harness wind). The Kwai, meanwhile, is now owned and operated by the Marshallese government, which is committed to reducing domestic shipping emissions by 40 per cent between 2010 and 2030.

Even so, emissions keep increasing year after year. The Avontuur‘s mission remains as important as ever: the shipping industry urgently needs to stop using fossil fuels. In July 2023, three years after I arrived in Hamburg, the IMO is expected to decide on a “revised strategy.” We can only hope this will bring their plans in line with a 1.5-degree future; if we can’t swiftly decarbonise shipping, we can’t solve the climate crisis.

Now I’m about to travel to the Marshall Islands for more fieldwork. This Pacific nation has the third-largest shipping sector in the world, but also pushes for the highest levels of ambition at the IMO. It’s at risk of losing many of its islands to rising seas, but it can’t afford more expensive shipping. That’s why the islanders are pushing for an energy transition that isn’t only environmentally ambitious, but is also equitable. So far, that’s proving easier said than done.

Later this year, I’m joining the Tecla to sail the Northwest Passage from Dutch Harbor in Alaska to Ilulissat in Greenland. We will be exploring a faultline in climate action: melting Arctic ice means the region is fast becoming a shipping shortcut between Asia and the Atlantic, saving on fuel, cargo vessels’ black carbon emissions speed up the ice melt and their underwater noise disturbs marine life. The region is already warming at a faster pace than almost anywhere on the planet.

Meanwhile, the Avontuur keeps sailing laps around the Atlantic. While it can’t compete on scale or speed, maybe it and the other “sail cargo” companies have a point. Slowing down and trading less might just be what the planet needs. •

The post Tack to the future? appeared first on Inside Story.

He would say that, wouldn’t he? But what was dismissed at the time as political hype is looking less improbable these days. In the dazzle of the seven teals storming home in previously safe Liberal seats in last year’s election, the Greens’ achievement in increasing their numbers by six — from one to four in the lower house and from nine to twelve in the Senate — has tended to be overlooked.

Representation in the Senate fell to eleven this week with the defection of Lidia Thorpe, the first Aboriginal senator from Victoria and the Greens’ First Nations spokesperson, over her advocacy of a No vote in this year’s referendum. But the loss of her Senate spot has the upside of ending a damaging internal split over the Voice.

In Victoria, although the party’s predictions of a “greenslide” in November’s election didn’t eventuate, its representation rose from three to four in the Legislative Assembly and from one to four in the Legislative Council. In a long and continuing journey, the Greens have not so much stormed the barricades as crept up on opponents who have habitually underestimated them.

Not so long ago, winning seats in lower houses was considered a hurdle too high for independents or minor parties. The Labor and Liberal parties simply had too much of a head start when it came to exceeding 50 per cent of the two-party vote.

Not anymore. Labor is in power in Canberra with less than a third of the first-preference vote — below its losing result under Bill Shorten in 2019 — while the Coalition parties did only slightly better on primaries (but a lot worse on preferences). Increasingly it is Labor and Liberal preferences that are being distributed to independents and smaller parties rather than the other way around.

It is thirty-three years since the Greens first won a place in the Senate, where proportional representation lowers the barrier for election to 14.3 per cent in a typical half-Senate election. That was with the election of Western Australia’s Jo Vallentine, who had previously represented the Nuclear Disarmament Party in the Senate.

In 1990, the Greens’ lower house vote was just 1.4 per cent; even though environmental issues were prominent that year, it was the Australian Democrats, with 11.3 per cent in the lower house, who benefited, together with the Hawke government, courtesy of Democrat preferences.

When Brown entered the Senate in 1996, he and Dee Margetts from Western Australia were the party’s sole representatives. At the following election the party’s national vote was still only 2.6 per cent in the lower house and 2.7 per cent in the Senate. Since then, the party has been on a mainly upward trajectory, though not without fluctuations and setbacks.

A significant shift upwards started in 2001, and by the 2010 election, when climate change policy was prominent, the Greens vote reached 11.8 per cent in the House and 13 per cent in the Senate. That was the year the party broke through in the lower house, with the election of Adam Bandt in the previously safe Labor seat of Melbourne. (Michael Organ had won a lower house seat for the Greens in a by-election the Liberals didn’t contest in the NSW seat of Cunningham in 2002 but was defeated in the general election in 2004.)

Twenty-ten was also the year the Greens had their first taste of real power — and its consequences — at the federal level. Their alliance with Julia Gillard’s minority government produced an agreement on climate change measures, but the association with her increasingly unpopular administration, defeated at the hands of a rampaging Tony Abbott in 2013, rubbed off. The Greens lost more than a quarter of their 2010 vote. But they resumed their upward trajectory in the next and subsequent elections.

In last year’s election, the Greens’ vote went up to 12.3 per cent in the House of Representatives and 12.7 per cent in the Senate. Its lower house vote was a record, whereas its Senate vote was marginally below its previous high. There might never have been a better time to stand for election representing anyone other than the major parties, but the competition for the minor-party and independent vote had also intensified.

According to the Australian Election Study — the detailed survey conducted by academics after each election — 24 per cent of the people who voted for the teals in 2022 had supported the Greens in the 2019 election. That was more than the 18 per cent who had previously voted for the Liberals.

Combined with the 31 per cent of teal supporters who had voted Labor in 2019, this at least partly tactical voting put the teals into parliament. They also reduced the Greens’ overall vote, though not in the seats that mattered. To the contrary, the party boosted its numbers in the House of Representatives from one to four, with the re-election of Bandt for a fifth term, and three seats in inner Brisbane won with strong grassroots campaigns, including two taken from the Liberal National Party

On one view, the Greens have reached or are close to the upper limit of their vote, except now in Victoria. Increasing their representation in the Senate will certainly be difficult for the foreseeable future, given they already have two senators in each state. But in the lower house the argument that the party has hit a ceiling is based partly on three assumptions that are looking outdated.

One is that a vote for the Greens is wasted because they can’t win. Increasingly, in inner-urban seats, that’s no longer true.

Another is that the party is too radical and left-wing to command mainstream support. So how come it’s winning Liberal seats? Possibly because the whole notion of left and right is breaking down, at least among younger voters.

The third assumption is that the Greens can’t overcome the dominance of the major parties and their habit of stealing any of their opponents’ policies that attract significant support. That tactic is becoming much harder for the big parties because they’re shedding support at both ends: the Liberals are losing votes to the teals on the one hand, and to One Nation on the other, while Labor struggles to straddle the gap between more conservative voters in the suburbs and those attracted to the Greens in the inner cities. And then there is the Brisbane factor, where community activism and volunteering, together with a solid base in local government, means Greens are identifying better than other parties with real voters.

Demographics are also working in the Greens’ favour. Better-educated voters are more likely to vote Greens and their numbers are rising as a proportion of the population. Younger voters are much more likely to support the Greens and more likely than in the past to keep doing so as they get older, countering the effect of an ageing population. Concern about global warming has been rising among the general voting population and it has been rising more among the young.

The greatest challenge for the Greens is spreading beyond its base in the inner cities. The suburban vote is large and — combined with the country vote in the case of the Coalition — that means there is still a long way to go to replace a big party.

Not that this deters Bob Brown who, when I contacted him for an update, stuck unhesitatingly to his prediction of the Greens as an unstoppable force. “I think it is too slow, but it’s inevitable and inexorable because the old parties — Labor, Liberal and National — simply can’t change from being in favour of widespread exploitation of nature,” he says. “These days I liken it to the slowly rising sea levels: people aren’t taking notice until the next storm hits.”

If the Albanese government remains popular — a big ask for any government these days — it may be able to stave off further Greens advances. But that can’t be taken for granted. The big risk for Labor is defections by supporters who think the government is not doing enough to tackle climate change.

The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss, who has worked for the Greens in the past, sees a particular vulnerability in the government’s position on coal and gas exports. “Labor for decades has focused on domestic emissions reductions, and they have always been slightly more ambitious than the Liberals and that has always been enough to win them first or second preferences on climate change,” he tells me. “Labor’s blind spot is supporting new coalmines and gas wells and arguing it doesn’t matter because they don’t count towards Australia’s emissions. This is an enormous opportunity for the Greens and the teals.”

The government argues that it is doing no more than following international practice in counting emissions where they are generated. But the United Nations and the International Energy Agency, among others, have said there can be no new coal and gas projects if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. The Greens claim 114 such projects are waiting for approval in Australia.

Underlying the government’s approach is the hope that the market will get it off the hook: that falling demand for coal and, in the longer run, gas will see many projects shelved. That means it won’t bear the odium for blocking development and jobs. In the meantime it has supported the development of the giant Scarborough gas project off the Western Australian coast, although on one estimate it could produce three times Australia’s current annual domestic emissions over its lifetime.

Environment minister Tanya Plibersek said last year that it was not sustainable or reasonable in a modern economy like Australia to argue for a stop to mining (overstating the Greens’ policy of no new coal or gas projects). Besides, so goes the refrain, other countries will simply buy their fossil fuels from somewhere else.

The trouble is that the United Nations and the International Energy Agency say that’s not good enough. Particularly not, so the Greens argue, since Australia is the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels and new projects will mean we miss our targets for emissions reduction.

Labor is caught politically on this issue. Stopping what has been an important source of Australia’s wealth would create a sizeable target for the Coalition, as would the risk of domestic gas shortages, though that should be avoidable. But the hypocrisy of its present policy creates the real risk of further haemorrhaging to the Greens.

The teals aren’t buying the government’s arguments either. Sophie Scamps, who won the Sydney seat of Mackellar from the Liberals, said in September it was hard to believe that “new coal and gas projects are being assessed and approved without any consideration given to the future impact that emissions from these projects will have on our environment and on our nation.”

But the Greens have their own dilemma: they need to avoid being seen as wreckers. After making loud threatening noises over the legislation enshrining Labor’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target, they ended up supporting it after securing minor concessions. Now the party is ramping up the rhetoric over the bill for the safeguard mechanism, which requires major polluters, including those opening new gas wells, to gradually reduce their emissions.

Bob Brown’s arguments about the Greens’ future notwithstanding, nothing is inevitable in politics. Independents and smaller parties have come and gone in the past. The Democratic Labor Party, formed from a split in Labor in the 1950s, maintained representation in the Senate for two decades and helped keep Labor out of office for twenty-three years by directing its preferences to the Liberals. The Australian Democrats, founded by former Liberal minister Don Chipp “to keep the bastards honest,” were a force on the centre left of politics for more than three decades. They have both faded to near irrelevance.

But the Greens are looking increasingly like a permanent fixture. Apart from their federal representation, the party has twenty-seven MPs in state and territory parliaments and more than one hundred in local government.

With growth, though, have come some of the same issues that make life difficult for the main parties. Stephen Luntz, the party’s long-serving Victorian psephologist, identifies three streams within the party: social democratic, a more radical or Marxist grouping, and a pure environmental strand. “We do best when we manage to harness those altogether,” he says. “There are times when we don’t and some members seek to push others out.”

This has been evident particularly in New South Wales (though also in Victoria), with outbreaks of factional fighting, threatened splits and resignations. In last year’s federal election, the Greens’ vote in New South Wales was 10 per cent, well below the national average of 12.3 per cent.

In Victoria, meanwhile, a brawl over perceived attitudes to transgender members escalated at the end of last year to an extraordinary threat to expel the Victorian Greens from the national party, which happens to be headed by Victoria’s Adam Bandt.

Going into next month’s state election in New South Wales, the party nevertheless has three seats in each of the two houses of parliament. The trend away from the main parties, reinforced by both the federal and Victorian elections, provides opportunities, though optional preferential voting will make it harder for the Greens to win lower house seats.

To date, the Greens have enjoyed the luxury of a party seldom held responsible for implementing its policies. Twice when it wielded real influence it suffered politically. In 2009, Labor blamed it for blocking the Rudd government’s legislation for an emissions trading scheme because it wanted something better. In 2013 it used its alliance with the minority Gillard government to negotiate significant measures to tackle climate change but was hurt by the association with a divided and unpopular Labor Party.

With more MPs in the current parliament, the Greens are walking a fine line between taking a stand against new coal and gas mines and not blocking progress on tackling climate change. The extent to which the party carries off this balancing act will help determine its future trajectory.

But the climb up the electoral mountain will get steeper as more attention is paid to Greens policies and the consequences of implementing them inevitably arouse controversy. That is the price of power. •

The post Walking a fine line appeared first on Inside Story.

After ten days of talks between officials end in deadlock, pairs of ministers (one from a developed country, the other from a developing one) are charged with seeking out compromises on the major issues. After two more days, still largely deadlocked, the ministers hand over to the host country’s COP president — this year, Egypt’s foreign minister Sameh Shoukry — to try to produce a compromise text. The president initially develops what are essentially shopping lists of options that define the differences between different countries’ positions but do little to resolve them.

By now it is Friday morning, and the conference is due to end at 6pm. The negotiations fall silent as the president takes further “soundings.” The exhibition halls and food stations are dismantled; anyone who isn’t a country delegate, UN staffer, journalist or NGO analyst leaves for home, their COP done. Six o’clock comes and goes. A new text is shown to the heads of delegation at 3am on Saturday morning, but there are no printed versions and phones are confiscated so they can’t take photos. The president again retreats to his cell, inviting individual ministers in for more hours of bilateral contemplation.

Finally, at 1pm on Saturday, a new compromise text is published. The major negotiating groups go into separate meetings to discuss how much they dislike it. The compromise is “unbalanced,” each of them says, leaning too far towards the other side. The groups take a long time to work through the various documents, not least because many countries are members of more than one group. (China, for example, is part of the “G77 and China,” which includes all the countries deemed “developing” when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992, but also part of a much more tightly knit and hardline “Like-Minded Group” with India, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.)

Teams of NGO analysts pore over the documents, examining what has shifted and what has not, and issue briefings to grateful journalists on-site and geeky campaigners back home. As the concluding plenary is postponed multiple times amid further consultations, and the meeting climbs up the league table of “longest-ever COPs,” bets are taken on when it will end.

By Saturday evening most COPs have at last finished, with a compromise agreement no one likes but everyone is too exhausted to oppose. The process is masochistic because it’s the delegates themselves prolonging their own irritable sleeplessness. It’s sado- because the only other people left are sad individuals who still care. Your correspondent included.

COP27 seemed determined to inflict even more pain than normal. By Saturday midnight, leaks revealed that Saudi Arabia had introduced new text not just watering down but reversing the opposition to fossil fuels. Britain’s head of delegation, Alok Sharma (president of last year’s COP26 in Glasgow), was spitting, while the venerable US deputy head Sue Biniaz — John Kerry by this time confined to his hotel with Covid — was seen talking at length on two phones. Presumably one was to Kerry; was the other the White House?

It’s now 2am and journalists and NGO staffers are sprawled out on chairs asleep. The Egyptian presidency announces there will be a plenary between 3am and 6am. It actually starts at 4am. When it does, it seems that final texts have at last been agreed. Shoukry takes no chances. Post-last-minute amendments have been made at this stage in the past (in fact, last year). He names the key document. “Seeing no objections,” he says, not looking up to the hall in case he sees any, “it is so decided,” and bangs his gavel down. Further pauses ensue, more documents are approved, but at around 6am on Sunday morning the texts have been concluded.

Not that it’s actually finished at this point. A further three hours of speeches come from the floor, as countries and negotiating groups explain their grudging welcome for some aspects of the text and their deep disappointment at others. It’s not till past 9am, fourteen days after the conference opened and nearly forty hours after it was due to close, that we can say that another COP is over.

Was it worth it? In the end, just two significant decisions caused all the conflict. The first was “loss and damage,” UNFCC-speak for the economic and human costs faced by developing countries as a result of the greenhouse gas emissions of developed ones over the past two centuries.

Loss and damage was recognised as a concept in the Paris climate agreement, but with a huge caveat: the developed countries secured an explicit exemption from legal liability for the multibillion-dollar impact of a warming world.

For the same reason the developed countries have held out against any kind of financing mechanism for loss and damage, which would require both more aid money and the tacit acceptance of moral responsibility. For the last six years, as developing countries’ demands for a loss and damage “finance facility” surged ever more strongly, the developed countries held them off with a variety of designed-to-be-useless discussion forums.

But this year the dam broke. After John Kerry had spent the first ten days insisting that the United States could not and would not support a financing facility or a fund, with the European Union equally adamant, each produced a new draft on the final Friday accepting just that. It was surprisingly poor diplomacy on their part: if they actually were prepared to concede this (and most observers thought they would have to), they would have gained much more credit by doing so early in the conference.

Crucially, this would also have given them a much better chance of winning their primary condition of support, namely that China could no longer hide behind its historical “developing country” status and would have to contribute to the funding pool as well. By leaving it so late to concede the creation of a loss and damage fund, the United States and the European Union wasted the opportunity to put public pressure on China, and the final wording included merely a vague reference to “other sources” of financing beyond the developed nations.

Nor was any actual money promised for the fund. Before that happens, further consultation on what precisely the fund can be used for, which countries will be eligible, and how it will be governed will proceed for at least a year. Nevertheless, this was a historic moment for climate-vulnerable countries, whose delegates were exhausted but jubilant at the end.

Ultimately, though, the more contentious final issue was fossil fuels. Last year, for the first time, the COP addressed not just greenhouse gas emissions in the abstract, but also their direct causes in the combustion of fossil fuels. A scientifically self-evident but nevertheless unprecedented bit of text was agreed noting that holding warming to the 1.5°C temperature limit would require the “phasing down” of coal use. (China and India baulked at the last at the aim of “phasing out.”)

In Sharm el-Sheikh the vulnerable countries’ and NGOs’ goal was an agreement that such phasing down should apply to all fossil fuels (that is, also oil and gas) and not just coal. Their cause was surprisingly taken up by India, keen to deflect attention from its still-abundant coal use.

But Saudi Arabia and next year’s COP hosts, the United Arab Emirates, were not having that. No doubt with a little gentle pressure on their import-dependent neighbour Egypt, they instead redefined “clean energy” to include “low-emission” fuels as well as renewables. By “low emission” they mean gas, a much lower-emitting fuel than oil, but not in the slightest a near-zero one in the manner of hydro, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal or nuclear. To the anger of many, the Gulf states’ language made it into the final agreed text.

The significance of these textual niceties is often overplayed. Nothing in general COP decision text is legally binding, and no petro-state will change its behaviour as a result of it. Last year’s bitter endgame argument over whether coal should be “phased out” or merely “phased down” was a case in point: without a date for phasing out, the two phrases in practice mean the same.

Yet the Sharm el-Sheikh language approving “low-emission fuels” as part of emissions reduction plans is a serious blow to the climate action cause. It will be used to justify the expansion of gas production and consumption everywhere this is government policy, giving the apparent seal of approval of the UN climate regime. The climate-vulnerable countries and NGOs were aghast; it was this issue that took the talks into the small hours on Sunday morning.

It won’t only be the Gulf states, however, who are pleased. One of the most insistent arguments running through COP27 pitched a range of African countries against the European Union and NGOs over the financing of gas. Africa has a lot of unexploited gas resources, and the countries under whose territory they lie are understandably keen to exploit them. Yet it is also true that keeping within the 1.5°C goal will require, as the International Energy Agency has pointed out, the cessation of all new oil and gas (as well as coal) production anywhere in the world.

The European Union and NGOs insist that Africa could supply all its energy needs through solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable resources. But that’s not the issue. The value of gas is in the foreign exchange it earns — a major source of the hard currency dollars to which few African countries have much access. They are simply not going to pass the opportunity up — and particularly not at the behest of a hypocritical Europe that built its own wealth on fossil fuels and is currently scouring the world for new gas contracts to make up for lost Russian supply.

In fact, the issue of African gas heralds the emergence of a new era in climate policymaking. It’s a focus on the so-called “just transition”: the principle that decarbonisation strategies must be aimed not just at cutting emissions but also at providing alternative sources of jobs and livelihoods in the process.

As countries get serious about tackling climate change, moving from generalised target-setting to specific economic policymaking, this imperative is coming to the fore. African countries desperate to reduce poverty and develop into middle-income economies won’t allow decarbonisation to stop them. And nations already dependent on homegrown fossil fuels will only be willing to reduce their dependence if they can see a viable alternative source, not just of domestic energy, but also of employment and foreign exchange earnings.

The argument over fossil fuels in the final text was symbolic, but in this context it was not nearly the most important development at COP27. That came in two separate announcements that were not part of the formal conference but merely part of its fringe; and indeed one of which was not made in Egypt at all.

During the first week of COP27 the government of South Africa announced a new US$8.5 billion “Just Energy Transition Partnership,” or JET-P, with the United States, the European Union, France, Germany and Britain. It aims to transform South Africa’s energy and industrial landscape by reducing its dependence on coal, increasing its renewable supply, upgrading its electricity grid, and developing its car manufacturing sector to become a domestic and global supplier of electric vehicles.

For a country that employs 92,000 coalminers, and whose giant, sclerotic state-owned energy company, Eskom, is unable to prevent regular blackouts across the country, this is a hugely ambitious program. The loans and loan guarantees from the donor countries will barely begin to cover the scale of the investment needed, but it is hoped they will leverage in orders of magnitude more from the private sector.

Even more importantly, the political challenges will be enormous. In a country already experiencing social unrest as a result of the rising cost of living and persistently high levels of unemployment, laying off coalminers could be a recipe for trouble. The coalmining union is one of the bastions of political support for the country’s ruling African National Congress. During the year-long consultation process the government undertook to prepare the partnership plan, it was clear that many sections of the public remain to be convinced that reducing coal consumption is in the country’s interest, or will make their own lives better.

The same challenge also faces the government of Indonesia, which, a week after South Africa, announced its own Just Energy Transition Partnership with the United States, Japan and others. This time the package of loans and guarantees was worth US$20 billion. The announcement was made not in Sharm el-Sheikh but in Bali, where Indonesia was hosting the annual G20 summit. But it had the same COP27 resonance: another huge coal-producing nation choosing ultimately to leave the coal in the ground and pledge its long-term future to renewable and geothermal energy. The partnership plan envisages Indonesia embarking on an industrial strategy designed to exploit the country’s world-leading nickel and tin mining to create battery factories and other high-technology plant.

If the world is to succeed in cutting greenhouse emissions at the same time as enabling developing countries to grow and to modernise, these JET-Ps, or something like them, are surely the form it will take. Vietnam is currently in talks with the Western powers to do the next deal, and India is making interested noises as well. It has not escaped anyone’s notice that such partnerships are potentially a means by which the West can offer developing countries financial assistance — and political influence — to rival those of China’s huge Belt and Road Initiative.

More widely, the principle of the “just transition” is likely to be the basis for much climate policy over the coming years. It already informs Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, whose trillion-dollar subsidies for green energy and industrial production are conditional on components being sourced from US manufacturers (or those within the North American Free Trade Association, namely Canada and Mexico), a fact which has led the European Union to threaten to take the United States to the World Trade Organization for breaching trade rules.

This is essentially a form of green protectionism — but it is also surely the inevitable political consequence of serious decarbonisation. Moves away from fossil fuels and energy-intensive industry will only be supported by the workers and communities affected if alternative jobs and livelihoods are on offer. Imposing domestic supply chains may not be economically efficient according to neoclassical free-trade theory, but in the eyes of any politician it makes perfect political sense.

Although these issues were animatedly discussed in COP27 fringe meetings — there was an entire pavilion devoted to Just Transition policy, sponsored by the International Labour Organization — very few measures or proposals entered the decision text. But they almost certainly will in due course.

COP27 has demonstrated the notable shift that has occurred since the 2015 Paris agreement. Before then, COPs came first, setting out principles and mandating national action, which countries subsequently followed. Today the order has been reversed. Countries are designing and implementing policies for mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. If a few years later they get mentioned in COP texts as important examples to follow, that is just a bonus.

This is indeed how it should be. The Paris climate agreement sets out the principles and legally binding rules of climate action, with more detailed regulation negotiated at subsequent COPs. But now the international rules are in place, the focus of debate must inevitably shift to the national political arena, where policy is made and politics rule. Given how tortuous they have become, that COPs have less and less for their negotiators to do is a boon to them as well as to the watching world. •

The post Agreement by ordeal appeared first on Inside Story.

It takes twenty-five minutes in an overpriced taxi, and longer in a free shuttle bus, to get from either end of the coastal strip to the UN COP27 venue, which has been specially constructed in temporary buildings around the international convention centre. When the conference palls, the bright lights, loud music and traditional Egyptian belly dancers of the Naama Bay strip inevitably have their appeal. “It’s like Las Vegas,” one delegate said, “only not as highbrow.”

Nevertheless, this is where COP27 is taking place, and it’s the scene of plenty of serious negotiation and debate. The Leaders’ Summit in the first two days was notable mainly for the traffic jams caused by presidential convoys and tight security. Although the speeches didn’t generally rise very far to the occasion, they served their allotted purpose: forcing heads of government to declare in front of their domestic TV audiences that climate change is an urgent priority and they are committed to stronger action to combat it.

The two most eagerly awaited speeches were not actually scheduled for the summit itself. Fresh from his unexpected triumph in the US midterm elections, Joe Biden arrived in the largest convoy of all a couple of days after the other leaders had left. In his usual inimitable monotone, he declared that the American Inflation Reduction Act — his administration’s unprecedented package of climate change measures, which finally got through Congress in August — would enable the United States to meet its 2030 emissions targets, driven by investment in new technologies and American enterprise.

The president also declared the United States would provide more help to developing nations to combat a climate crisis that concerned “human security, economic security, environmental security, national security and the very life of the planet.” Climate wonks poring over the text could find little new support that had not already been announced, but the general uplift from Biden’s presence was evident. A grateful audience gave him a standing ovation, not something hard-bitten COP delegates are wont to do.

The other eagerly awaited leader has only just arrived. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, fresh from his even more momentous election victory, will make his speech today, and his ovation will be even longer. Under the far-right, Trump-imitating Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has gone from climate leader to renegade destroyer of the Amazon, and the relief among the climate community to have Lula back in power is palpable.

Without control of Brazil’s Congress, the returning president may struggle to pass the environmental legislation he wants, but he will beef up security protection for forest lands and indigenous peoples, and commit to “net zero deforestation” in the future. He has already made clear that he will be a regional and global champion for climate action, and in a geopolitical world riven by tension between the big Northern hemisphere states — the United States, China, the European Union, Russia and India — there are high hopes for his Southern leadership.

If the big countries inevitably take up the largest space in UN climate conferences — commensurate with their outsized emissions pouring into the atmosphere — there is nevertheless always room at COPs for the small nations to make a mark. It is one of the more remarkable features of the thirty-year-old UN climate regime that decisions have to be reached by consensus, which gives otherwise internationally invisible and powerless countries a crucial role. Coupled with the fact that the poorest countries most vulnerable to climate change — the small islands of the Pacific and Caribbean, low-lying nations such as Bangladesh and glacier-melting ones like Nepal — are the evident victims of a climate crisis they didn’t cause, this creates a rather remarkable dynamic.

At the Paris COP in 2015, it was the tiny Marshall Islands that led the High Ambition Coalition with the European Union and the United States that drove the final treaty negotiations to an unexpectedly radical conclusion. And in Sharm el-Sheikh it is Vanuatu and Tuvalu that have made the early headlines. They have been reiterating their request for an International Court of Justice ruling on the legal liability of rich countries and companies for the historical emissions that threaten their island existence. The two countries have demanded that the world agree a “Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty” to manage the global phase-out of coal, oil and gas.

The most powerful speech at the Leaders’ Summit also came from a small island. The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, was the standout speaker at last year’s COP26, and retained her top spot in the unofficial charts with another remarkable and insightful contribution here.

Mottley’s rhetoric transfixed the hall. “We have the collective capacity to transform,” she told the heads of government sitting in the rows of seats in front of her. “We’re in the country that built pyramids. We know what it is to remove slavery from our civilisation… to find a vaccine within two years when a pandemic hits us… to put a man on the moon. And now we’re putting a rover on Mars. We know what it is. But the simple political will that is necessary, not just to come here and make promises, but to deliver on them and to make a definable difference in the lives of the people whom we have a responsibility to serve — this seems to be still not capable of being produced.”

Mottley’s core argument was that the international financial system isn’t working for poor and middle-income countries, like Barbados, that want to move to net zero emissions and cope with the devastating climate change they are already experiencing. They cannot access the finance or the technology to do so. She laid the blame squarely on the World Bank, the IMF and their developed country shareholders. “This world,” she said, “looks still too much like it did when it was part of an imperialistic empire.”

Mottley is not, however, content with rhetoric. Over the last few months she has been promoting a new plan for financial reform dubbed the Bridgetown Initiative after the Barbados capital in which it was hatched with her adviser, economist and former investment banker Avinash Persaud. And it has been getting increasing traction at COP27.

At the core of the plan are three innovative reforms that between them could galvanise more than US$1 trillion of new finance for climate-compatible development, including emergency help to countries hit by extreme weather events, and low-cost lending for emissions reduction investments.

The first is to get the World Bank, along with the other multilateral development banks, or MDBs, in Africa, Latin America and Asia, to use their capital base more expansively. These banks are all funded by the richer countries to provide concessional lending to developing ones. But the World Bank in particular has become deeply risk-averse. Highly protective of the triple-A rated status of its bonds, it has refused to use its healthy balance sheet to increase its lending capacity.

A recent expert report commissioned by the G20 group of nations found that between them the MDBs could lend an extra US$500 billion or more if they slightly relaxed their risk appetite and capital accounting procedures and better utilised government guarantees.

Second, Barbados has been pioneering “disaster clauses” in its debt contracts. These are stipulations that if a country borrowing money from private or public creditors experiences a predefined extreme weather event, all its debt repayments will be postponed for two or more years. Given how much many developing countries are forking out in debt repayments, such clauses immediately release millions of dollars of liquid funds for disaster relief and reconstruction and public service budgets. The creditors get repaid on a later schedule, but with the interest they have lost made up, removing any financial loss. Barbados is proposing that such clauses should become standard practice in all sovereign debt contracts.

Third, Mottley has called for a new issuance of Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, the reserve currency the IMF is empowered to release to support the global financial system. She proposes that these SDRs be put into a trust fund that can then back new lending for emissions reduction investments such as renewable energy, methane control and forest and land management. For most developing countries, the cost of capital is simply too high to enable them to borrow for such priorities.

Where developed countries with strong currencies can borrow on international markets at 3 to 5 per cent, most developing countries — including relatively stable, growing ones such as India and South Africa — face interest costs at least three times higher. Barbados proposes that the new fund should auction its lending capacity to the projects, wherever they are located, that can achieve the highest and fastest emissions reductions.

These reform ideas are not the only ones circulating at COP27. The V20 group of climate-vulnerable nations has produced its own suggestions for new financing mechanisms, and innovative ideas are being produced by academics and civil society organisations, including a plan for the cancellation of developing country debt in return for commitments to verifiable climate action plans.

Mottley used her short stay in Sharm el-Sheikh to discuss her ideas with other leaders. French president Emmanuel Macron duly called for an expert group to look at the Bridgetown Initiative and other proposals and make rapid recommendations on their implementation to the international financial institutions and their shareholder nations next year.

And in the negotiating sessions that have followed, ministers from other countries have gone further. Several have called for a review, not just of individual funding mechanisms, but of the entire international financial system. Many countries are today experiencing once again the problem of the dominance of the US dollar. As American interest rates rise, their own currencies are depreciating, making imported energy, food and manufactured goods more expensive and raising the cost of dollar-denominated borrowing. Another global debt crisis looms, with more than forty countries in or at risk of debt distress, according to the IMF. When the United States catches a cold, one delegate noted, the rest of us get flu.

So an even bigger agenda is beginning to make its way into COP speeches and debates. The present international financial system and its institutions were designed in 1944, in a very different economic and political world. Nearly eighty years on, they could do with a refresh.

No one is yet claiming Sharm el-Sheikh will one day be as famous a venue for international financial reform as Bretton Woods. But the seeds are being planted. •

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Yes, it’s COP time again: that annual attempt by journalists to persuade their editors that this year’s UN climate conference is genuinely important and they really should give it some coverage.

Is COP27 genuinely important? At first sight it’s hard to make the case. Up to and including the twenty-first of these conferences, in Paris in 2015, COPs really were important. The international community was desperately trying to reach a new international agreement to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and every year the torturous negotiations produced another faltering step forward. Paris itself produced a historic treaty: the first genuinely comprehensive global climate agreement, with a built-in mechanism for strengthening itself every five years.

But once we had the Paris agreement, what was there to negotiate about? There was a geeky answer: Paris was a high-level accord and many detailed implementation rules still needed to be worked out. COPs 22 (Marrakech), 23 (Bonn), 24 (Katowice) and 25 (intended for Santiago but actually in Madrid because of some local political difficulties) duly worked on these specifics, with few people outside the climate world taking much notice.

COP26, scheduled for Glasgow in 2020 but postponed for a year because of Covid, was the five-year moment when the emissions targets set in Paris had to be strengthened. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had reported in 2018 that global emissions must be more or less halved by 2030 if the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels was to be met. Greta Thunberg was leading an increasingly vocal movement of younger climate activists; publics were beginning to mobilise again. Countries would be under the spotlight to respond.

But the conference ran into a huge problem. Yes, many governments brought new emissions reduction commitments (“nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs) to the table, some of them quite ambitious. And many pledged themselves to net zero emissions by 2050 or a decade or two later. But when all these promises were added up, they still fell well short of the cuts scientists said were necessary to meet the 1.5°C goal.

COP26 came up with pretty much the only option it could to “keep 1.5°C alive” and rescue the conference from failure: countries admitted they were not doing enough and promised to come back in a year’s time with stronger, 1.5°C-compatible commitments.

And so COP27 was dragged from post-Paris obscurity and turned into the next critical climate moment. Will those world leaders use their six minutes to announce new targets sufficient to close the “emissions gap”?

Unfortunately we know the answer, and it’s No. Only one major economy has said that it will table a new and stronger NDC — Australia, which for a short time finds itself in the unusual position of being a global climate leader. But the other 195 signatories to the Paris agreement have offered little or no change.

As a result, the emissions gap is barely narrower than it was a year ago. In its latest annual report the UN Environment Programme calculates that current policies offer a two-thirds chance of limiting the global temperature increase to 2.8°C above pre-industrial times. Cuts pledged by governments would reduce this only to 2.6°C.

To limit global warming to 1.5°C, emissions must fall by 45 per cent more than is envisaged under current policies by 2030; for 2°C, a 30 per cent cut is needed. Launching the report, UNEP executive director Inger Andersen warned that “we had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”

It is hardly surprising, of course, that so little progress has been made over the past year. It’s not been a propitious time to think about emissions reduction plans. In a world still recovering from the Covid pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered huge global energy price increases, food shortages, generalised inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, not to mention the threat of nuclear war. China and the United States are adopting increasingly belligerent stances towards one another. With the US dollar rising as the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates, many developing countries are seeing trade and growth slow and are falling back into unsustainable indebtedness.

In the meantime, severe climate impacts have become more frequent. After record-breaking heat waves baked India and Pakistan in the summer, monsoon flooding left a third of Pakistan under water, affecting an estimated thirty-three million people and killing more than 1500. As glaciers melted in the Himalayas, extreme heat in Europe led to wildfires. In France, low river levels meant insufficient water to cool nuclear power stations, which had to be shut down, while German barges had difficulty finding enough water to navigate the Rhine.

In the United States, Colorado River reservoirs hit record lows and major flooding occurred elsewhere, from Death Valley to eastern Kentucky. In China, an eight-week heat wave and drought dried up parts of the Yangtze River to the lowest level since the mid nineteenth century — until parts of the same area were inundated with flooding rains in August.

The need for action could hardly be clearer. But if COP27 won’t see any new commitments to cutting emissions, is it even worth holding? Could not the greenhouse gases from all those leaders’ and delegates’ flights at least have been saved?

There are two grounds for saying that, despite all this, COP27 will be a worthwhile event. The first is that climate change is not all about cutting emissions, or “mitigation” as climate negotiators call it. This aspect of the subject dominates the debate in most developed countries because they are responsible for most of the world’s historical and present emissions, and are now more or less all embarked on a difficult process of decarbonisation.

Elsewhere, though, reducing emissions is not the big national issue. Most developing countries produce very few greenhouse gases: their economies are just not large or rich enough. What they are desperately trying to do is cope with the climate change they are already experiencing, and what they want is for the developed world finally to provide them with the financial assistance they have been promised for thirty years to support climate-resilient development.

It is these issues, not mitigation, that will dominate debate at COP27. The agenda has three parts.

The first is adaptation, climate-speak for the things countries have to do to adjust to a warming world: building flood defences, planting drought-resistant seed varieties, and so on. The Paris Agreement decided that there should be a “global goal on adaptation” in the same way that there is a global goal (1.5°C) for cutting emissions.

It seemed clear to scientists and to many developing countries that the adaptation goal should logically be the obverse of the mitigation one, since the more emissions are reduced, the lower the global temperature rise will be, and therefore the less adaptation countries will have to undertake. But the developed world has so far resisted any attempt to define the adaptation goal in this way: it would cast an unforgiving light on their failures to mitigate enough. Negotiators will have another go at COP27.

Second, the subject of “loss and damage” will take centre stage. This is the term used to describe the economic costs developing countries experience from climate impacts. Such costs are in many cases large and growing, not least because of more frequent and more severe extreme weather events.

But the concept of loss and damage unnerves developed country negotiators. It looks far too close to the idea — increasingly being tested in the international courts — that the rich world is legally liable for such costs, and could therefore be forced to pay practically unlimited compensation. The Paris Agreement did recognise that loss and damage occurs but included an explicit clause ruling out any legal liability.

This has not stopped developing countries — particularly the small islands and low-lying states most vulnerable to climate impacts — from pushing for more financial aid. At COP26 they demanded a new financial facility be created for this purpose. The knockback by developed countries nearly brought the conference to a halt; a last-minute compromise in which a “Glasgow Dialogue” was established did little to assuage the vulnerable countries’ anger. They pointed out grimly that the Glasgow Dialogue on Loss and Damage could now be added to the list of futile non-negotiations that already included the Warsaw Mechanism for Loss and Damage and the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage created by previous COPs.

A new financial facility for loss and damage will therefore be back on the agenda in Sharm el-Sheikh; it will be the developing world’s single biggest demand. Recognising the Paris clause, many are now insisting that what they want is specific and automatic help when they are hit by an extreme weather event. They are not seeking reparations for historical emissions. Some developed countries may in turn be relenting: Denmark recently announced the first-ever pledge of specific loss and damage funding. If the financial facility is not agreed — or explicit talks are not at least promised towards it — the vulnerable countries may well walk out.

In the end, adaptation and loss and damage both come down to the third key agenda item, which is finance. Once again, the developed world will be in the dock: it has still not organised the $100 billion per year in financial flows to developing countries it promised at COP15 (Copenhagen, 2009) and again in Paris. Although the funds were meant to be secured by 2020, only $83 billion was provided that year, and the latest review suggests the $100 billion won’t be met till 2023.

The consequence is not just that insufficient money is flowing. It’s the disastrous loss of trust that the shortfall has caused. If developed countries can’t keep to their most straightforward promises, developing nations are little inclined to make commitments of their own.

At the same time, though, the $100 billion is not really the issue. That sum doesn’t get anywhere close to the trillions of dollars now needed for global investment in climate mitigation and resilience. Governments don’t have that kind of money; it’s going to have to be raised from the private sector. Intense discussions are under way looking at how this can be done.

In Sharm el-Sheikh these discussions will take place away from the formal negotiations. Veteran climate economist Nicholas Stern of the LSE will publish a new report with the executive director of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Vera Songwe, on how much money is needed for different purposes, and how it can be mobilised. Banks, insurers and investment funds will be out in force, proclaiming their commitment to net zero and green growth, while trying to defend their continued financing of fossil fuels.

The World Bank, meanwhile, will come under renewed attack for inadequate climate commitment. The International Monetary Fund will look good by comparison. Even the world’s central banks will be in on the debate, now committed to assessing their financial systems’ stability in terms of “climate risk” as well as the usual capital adequacy.

And this is where COP27 will prove itself worthwhile after all. It’s not really about the formal negotiations. COPs are the annual gatherings of the world’s climate industry. That’s not a term of abuse: acting on climate change is now a major driver of economic growth, of investment and trade, of urban regeneration and rural land restoration, and of civil society mobilisation.

People come from all those sectors: from city authorities and sub-national states, from multinational corporations and green technology innovators, from impact investment funds and academic research institutes, from non-government organisations from both the North and South of the world. They come to announce their new projects and commitments, to network and plan, and to discover what’s happening elsewhere.

And those government leaders will have to make a speech about climate change when they come to the COP. For many of them it may be the only one they make on the subject this year. Oddly enough, none of them will say “actually, you know, this climate change thing is not really happening, so we’re doing bugger all about it.” Each of the six minutes will force leaders’ attention onto the global crisis and what they should at least say they are doing in response. And most importantly, each of those speeches will be covered by those leaders’ national media outlets. They will appear to be talking to the international community, but that’s just the backdrop (and an important one). Each will be talking primarily to their national media and public.

This, in the end, is the justification for the annual UN circus. Progress on climate change will ultimately come because publics the world over will demand it from their governments. They will do this when they are better informe, and the challenge gets a higher profile in each country’s political debate.

Political leaders need to be forced to say they will act, and to be held to it. In a world where so much else is happening, that’s hard to engineer, either for civil society or for the media. Climate change is not news: it’s been the same story now for many years, and if it can be reported on any day it can always wait for another one.

So the point of COPs is to provide a focal point, a moment: one fortnight a year when climate change is unequivocally on the political agenda, and on the news. This year NGOs will find it harder than usual to make their voices heard: the Egyptian government has notoriously been cracking down on dissent and demonstration, and hotels in Sharm el-Sheikh are too expensive to allow most activists to attend.

Nevertheless, for a couple of weeks, climate will come into focus. Political leaders will make speeches, and they will be covered on the main TV news. Broadcasters will run climate change features. Editors will commission articles. •

The post What exactly is the point of COP27? appeared first on Inside Story.

To Sims, and many others around Australia, that’s how crucial the new tax debate is. It’s no longer just about whether Labor waves through Scott Morrison’s stage three tax cuts, amends them or abandons them. There is a much wider question, with much greater consequences for our country.

Governments can never satisfy us all. But from hospitals to defence, from childcare to aged care, from schools to fixing potholes, government services are falling way short of what Australians need and expect from their country. That shortfall helped Labor get into government. Now Labor’s there, what is it going to do about it?

Labor came to office as the flagbearer of many Australians’ hopes for a government that would end the chronic underfunding of education, health and welfare, not to mention the miserly $47.74 a day we give the unemployed to live on.

Some of those areas have now reached the point where things fall apart. GPs, tired of being cast as the poor cousins to specialists, are deserting country towns and suburban practices, and young doctors are not replacing them. Aged care homes and childcare centres are perpetually short-staffed because low pay and high workloads create constant turnover. Across the board, Australia is short of skilled workers because apprentice wages are so low that only half of them stay on to complete their training.

We could all add more examples. To me the most important is that Australia now finds itself in the most dangerous environment since the second world war, yet the Coalition kept defence spending to just 2 per cent of GDP (lower than in the 1960s when we faced no real threat) and settled on submarines that will be delivered between 2038 and 2050.

Faced with all these needs, Labor nonetheless went to the election with a platform of relatively modest, tightly targeted new spending, promising no new taxes and a big tax cut primarily for those in least need.

You can understand why. It wanted to be elected, so it played safe. And in 2025 it wants to be re-elected, so it doesn’t want to risk breaking any promises now. At least, not yet.

You see what Rod Sims meant? All those spending goals require more money, much more money. In the short term, the only way governments can get more money is by raising taxes, to reallocate spending from private purposes to public ones. What do we want Australia to be?

The looming budget is the government’s first test — and the timing is not good.

The fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (amid other factors) has lifted global food prices almost 50 per cent above pre-Covid levels, blown global energy prices to several times pre-Covid levels, provided cover for businesses everywhere to sneak their prices up — and could throw some big economies into recession.

The International Monetary Fund this week estimated that after decades of low price growth, global inflation has jumped to 8.75 per cent. Even with central banks slamming the brakes on hard (which the IMF applauds), it predicts global prices will rise 6.5 per cent next year before returning to something like normal in 2024.

Contrary to some commentary, the IMF is not forecasting a global recession; its half-yearly World Economic Outlook is towards the optimistic end of the spectrum. It predicts the global economy to grow by a relatively low 2.7 per cent next year, dragged down by global supply disruptions, a permanent slowing of China’s growth rate (to 4.4 per cent) and the fallout from the war in Ukraine.

It expects the United States to keep growing, albeit slowly (1 per cent); other forecasters expect much worse. The IMF envisages some big developing economies like India (6.1 per cent) and Indonesia (5.0) more or less hurdling the upheaval, while Brazil, Russia and Turkey now seem to be doing better (or in Russia’s case, less badly) than was forecast six months ago.

If there is a recession, it would be in the advanced economies — whose growth collectively is expected to slump to 1.1 per cent — and centred in Europe. Germany, Italy and Sweden are forecast to experience mild recessions: no upsurge in unemployment, just a year without growth.

On the IMF’s forecast, Australia will also be hit. It expects our growth to fall to 1.9 per cent next year and 1.8 per cent in 2024, and to stay low thereafter. Unemployment would gradually edge back towards 5 per cent, per capita growth would total just 4 per cent over five years. Governing Australia would not be fun.

These are only forecasts. But clearly the budget outlook is far worse than the one Josh Frydenberg unveiled in his budget in March. And even that projected a string of hefty deficits as far as the eye can see. At a time of record mineral prices and low unemployment, there is no good reason why Australia should have run up new debt of $32 billion in 2021–22.

A cardinal rule of budgeting is that, by and large, you pay for what you spend. If you don’t, you are leaving the bill for the new generation to pay. There are exceptions: you run deficits in bad times and cover them by running surpluses in good times. Infrastructure spending largely benefits the next generation, so it is fair to borrow to build. But at federal and state level — especially in Victoria and the ACT — governments have simply lacked the courage to make us pay for what they spend.

This combination of a grim global outlook, a grim state of the budget and a government still new to the job does make it likely Labor’s first budget will be, as treasurer Jim Chalmers keeps saying, responsible.

I assume he means that Labor will give priority to reducing the budget deficit. And that in working out the numbers, Treasury will err on the side of caution in guessing future energy prices, and hence company tax revenue. And that any new taxes and spending will implement the commitments Labor made in the campaign, and little else. And, of course, that Labor will go after the Coalition programs it has identified as rorts.

All that buys time. But circumstances are conspiring to force Labor to confront Rod Sims’s question: what does it want Australia to be? To deliver First World services, you need a First World revenue base. And for Australia, that means higher taxes.

Let’s take the long-term issue first. Australia is a low-tax country. At the government’s recent jobs summit, economist Ross Garnaut cited OECD figures showing that total federal, state and local government tax revenue as a share of GDP was 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed country average. That’s a shortfall of almost $140 billion a year.

The IMF’s data for total revenue reports a similar gap: governments in Australia raise 5 percentage points of GDP less revenue than the median advanced economy. In 2019 federal, state and local governments raised 34.6 per cent of GDP, well below 40.7 per cent in Canada (the country we most resemble), 46.5 per cent in Germany, and an average of 50.6 per cent in Scandinavia.

In part, that’s because retirement income in Australia is semi-privatised through superannuation, whereas retirees in almost all other Western countries, even the United States, rely on government-run retirement benefits funded by a separate social security tax on income. (The reason Australia appears to rely so much on income tax is that we have only one income tax. Most other Western countries have two, under separate names.)

But the OECD’s data show Australia also has the highest private spending on education of any OECD country, and the third-highest “voluntary” private spending on healthcare. Unemployment benefits are among the very lowest in the Western world.

Once, Labor ministers might have rebelled against this two-stream system in which the best services are reserved for those who can pay the fees demanded in the private sector. Now, as we saw when the Gillard government squibbed on the Gonski report’s school funding reforms, preference to private schools is one British tradition Labor still loyally supports.

In theory, Labor could use more desirable ways to meet the cost of bringing Australia’s services to the standards we expect. It could reduce spending on lesser priorities and reallocate the savings. Or it could take on the politically difficult economic reforms needed to speed up Australia’s sluggish rate of productivity growth.

In reality, speakers at the revenue summit agreed, the gap between today’s service levels and those we expect in aged care, the health system and so on is too vast to be filled by cutting services in other areas. Sims called it “self-evident” that savings from those cuts, while they could and should be made, are not on the scale needed to get us where we want to be.

For ten years until recently, Sims chaired the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The experience has made him sceptical of the potential for dramatically improving our productivity and hence growing a bigger economy. Rapid productivity growth, he said, requires increased competition — and the reality is that business is reducing competition, not increasing it.

“Our political debate always favours low taxation,” he said. “We have to point out that what comes with that is low expenditure. And we have to keep asking the question: is that what we want? If you want to spend extra money, you have to raise extra revenue. There’s just no avoiding that.”

He went on: “If you are against higher taxation, then you are against higher government expenditure… Many do not realise that in opposing taxation they are opposing extra spending on health, education and much else. I think we need higher taxation. I think it’s unavoidable.”

Why? Sims and other speakers at the summit gave several reasons:

1. Australians need better services

Annie Butler of the Nurses Federation cited the findings of the aged care royal commission: neglect and substandard care are widespread and systemic in aged care because the industry is underfunded by $10 billion a year. “Ridiculously low” wages lead to high staff turnover and hence shortages.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus argued that a lot of the crises Australia is experiencing in health and other services result from years of “chronic underfunding.” Economists predict that 30 per cent of all jobs created in the next decade will be in caring for others, but unless those jobs are better paid, workers will not stay in them. Our priorities have to change.

2. The transition to a low-carbon economy

The big economic reform facing Labor is going to be an expensive one: valuable in the long term but costly upfront. Business and government will need to invest tens of billions of dollars in building the solar and wind farms that will generate the power, the batteries that will store that power, and the transmission lines that will bring it from the inland to the cities. And if our coal stations are to close down by 2035, this money needs to be spent in the next decade or so to guarantee that we will still be able to turn on the lights.

The task is made even bigger and more crucial by the need to transition cars from oil to electricity and households and businesses from gas to electricity. Tim Washington, chair of the Electric Vehicle Council, told the summit that electric vehicles comprise, at best, 3 per cent of Australian car sales, compared with 15 per cent in other Western countries. With a global shortage of EVs likely to persist, he urged business and government to manufacture them here, using Australian designs, software, metals and lithium to create an entire value chain. He’s not likely to get that.

Fortunately, there is an ideal solution. Unfortunately, only the Greens, teal independents and economists support it. It is a carbon tax.

Sims confessed he found it baffling that so many Australians want action on climate change but instantly condemn the idea of a tax on carbon. Governments are going deeper into deficit to subsidise solar panels and electric vehicles, whereas the carbon tax would give the whole economy an incentive to decarbonise while raising taxes to fund the investments required.

“No such transition can be painless,” he said. “We need to decide whether we are serious about climate change. If we are, then it can be funded by a tax that will have the benefit of directly changing behaviour while insulating low income earners [through compensation].”

3. Get out of deficit and start paying down debt

Australia has less government debt than most Western countries, but only because the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments made fiscal responsibility a priority from 1985 until 2005. In both 2009 and 2021, as a resilient Australia emerged from the global financial crisis and Covid lockdowns respectively, our governments kept piling on stimulus as if money were no object. And the pollies’ fear of tax rises — much of it due to the vicious hostility of the Murdoch press towards anyone, especially anyone from Labor, brave enough to impose them — has kept us in deficit ever since.

Federal government revenue in this century peaked at 25.6 per cent in 2005–06, when it was 24.1 per cent of GDP. Since then spending has swollen to 26.8 per cent of GDP. Yet, far from keeping pace, revenue has fallen — because governments are frightened of raising taxes.

As ANU economist Ben Phillips put it, “We have plans for increased expenditure, but not for increased revenue. All we’ve got to increase revenue is bracket creep: it’s sneaky, but it works.”

(Bracket creep is the additional tax you pay when inflation pushes more of your nominal income into a higher tax bracket. The stage 3 tax cuts are often defended as simply handing back that extra tax. But only the high income earners will get their bracket creep back, and they get back more than they lost.)

Phillips estimates that Australia faces a revenue gap of $25 billion to $50 billion a year for the next decade. The summit heard lots of suggestions on how to close that gap: one that Labor has flagged for this budget, and others that we should be debating and putting to a new tax review.

Sims alone proposed five:

• Crack down on multinationals avoiding tax by non-commercial transfer pricing, including paying ridiculously high interest rates or “marketing fees” to a head office in a tax haven.

• Ensure Australians benefit when our mineral and energy resources are extracted. Norway takes almost 80 per cent of the revenue from its oil and gas fields, yet Australia allows companies to take those resources for virtually nothing. The petroleum resource rent tax, which is meant to do the job, desperately needs big repairs — and an extension to cover coal and iron ore.

• Introduce an excess profits tax, as the European Union has done recently. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that in the Coalition’s nine years in office, mining output rose by $195 billion but wages in the industry by just $5 billion. Net profits by the mining industry grew by $190 billion, yet taxes on mining shrank by $0.1 billion. If there is ever a time for a tax on excess profits, it is in Australia now.

• A carbon tax. (See above.)

• At state level: a comprehensive land tax covering all private property except farmland, to replace stamp duty on conveyancing. Economists generally see land tax as a most efficient tax. Sims called it a progressive tax, “based on assets that cannot be moved,” that produces a steady revenue flow.

• Road-user charges will be inevitable as electric vehicles replace petrol-driven cars. Their advantage is that they can be fine-tuned for vehicle type (trucks pay for the damage they do to roads) and time of day (peak-hour pricing).

Other speakers added at least another five:

• Prune tax breaks for superannuation.

• Prune or phase out negative gearing of property investments.

• Scrap fossil fuel subsidies, including the mining industry’s exemption from fuel excise.

• End concessional tax rates for family trusts.

• Increase the Medicare levy to pay for extra spending on aged care.

Sims emphasised that the reforms would need to be sold as a package, with compensation where appropriate, as the Hawke government did when it reformed tax in 1985. That package was preceded by a tax review by Treasury and a tax summit where a wide range of groups put their case.

Albanese has pledged no new taxes in this term apart from the ones Labor took to the election (primarily a crackdown on tax avoidance by multinationals — no votes lost by tackling that). But independent MPs Allegra Spender (Wentworth, NSW) and Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Victoria) both urged a new tax review “with everything on the table” — with Spender adding “including the GST” and a hopeful plea: “We need to have grown-up conversations about tax.”

Well, good luck with that. I suspect most tax economists would agree that the GST rate should be raised, or its field widened, or both. New Zealand lifted its GST rate to 15 per cent back in 2010 without suffering any visible social collapse, and its GST is far more comprehensive than ours. That’s the main reason its government can spend more than ours.

The left needs to stop demonising the GST and think of tax reform as a package. You can introduce or increase or widen a GST fairly so long as you design the right package — as we saw in 1999 after the Australian Democrats stopped the Liberals using the GST to shift more of the tax burden onto lower and middle income earners.

But so long as we are unable to see any bipartisanship on tax, the GST will remain a no-go area. And bipartisanship is probably off the agenda as long as Peter Dutton is Liberal leader.

Where does that leave the stage 3 tax cuts? It looks like this movie has ended now, with treasurer Jim Chalmers apparently losing the fight despite his skilful attempts to persuade colleagues to revise, reduce or even scrap the cuts — which would be in line with his theme of protecting the budget in increasingly dangerous times and giving support only to those who really need it.

But good movies these days have a sequel, and these tax cuts won’t take effect until mid 2024. Given his impressive debut in the role, Chalmers has time to perfect it when he plans his next budget. He knows the case for either abolishing the cuts or reducing and retargeting them is very strong.

Stage 3 contains three elements:

• abolish the 37 per cent marginal tax rate on income earned between $120,000 and $180,000

• raise the threshold for the 45 per cent top rate from $180,000 to $200,000

• reduce the standard 32.5 per cent rate to 30 per cent — which would then be a flat tax rate for all income from $45,000 to $200,000.

Modelling by the Parliamentary Budget Office and by Ben Phillips found the first and the third are the expensive items. And the consensus at the summit seemed to be that if there is compromise, we should keep the third while scrapping the first.

A few points are important to note.

First, these tax cuts were proposed by treasurer Scott Morrison way back in 2018, six years before they would take effect. Since then, we have had a global Covid pandemic and the global inflation breakout. Committing to tax cuts six years before they took effect had no economic rationale. What drove it was politics. Morrison assumed the budget in 2024 could afford it. He was wrong.

Second, the cuts follow stage 1 (in 2018), directed to lower-middle income earners, and stage 2 (in 2020), focused on upper-middle incomes. Stage 1 was small, and has since been abolished by the Coalition itself. Stage 2 was bigger: it cut taxes for people earning less than $90,000 by $10 a year, and taxes for people earning over $120,000 by $1890 a year. The idea that high earners have been kept waiting while others have had tax cuts is quite untrue.

Stage 3 is seriously big money. The Parliamentary Budget Office last year estimated their cost at $18 billion in year one (2024–25), then more than doubling to $37 billion by year nine (2032–33). Treasury is now revisiting those numbers — and the cost will almost certainly be even higher now.

But even on the PBO’s 2021 estimate, that would reduce total government revenue by 3.5 per cent initially, and by more than 4 per cent by the start of the 2030s. That is a huge cut in revenue at a time when the budget is unable to cope with Australia’s existing spending needs, let alone the new ones coming over the horizon from the ageing of our population, China’s attempt to assert hegemony over the region, the excesses of the NDIS, and so on. We need tax rises, not tax cuts.

Third, the PBO estimates that 78 per cent of those billions of dollars would go to the richest 20 per cent of Australians. That’s largely because they pay 68 per cent of all income tax — but that in turn is because they get such a high share of the nation’s income. They would rank low on a list of those in need.

That said, it seems fair to say that the threshold of $180,000 for Australia’s top tax is too low. If Chalmers and his colleagues want to compromise, one option they might consider is to reduce the 37 per cent rate to 35 per cent with the same thresholds as now — but add a new 40 per cent rate for income from $180,000 to $200,000, and a timetable to raise that threshold to $250,000. Over time, that would save the budget a lot of money, without taking everything from those who would gain from the plan Labor promised them. •

The post Time to talk about tax appeared first on Inside Story.

In the leadership election, held among the OECD’s thirty-seven member states, Cormann beat the Swedish former EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström, a centrist liberal. Campaigning for the job, Australia’s longest-serving finance minister made a point of toning down his economic opinions and record, particularly on climate change. Challenged by environmental organisations, he insisted that he was in favour of “an inclusive and future-focused recovery, including a green recovery” and “accelerating the transition to a lower emissions future.” Commentators assumed that in his new position, accountable to the wide range of economic policy views held by the OECD’s member governments, he would operate with a more plural and open economic outlook.

But recent events suggest that Cormann’s free-market instincts remain intact. Among his early reforms is a move to effectively shut down one of the OECD’s most innovative programs, the New Approaches to Economic Challenges, or NAEC, initiative.

NAEC was established in 2012 by the previous secretary-general, former foreign and finance minister of Mexico Angel Gurria, as a way of bringing new thinking into the institution after the global financial crisis. Gurria’s view, shared by many leading economists, was that orthodox economic thinking had helped precipitate the 2008 crash, and new economic ideas were required to get the world out of it. NAEC was to help the OECD lead that process.

The OECD has never been a source of what you might call radical economic thinking. Throughout its sixty-year history it has more or less dutifully followed the consensus of mainstream economics and economic policy. Originally broadly Keynesian, in line with the approach adopted by almost all developed economies in the 1960s and early 70s, it took the same free-market turn as they did in the late 1970s and 80s.

Often described as “neoliberalism” or the “Washington consensus,” the policy approach originally championed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — and then copied around the world — was based on the economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. They saw “free” (relatively unregulated) markets as not just the best means of generating economic prosperity but also the guarantor of political liberty.

Neoliberals wanted a smaller state, with lower taxes, privatisation of nationalised industries and public services, less government regulation and greater freedom for enterprise, unencumbered by trade unions. The OECD joined its fellow international economic institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in proffering such policy advice to governments throughout the 1980s and 90s.

For its critics, neoliberalism achieved its apotheosis in 2008, when the “efficient markets theory” — the idea that well-informed financial markets would always generate optimal outcomes — took something of a beating. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and neoliberal high priest, famously admitted to Congress that the theory had a “flaw.”

Yet neoliberal policy prescriptions had not yet been exhausted. Reacting to the global economic slump and the huge increase in government borrowing to which bank bailouts had led, many governments opted for “austerity,” slashing public expenditure and raising taxes in order to balance the books and reduce public debt. With interest rates reduced to near zero, central banks flooded the financial sector with printed money under a program of “quantitative easing.”

It was what the neoliberals had prescribed; but it merely succeeded — as the Keynesians predicted — in slowing economic recoveries and exacerbating wealth inequality, as asset values inflated far above wages.

In 2010–12 the OECD took the neoliberal position, praising Greece’s austerity program, which almost brought the country to its knees, and prioritising deficit reduction and public spending cuts in its advice to governments. As the decade developed, along with mainstream economists everywhere, the OECD puzzled over stagnant productivity, and why economic growth remained so weak for so long. It began to worry about rising inequality but struggled to relate this to quantitative easing and over-flexible labour markets. It did advocate taxing carbon to tackle climate change, but such taxes were never high enough to make a significant dent in emissions.

It was in this intellectual and policy context that Gurria launched NAEC. He was not sure precisely what those “new approaches” should be, but he knew that something better was required. The OECD’s member states agreed, providing the new program with a small but significant budget and encouraging its outreach to some of the world’s leading economists.

The result has been a decade of fruitful research, analysis and events, seeking to bring new economic thinking not just to the OECD’s own policy departments but also to the wider international community. Economists contributing to NAEC’s seminars, conferences and publications have included Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz, Esther Duflo, James Heckman, Angus Deaton and Robert Shiller, along with other world-leading figures such as Mariana Mazzucato, Thomas Piketty and Adam Tooze.

NAEC has focused on some of the key problems facing the world in the post-crash period, including reform of the financial sector, climate change and economic resilience after Covid. It has brought the relatively new field of complexity economics — which sees the economy as a complex, adaptive system rather than a self-balancing mechanism — to mainstream policymakers, and explored whether policymakers should now be seeking to go “beyond economic growth” to achieve environmental sustainability, reduced inequality and greater wellbeing.

NAEC has not fundamentally changed the OECD’s economic approach. The Paris-based institution employs hundreds of economists whose views were not going to change overnight, and most of its member governments wish to continue following largely orthodox economic prescriptions. But as Gurria wanted, it has provided a space for new thinking to be developed and debated, and some of this has been taken up both within the OECD and beyond it.

Cormann, it appears, is not impressed. He has reduced NAEC to a series of internal seminars for country delegates, ending its association with external economists and policymakers. In May he ordered a NAEC seminar on globalisation featuring a senior US senator and government official to be cancelled at the last minute. As a result of these changes, donors to the program have threatened to withdraw their support.

Now a group of twenty-six economists who have spoken at NAEC events have written an open letter to Cormann expressing their alarm at its demise. Including Stiglitz, Mazzucato and Tooze, the group originally wrote privately to Cormann in January praising NAEC’s work and asking him to maintain it. Cormann didn’t reply, and so the group has gone public with its concern.

In their letter the group notes that new forms of economic analysis and policy are needed more than ever, given the multiple crises currently facing the world. Many OECD countries are now heading for a period of “stagflation” — simultaneous inflation and recession — while many low-income ones are about to run into another debt crisis. What the economists call the “existential” challenge of climate change needs to be confronted urgently. In these circumstances, they say, it is important that an organisation providing advice to governments, like the OECD, “is at the forefront, not just of the present orthodoxy, but of competing views, theoretical frameworks and policy approaches.”

Throughout the history of economics and economic policy, the economists note, orthodox economic frameworks and policies have often been superseded as the empirical evidence changes and rival theories come to be more convincing. “This to and fro between received economic ideas and new ones is an important part of how intellectual and practical progress is made,” they argue. So it is not just the OECD, they conclude, but the wider international economic policy community that would benefit from NAEC continuing. They end their letter by offering to help Cormann and his staff in developing a new work program for NAEC.

No response has been received so far from Cormann or the OECD. •

Former senior OECD official Kumiharu Shigehara responds to Michael Jacobs’s observations about the OECD orthodoxy in the 1980s and 90s:

It is not true to say that the OECD’s advice followed that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank throughout the 1990s, at least when I was OECD chief economist from May 1992 to May 1997 and a deputy secretary-general from May 1997 to the autumn of 1999. I strengthened the OECD Economics Department’s work on inequality and, unlike the IMF and the World Bank, I spoke against too hasty liberalisation of international capital movements in emerging market economies, at an IMF seminar chaired by Michel Camdessus, then IMF managing director, and more openly at a number of other international gatherings and conferences.

My recollection is supported by an article, “Don’t Blame the Victims of Asia’s Crisis,” by Anthony Rowley, a reporter for the Business Times in Singapore, who wrote: “It is instructive that a Japanese national [Mr Shigehara] writing from Paris [the OECD offices in Europe] should be able to analyse the situation with such clarity. It seems that the ideological miasma in which Washington-based institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank have become entrapped, by virtue of their proximity, to the US administration and Congress, render such clear thinking impossible on their part. They dare not blame the system of unthinking trade, investment and capital market liberalisation to which they have co-opted, so they blame its victims.”

The post Trouble at the OECD appeared first on Inside Story.

Greg Mullins’s account of the Black Summer in Firestorm is therefore significant and timely. Mullins is a former NSW fire and rescue commissioner who gave almost four decades of service as a firefighter before returning to the Terrey Hills RFS brigade, which he had first joined as a teenager. He is now an eloquent member of the Climate Council and well known as the guy who in early 2019 led the prescient request from fire leaders to the prime minister for consultation, resources and action on emissions. Morrison refused.

The firefighter is the antithesis of the prime minister. While Morrison holidayed in Hawaii, Mullins put his body on the line to save property and lives. He is compassionate, learned and practical, serves the national interest and recognises the dire threat of climate change. He does hold a hose, mate, and that’s why his account of Black Summer has particular interest.

Mullins’s story begins in “the good old (predictable) days.” Born in 1959 in semirural bushland on the northern outskirts of Sydney, he grew up with a father who was a volunteer firefighter. Young Greg heard his dad’s stories from the fire front as well as the reflections of revered old-timers about firefighting operations.

Firestorm is partly a homage to his father, Jack Mullins, and a tribute to his gift of bush lore and wisdom. When Jack died aged ninety-three in 2018, his memorial service was announced by three long blasts on the old fire siren. But it was the end of an era in another way, too: a year or so later, Black Summer would definitively rule a line across the past, declaring that as far as bushfire in Australia is concerned, history is no longer a guide to the future.

When I started writing about forests and fire more than three decades ago, I often said that “local history is your best survival guide.” Old-timers knew the worn paths of historical flame, knew the likely direction of the most serious threat and knew the fire ecology of their particular forest. But today even they can be surprised. Firestorm tells of the dawning of the disturbing realisation that we are entering a new era. For Mullins, the climate change penny started to drop when, after more than two decades as a volunteer and then career firefighter, he was caught unawares in the bush.

It was December 1993 and, despite his experience, he didn’t see a bad fire season coming. There had been good rains in November and New South Wales wasn’t officially in drought. But in early January 1994 he was suddenly smoked out of a family bush camping holiday and summoned back to work to help deal with an unexpectedly terrifying time, the worst fires in the state’s history to that date in terms of property loss.

“The 1994 fires were unprecedented,” writes Mullins, acknowledging that the word is now starting to lose its meaning. They “really grabbed my attention.” Even old firefighting hands like his father had not seen this one coming. “The weather was not behaving as it always had.” The fast-changing scene was confirmed by the 2002–03 alpine fires, which were started by lightning and burned through two million hectares of country. They brought home to Mullins that the frequency and length of major fire seasons was changing.

Prior to Black Summer, Mullins acknowledges, Victoria was the state in Australia most affected by bushfires and on the front line of increasing bushfire risk: it had experienced the fatal days of Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Friday 1939 and Ash Wednesday 1983. Then in 2009 Black Saturday unleashed its fury.

In the days afterwards, as the human death toll mounted to 173, Greg Mullins and his NSW colleague Shane Fitzsimmons flew to Melbourne to provide moral support to a “shocked, demoralised command team” overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness in the face of such a violent, uncontrollable, unstoppable firestorm, a blast akin to a nuclear explosion. Many of those firefighters and leaders are still struggling to come to terms with what happened that day.

Black Saturday brought about a fundamental reset of national fire prevention, mitigation and firefighting doctrine. As Mullins reports, a new, overt focus on “primacy of life” made evacuations far more common. Also, there was acknowledgement that on some days firefighters would be able to do little more than convey information and warnings.

Black Saturday also launched a serious conversation about whether fires might be associated with climate change. Mullins was ready to speak about it in 2009 and did so. But as a senior public servant he “quickly learned that speaking publicly about climate change was out of bounds.” He was told “in no uncertain terms to keep out of the climate change debate and stick to fighting fires.”

The 2013 fire season along the east coast, especially Tasmania, unnerved him. He sees it now as a further wake-up call. It was not an El Niño summer yet the season was super-charged anyway. With the norms of weather and climate changing, what would an El Niño–driven fire season look like in these conditions? Yet it still seemed unlikely that New South Wales would soon experience life-threatening fires and property losses on a scale like those in Victoria and Tasmania. As Mullins explains, “we had never experienced the confluence of drought, weather and fuel conditions capable of producing such firestorms.”

Victoria is the firestorm capital of Australia. The most frightening and fatal firestorms have all roared out of “the fire flume,” as historian Stephen Pyne calls the region where hot northerly winds sweep scorching air from the central deserts into the forested ranges of Victoria and Tasmania. Firestorms are bushfires of a different order of magnitude; they cannot be fought; they rampage and kill. In 2019–20, the firestorm came to New South Wales.

Greg Mullins gives a personal, thoughtful, harrowing account of his work at the myriad fire fronts throughout the Black Summer. Tried and true firefighting techniques were no longer working and “pyro-convective events” (fire-generated lightning storms), once rare, erupted frequently. He was constantly in the bush working beside dedicated teams he admired, releasing people from smoke-filled homes and always ready to use his “firefighter’s master key” (his boot to kick a door in).

Black Summer, explains Mullins, wasn’t really a summer but a fire season that lasted half a year, from July to late February and early March. Australia was burning from the end of winter to the end of summer, from Queensland to Western Australia, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, from the NSW south coast to Kangaroo Island, from the Great Western Woodlands to Tasmania. Everywhere, suddenly, bushfire was tipping into something new.

New South Wales experienced six days of Catastrophic Fire Danger (the new level invented after Black Saturday), twenty-two days of Extreme Fire Danger, and seventy-two of Severe. Fifty-nine Total Fire Bans were declared.

As spring edged into summer and the fires worked their way down the Great Dividing Range and turned the corner into Victoria, people who remembered Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday braced themselves. January and February are traditionally the most dangerous months in the southern forests. But this time central Victoria’s good winter rainfall and wetter, cooler February prevented the flume from ripping into full gear. Therefore an unusual aspect of Black Summer was that these “Great Fires” did not explode out of the firestorm forests of Victoria and Tasmania.

This was a major reason why the death toll for such extensive and enduring fires was relatively low: they didn’t break out in the most fatal forests. Another reason, as Mullins acknowledges, was that Black Saturday introduced a new survival policy: to leave early rather than stay and defend. Early evacuation thus became the enforced strategy of authorities well beyond the original firestorm forests. The experience of Black Saturday powerfully shaped the management of Black Summer and undoubtedly saved lives.

That recent NSW experience of a firestorm impressed itself on the national imagination. Greg Mullins has used that word as the title of his book. It’s a good homegrown word, much better than the American term “mega-fire.” It captures the distinctive ferocity of a weather event intensified by its own frightening physics and chemistry. It describes a quite different phenomenon from a bushfire. And the full manifestation of a firestorm is still to be found in the flume, in the highly combustible tall ash forests of Victoria and Tasmania where it takes its most deadly form. If I were to make one criticism of this book it would be that, like much fire management literature, it is insufficiently attuned to these regional and ecological differences.

But Greg Mullins is understandably focused on national policies, and he addresses both fire management and climate change. Firestorm finishes with recommendations — short-, medium- and long-term — about how “we must stop the climate emergency becoming a climate disaster.” And at the heart of the book is a calm, reasonable and utterly scathing account of the federal government’s failures before, during and after Black Summer.

In early 2019 Mullins started calling former fire chief colleagues — a stellar cast of experienced senior fire officers from the states and territories — and asked whether they would come together to form a group called Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, or ELCA. In Firestorm, the government’s response to these civic-minded, courageous experts has been carefully recorded, and it is worth detailing it here.

The prime minister rejected ELCA’s requests to meet (he was “too busy”), dismissed their calls for strategy and resources, did not respond to their offers of briefings, refused bipartisan action, fobbed them off to ministers who fobbed them off to staffers, stood by while his deputy called them “time-wasters,” misled the public about the level of government response, abided false personal attacks on ELCA members by the Murdoch press, and was altogether so consumed by the busywork of spinning, dissembling and gaslighting that neither the national interest nor the welfare of fire-ravaged communities ever seemed within the vision of the man occupying the highest office in the land.

That is my condensation of the damning evidence given in Firestorm. Mullins, however, is always courteous, patient and constructive. But consider that this is how the Australian prime minister treated our most revered public leaders at a time of national crisis, a crisis that remains with us. Not to mention the report that not one cent of the $4.7 billion of federal funding promised for bushfire recovery after Black Summer has been spent. And remember also that this do-nothing federal government has done everything possible to frustrate climate action.

There is an election coming and I hope you read Firestorm before you vote. •

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Fortunately for us readers, Labor’s factional politics and small-target tactics have prevailed, and so Andrew has time to spare beyond fulfilling his duties as shadow assistant minister for Treasury and charities, and indulging his (tri)athletic obsessions. Ever the academic nerd and policy wonk, he spends that time writing books explaining complicated matters to ordinary people. Reasonably smart people, that is: his books are full of studies, stats, and references to the arts as well as popular culture. Combining erudition with lucid, brisk, even playful prose, he doesn’t seek merely to inform and educate; he also offers some form of practical advice or policy advocacy (“What we can/should do to…”).

Since joining parliament in 2010 he has researched and published no fewer than eight such books: Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia (2013), The Economics of Just About Everything (2014), The Luck of Politics (2015), Choosing Openness: Why Global Engagement Is Best for Australia (2017), Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World (2018), Innovation + Equality: How to Create a Future That Is More Star Trek Than Terminator (with Joshua Gans) (2019), Reconnected: A Community Builder’s Handbook (with Nick Terrell) (2020), and now What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

The Australian parliament has seen its share of high-calibre thinkers in its 120 years of existence, but I can’t think of anyone with the sheer ability and stamina to write thoughtfully across such a broad range of subjects on the margins of a demanding day job as an MHR.

Leigh’s latest offering is about “black swans”: those nasty events with devastating effects whose probability is either low or hard to determine. In other words, what most of us once thought were the chances of a global pandemic. Corporate managers and public policymakers alike are baffled by black swans: should we focus on their impact, and thus go all out in taking preventative or preparatory measures? Or should we focus on probability and therefore prioritise risks whose probability is higher or at least clearer?

Going down the first path may expose policymakers to charges of overreacting — of wasting resources on obscure hypotheticals. Remember Y2K? The doom scenarios that were bandied about in the years leading up to the turn of the millennium never came to pass. Although some claimed this was precisely because so many risk managers and policymakers had taken ambitious and costly precautionary measures, majority armchair opinion is that countless millions were needlessly invested in forestalling a disaster that was never going to happen.

But taking a more relaxed view risks us bearing the brunt of improbable yet devastating crises for which we have been left unprepared. In that scenario, policymakers face the prospect of intense blame for what feels, after the event, like a callous and cavalier disregard of real dangers.

Leigh surveys the state of our knowledge, and our guesstimates about the upper range of black swan events: potentially civilisation-extinguishing mega-catastrophes. The candidates he covers in brief but fact-packed chapters include ultra-lethal germs and bugs (naturally occurring or engineered and weaponised); runaway climate change; nuclear war; and runaway artificial intelligence (“killer robots” and the like). Drawing on an impressive array of studies, he dazzles us with statistics and analogies, mostly to make the point that each of these four doom scenarios is (a) not as unlikely as most of us prefer to think, and (b) getting likelier because of our overwhelming passivity in the face of their technological and other enablers.

Then, about halfway through, the book’s focus shifts to populist politics. Why? For one, because countries run by populists are bound to be short-sighted, stupid, lazy and opportunistic in coping with deep systemic threats. As Leigh explains, “Tackling long-term threats requires four things: strong science, effective institutions, global engagement, and a sense of cooperation and order. Populists are anti-intellectual, anti-institutional, anti-international, and anti-irenic (‘irenic’ means to strive for peace and consensus).” This posture is at the heart of their popular appeal — and denialist myopia with regard to systemic risks is its inevitable by-product.

But there’s more: Leigh also argues that populism itself becomes a potentially destructive force when “populist democrats become authoritarian demagogues — quashing democracy and ushering in a frightening future.” Tapping into the burgeoning “death of democracy” literature, Leigh paints a gloomy picture of what might happen when the Trumps, Orbáns, Modis and Bolsonaros of the world succeed in entrenching their populist regimes: authoritarian repression at home, foreign-facing aggression and, at the very least, irrational inaction regarding the creeping systemic risks that need to be tackled urgently.

Having presented diagnoses as gloomy as this, authors of doomsday books have two choices when it comes to dealing with the “what now?” question.

Option 1 is to come up with measures that are proportionate to the magnitude of the threats. A good example of an author who has followed this path is Yehezkel Dror, the Israeli-born grandfather of modern policy science. Now well into his nineties, Dror has continued to produce books that starkly catalogue how humanity is busily beavering away at worsening the odds of its own survival, which he then matches by calling for transformational political leadership to combat complacence and bring us back from the brink of destruction in the many crises we will face. His books’ titles speak for themselves: Avant-Garde Politician: Leaders for a New Epoch (2014); For Rulers: Priming Political Leaders for Saving Humanity from Itself (2017); and Steering Human Evolution: Eighteen Theses on Homo Sapiens Metamorphosis, Routledge (2020).

Dror’s proposed solutions are radical indeed: he advocates a transnational global directorate of rulers populated by carefully selected, superbly trained and enlightened technocrats whose sole preoccupation is with the survival of the species, backed up — and here’s the sting — by awesome military might to enforce its decisions. It is a daunting and deeply controversial policy recipe, but at least one that is commensurate with the challenge of the preceding diagnosis.

Leigh doesn’t go down that path. His final chapter is of the Option 2 variety: to talk the language of pragmatism and offer small, practical steps that should somehow add up to a transformation of our catastrophe-inducing, vulnerability-enhancing practices, beliefs and power relationships. Bypassing the bulk of scenarios in his own risk catalogue and focusing entirely on staving off what he clearly sees as the mother of all systemic risks, a populist takeover, Leigh proposes we turn our hand to what he calls “fixing politics.”

As it turns out, he talks mostly about fixing American politics, rather than, say Chinese, Russian, Indian or even Australian. And in doing so, he leads us into humdrum territory: recommending compulsory voting, moving polling day to the weekend, creating independent bodies to recarve electoral districts, strengthening civics education.

These are all sensible and worthy “maintenance” measures within existing democracies. But the glaring discrepancy between diagnosis and solutions reminded me of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which after scaring the hell out of its readers by painting a stark 200-page picture of apocalyptic climate change culminated in a tucked-away two-pager of “what you can do”s. Gore admonished his readers to unscrew a few lightbulbs around the house, turn the thermostat down a bit and put on a warm sweater in winter. It just didn’t cut the mustard.

And the same holds true, regrettably, for this book. Gone by its end are the sweeping time horizons with which the book began; virtually all we are left with is muddling-through institutional tinkering for Americans. So, while What’s the Worst That Could Happen succeeds admirably in putting us on our toes about the risks we face, it doesn’t turn up the heat on our leaders, or indeed ourselves, about what has to come next.

Perhaps Andrew can put that formidable brain of his to work on a follow-up book that delivers a much-needed roadmap for transforming our economies, our ways of life, our conceptions of citizenship and our political institutions — the things he knows are urgently required to give his and our great-grandchildren a fighting chance to lead reasonable lives on an already stressed planet. •

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Ritter argued that the Morrison government needed to come up with more ambitious climate change policies to avoid ruining Australia’s international reputation. His suggestion that in the eyes of outside observers Australia had gone “rogue” responded to Australians’ growing concerns about their country’s image overseas. It was also designed to generate maximum attention by scandalising his audience.

If Australia were indeed widely regarded as a rogue state, it would be in select but dubious company. Probably the first country that comes to mind when we hear the term “rogue state” is North Korea. It was the first Clinton administration that designated as rogue states those regimes that were considered to flout international rules and agreements, support terrorism, develop weapons of mass destruction and suppress human rights. At the time they also included Libya, Iraq, Iran and Cuba. Clinton’s Republican predecessors Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior had similarly singled out “renegade” or “outlaw” states that should live in fear of an American sheriff intent on restoring order.

Although the State Department temporarily dropped the designation “rogue state” in favour of “state of concern” in 2000, the idea remained that the behaviour of certain regimes justified the United States’ ostracising and punishing them. Punishment could mean imposing economic sanctions, as in the case of Iran. It could also involve military action by the United States, ostensibly on behalf of an international community.

When the Greenpeace CEO suggested that outside observers were regarding Australia as a rogue state, he may not have had the origins of that designation in mind. But he was probably aware of precedents for turning the term back on the very governments that had taken the moral high ground vis-à-vis the likes of Kim Il-sung, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević.

Perhaps the most famous example is William Blum’s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, published in 2000, which describes the United States as a “Mecca of hypocrisy” that harbours terrorists, bankrolls human rights violators and pays little heed to international rules and norms. American hypocrisy has also inspired books by Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida. Similarly, two well-regarded economic journalists have argued that Switzerland ought to be regarded as a Schurkenstaat, or rogue state, for facilitating tax evasion on a global scale.

Even if Ritter didn’t think of the United States or Switzerland, he would have known that he wasn’t being particularly original when suggesting that Australia’s stance on climate change might qualify it for rogue state status. As early as 2002, in a paper delivered at the Melbourne Institute’s Economic and Social Outlook Conference, the Griffith University environmental scientist Ian Lowe referred to Australia as a rogue nation when arguing that the Howard government ought to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Three years later, one of Ritter’s predecessors at the helm of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Steve Shallhorn, said that “Australia is a rogue government when it comes to the Kyoto Protocol… because on that question they are outside the norm of industrialised countries.”

Australia did belatedly ratify the Kyoto Protocol — in 2007, after a Labor election win ended John Howard’s long reign. But when the Coalition government — and thus a Howard-era approach to climate change — returned in 2013, the charge that Australia was behaving like a rogue nation resurfaced. During 2013, for example, the Marshall Islands’ climate change minister Tony deBrum said Australia, Canada and Japan, which had argued against tougher measures at COP19 in Warsaw, were acting like rogues. Two years ago, Adam Bandt, the Greens member for Melbourne, told parliament, “Increasingly in Europe and many other countries, Australia is seen as a rogue state… drunk on our fossil fuels that we peddle to the rest of the world.”

But the federal government’s support for fossil fuels is not the only, and not even the main, reason why Australia has often been likened to a rogue nation. It is in relation to the government’s migration policy that the epithet “rogue state” has been most often applied.

Earlier this year, for example, Golriz Ghahraman, the foreign affairs spokesperson of the Greens in Aotearoa New Zealand, said Australia was an “outlier” and a “rogue nation” and should be referred to the United Nations. He was outraged after the deportation of a fifteen-year-old permanent resident of Australia.

In 2014, then Greens leader Christine Milne told the Senate that she was opposed to the Migration Amendment (Protection and other Measures) Bill because “it confirms what many other countries around the world are saying — that is, that Australia, as a state party in the United Nations, has gone rogue on human rights, on international law and torture.” That same year on Lateline, Alastair Nicholson, the former chief justice of the Family Court, likened the government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Cambodia to “behaving, I think, as a rogue nation.”

The same year, Greg Barns, a former chief of staff of Liberal Party politician and federal finance minister John Fahey, wrote in the Hobart Mercury that Australia “is the newest member of the infamous rogue state club” — both on account of the government’s asylum seeker policy and because of its response to global warming.

When Greg Barns, Christine Milne, Alastair Nicholson and David Ritter said that Australia might be considered a rogue nation or rogue state, they used the term in a loose sense, ignoring some of the specific attributes identified by US State Department officials in the 1990s. They were suggesting that Australia was acting outside internationally agreed rules and norms, and/or that its actions were jeopardising the wellbeing of other nations, if not imperilling the global commons.

Such accusations have been well founded. International lawyers, Australian and international human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, various UN rapporteurs and committees, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have repeatedly and justifiably condemned Australia’s response to asylum seekers, including pushbacks, mandatory and potentially indefinite immigration detention, and the deportation of asylum seekers to former colonies. Here is not the place to revisit these arguments.

When it comes to climate change, Australia has long been one of the world’s prime greenhouse gas emitters on a per capita basis, as well as a leading exporter of fossil fuels. It has also long been a prominent naysayer at a succession of international meetings, and one of those slowing down progress on global action against climate change. Australian intransigence and recalcitrance were particularly evident at COP25 in Madrid, when the Australian delegation was reportedly instrumental in thwarting progress at the negotiating table.

Ritter had good reason to sound the alarm in August, a couple of months before the COP26 negotiations. The Australian government committed to a zero emissions target by 2050 but without revealing a roadmap to show how that target could be reached. And the government refused to revise its target for 2030, instead lauding the “Australian way,” which includes a “gas-fired recovery” and a continuation of coalmining “for decades to come.” It was not surprising that a survey by media monitoring company Meltwater Australia found Australia’s international reputation took a hit in the lead-up to COP26.

Nevertheless, Australia’s role was less controversial in Glasgow than it had been two years earlier in Madrid. That was because the Morrison government was but one of many that proved reluctant to agree to meaningful measures to slow down climate change. And because India took on the role of the principal villain, there was no need for Australia to be a prominent naysayer (it was nevertheless firmly in the camp of nations who showed little interest in substantial progress). Thus, those critical of Australia didn’t resort to calling Australia a “rogue nation,” but instead employed more moderate language, such as “laggard.”

But whether or not a negotiator is obstructing proceedings can also be a matter of perceptions. Unlike in Warsaw and Madrid, Australia tried to fly under the radar at COP26. Its delegation even agreed to a text asking governments to provide updated targets next year; only after the conference had concluded did the Morrison government admit that it had no intention of meeting this request.

The point made by Australian critics of government policy, as well as by Tony deBrum, Golriz Ghahraman and other outside observers, is not usually to argue that Australia meets any accepted criteria of a rogue nation. It is to suggest that others might well regard Australia’s behaviour as befitting that of a rogue nation. In other words, the critics have been talking about Australia’s reputation more so than its actions.

Whether or not Australia is considered a rogue nation on account of its climate change policies does matter. Here, the North Korean analogy is instructive. Because North Korea is considered to have gone rogue (by threatening to harm others rather than causing harm to people other than North Korean citizens), it has been punished with sanctions. There is no talk yet of imposing sanctions on Australia, but nations taking costly measures to slow down climate change don’t want nations that refuse to take such measures to gain an unfair advantage. The European Union, for one, will impose tariffs on products exported from countries, including Australia, that don’t do their fair share in tackling global warming.

Has Australia’s reputation been affected by its actions or policies? The answer would certainly be “yes” among those whose job it is to evaluate those actions and policies: international human rights and refugee law experts, and climate scientists.

But what about overseas publics, whose knowledge of Australia is largely mediated by journalists and other opinion-makers? Here, let me first debunk the myth that Australia’s reputation has only suffered in the past twenty years, in the wake of the Tampa affair and Australia’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Some of Australia’s Asian neighbours held highly unfavourable views of Australia during the 1950s and 1960s, well before the term “rogue state” was first officially used, because of the racist White Australia policy. Memories of that policy persisted long after it was officially abandoned in 1973. In the Philippines, for example, echoes of White Australia and the infamous Gamboa case of the late 1940s reverberated in 2005 when it was discovered that Vivian Alvarez Solon, an Australian citizen born in the Philippines, had been unlawfully deported from Australia four years earlier.

Immigration policy wasn’t the only problem. Australia attracted criticism in the United Nations in the 1960s because it held on to Papua New Guinea long after most British and French colonies in Africa and Asia had become independent, though such criticism did not extend much beyond the UN Trusteeship Council.

In Europe, concerns about Australia being an outlier, at least among First World democracies, initially arose over Indigenous rights issues in the 1990s, including the government’s native title legislation in the wake of the Wik judgement, the Howard government’s refusal to apologise to the stolen generations, and the disproportionate number of Indigenous people who died in custody.

These concerns related to the treatment of Australian citizens, in Australia, by Australian authorities. Those voicing them shared the belief that human rights violations are not just a matter for the country where they occur and that Australia’s conduct domestically represented a flouting of international human rights law, including treaties Australia had signed. The apology issued by the Rudd government did little to dampen these concerns, not least because it was accompanied by the Northern Territory intervention, carried over from the Howard government, and because endemic injustices remained.

While Australia’s international reputation was diminished among activists championing Indigenous rights causes, it took an issue affecting asylum seekers — that is, non-Australian citizens — both in and outside Australia further to tarnish the country’s reputation.

But it is Australia’s stance on climate change, especially since the 2019–20 bushfires, that has had the biggest impact on its image overseas. In 2020 Austrade published the Global Sentiment Monitor, the results of a survey about Australia’s reputation in five Asian countries, Britain and the United States. It found that Australia’s global reputation remains strong. Reading between the lines, though, it also suggests that there is much room for improvement:

To grow our reputation, we need to demonstrate the high quality of our products and services, our clean, green produce, effective climate policies, fair immigration policies, and positive contribution to global issues.

True, Australia’s self-perception as a model international citizen, on the one hand, and international perceptions of Australia, on the other, have often been at odds. And not everybody in Europe thinks first of reefs, beaches and the outback, or the Sydney Olympics, when Australia comes up in conversation. But let’s keep this in perspective. The evidence from the Global Sentiment Monitor and other surveys suggests that most people in East Asia, North America and Europe still associate Australia far more closely with an enviable lifestyle than with the poor life expectancy of Indigenous Australians, the incarceration of asylum seekers or the volume of coal shipped from the Port of Newcastle. Even New Zealanders, who tend to know more about their trans-Tasman neighbours than people in faraway Europe, would probably point to underarm bowling before mentioning the detention and deportation of fellow citizens.

Successive Australian governments, notoriously beholden to the fossil fuel industry, have argued that Australia’s share of greenhouse gas emissions is negligible. Of course, Australia isn’t on its own responsible for global warming. In fact, whether or not Australia becomes carbon-neutral doesn’t really matter in the global context. Other countries would be able to compensate if the Morrison government continued to drag its heels.

Given that global warming is indeed a global issue, Australian inaction would not even be decisive when it comes to the effects of that warming on the Australian continent. The risk of Australian bushfires does not only, or even mainly, increase because of Australian CO2 and methane emissions.

That is not to say, however, that a nation’s obligation to reduce emissions ought to depend on the size of its population. Rather, I’d suggest it should depend on its contribution to global warming historically, its emissions on a per capita basis, and its capacity to take effective measures to reduce emissions — and to assist others taking such measures.

Australia’s stance on climate change is arguably more extreme than that of other industrialised countries. Much like in the debate about the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which the Morrison government refused to sign, Australia has been an outlier. It may be instructive to consider whether Australia’s approach, both in relation to irregularised migrants and in relation to climate change, amounts to “rogue” conduct. But the value of characterising Australia’s conduct as “rogue” for heuristic purposes ought to be decoupled from the question of whether it is productive to label Australia a “rogue nation” in public debates about climate change.

A focus on Australia’s “rogue” status is, I think, unhelpful both overseas and in Australian domestic public debate. In other industrialised countries, a focus on the Morrison government’s stance detracts from the fact that most governments are not effectively addressing climate change. In the global north, there is hardly a nation that has not gone rogue. Even where I currently live, in Germany, a country that likes to think of itself as an exemplary international citizen, none of the parties currently represented in federal parliament took policies to the 2021 election that, even if fully implemented, would allow Germany to meet the 2015 Paris agreement’s target of keeping global warming to below 1.5°C.

I’m all in favour of adopting climate change policies that don’t stop at the border, such as a ban on investments in fossil fuel industries, wherever they are, and additional import duties on products from countries that refuse to transform their economies to slow down global warming. But I also believe it is more appropriate to demand action where I live, in my neighbourhood and in my city, rather than in faraway countries. That action could well have an impact in faraway countries — if, for example, it involves lobbying a German company to withdraw from a coalmining venture outside Germany (as happened, albeit unsuccessfully, in early 2020 when Siemens was put under enormous pressure to withdraw from the Adani project in Queensland).

But people overseas may not need much convincing that they should focus their attention on what’s close to home. In fact, as far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of references to Australia’s being considered a rogue nation have originated in Australia. My sense is that Europeans, for example, tend to be puzzled, rather than outraged, by Australia’s response to asylum seekers and by its stance on climate change.

Australians often overestimate the critical attention their country attracts. That has been the case in relation to asylum seeker policies: both the government and refugee advocates exaggerated how much these policies repulsed, or appealed to, publics overseas, particularly in Europe, and the extent to which other countries were prepared to emulate them.

Such overestimation could also be the result of a misconception about the originality of Australia’s rogue behaviour. Australia is not the only country that has ignored calls by scientists to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Canada under prime minister Jean Chrétien, for example, was singled out as a “rogue state” on climate before that term first appeared in the Australian discussion. And of course Australia didn’t invent the extraterritorial processing and detention of asylum seekers; they were already practised in the 1980s by the United States in the Caribbean.

The claim that others might regard Australia as a rogue nation could be intended to prompt the government to change tack lest the nation’s reputation be tarnished. If that’s the case, I don’t think it will work. Some Australian governments have prided themselves on snubbing their international partners, and Morrison and his crew may fall into that category; they might simply consider the information that their actions upset some people overseas a feather in their cap. Most Australian governments, however, have paid close attention to how Australia has been perceived overseas, and don’t need reminding by members of the public. It was not least such international attention that contributed to the demise of the White Australia policy, well before it became a major issue domestically.

If references to Australia’s poor reputation overseas are at all useful, then that’s because they may temper Australians’ view that their government’s approach to international relations is informed by a commitment to human rights, humanitarianism and the rule of (international) law. No, Australia is not a model international citizen, and could do well with the occasional reminder that self-perceptions can be deceptive.

In Australia, statements such as Christine Milne’s and Adam Bandt’s appeal to the audience’s nationalism (which sometimes manifests as a reverse pride in the nation’s flaws). Such an appeal is questionable for two reasons: first, because it could also work the other way, as the Howard government’s popular bashing of international organisations showed; and second, and more important, because a focus on the national interest is at the heart of the predicament that we are currently facing.

This has also been true in the debate about asylum seekers: rather than referring to Australia’s reputation, or to economic losses or gains for Australia, that debate ought to focus on Australia’s capacity to assist people in need of a new home, its responsibility as a regional power, its legal obligations as a member of the international community and, not least, the precarious circumstances of the men, women and children who are seeking Australia’s protection.

Similarly, rather than focusing on Australia’s reputation or the economic gains involved in a transformation of the Australian economy, we may instead want to foreground arguments that explain why such measures are desirable: because all countries need to deal with climate change to the best of their ability, and because Australia has specific obligations as a wealthy industrialised country that produces a comparatively large amount of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis and has also done so in the past. •

This is the extended version of a talk delivered on 22 November at a symposium to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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Countries had to dismount from plenty of high horses in the last few days of the conference. As negotiators sought a final agreement, many nations’ red lines were crossed in the interests of compromise. But the conference ended in high drama when India stubbornly refused to get off its particular steed.

The issue was coal. Every other country had accepted a line in the final agreement calling for “the phasing-out of unabated coal” (that is, coal used without carbon capture and storage technology). But India — supported by China — would not. Even after the conference had to be adjourned because of its refusal, and after delegates were called back two hours later assuming a deal had been done, India objected again, proposing a further amendment to the now-completed text. “Phasing-out,” India said, should be replaced by “phasing-down.” The British chair of the conference, Alok Sharma, choked back tears as he apologised for the failure of the process, to much sympathy from delegates.

India’s and China’s late obstructionism highlighted both the power and limitations of these UN climate conferences. On the one hand, the largest and fifth-largest economies in the world cared enough about the precise wording of the agreement to face down the anger of 194 other nations. Other countries didn’t like many things in the text either, but had accepted them in the spirit of compromise required to reach agreement. On the other, it will make practically no difference to anything that happens in the real world beyond the conference hall. Though Greenpeace and other climate campaigners hailed the first-ever mention of getting rid of fossil fuels in a COP decision, the words are entirely symbolic. Without a date by when it must be done, neither “phasing-out” nor “phasing-down” have much practical meaning.

Part of the reason we know that it was only symbolic was that Australia had accepted “phasing-out” even though the government in Canberra has no plans to end coal use or exports at all. Poland and South Korea, two other coal-dependent nations, have agreed to a phase-out, but not till 2049. In practice, all five countries will have to end their use of coal well before that date if the Paris goal of limiting global heating to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial times is to be achieved.

The 1.5°C limit was in fact not the principal Paris goal, which was “well below 2°C.” But the small island states in the Pacific, Caribbean and elsewhere most existentially threatened by climate change — some of the lowest-lying will not survive rising sea levels at all — have succeeded in making 1.5°C the new benchmark of tolerable warming.

Remarkably, the conference didn’t just accept the new goal. It also acknowledged that countries’ current plans to reduce emissions would not go anywhere near meeting it, and agreed to come back next year with stronger plans aimed at doing so.

On this criterion alone COP26 should probably be regarded as a relative success. Given the pre-conference hype about Glasgow being “the last chance to save the planet,” many in the public might have been forgiven for expecting countries to announce new and stronger commitments during the conference. But that was never going to happen. They came to the meeting with emissions reduction targets decided — in many cases with great difficulty — in their domestic political systems. This is why the Paris agreement calls them “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs. Countries had neither the desire nor the mandate to raise their ambition levels during this fortnight, and the possibility of doing so was not even on the agenda.

So the most this conference could ever do was to acknowledge that the global reduction in emissions was nowhere near enough to put the world on a path to limiting heating to 1.5°C; and to resolve to reconvene as soon as practically possible with stronger commitments. Which is precisely what it did.

The numbers presented were stark. If implemented, current national pledges up to 2030 would lead to average global heating of 2.4°C. At those temperatures the oceans would be stripped of all coral reefs, many land species would become extinct, major regions would lose their water supplies, and productive agriculture would become untenable in many countries. Revisiting and strengthening NDCs is crucial if such a projected temperature rise is to be averted.

The other big issue of COP26 was finance: specifically, money provided by the rich nations to the poorer ones to help them tackle climate change. For a long time the most vulnerable countries have been angry that most of the money provided so far has been for “mitigation” (emissions reduction in those countries) and has taken the form of loans. Their emissions are too small to matter much, but they are already suffering severe effects as the climate changes. So they wanted more money directed towards adaptation, and as grants rather than loans.

They won some of this. Developed countries agreed to “at least double” their finance for adaptation (which could take it to 40–50 per cent of total financial flows) and the World Bank has been told to increase its overall funding to vulnerable countries.

But developed countries resisted the demand that they make up for their failure to hit the goal of US$100 billion in financing by 2020 — first promised over a decade ago — by providing more in 2024 and 2025. Instead the text sticks to US$100 billion a year. A new process will be established to define how much wealthy countries should pay after 2025.

It was the issue of “loss and damage,” however, that provoked the most anger — and the greatest resistance. This is the idea that rich countries should compensate poor ones for the economic and human costs caused by the former’s emissions. The idea of compensation for loss and damage represents a vital principle for the global South, one that lies at the heart of the idea of “climate justice.” Climate change is the result of the two-centuries-old economic development process that has made rich countries rich. But its most damaging effects are being experienced by the countries that contributed least to causing it — and it is making them poorer.

In climate negotiations the developed world has always fiercely resisted the idea of compensation. They fear it is a slippery slope. Accept liability for causing climate harm and before long they will find themselves in the international court, required to pay out trillions of dollars to every developing nation.

This clash of interests was never going to end harmoniously at COP26. The least developed nations and small island states demanded a new financing facility for loss and damage — with no sums or liabilities mentioned. But the United States, the European Union and other developed nations were determined not to concede. The final text called merely for a “dialogue” to discuss “arrangements.” The island nations vowed to return next year with the same demand.

So, two weeks of intense wrangling, with a leaders’ summit thrown in, ended in a nine-page main document primarily notable for asking countries to do it again next year at COP27 (to be held in the somewhat warmer location of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt). It’s easy to see why the whole process attracted so much hostile comment. Did the Glasgow jamboree actually achieve more by way of reducing emissions than it caused, in bringing 25,000 people together from across the world to merely talk about climate change? Haven’t greenhouse gas emissions risen continuously throughout the thirty years in which these annual UN climate chinwags have taken place?

Cynicism is understandable. But the right question to ask is not whether emissions have fallen since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was first signed in 1992. It is what would have happened if there had been no international treaties, and no talks.

We have an answer to this. Before COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, projected that if emissions continued on their “business as usual” path, the average global surface temperature would likely rise 4–6°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Prior to COP21 in Paris in 2015, the projected temperature rise had been reduced to around 3–5°C. In 2018, it was around 3°C. If the “nationally determined contributions” presented in Glasgow are implemented, the projected likely temperature rise is 2.4°C.

So it is not true (as Greta Thunberg is wont to say) that nothing is being done. Almost all countries have either reduced their absolute emissions (in the developed world) or slowed their rise (in the emerging economies). Not by enough, as the IPCC makes clear. But this is not a record of complete inaction.

Has this anything to do with climate negotiations? Yes. The reason we have an international climate treaty and big global “moments” like COP26 is that they internationalise what would otherwise be national policy responses to a global problem.

Climate change can only be tackled if all countries reduce their emissions. The largest single emitter, China, contributes 31 per cent of the global total; the United States 14 per cent, India 7 per cent, Russia 5 per cent. No other country’s share is above 3 per cent. Global emissions can only be reduced if every country plays its part, but if it were left to every country to act on its own, most would surely not. It would be too easy for each to say, “Our emissions are too small to make a difference; how do we know anyone else is acting?”

But it is also a problem of political circumstances. There are few countries in which climate change is a major political issue, with powerful interests favouring action. Left to themselves, most governments would no doubt do something, some time; but it is highly unlikely that this would be coordinated with every other country’s domestic political timetable.

By forcing all countries to act simultaneously, not just when it is domestically propitious to do so, the UN climate process has created much larger collective action. And in doing so it has built global scale for emissions-reducing technologies. It is no coincidence that the cost of solar power has fallen around 90 per cent since Copenhagen in 2009, and wind power up to 70 per cent. That has happened because all larger countries have introduced renewable energy policies in response to UN climate agreements (even the apparently “failed” one in Copenhagen), and the resulting scale and innovation have slashed costs. The same effect has led to the rapid and continuing fall in the price of electric vehicles and batteries since Paris in 2015.

And, of course, the declining cost of decarbonisation means that more of it can be done. It is a virtuous circle. International agreements lead to near-universal national action, which creates global markets for green technologies, which reduces costs and incentivises innovation, which allows stronger targets to be adopted next time round.

Given the requirement in the Glasgow agreement that every major country produce new 2030 commitments by COP27 next year, attention will now turn back to domestic politics. It won’t be easy for any country, barring a few with very weak plans (such as Australia), to find ways of cutting their emissions further than they have already decided. New policies and new public investment funding will be required, whether in renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, industrial emissions, or research and development into green technologies.

Can it be done? Technically and economically, yes. But politically, for many countries, it will be mighty hard. The Glasgow agreement acknowledges the need to support a “just transition” — the creation of alternative jobs and incomes for the workers and communities of high-carbon industries — but it will still be difficult to overcome the power of incumbent interests. The fossil fuel sector will defend itself vigorously for some time yet.

And yet, taking the longer view, Glasgow did feel like a turning point. Never at a COP has there been such a recognition of the injustice faced by poorer countries as a result of a problem caused by rich ones. Never have leaders been confronted so directly with the evidence of their failure. Never have they admitted that failure, and agreed to have another go. China and India’s pyrrhic victory in the dying minutes of the conference may have given heart to all those still wedded to coal. But for the rest of the world it looked like the beginning of the end for the age of fossil fuels. •

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COP26 has been more challenging than normal for Pacific island delegates. Faced with pandemic restrictions, some delegations have struggled to travel halfway round the world to participate. But those who have made it to Glasgow — official delegates, youthful climate agitators and a roll call of past and present island leaders — aren’t mincing their words. The time for quiet diplomacy is long gone.

Samoan student Brianna Fruean joined a climate action group when she was eleven. Last week, as a member of the youth network Pacific Climate Warriors, she spoke at the opening ceremony of the global conference: “You don’t need my pain or my tears to know that we’re in a crisis. The real question is whether you have the political will to do the right thing.”

For Fruean and many other Pacific delegates, the pledges made at global climate negotiations are more than just words, they are a bond and a commitment. As she stood before the dignitaries assembled at the opening — including US president Joe Biden, Prince Charles and environmental elder Sir David Attenborough — she relayed the Samoan proverb E pala le ma’a, a e le pala le upu (Even stones decay, but words remain).

“They’re promises, and a lot of the time, broken promises,” she said. “If we can really be intentional with how we wield words in these spaces, those are really the compass of how we will move forward in this climate crisis. We are currently living with the consequence of inaction, and we can’t just continuously have these COPs have these conversations and use words that aren’t as ambitious as we need them to be.”

Despite this, Fruean believes that the theatre of COP speeches can still resonate with young people who are watching these summits. “I was walking back to the accommodation and these four Swedish girls stopped me and said ‘E pala le ma’a, a e le pala le upu.’ They were speaking Samoan to me and saying, ‘You’re the one who spoke at the opening ceremony!’ They had memorised the proverb! This was a very heart-warming moment for me. I feel it is an honour for us to share our culture with other people, like those Swedish teenagers.”

Another Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, has been leading youth activists onto the streets of Glasgow, challenging the “blah, blah, blah” of official proceedings. But Fruean contrasts the hope and pride evident among young Pacific islanders at COP26 with the despair shown by many other young people from developed countries. “There is a very strong message coming from the pālagi youth, the global North youth, that their elders have failed them,” she tells me. “But I don’t feel that way with my elders. I know that a lot of young Pacific people don’t feel that either. Our Pacific elders have not failed us, because they have continually told the world that climate change is real and we need to do something.”

She adds, “Even though it is young voices like Greta Thunberg and the school strike that push this conversation forward, in the Pacific we young people stand on the shoulders of giants, who have been doing the work before Greta was even born. I feel that Indigenous people like Pacific islanders have always carried this message.”

Outside the global climate negotiations, youth networks like the Pacific Climate Warriors are developing targeted programs to put pressure on financial institutions that invest in fossil fuel corporations.

“A big part of our work at COP26 has been around finance, particularly divestment from the fossil fuel industry,” Fruean says. “We’ve always been pushing to keep fossil fuels in the ground, in order for the Pacific to survive. So we’ve added a new tactic, with our campaigning to get banks and financial institutions to remove their money from the fossil fuel industry. If these fossil fuel industries don’t have money for their extraction, it will make things so much harder for them.

“Governments have promised us money [through adaptation climate finance] but they’ve also been giving money to the industries that are destroying us,” she adds. “That’s why we are trying to follow the money. We want Lloyds of London and the Bank of England and other financial institutions to take their investments out of coal and oil — and that work goes on beyond COP26.”

Across the Pacific islands, churches, mosques and temples play a crucial social and political, as well as spiritual, role. Through the Pacific Conference of Churches, or PCC, mainline Christian churches are involved in a range of social justice campaigns around the environment, poverty and self-determination for Indigenous peoples.

In recent days, PCC general secretary James Bhagwan has been rushing from meeting to press conference to demonstration in Glasgow. As a member of the World Council of Churches delegation, the Indo-Fijian church leader says he’ll speak to the summit on behalf of the global ecumenical network. “As an official observer, the WCC speaks at plenary,” he tells me. “However on an alphabetical list we are always at the end, so probably I’ll speak at the end of the week very late at night. Given the fact that the Australian prime minister made his speech to an almost empty room, it won’t be much different for me!”

Echoing the appeal on “Faith and Science” issued by Pope Francis and religious leaders on 4 October, Bhagwan argues that “faith communities have been quite clear on the moral imperative around the human and non-human impacts of climate change. We have not just focused on the anthropocentric aspects of climate change, but also the more ecological and biodiversity aspects.”

He stresses the capacity of religious denominations in the Pacific to reach out to every town, village and tribe, a key network for climate advocacy and community education. Faith communities are “very important in terms of mobilisation of communities,” he says. “The key part of this discussion is about the social transformation that has to take place. This is where civil society and faith-based communities have a crucial role.”

Smaller island states like Tuvalu, Kiribati and Marshall Islands have long been crucial diplomatic players at the global negotiations. This year, however, a number of Pacific countries have been unable to send large delegations. The disruption of airline schedules, the diverse quarantine regimes that islanders must transit to reach Glasgow, the added expense of travel in a pandemic, and a fear of bringing coronavirus back to largely Covid-free nations are all factors that have limited the size of most Pacific delegations to this year’s summit.

Dismissing “the circus of COP” — the celebrities and speeches, the salespeople and snake oil merchants — Bhagwan highlights the important work of Pacific negotiators.

“This year, we have a very small number of Pacific negotiators and they have to work two or three times as hard, because they are small in numbers and thin on the ground,” he says. “Everybody is spread really, really thin. Negotiators and delegates need to double up in the spaces that exist, but you may find that people get called out of meetings to go into other bilateral meetings.”

Bhagwan says this is a major problem for Pacific delegations, facing up against legions of fossil fuel lobbyists in Glasgow: “This is one of those places where numbers matter. You can see the strain on our delegations already, just not having enough people. Each thematic area needs at least one negotiator, but you need two or three to back up.”

Beyond his own advocacy work in Glasgow, Bhagwan has found himself in a pastoral role, supporting the exhausted team who are working to advance Pacific agendas: “Our work is talking with our Pacific people and encouraging them, praying with them for those of the Christian faith, to help with the stress that they are under.”

While the northern hemisphere media often highlights the David and Goliath battle of Pacific states, the concrete proposals initiated by island governments are often overlooked. At COP26, for example, Forum Island countries have highlighted the oceans/climate nexus, looking at how warming ocean temperatures will affect the migration of tuna stocks and damage reef ecologies and marine biodiversity. Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands have been campaigning for action on maritime emissions at the International Maritime Organization. Pacific governments championed a recent resolution at the UN Human Rights Council creating a Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights.

A function organised by the Office of the Pacific Oceans Commissioner launched the region’s new Declaration on Preserving Maritime Zones in the Face of Climate Change-related Sea-Level Rise, which seeks to expand international law on maritime rights. The statement, adopted in August, proclaims that the rights and entitlements that flow from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea “shall continue to apply, without reduction, notwithstanding any physical changes connected to climate change-related sea-level rise.”

A crucial objective of Pacific delegations is to finalise the rulebook for implementation of the Paris agreement on climate change. Another objective is to lock in predictable, accessible and targeted climate finance for developing countries, increasing the global commitment of funding for adaptation, and loss and damage. Joining delegates from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, Forum Island countries amplify their message as members of wider alliances, such as the Higher Ambition Coalition, the Climate Vulnerable Forum, the Alliance of Small Island States, and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.

In Glasgow, Pacific island delegations have established a ‘Blue Moana’ space as an exhibition centre and meeting room. It’s a hub for the united OneCROP team, which assembles the delegates, experts and negotiators from the Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific. But Bhagwan notes that “unfortunately this year the Blue Moana space is much smaller than usual and they’ve been put out of the way. Normally these spaces are a place for our team to congregate, but with Covid protocols in place, it’s really a very, very difficult place for people to work in.”

Australian prime ministers Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull have continued to intervene in political debates since they left office. In the same way, former Pacific island leaders have a level of freedom to speak without the constraints facing current officeholders. They can also present perspectives from island nations that are often watered down in the final communiqués of the Pacific Islands Forum, where Australia often stands against the agenda advanced by its Pacific neighbours.

To complement the urgent voices of Pacific youth, a new network of former presidents, prime ministers and senior officials has entered the fray — Pacific Elders Voice. Its members make up a roll call of island leaders who have been active in COPs for many years, including former Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga and recently retired Micronesian presidents Anote Tong of Kiribati, Hilda C. Heine of Marshall Islands and Tommy Remengesau Jr of Palau. They are joined by leading Chamorro scholar and politician Robert Underwood of Guahan (Guam), and the outgoing secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, Dame Meg Taylor of Papua New Guinea.

In a series of statements, tweets and speeches, the Pacific Elders have played a prophetic role during COP26. They seek more urgent action to maintain temperature rises below 1.5°C, more targeted and accessible climate finance, and call for G20 nations to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. They propose a new climate Marshall Plan, on a scale similar to reconstruction after the second world war, to “rapidly decarbonise the global economy and provide the necessary financial support to those most affected by the impacts of climate change.”

While their demands are directed at all OECD countries as well as China, India and other industrialised developing nations, the Pacific Elders place a special focus on Australia, the largest member of the Pacific Islands Forum.

In Glasgow, Greenpeace Australia Pacific launched a new report, Pacific Bully and International Outcast, which documents how successive Australian governments have attempted to use aid money to block a regional consensus on emissions reduction, diluting the official communiqué at the annual Forum leaders’ meeting. Much of the Australian media has underplayed the growing anger and scorn in the Pacific directed towards “The Australian Way” — the Morrison government’s so-called plan for climate action. Nor have the displays from oil and gas company Santos at Australia’s official conference pavilion gone unnoticed — PCC’s James Bhagwan describes them as “a slap in the face to the Pacific community who are calling for an end to fossil fuels.”

Despite Scott Morrison’s belated proclamation of “net zero by 2050,” Australia’s refusal to announce a new emissions target for 2030 has angered Pacific delegates, young and old alike. “Once again, Prime Minister Morrison has failed to deliver anything new,” says former Marshall Islands president Dr. Hilda Heine. “There is very little detail and none of the clear action on fossil fuels required to keep global warming at 1.5°C.”

As the controversy since the signing of the AUKUS agreement highlights, Scott Morrison’s highly personalised diplomacy is damaging Australian strategic interests. His first presence at a face-to-face Forum leaders’ meeting in 2019 ended in bitter wrangling and criticism, and not much has improved since. Last week, former Kiribati president Anote Tong stressed that Morrison’s climate diplomacy is floundering: “We’ve hoped for far more from our Pacific neighbour. The rest of the world hoped for more. This great nation is becoming more and more isolated due to the government’s lack of action and ambition on climate change.”

Even Fijian prime minister Voreqe “Frank” Bainimarama, the current chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, has used social media to make some sharp points. Bainimarama tweeted a welcome to his “good friend” Scott Morrison at the Glasgow summit. It was accompanied by a picture of Bainimarama presenting his Australian counterpart with a copy of Fiji’s newly legislated Climate Change Act — a tongue-in-cheek reference to Morrison’s refusal to legislate even the long-delayed commitment of net zero by 2050.

In his formal national statement to the Glasgow summit, Scott Morrison announced a new pledge of A$500 million for climate finance for Asian and Pacific countries. He highlighted the way that $200 million of this amount will be “invested in our backyard amongst our Pacific island family.”

This gesture was immediately critiqued as too little, too late. In reports like Fairer Futures, Australian environment and development organisations had been calling for much greater increases to meet Australia’s fair share of the global target of US$100 billion of climate finance per annum, with a doubling of current commitments to A$3 billion by 2023.

Former president of Palau, Tommy Remengesau Jr, also made clear that adaptation funding means little unless accompanied by more ambition on emissions reduction: “Prime Minister Morrison cannot buy himself out of a much greater responsibility for urgent and rapid action to reduce emissions at home and to stop the export of coal.”

Island diplomats are concerned by Australia’s reliance on the shrinking Official Development Assistance budget for its international climate finance pledges, at a time when other OECD countries are looking at innovative sources to increase both development and climate finance. In Glasgow, Samoa’s UN ambassador stressed the importance of looking beyond aid budgets as the sole source for climate finance.

“I think it’s important to emphasise that we are looking for new money, not money that you shift from one pocket to the other, because it doesn’t really help us,” Fatumanava-o-Upolu said. “If you put more money to [climate] finance but that comes out of aid to our countries that has funded basic infrastructure or social sectors like education, health, etc., then it’s a no-win situation for us.”

Leaders of Smaller Island States are also angered by Australia’s refusal to reinstate contributions to the Green Climate Fund, or GCF, the global climate finance mechanism created under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Despite complex application processes and long delays, most Forum Island countries have already accessed GCF funding. By June this year, grants to Pacific Small Island Developing States amounted to US$440 million, combined with US$690 million of co-financing.

Playing to a conservative domestic audience, Scott Morrison has long railed against “negative globalism” and an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” In response, a member of Pacific Elders Voice, former Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga, suggests the Morrison government refuses to work through multilateral structures because it fears losing control over decision-making.

“We know that very little of this money will leave Australia,” Sopoaga said. “It will go to highly paid Australian consultants to do projects designed and managed by Australia. Pacific island countries believe in the Green Climate Fund and our own regional mechanisms because they give us access to critical climate finance, as well as ownership and control over how the money is spent.”

Beyond this, Morrison’s outdated, racist imagery of the Pacific islands as “our backyard” wins little support in the region. The Australian leader often presents himself as a Christian committed to the Pacific vuvale, or family. But this language is grating for many, including the leader of the region’s main ecumenical church organisation.

“I’m very concerned about the way Australia throws around the word vuvale as if they’re part of the Pacific family,” says PCC’s Reverend Bhagwan. “They are not honouring the meaning of that word, which talks about unity and working together for the common good and caring for the common household.”

“People need to ‘walk the talk’ of their faith,” he adds, “particularly for those leaders who proclaim to be part of the Christian faith, which talks of justice. They need the moral courage as well as the political courage to stand up. Whether they have the guts to put their political careers on the line for the sake of the future, that’s up to them.” •

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Colourful and noisy, the Glasgow demonstrators waved a diverse range of banners and placards. But one seemed to dominate. “Make it a fair COP!” said the bright yellow hearts waving above the marchers’ heads. “Climate justice now!” It expressed the marked shift within the climate movement over the last few years, in Britain and elsewhere. This cause is no longer just about protecting future generations from the likely ravages of a warming planet. It is about defending the poorest peoples of the world from the devastating impacts they are experiencing right now.

After all, the idea of “climate justice” expresses a profound truth. Climate change has been caused by the burning of fossil fuels over two centuries in the richest countries of the world. It is indeed what has made them rich. But it is wreaking its greatest damage on the poorest countries and people; indeed, it is making many of them very much poorer.

I walked for a while alongside a group wearing brightly coloured national costumes. They came from some of the low-lying Pacific islands that will cease to exist if sea levels rise as currently predicted. Walking with them was Tishiko King, a Torres Strait Islander and campaigns director of the Australian youth environmental organisation Seed Mob. She was there, she said, to stand shoulder to shoulder with First Nations across the world fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples. “Too often our voices are missing when decisions are being made that impact our future,” she told me. “So if world leaders won’t hear us in the conference, we’ll make sure they’ll hear us on the streets!”

Nearby another Australian, Caroline Sherwood, held a homemade banner depicting Scott Morrison with his head in the sand in front of a massive coalmine. The Sydneysider said she was ashamed of her government. “Their plan to meet net zero by 2050 is nothing more than a public relations exercise: it has no substance,” she told me. Almost everyone I spoke to, wherever they were from, expressed similar shame or disappointment. They all noted the gap between politicians’ rhetoric and what they themselves saw happening.

At the “Fridays for Future” march the previous day, though, the mood had been different. This was the demonstration by the young people galvanised by Greta Thunberg’s weekly “school strikes” — around 20,000 of them — and they, like Thunberg, were angry. Though COP26 was only halfway through, Thunberg told the crowd, it was already a failure. The politicians were all talk and no action. It’s just “blah blah blah,” she said, repeating the catchphrase that has reverberated around the global media this past week.

To the young people I spoke to, almost all of them under twenty-five, climate change feels like an existential threat. One banner put it simply: “You’re stealing my future!” At a personal level, the prospect of living in an unstable world of frequent natural catastrophes and geopolitical conflict fills many with deep anxiety. A recent Pew poll of 10,000 young people in ten countries found nearly half admitting to climate-induced feelings of distress that affected their daily lives. Almost four in ten said they were not sure if they would want to bring children into such a world.

At a political level, the young people’s concerns are much more directed. They are angry with their parents’ generation. It is those born before 1970 — as several of my interviewees made pointedly clear to me (born 1960) — who have failed to act on climate change over the past quarter century. And it is they, the millennials and “generation Z,” who will suffer from our self-indulgent and selfish lifestyles.

And many of them are angry at capitalism too. This was a powerful thread running through the assembled slogans. “Systems change not climate change!” said one banner. “Uproot the system!” demanded another. And a third: “Environmentalism without socialism is just gardening.”

Wit aside, this was no throwaway rhetoric. These young climate activists offer a powerful critique. Capitalism has caused this emergency. So only getting rid of capitalism can solve it. It’s an argument fed by some serious scholars and bestselling writers. In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, the Canadian author Naomi Klein argues that the modern capitalist economy, run by huge corporations and financial interests, and feeding on mass high-carbon consumption, cannot reverse its core dynamic of material growth and human exploitation. Only economic transformation, based on the principles of ecological sustainability and social justice, can do that.

The core demand of the radical climate movement is for a “green new deal”: a thoroughgoing program of public investment in reducing emissions and restoring nature, combined with new rights and higher wages for workers and oppressed minorities, and constraints on financial capital. Its most famous champions are Klein — whose most recent book sets out the case — and the young US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose millions of followers on Twitter and Instagram attest to the power of her inspirational rhetoric (as well as her effective interventions in the US Congress). Thousands of young people have become local and national activists for a “GND” in America, Britain, and elsewhere across the world.

Listening to young people articulating these arguments it would be easy to dismiss them as the usual activist minority. But the Pew poll should make politicians ponder. Around 65 per cent of those surveyed around the world felt governments were failing young people. These are voters (or in some cases soon will be) and it is pretty clear that climate change will determine how many of them vote.

They have already shaken up the environmental movement. Only a few years ago that movement was led by the “big logos” — Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the like. Today the running is made by young climate strikers, direct action groups blocking roads and chaining themselves to bulldozers, and students forcing their universities to divest from fossil fuels. It’s Greta Thunberg whom the media now turn to first. Here at COP the dominant civil society voices are groups from the global South rather than their Western counterparts. The new political power of radical and predominantly youth-led climate activism is everywhere apparent.

And yet there is something paradoxical about this too. Because looking at the climate science — and there is also plenty of that on show in Glasgow — it is the urgency of the required action that presses most strongly. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that global greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by 45 per cent by 2030, en route to net zero by around 2060. It is difficult to imagine capitalism being overthrown in that kind of time. In practice, capitalism will have to solve the climate problem, or it will not be solved.

There are plenty of capitalists here who will tell you that this can be done. Companies with climate solutions are out in force: hundreds of them boasting of their new and cheaper green technology, their expert financial and consultancy services, their innovative new product just waiting for some government policy to make it profitable.

Their business rivals are here too, of course. Global Witness has enterprisingly counted the number of representatives from the fossil fuel sector registered for the conference and noted that, at over 500, it is more than any country has brought. Most of these companies are claiming to be turning green (if gradually), but few observers are very convinced. A recent report by the UN Environment Programme found that current plans for oil and gas drilling and coalmining globally amount to twice the level that would be allowable under a scenario in which global heating were limited to the COP26 goal of 1.5°C above pre-industrial times.

Can capitalism be greened? It is the question that underpins the entire conference, though it won’t be mentioned in the negotiating rooms and is too provocative for most of the fringe meetings. The answer in practice is likely to have two parts.

First, it won’t be greened by itself. Almost all the progress in environmental technologies and consumption patterns over the past thirty years has come about as a result of government policies. Energy efficiency standards, pollution regulations, renewable energy mandates, conservation orders, product bans, green taxes, emissions trading schemes, research and development subsidies: it is the panoply of state interventions in markets that have driven such progress as we have had. And it is much more far-reaching interventions that will be needed if fossil fuels are to be squeezed out of the global economy and investment in green solutions increased to the levels required. There might even be some people who would question whether an economy subject to such intervention should still be called entirely “capitalist.”

Second, this will be a continuous battle, for every policy put forward will be opposed by an incumbent interest. The fossil fuel representatives gathered in Glasgow are as nothing next to the number of their lobbyists who are being deployed in national legislatures. The banks and pension funds will carry on financing them until they are legally prevented from doing so. For every politician with green voters to satisfy there will be another — often the same one — with local high-carbon jobs at risk and consumers complaining about higher prices.

In this field of political conflict — one that will inevitably dominate the next decade — it matters that there are people on the streets and young people who are angry, for the demonstrators in Glasgow and elsewhere across the world are setting the terms of the debate. Climate justice, fairness for future generations, net zero, 1.5°C, a green new deal, green capitalism and anti-capitalism: we are only going to hear more of this argument. For those seeking to understand what the political and economic future might look like, this will surely be it. •

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The case for pessimism was made eloquently — if perhaps unintentionally — by Sir David Attenborough in a powerful address to the Leaders’ Summit that opened the conference on Monday. Tracing the precipitous rise in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere over the past hundred years, the ninety-five-year-old naturalist reached a simple conclusion: “We are already in trouble.”

The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, was even more brutal in her speech in response. The developed world had failed to meet its promises to cut emissions and provide financial assistance to the poorest countries. The cost, she said, would be measured in lives, and in livelihoods. “It is immoral, and it is unjust.”

Both Attenborough and Mottley insisted humanity can still turn things around. But listening to the rhetoric of the 119 leaders whose speeches filled the next two days — all of them stressing how much their countries were doing, despite most of the facts showing otherwise — it was hard for the rational brain not to feel overwhelmed by pessimism.

The facts are pretty simple. To have a reasonable chance of limiting global heating to the UN goal of 1.5°C above pre-industrial times, global emissions need to be cut by 45 per cent by 2030. On current trends they will rise by 16 per cent.

And yet COP26 is strangely a place of extraordinary optimism. This is mainly a function of its structure. Most of the 25,000 attendees aren’t country negotiators here for the UN climate talks, who probably number around 2500. The rest are people who work professionally on climate change, for businesses, charities and activist groups, universities, city and regional governments, and myriad others. They are here not to negotiate but to sell their wares, meet their international colleagues and network tirelessly.

For a COP is never just — or even mainly — a UN negotiating meeting. It is the world’s annual global climate expo and conference. And almost everyone who comes has a positive story to tell about how they are tackling climate change in some way. For some reason the climate sceptics and the opponents of climate action don’t seem to regard themselves as welcome, and they don’t show up.

So walk among the country and business “pavilions” in the middle of the conference centre — a slightly grandiose name for a series of pop-up stalls and exhibits — and the good news is relentless. Every country is doing so much to tackle the problem, from renewable energy to flood defences, sustainable transport to overseas aid. Every business is committed to “net zero,” engaging its eager workforce in meeting the goal. Every technology company has a world-leading solution, from green hydrogen to drought-resistant crops.

And every hour of the day all the side rooms are full, hosting hundreds of fringe meetings on every possible aspect of climate change. And here too the mood is powerfully feel-good. Of course most of them start with speakers recounting how dire the climate situation is. But they quickly move on to what can be done to tackle it; indeed what their organisation is already doing, in partnership with local communities and local businesses, supported by benevolent financiers and researched by concerned academics. The poorest people in the world may be suffering from severe climate impacts, but a lot of people claim to be helping them.

Observing all this it is easy to be cynical. But it’s also hard not to be affected. It can only be a good thing that a global climate industry of this scale and variety exists. There will surely be no solutions without it. And it has contributed to the remarkably upbeat mood of the official COP proceedings in the first few days.

The negotiations themselves have barely started. An agenda was agreed on the first day — you might think that this would be routine, but plenty of seasoned negotiators saw it as something of a triumph — and the committees and working groups on key issues have held their opening sessions. But most of the attention has been taken up by a series of side agreements carefully choreographed by the British hosts. And the extent and ambition of these have taken many by surprise.

The first was on deforestation. A new pact was announced between more than a hundred governments, representing over 85 per cent of the world’s forests and including Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, pledging to halt and then reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030. Donor countries would give US$12 billion for forest protection and restoration; many of the countries, companies and financial institutions most involved in trading forest products, including timber, pulp and palm oil, would eliminate deforested areas from their supply chains.

After forests, methane. US president Joe Biden announced that ninety countries had agreed together to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent by the end of the decade. Methane, produced from agriculture, oil and gas, and landfill sites, is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide: if fully implemented, the pledge could limit global heating by about 0.2°C by 2050.

Green technologies were next in the spotlight. Forty countries, including the United States, China, India, the European Union, Britain and Australia, signed up to a “Breakthrough Agenda” to coordinate the global introduction of clean technologies, starting with zero-carbon electricity, electric vehicles, green steel, hydrogen and sustainable farming. The governments said they would align standards and coordinate investments to scale and speed up production. The aim is to bring forward the tipping point at which green technologies are more affordable and available than fossil-fuelled alternatives.

Then it was the turn of finance. Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and Britain’s climate finance envoy, announced that financial institutions holding US$130 trillion of assets under management had committed to hitting net zero emissions targets by 2050. Including more than 450 banks, insurers and asset managers across forty-five countries, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero said it could deliver as much as US$100 trillion of financing to help economies decarbonise over the next three decades.

Not everyone applauded all this. Observers noted that a very similar agreement on forests had been announced at the UN Climate Summit in 2014. Nothing much had happened since then; would this time really be any different? It was pointed out that China, one of the world’s largest sources of methane, had not joined the new agreement. Several other green technology initiatives over the last ten years, including a “Mission 2020” platform announced with great fanfare in Paris six years ago, had proved disappointing.

The finance announcements attracted the most criticism. Non-government organisations quickly pointed out that the financial institutions were not promising that all the financing would be focused on environmentally friendly companies. Many of the banks and pension funds would only be greening a small proportion of their portfolios while happily continuing to invest in fossil fuels. The “net zero” commitments of the firms whose shares they owned were in many cases pretty dubious, resting on “offsetting” mechanisms (such as buying trees in developing countries) that can’t be guaranteed to have any effect.

And yet these agreements can’t be wholly dismissed. Many involved a large number of countries that had not previously signed up to such pledges; and most came with a lot more money — both public and private — than previous attempts. A specific agreement between South Africa, the United States and several European countries to help South Africa move away from coal particularly impressed observers: it included both significant policy reform and serious financial support.

These side agreements have a slightly strange relationship to the main negotiations. Formally, they have nothing to do with them: they do not involve the universal participation of the 197 parties to the UNFCCC (the Framework Convention that governs the talks) but rather are “coalitions of the willing.” Most of them involve private sector partners that have no formal place in the UNFCCC.

Yet in another sense they are clearly part of the process of cutting global emissions and increasing climate-related finance, which are the two main goals of COP26. Indeed, they are rather more concrete manifestations of this than anything negotiated in the conference hall. So the British government is trying to find a way of bringing them into the final COP agreement. In particular it wants to show how these agreements will help close the emissions gap between the 1.5°C trajectory demanded by the science and the current total of country pledges. Initial analysis has been uncertain: it’s possible that these sector-specific emissions reductions will be the means by which the “nationally determined contributions” of the participating countries will be achieved. Or it could be that they will enable those contributions to be exceeded.

And the nationally determined contributions themselves have also received a welcome boost in the first few days. China and India were the only two major countries who came to the COP without having announced new commitments for 2030. When it did come, China’s statement added nothing to what it had already pledged. Coupled with president Xi Jinping’s non-appearance at the Leaders’ Summit, it has made many observers question China’s current stance: a country that once prided itself on being the champion of the developing world is appearing to absent itself from this crucial moment.

India, by contrast, announced a much more ambitious contribution than anticipated. Speaking in his leader’s slot, prime minister Narendra Modi declared that India would commit to net zero emissions by 2070, and half of its electricity production from renewables by 2030. The former — a later date than China (which has committed to net zero by 2060) and apparently too late to be compatible with the 1.5°C goal — seemed disappointing to some. But scientific observers noted that this was not necessarily the case: it was indeed too late if Modi meant net zero carbon dioxide, but not if he meant net zero from all greenhouse gases. And the renewables pledge was truly ambitious: with India’s proportion of renewable electricity currently under 20 per cent, a more than doubling in less than ten years is a startlingly radical goal.

And so the early feeling in Glasgow is considerably happier than many had feared. More side agreements are still to be announced, including on phasing out coal and electrifying cars. No one will admit to expecting that COP26 will be a raging success. But some are allowing themselves a small boost of optimism. •

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Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of the software house Atlassian, paid a record $100 million for Fairwater in 2018, and moved in with his young family. Atlassian’s other founder, Scott Farquhar, had already bought the neighbouring house, “Elaine,” which had been owned by Sir Warwick’s cousin and John Fairfax Ltd director Sir Vincent Fairfax, for $71 million.

Where Sir Warwick went to work chauffeur-driven in finely tailored Prince of Wales check suits, in later years favouring mutton-chop sideburns, forty-one-year-old Cannon-Brookes wears jeans, sweatshirts and a peaked canvas cap, has a straggly beard and shoulder-length hair, and takes public transport to work.

The old Fairfax building on Broadway featured different tiers of catering, ranging from an executive dining room for senior managers, editors and directors down to two greasy-spoon canteens, one for white-collar staff and the other for the inky printers. A reserved elevator took Sir Warwick and other directors to the wood-panelled top floor. Otherwise the building was so bleakly utilitarian it was once used as a location for a movie set in Stalin-era Moscow.

Some 300 metres away, Atlassian’s new $546 million headquarters, recently approved by the NSW government as part of the remake of Central railway station, will be a forty-storey concrete, steel and timber structure running on 100 per cent renewable energy. It will feature indoor and outdoor garden terraces where executives and programmers will mingle under a corporate philosophy that declares “no bulls—t” as one of its guiding principles.

The Atlassian story, now a legend, has inspired a generation of internet startups. It began when Cannon-Brookes, a banker’s son who went to the expensive Cranbrook school, not far from where he lives now, and Farquhar, a working-class boy from Sydney’s outer suburbs who won a place at the selective James Ruse high school, met during information technology and science classes at the University of NSW.

On graduating in 2002, they formed Atlassian and began work on a new program called Jira, designed to improve collaborative software development projects and sort out program bugs. They financed the startup with $10,000 drawn on maxed-out credit cards. Jira and other products designed to enhance creative cooperation found ready markets. Two decades later, Microsoft, Oracle and the other top-ten software makers use Atlassian products, as do major global companies including Shell, Toyota, Amazon and Nokia Verizon, and universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale and MIT.

In 2010 the partners raised US$60 million from a big US venture capital fund, and in 2015 they floated Atlassian on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York. It now has a market capitalisation of US$108 billion, making it the 143rd-biggest corporation in the world by that measure, with 6000 employees in Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Japan and India. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar both own 22.7 per cent, making each of them worth US$24.5 billion.

The two partners haven’t just spent big on the finer things in life. They have also been lobbing boulders into the stagnant ponds of Australia’s economy and politics. Belatedly, a decade or so after the United States, tech billionaires are disrupting Australian business, and their firepower is immense.

One of the first inklings came in early 2017 when South Australia suffered a statewide blackout after tens of thousands of lightning strikes and two tornadoes cut power lines. Conservative politicians and journalists pounced, blaming the then Labor state government for relying too much on wind and solar power rather than “stable” coal or gas generators.

Cannon-Brookes picked up on a claim by Tesla’s vice-president for energy products, Lyndon Rive, that his company’s big lithium batteries could fix the state’s energy network in one hundred days. On Twitter, he asked Tesla founder Elon Musk how serious he was. “If I can make the $ happen (& politics),” he asked, “can you guarantee the 100 MW in 100 days?”

“Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free,” Musk tweeted back. “That serious enough for you?”

Musk was derided by then federal treasurer Scott Morrison, who around the same time brandished a lump of coal in parliament to taunt Labor and the Greens. “By all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the world’s biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country,” said the man destined to be prime minister. “But that is not solving the problem.”

The big battery began operating in November that year, some sixty days after an agreement had been signed between Tesla, French renewable firm Neoen, and the SA government. As a backup, it can power 30,000 homes for eight hours, or 60,000 homes for four. As a source of cheap power, it’s estimated to save South Australian consumers about $40 million a year.

The battery’s capacity is currently being doubled, and state governments and power companies around Australia are following its example.

“The way capital has moved much more strongly towards renewables than the Coalition has is fascinating,” says former Australian National University professor of economics Andrew Leigh, now a federal Labor MP. “You can see the tension within the Business Council of Australia and how increasingly renewables are being seen as the sensible way to go.”

Leigh believes that Mike Cannon-Brookes stands out so much because the Australian business landscape has been so static. Aside from pharmaceutical major CSL, he says, the five largest firms on the stock market are the same as they were thirty-five years ago. “You see much more dynamism and flux in the US. The US has completely turned over its top five companies in the last thirty-five years, and the dominance of tech in the share market has been well-established for a decade.”

Business is coming round on climate, though. Leigh reports having very different conversations with business leaders from those he has with his counterparts on the other side of parliament. Coalition MPs, he says, “are caught up in talking about 2050 targets when the conversation in Glasgow is going to be about 2030. They’re still running scare campaigns about electric vehicles ending the weekend. You get a sense when you are talking to businesspeople that they’re excited about what Tesla and others are doing, they’re looking at renewables, they’re aware they have to account to the market on climate emissions. It’s just a very different conversation.”

“It’s a great thing for Australia that Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar have made an absolute fortune,” says Ralph Evans, a former head of the federal government’s Austrade. “There have been venture capital successes before, but much smaller. This is a very big one and it shows it can be done. It will encourage many others.”

Evans cites other examples of emerging firms, notably the Sydney-based graphic design platform Canva, started by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams in Perth eight years ago, which now has 1500 staff and 750,000 customers worldwide, and is valued at US$40 billion.

For Evans, the Atlassian partners reflect the spirit of the San Francisco Bay area. “It’s full of people like Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar,” he says. “They are not going to put up with what they’re told to think by Murdoch or Donald Trump or anybody else like that.”

As well as taking a high-profile position on climate, the company weighs into debates on immigration, arguing for more open transfers of expertise, and IT security, questioning the push by intelligence agencies to compel communications and social media companies to give them “backdoor” access to encrypted data.

But green technology is the subject that has brought Cannon-Brookes out into advocacy — and action. Over the past week, as Morrison dragged his Coalition partners into reluctant agreement on a net zero target for 2050 while sticking with the Abbott government’s target of 28 per cent reduction by 2030, Cannon-Brookes has been spurring action outside the federal government.

He and his wife Annie pledged to invest $1 billion in green technology projects and donate a further $500 million to organisations working on the climate crisis, and promised that Atlassian itself would be a net zero operation by 2040. He says the 2050 target cited by Morrison as a historic moment was already a “done deal” for most of the advanced economies, with ambitious 2030 targets now far more important.

His latest commitments come on top of some $1 billion that Cannon-Brookes has put into green energy ventures. One is a company called Sun Cable, with offices in Singapore, Darwin and Sydney, started by partners David Griffin, Mac Thompson and Fraser Thompson. It was seed-funded by Cannon-Brookes’s private investment firm, Grok Ventures, alongside iron ore magnate Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy and others.

On 20 October, as the Nationals caucus was still chewing the grass stalks on net zero, Sun Cable announced that a raft of important global firms, including engineering giants Bechtel, Hatch and SMEC, were joining its $30 billion project to take solar power from northern Australia to Singapore.

The project involves some 125 square kilometres of solar arrays in the Simpson Desert, connected to Darwin by an 800 kilometre cable, and then undersea to Singapore by a 4200 kilometre high-voltage direct current cable. The project is designed to supply 15 per cent of the island republic’s electricity and cut emissions by enough for it to reach its 2030 abatement target. Construction is planned to start in 2023, with completion in 2028, when it is expected to generate about $2 billion a year in earnings for Australia.

It’s a big test of the cable transmission technology. The most ambitious example so far is an 800 kilometre high-voltage direct current cable between Norway and Britain, with shorter ones from offshore windfarms to European centres. But a solar-cable project over a similarly ambitious distance is proposed to link solar arrays in Morocco with Britain.

Iain MacGill, a UNSW associate professor of electrical engineering who has collaborated with Sun Cable, says the project is “technically leading edge” in its combination of terminal configuration, distance, power transfer capacity, and water depth. “There are other HVDC links that collectively do most of these things (except that distance), but not all together,” he says.

“The commercial challenges and risks are likely the most important in terms of the project being implemented,” MacGill goes on. “However, the commercial opportunity is also extremely attractive given Singapore’s current reliance on gas generation, limited local renewable energy options, and plans to increase their use of renewables and reduce emissions.”

Another big renewables scheme, the solar-and-wind Asian Renewable Energy Hub proposed for northwest Australia, has switched from HVDC energy exports to green hydrogen and now green ammonia. Ralph Evans notes that Singapore is already building floating solar arrays in its own backwaters, and could find larger floating arrays in nearby Indonesian waters a cheaper proposition than the distant Australian source.

Somewhat ironically, Scott Morrison has found himself part of the marketing for Sun Cable, pushing its merits to his Singapore counterpart Lee Hsien Loong on a stopover to the G7 summit earlier  this year. Australia’s ambassador in Jakarta, Penny Williams, also worked to gain the Indonesian government’s approval for the undersea cabling, announced last month, with the project pledging $2 billion in technology transfers to Indonesian institutions.

After these latest announcements, Cannon-Brookes said Sun Cable could be just the start of renewable energy exports, and Australia should be thinking of a “500 per cent” renewables target.

“Every step forward puts the naysayers further in the rear-view mirror,” he tweeted. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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COP26 is not the first “last chance,” of course. Several others have been so billed over the past decade or so. But this is indeed an important meeting because it’s the moment specified under the 2015 Paris climate agreement when countries must strengthen their commitments to tackle global heating. After three years of biblical droughts, fires and floods on every inhabited continent — and melting ice sheets on the other — no leader can claim that climate can safely be left to the future.

COP26 must tackle two big issues. The first of these is the gap between the aggregate commitments countries have made to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and the total the scientists have said is required to keep global heating to the Paris goal of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. To have a reasonable chance of achieving this limit will require global emissions to be around 26 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or GtCO2e, in 2030. Countries’ announced emissions reduction pledges will reduce global emissions to around 46–49 GtCO2e, leaving an emissions gap of 20–23 GtCO2e. Put another way, we are currently on track for an average global temperature rise not of 1.5°C but of 2.4–2.9°C, levels at which the severest climate impacts become certain.

The second issue for COP26 is the finance gap. In Paris the richest countries promised the poorest that they would mobilise US$100 billion a year by 2020 to help them tackle climate change, and more thereafter. At the last count, in 2019, they had raised around US$80 billion. Developing countries have been loud in their protests.

But there’s a problem. Although the emissions and finance gaps are the big issues COP26 must address, neither will actually be negotiated in Glasgow. They are not even on the official agenda for the talks.

How is this possible? To understand it we need to delve into the past, for what might be called the “Glasgow paradox” — that the two most important issues at COP26 will not actually be the subject of its negotiations — has its origins in the turbulent history of UN climate negotiations.

The treaty underpinning these negotiations is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, agreed at the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Just a few years after the first assessment of global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, it set out an overall goal and some governing principles for how the international community should control emissions and adapt to a warming world. In doing so it made a very clear distinction between developed and developing countries. Countries had “common but differentiated responsibilities”: while all had a general responsibility to act, developed ones — the Western world and Eastern Europe — had the specific obligation to reduce their emissions and provide finance and technological support to developing countries. In 1992 China was still unequivocally “developing.”

These principles were then enacted in the Kyoto Protocol, agreed at COP3 in 1997. The developed countries negotiated how much each would commit to cutting its emissions by 2008–12. (Some, such as Australia, were allowed to increase them.) Developing countries took on voluntary actions only — and insisted that these depended on financial and technological assistance from the rich world.

Kyoto was a landmark agreement, backed by sanctions in international law for non-compliance. But it failed at its first hurdle. Though personally negotiated by US vice-president Al Gore, it attracted not a single vote in the US Senate. America, its legislators agreed, could not accept a treaty in which China did not have the same legal obligation to act.

The emissions reduction targets negotiated under the Kyoto Protocol were largely achieved. But the US’s absence was not acceptable to the European Union, Japan and the rest of the developed country signatories, and they sought to negotiate a new agreement at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. Copenhagen foundered, though, when the United States insisted that China — now a rapidly growing “emerging economy” — must take on the same legal obligations to cut its emissions (and to be transparent about reporting them) as it had. China refused, and the negotiations broke down in acrimony and recrimination.

Fast-forward to COP21 in Paris in 2015. A third attempt was being made to agree on an implementing treaty. Now China was the world’s second-largest polluter and a major economic competitor to the United States and the rest of the developed world. Brazil, South Africa, India and other emerging economies had also become major contributors to climate change, and each was now willing to take on emissions reduction commitments. But they weren’t willing to negotiate these with other countries. And they were not prepared to have them made legally binding in international law, with Kyoto-style sanctions for non-compliance.

If the emerging economies wouldn’t do this, nor would the United States, which still insisted on legal parity. So the Paris agreement found a compromise. It set out a new and comprehensive set of rules on how governments should act, including the legal requirement that they must make a “nationally determined contribution” to the global climate process. But it was up to each country to decide for itself what that contribution should be.

The Paris agreement was undoubtedly a breakthrough. For the first time, every country in the world had to tackle its emissions, and to do so in pursuit of a specific temperature goal — limiting heating to “well below” 2°C, with an aspiration to keep it to 1.5°C. The agreement even set a “net zero” goal, albeit for some time in the second half of the century.

But Paris had a huge flaw. The contributions submitted by countries alongside the agreement didn’t add up to the agreed aggregate goal. The emissions gap was born.

Paris has a mechanism designed  to patch this up. It requires the IPCC to conduct a “stocktake” of the climate science three years after the agreement, and assess progress so far. And two years after that, countries must return to the table with stronger commitments.

The IPCC duly reported in 2018, with a much starker injunction that global emissions had to be cut by 45 per cent by 2030 to hold heating to 1.5°C. COP26 is now the five-year moment (having been postponed from 2020 because of Covid) when the emissions and finance gaps must be dealt with.

But the Paris compromise still rules. It is still up to individual countries to make their emissions cuts and finance pledges on their own. It is still not the task of the UN climate talks to negotiate these, and still not even the job of countries to discuss with one another what they each should be doing. Hence their absence from the COP agenda.

And despite much stronger commitments, countries are still not doing enough. The United States, the European Union, Britain, Japan and others have all this year strengthened their emissions reduction pledges for 2030, some very dramatically. But the gap to the 1.5°C trajectory remains. Although China and India have not yet announced their contributions (the only major emitters not to have done so), they can’t get near to closing the gap on their own.

So the emissions and finance gaps are what COP26 is primarily about, but neither is on the actual agenda. Of course, the conference will discuss emissions reductions and finance in general, and no doubt bitter speeches from developing countries about the inadequate commitments of the developed world. But there will be nowhere in the talks where the gaps can be narrowed.

So what will be negotiated at COP26? The official agenda is all about the “Paris rulebook,” the task of turning the general principles of the Paris agreement into specific, detailed regulations. Much has already been done in the intervening years, but there are still some major sticking points.

The largest of these is about “carbon markets.” These are the mechanisms by which developed countries, including Australia, and companies hope to be able to buy emissions reductions (such as tree planting) done in developing countries, to save them the difficulty and cost of reducing emissions themselves. Many companies claiming to be committed to acting on climate change (notably in the oil and gas and airline sectors) are expecting to get much of their emissions cut in this way — to the great consternation of climate campaigners, who see such “offsetting” largely as an unsustainable scam. Many developing countries are not happy about carbon markets either, and the Glasgow talks are likely to be tough.

So the Paris rulebook is not insignificant. But it is hard to argue that it is what’s really important. The negotiations over the regulations are highly technical, barely needing ministers, let alone leaders. And they are certainly not what climate activists, the public or the media think COP26 is about.

So how can this mismatch of expectation and reality be overcome? As the COP convenor, the British government hopes to bridge the gap in three ways.

First, it has brought the leaders together (which does not normally happen at COPs) precisely to discuss the shortfalls in emissions cuts and finance. In an ideal world it would be extracting stronger commitments than the assembled presidents and prime ministers have so far announced.

They might — just — achieve this on the finance gap, where recent announcements by the United States and others have offered hope that the US$100 billion promise could finally be achieved, and maintained up to 2025. But it seems extremely unlikely that any major country will improve its emissions pledge. In most cases, these have been painstakingly won in each country’s domestic politics, and no leader will want to reopen the argument at home. With China’s leader absent, the idea of a new “grand bargain” between the great powers looks out of the question, too.

But Britain still hopes that it can at least get the leaders to acknowledge that they’re not doing enough, and to commit conclusively to the 1.5°C goal and to the new goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. This certainly looks possible.

Second, Britain hopes to get some “side agreements” in four key areas where emissions need to be brought down. These are on building and financing new coal-fired power stations; slowing deforestation; accelerating the phase-out of petrol and diesel cars; and mobilising trillions of dollars of private finance for investment in green infrastructure and technologies. In each of these areas countries and companies have both been signing up to new commitments. So Britain hopes that “real economy” announcements in these areas will show that genuine progress is being made. It will try to bring these for the first time into the formal declaration at the end of the conference.

Third, Britain will encourage the demand by vulnerable countries that parties to the agreement should come back earlier to review their pledges. Under the Paris agreement this is due in 2025: given the continuing emissions gap, there will be huge pressure to agree an earlier review date, probably 2023.

But even if they are achieved, will these moves assuage the public demand for more urgent and stronger action? It is hard to see how they could. The climate scientists and campaigners — with Greta Thunberg their clear-eyed clarion — will say that it isn’t enough. In the conference hall they will be joined by the most climate-vulnerable countries. It will be hard for the media to report anything else. •

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“There is no greater potential problem for the world than greenhouse-induced climate change — particularly for Australia and for our region,” she said at the time. Since then, the potential has turned to reality while governments have dithered and slithered to avoid serious action. And nowhere more so than in Australia.

Two and a half years ago, the Morrison government went to an election still refusing to contemplate the reality of inevitable changes in energy use. It was far too busy proposing subsidies for new coal-fired power stations, approving new coalmines and running a scare campaign against Labor for threatening the jobs of coalminers. There was no policy on transition: it was coal and gas forever.

As slippery as he was on these questions during the campaign, Bill Shorten did promise to create a Just Transition Authority — an independent body working with companies, employees, unions, local communities and state governments on economic diversification, pooled redundancy schemes, and labour adjustment packages for regions affected by the closure of coal-fired power stations. But he gave no further detail and no commitment to funding beyond establishing the authority. The Greens promised something similar but added that their Clean Energy Transition Fund would have a total of $1 billion to spend.

Two and a half years later, promises of new jobs are raining down on fossil fuel workers like confetti. Earlier this month the Business Council of Australia said that moving to net zero by 2050 will create 195,000 jobs by 2070. Then it went one or two steps further and joined the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the World Wide Fund for Nature in promoting the prospect of 395,000 jobs by 2040 if we build export industries in clean hydrogen, batteries and other areas. Take your pick — that’s either one and a half or three times the estimated 133,000 jobs now in fossil fuels in Australia. Are there any further bids?

Workers are entitled to be sceptical. Before the last election, the BCA said Labor’s policy of a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 would “wreck” the economy. Now it is advocating the same policy and says this is the one and only true road to prosperity.

New industries will certainly create opportunities, but not automatically. The NSW government’s announcement of five renewable energy zones has attracted serious investment. The first to go ahead is in the central west of the state, where the government received bids from the private sector for twenty-seven gigawatts of electricity worth $38 billion — nine times the generating capacity planned by the government. Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest has the resources to make good his proposals for green hydrogen manufacture in Gladstone in Queensland and the Illawarra and Hunter in New South Wales, even if there is a long way to go to turn them, and the jobs that go with them, into reality.

The labour market is dynamic, with jobs constantly disappearing and being created. The monthly employment and unemployment figures hide much of this movement because they capture only the net result of the change. And the phasing out of fossil fuels will be gradual, spanning decades, albeit with bumps along the way.

The Australia Institute’s Jim Stanford points out that his estimate of 133,000 fossil fuel jobs represents only about 1 per cent of the Australian workforce, and that proportion is already declining. The largest component is the 52,000 jobs in coalmining, followed by 33,000 in that portion of electricity supplied by fossil fuels, 28,000 in oil and gas extraction, 12,000 in gas supply and 8000 in coal and petroleum refining. Half of these jobs are located in or near capital cities — in companies’ head offices, in technical and professional roles, and in manufacturing and distribution — rather than in rural Australia.

In any one year in recent times, the economy has created twice as many new jobs as exist in fossil fuel industries. But particular regions are disproportionately affected. In six communities in Queensland, four in New South Wales and one in Western Australia, around one in nine jobs are in fossil fuels. Even then, Stanford points out, a similar number of people in each of those communities work in healthcare and social services.

None of this guarantees a smooth or fair transition, of course. Few miners and employees of coal-fired generators can expect to finish their old jobs one day and turn up in renewable energy or other industries the next, let alone with comparable pay and conditions.

Luckily, we already have experience in handling these kind of disruptions. Despite the suddenness of the French owner’s decision to close Victoria’s Hazelwood coal-fired generator in 2017, a series of initiatives cushioned the blow. The Victorian government created a support package that helped workers move to other power stations in the region or obtain jobs in mine rehabilitation, and established the Latrobe Valley Authority to fund a series of development and job creation initiatives. The unemployment rate in the Latrobe Valley actually fell from 9 per cent before Hazelwood closed to 6.5 per cent three years later. This success came at a cost to government budgets: the state committed $690 million and the federal government $43 million.

Other positive examples, and on a much larger scale, come from overseas. Before it started its long-term decline, Germany’s Ruhr Valley employed almost 500,000 coalmining workers. In 2007 federal and state governments, unions, the coal company and community representatives reached agreement to end subsidies for coalmining by 2018 and gradually close the mines. No redundancies were forced, but retraining and redeployment were strongly supported. Governments built new universities and technical colleges, funded environmental restoration projects and encouraged new business clusters, technology parks and cultural precincts. Unemployment remains higher than in the rest of Germany but much lower than it might have been in the absence of the orderly phasing out of coalmining.

Germany’s experience stands in sharp contrast to Britain’s, where laissez-faire policies largely ruled. Former coal regions in England, Scotland and Wales are now among the most deprived, with higher unemployment, poorer health and 50 per cent more people claiming the disability living allowance than in the rest of the country.

The assurances of a long-term role for coal and gas offered to the National Party by emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor — industries he says have “a great future” — put Australia where Germany was in the 1980s, before it accepted the reality of coal’s decline and started seriously planning.

But nor are promises of new industries enough, economically or politically. The successful precedents suggest that major policy and financial commitments are required from governments. The question is whether a federal government inclined to a hands-off approach (other than during Covid emergencies) is willing to step up.

The ACTU argues that the orderly closure of coal-fired power stations must involve no forced redundancies; lengthy and enforceable notice periods, such as AGL’s five-year notice of the closure of the Liddell plant; retraining schemes; and government support for economic diversification via investment in new infrastructure, education facilities and other initiatives. The rehabilitation of power stations and associated mines can also be a significant source of employment.

Most important of all for displaced workers are good wages and working conditions, which often have not been available in renewable energy.

Lest the Morrison government baulk at implementing union recommendations, substantial common ground can be found on these issues. “To believe that the market will be the sole solution to Australia’s decarbonisation is foolhardy,” says the Blueprint Institute, a think tank established by Liberal moderates that characterises itself as generally pro-market.

Blueprint argues that adaptation authorities should be created in coalmining and power-generating areas as a means of empowering local communities. They would each receive an initial $20 million from the federal government and continuing funding through 5 per cent of coal royalties collected by the states. Based on 2019–20 figures, this would raise $259 million a year, including $175 million in Queensland.

Like the ACTU, Blueprint favours requiring companies to give lengthy notice of closures, together with detailed planning for future investment and employment. It proposes income insurance for the first six months of unemployment to give employees the economic freedom to find high-quality jobs. This would be a variation on the social insurance schemes widely used in Europe and other developed countries that guarantee employees a large proportion of their previous incomes if they lose their jobs.

Blueprint suggests topping up existing welfare benefits to 70 per cent of individuals’ former wages, capped at $35,000. As well, it proposes short-term wage subsidies to firms hiring displaced coal workers in regions seriously affected by closures, and voluntary early retirement packages for workers over sixty.

If the government isn’t prepared to make commitments on this scale, it will create an obvious opening for the opposition. Labor is holding much of its fire, with the aim of directing maximum attention to the government in the lead-up to the Glasgow COP26 gathering. So far it has promised a National Reconstruction Fund with $15 billion in capital to help fuel a private sector revival of manufacturing, including in regional areas and renewable energy. Shadow climate change minister Chris Bowen has announced a $10,000 subsidy for each of 10,000 apprenticeships for jobs in renewable energy industries and another $10 million for a new energy skills program.

Bowen is also pushing for approval of offshore wind farms, which operate on a much larger scale than those on land and can, he says, provide tens of thousands of jobs, including in areas where coal-fired generators will be phased out. He promises Labor will “have much more to do and much more to say” on climate change policy.

The 2015 Paris agreement required signatories, including Australia, not only to develop ambitious targets to decarbonise their economies but also to take into account the “imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs.”

Some countries have taken this seriously. The European Union has established a Just Transition Mechanism that is using a combination of grants and loans to mobilise no less than an anticipated €65–75 billion (A$102–118 billion) on a range of measures, including funding jobs in new sectors and providing training and other help to investors and businesses.

From what we know, Scott Morrison will be going to Glasgow without meeting the Paris agreement’s requirements on either score. Such a move would hasten the removal of climate policy from the government’s hands. Companies and investors would continue to withdraw their support for fossil fuels and look elsewhere to invest in renewable opportunities. Major trading partners could be expected to act on their threats to tax our exports for their emissions component. And our economic transition would be much more painful and disruptive than it needs to be. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Promising net zero emissions by 2050 is a marketing tool; no cost, some gain. It matters only because it sets up expectations that will be used to pressure future governments to introduce the emission-reducing policies this government refuses to provide. Without matching action, business won’t believe the promise, and won’t make new investments. In itself, pledging net zero emissions by 2050 is just words.

A more significant question has been played down in the media coverage. Will the government meet Boris Johnson’s challenge to lift its target for 2030 — a 26 to 28 per cent reduction on 2005 levels, the smallest cut being offered by a G20 developed country? This short-term target is something the Morrison government might conceivably have to deliver; and it claims its existing policies would get us there. But figures within the Coalition are resisting Johnson’s pressure, and the government lacks the leadership to counter them.

Suppose, though, that “net zero emissions by 2050” was not just words. Suppose our government and other governments actually meant to change their policies to put us on course to meet the target. What would they have to do?

That is the core question put by the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in its latest World Energy Outlook. A Paris-based bureaucracy whose job is to track the data on energy use and give information and advice to governments, the IEA released this year’s report early to get in ahead of next month’s COP26 summit in Glasgow.

The IEA’s summary of the world’s current position is that we are now moving in the right direction at last, but there is a long way to go — a long way. “The world has started to bend its emissions curve,” its chief modeller, Laura Cozzi, said at the report’s launch last week. But if net zero emissions by 2050 is our target, she added, we are nowhere near meeting it.

The world’s use of coal peaked in 2018. Oil use is likely to peak by around 2025. Economic growth no longer means growth in emissions. Most of the electricity generation being added worldwide is solar, wind, hydro or bioenergy. Wind and solar are now the cheapest fuels for future electricity generation, and set to remain so.

But the IEA’s executive director, Turkish energy economist Fatih Birol, warns: “The world’s hugely encouraging clean energy momentum is running up against the stubborn incumbency of fossil fuels in our energy systems. Governments need to resolve this at COP26 by giving a clear and unmistakeable signal that they are committed to rapidly scaling up the clean and resilient technologies of the future. The social and economic benefits of accelerating clean energy transformations are huge, and the costs of inaction are immense.”

On present government policies worldwide, says the IEA, emissions will still be growing in 2100 and global temperatures will have risen by 2.6 per cent.

Even if recent government pledges to reach net zero emissions, mostly by 2050, are delivered in full, the modelling says that the world will be 2.1°C degrees hotter in 2100 than in pre-industrial times — clearly overshooting the goal of holding the temperature rise to 1.5°C degrees.

Why? Because global warming requires concerted global action. Of the more than 200 countries in the world, just eighty have committed to lowering their emissions to net zero. Australia, Israel and Singapore are the only holdouts in the developed world, but others yet to commit include India, Indonesia and Russia — three of the six countries now generating most of the world’s economic growth — plus most of Southeast Asia, most of Africa, and virtually all the Middle East.

“Emissions don’t have a passport,” Dr Birol notes. This is why Australia’s failure to lift the low bar it has set itself for 2030 is sand in the wheels of other world leaders trying to make global action work. With Australia one of the world’s largest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases, its modest target tells the world we aren’t serious about ending net emissions by 2050; we are a coal exporter looking after our interests. And that strengthens resistance to action in other countries.

But suppose Australia and the other recalcitrants do end up on board, and soon enough to matter. Suppose the leaders in each country actually legislate policies that would end the world’s net emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 2050. What would they have to do to end global warming?

The IEA modelled energy and emission outcomes on several scenarios: business as usual (continuing existing policies in each country); adding the pledges made by China, the United States and seventy-eight other countries to reach net zero emissions; and its own estimates of the cheapest and fastest path for the world to reach net zero by 2050.

Of course the IEA’s path is not the only way to get there, but any alternative way is likely to be more expensive and just as disruptive. This is modelling, so it’s not gospel, but it does suggest the orders of magnitude we are facing, and which pieces of the puzzle are the most important. These are a few key takes.

The critical battles in this war will be fought not in Australia and the West, but in today’s developing countries: above all China, but also India and its neighbours, Southeast Asia and, not least, Africa.

Developing countries are already the driving force of the global economy. The International Monetary Fund projects that they will provide 70 per cent of the world’s real economic growth in the next five years. On that reckoning, China and India alone will generate 40 per cent of global growth, while all the advanced economies combined — the United States, Europe, Japan and the others — will supply just 30 per cent.

But the choices the developing countries make will be greatly influenced by how rapidly the developed world — and advanced developing countries like China — phase out the old technology to bring in the new.

The faster the West dumps fossil fuels and invests to bring on new technology and lower its price — by developing green hydrogen and ammonia as energy sources, for instance, and making it viable to capture, utilise and store carbon emissions — the cheaper it will become for developing and developed countries to invest in them rather than coal and gas. We have an important part to play.

Coal-fired power must go, and as soon as possible.

The IEA’s findings are not strictly policy recommendations. But in effect it is saying, “If net zero emissions by 2050 is your goal, this is the best way to get there.” And in the power sector, the message is very clear: coal has to go, ASAP.

The IEA’s pathway to net zero specifies no new coal-fired power stations, anywhere in the world. Those already under way (mostly in China) should be abandoned where possible. And — in sharp contrast to the Australian government’s policy — the world should open no new coalmines or extensions thereof.

On the IEA’s path to net zero, half the world’s coal-fired generators would shut down by 2030 and the electricity generated from coal would shrink by two-thirds. The plants that remain would be newer ones that could operate flexibly as a back-up to solar and wind power — or one able to be converted to capture their CO2 emissions and utilise or bury them.

By 2050, in its scenario, coal-fired stations would supply only 1 per cent of the world’s electricity demand, and they would all be capturing their carbon dioxide emissions for industrial use or storage. Coal would survive only by becoming emissions-free.

Coal (and gas) would retain a bigger role in large industrial plants designed to capture their emissions. But the IEA projects that even in 2050, a world producing net zero emissions will use only a tenth of the coal we now produce each year. That would have quite an impact on Australia.

“Accelerating the decarbonisation of the electricity sector is the single most important way to close the 2030 gap,” it says, “and could cut emissions by around 5 gigatonnes,” or about 15 per cent of global emissions. “We estimate that up to 60 per cent of the gap [between existing policies and the path to net zero] in the electricity sector can be closed through cost‐effective expansion of wind, solar photovoltaics, hydro and nuclear power.”

The IEA’s modelling implies that coal is already in inevitable decline; the net zero target would simply accelerate that. Even on existing policies, it sees coal’s share of global electricity demand shrinking from 40 per cent in 2010 to 26 per cent by 2030, and 13 per cent by 2050.

In advanced economies, even Australia’s, coal has been shrinking in importance for years, and now faster than ever. Renewables have replaced it as the cheapest source of power, so when solar or wind are going full pelt, coal stations have to reduce their output, and be ready to increase it again when needed. They work much better when they can burn coal steadily, flat out. But that world has now gone.

New South Wales and Victoria have not built a new coal-fired power station since last century. Their remaining coal generators are like a collection of old Holden Kingswoods, being driven past their use-by date. They frequently break down and are becoming uneconomic to run in a system in which renewables are the cheapest source of power. Last year coal supplied just 54 per cent of Australia’s electricity — not the 60+ per cent claimed by many analysts — and could already have sunk below 50 per cent.

Yet as coal fades away, total power generation worldwide is set to almost treble by 2050. Most of it would come from new solar and wind plants, but with significant portions also from hydro, bioenergy and the new kids on the block, hydrogen and ammonia.

In the world of net zero emissions, the IEA projects that 88 per cent of a vastly expanded global energy demand will be met by renewables. Solar and wind would each generate roughly a third of that — each generating almost as much electricity in 2050 as the world now generates from all sources including coal, gas, hydro and nuclear.

But the IEA believes we will also need nuclear power and carbon capture to make net zero work.

Its proposal to ban coal might warm green hearts, but the IEA is convinced that the world in 2050 will also rely for its electricity on expanded nuclear power — and some gas and coal, mostly from power stations that capture their carbon and use or bury it.

The critical issue is the one Australia has been grappling with for years without success: how to generate electricity when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. The IEA points out that there are many ways of doing so, but they are expensive, and some are cumbersome, so all possible options will be needed.

It would be expensive to have your power system relying solely on batteries and pumped-storage hydro to provide energy when solar and wind are having bad days. Witness the latest revelations that Snowy Hydro 2.0 and its transmission links could cost more than $10 billion, rather than the $2 billion first promised. The scale of new battery storages is growing rapidly, but they are still niche products, there to help in emergencies rather than power us night after night at low cost.

That’s why the IEA’s modelling envisages nuclear power generation roughly doubling worldwide by 2050, mostly in China and the developing world. It accepts that nuclear is now politically unacceptable in the West, but expects it to regain its place, even in Japan and Europe. In its view, nuclear is a mature, safe and relatively cheap technology that produces no emissions — and can supply the crucial backup flexibility required by a renewables-based system.

By 2050 it sees nuclear supplying 8 per cent of the world’s power needs, with emissions-free gas and coal producing just 2 per cent between them but playing a backup role to the dominant renewables. Gas would hold its ground longer than coal, because it emits only half as much carbon dioxide and gas plants can operate more flexibly than coal stations. But by 2040 most of the world’s gas-fired power stations would also have shut down.

The IEA has not abandoned hope that carbon capture and storage will become a significant contributor to meeting the net zero emissions goal. But it argues that the lack of investment by business and governments to pave the way for carbon storage — and hydrogen and ammonia as sources of fuel — is limiting the potential role they can play.

“Without innovation and learning‐by‐doing to drive down their costs over the next decade,” says the IEA, “it would be much more difficult for these technologies to ramp up after 2030 to contribute to achieving net zero energy emissions by 2050.”

There is another problem with the carbon capture option that the IEA carefully does not mention. We’ll come to that shortly.

Emissions could be significantly reduced if we focused more on raising energy efficiency.

In the old world, growth in the economy and growth in energy use went hand in hand. But in the last decade they have diverged sharply: global GDP has surged, mostly in developing countries, while growth in energy use has slowed.

Energy intensity — the dollar of GDP created per unit of energy consumed — is now growing by nearly 2 per cent a year. Double this annual growth to 4 per cent, the IEA says, and in a decade we could prevent energy use that otherwise would have raised global emissions by a third.

There are thousands of opportunities: from behavioural changes like turning down the heating and airconditioning in homes and offices (the IEA recommends 19 to 20 degrees for heaters, 24 to 25 for air conditioners) to replacing inefficient old technologies with energy-efficient new ones. Industry in particular could make big savings, the IEA argues, especially in reducing its use of materials, but the opportunities are across the board, and include videoconferencing, working from home, retrofitting buildings and increased recycling.

The big one now is electric vehicles. Two years ago the IEA’s Outlook highlighted the energy inefficiency of SUVs. On average, it said, they need 25 per cent more fuel to drive a kilometre than a car does — and with 200 million of them on global roads, they had become the second-biggest source of growth in rising global emissions. Alas, no one took any notice.

But this time the IEA has a positive story to sell: switching to electric vehicles powered by renewable energy could save billions of tonnes of future emissions. As part of the path to net zero, the IEA says, with government support EVs could overtake petrol- and diesel-fuelled cars to win 60 per cent of the global vehicle market by 2030 — up from less than 5 per cent in 2020.

The mining industry must immediately implement a crash program to sharply reduce methane emissions from mining gas and other fossil fuels.

Methane gases in the atmosphere are shorter-lived than carbon dioxide but far more potent as a cause of global warming. We’ve all seen photos of flames soaring from the smokestacks of Middle East oil and gas wells as excess gas is burnt off. In Australia, soaring methane emissions from gas fields drove much of the rise in greenhouse gas emissions from 2014 to 2019.

The IEA says these emissions could be cut by more than 80 per cent by 2030 if mining companies carried out “the elimination of all technically avoidable methane emissions.” It’s all doable, and…

Many of these reforms could in fact save money.

A prime example: stopping the leaks from oil, gas and coal mining would cost the industry US$13 billion (A$17.5 billion), the IEA says, but the market value of the gas they would save is more than that. It’s an example of the inertia caused by that “stubborn incumbency” of established practices.

People in many countries are paying more for power from dirty coal-fired stations than they would if the old plants were replaced by new solar and wind generation. Even now, the IEA estimates, solar and wind plants are easily the cheapest to operate, and the cheapest even including construction costs, arguably except for gas in the United States. By 2030 they will be the cheapest everywhere, by a mile.

To get there, though, we need to double energy investment.

The world now spends about 1 per cent of its GDP investing in new energy plants, transmission lines, pipelines and so on. The IEA says that share needs to rise to 2.2 per cent to finance the rollout of solar and wind power, EV charging stations, transmission lines and other works needed to make net zero emissions feasible. And moreover:

Most of that investment must be in developing countries.

That’s the real problem. Borrowing money is cheap in countries like Australia, but in developing countries it can cost seven times as much. Their governments and companies are financially weak —  half the electricity companies in Africa are in financial difficulty — and rich countries like Australia have not delivered the aid they promised in Paris in 2015 to help developing countries to carry out their part of the green revolution.

The IEA urges the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and governments to get together to come up with new financial avenues to make this aspiration a reality. It points out that developing countries are going to need a lot of iron, steel, cement, chemicals and other energy-intensive products. And the chances of the world halting global warming anytime soon will depend on what choices they make, and how much energy-efficient technology they can afford to buy.

The World Energy Outlook 2021 is also full of the positive messages about the economic and social benefits of this green revolution that we now hear from its former opponents like the Business Council and the Murdoch press. (Welcome aboard, what took you so long?) But two of its most important messages are left unstated. They are crucial, so let’s end with them.

No country is more important in achieving net zero emissions than China.

The IEA is too diplomatic to say it, but China is the key to success. It now burns 56 per cent of the coal we consume. Xi Jinping has promised to stop financing new coal-fired stations in the rest of the world, but his government is still building and planning them in China. On its current policies, the IEA numbers show, China would still account for half the world’s use of coal in 2050. We will only get to net zero if the Chinese government stops building coal-fired stations in China.

My regular reminder: China is already the biggest economy in the world, and by a growing margin. The IMF projects that by 2025, its real output will be 30 per cent greater than that of the United States. Of course, China could be exaggerating its numbers, and right now — with its building giant Evergrande on the verge of collapse — the unsustainability of its economic path is more obvious than ever.

But it will still be by far the most important country we need to have onside.

The IEA’s path to net zero emissions assumes a carbon price.

You could get some of the way without a carbon price, but nowhere near zero. Regrettably, “technology, not taxes” is just another of the Coalition’s empty three-word slogans. The reason for a carbon price or tax is to drive the adoption of new technology when business as usual doesn’t provide sufficient reason for it.

I mentioned earlier the IEA’s continued faith in carbon capture, utilisation and storage. Its own numbers make it clear that CCUS has no future on current policy settings. Without a carbon price, it is simply unviable. Hydrogen and ammonia, too, need a carbon price to be viable. It is just Economics 101: if production involves “externalities” that damage third parties, governments should put an appropriate price on them. Make the polluter pay, and good solutions will be found.

It’s not hard for people to recognise that fact: Europe’s emissions trading scheme is now widely accepted. But to build the case for that, a country needs to have real leaders. Australia unfortunately has none, at least at federal level, and there is no sign of any emerging. •

The post Getting from here to net zero appeared first on Inside Story.

In a recent interview on the electric vehicle podcast The Driven, NSW energy minister Matt Kean was waxing lyrical about the Tesla Model 3 he bought last year — which he reckons is the best car he has ever driven — and mentioned that Perrottet, who also lives in the Hornsby LGA, is one of the few fellow ministers he can regularly see in the current Covid lockdown.

“We’ve been catching up, doing a bit of walking and whatnot, and he actually asked if he could have a drive (of the Tesla) the other day. And I’m not going to get him in trouble, but it’s fair to say that he enjoyed the very fast experience,” Kean told the podcast. “And he says to me, ‘I’d love to get one of these things.’ So I’m doing a bit of environmental or EV diplomacy with my colleagues at the moment. And hopefully they can see that [EVs] are fun vehicles, they’re cost-effective and they’re a great product.”

It remains to be seen whether Perrottet buys a Tesla, either for personal use or for work. But given that he has just become premier, and the premier’s vehicle is probably already decided for him, and he’s in the middle of a pandemic, there will be other priorities. And, to be honest, you can’t fit a family of his size in a Tesla Model 3, and even the new and bigger Model Y crossover SUV isn’t coming as a seven-seater, at least not initially.

But the fact that Kean — who features prominently in the reported cross-faction deal that is likely to propel Perrottet to the leadership this week — has got Perrottet interested in Teslas in the first place is no mean feat. Everyone will be hoping that it points to a broader awakening.

Several years ago, the signs were not so good that Perrottet understood the threat of climate change or the opportunities available from tackling it. Addressing conservative think tank the Centre for Independent Studies, he railed against investments in renewables, and climate policies in general.

“An example of gratuitous waste is the almost religious devotion of the political left to climate change,” said Perrottet, who knows a thing or two about religious devotion, having grown up as a devout Catholic — one of twelve children and now father of six — and been educated at an Opus Dei college.

But the thirty-nine-year-old will find himself leading a state that has just announced what could easily be described — with the exception of the Australian Capital Territory — as the country’s most ambitious climate policy. New South Wales, which had been slow to adopt renewables and move away from coal, has set a new, improved target of a 50 per cent emissions cut by 2030 as it seeks to replace its ageing and increasingly decrepit coal generators. And Kean has made it clear that if all the coal generators in the state need to go by 2030, then they can and they will.

Along the way, Kean managed to convince Treasurer Perrottet to commit $380 million towards creating the renewable energy zones that will be crucial to navigating that clean energy transition, which promises to be as quick and dramatic as any other state’s, or even country’s. “The Roadmap is expected to attract $32 billion of investment over the next decade and create thousands of jobs,” Perrottet enthused at the time.

Kean also managed to convince Perrottet not to follow in the footsteps of Victoria and immediately impose an EV road tax, and to instead delay it until EVs are well established in the market. The pair, along with transport minister Andrew Constance, ushered in the most generous EV support mechanisms of any state — a $490 million package that includes $3000 rebates, a stamp duty exemption, and funding for a comprehensive EV charging network. “From young adults saving for their first car in Western Sydney to retirees planning a road trip to Broken Hill, these incentives will make electric vehicles accessible and affordable for all NSW residents,” Perrottet said.

Kean is clearly a very persuasive man. He also succeeded in persuading Nationals leader John Barilaro of the benefits of the clean energy switch and the opportunities in regional Australia that will come from being a renewable superpower. These are ideas that have proven well outside the comprehension of Barilaro’s federal colleagues.

But there are two big questions for voters and investors as Perrottet gets ready to take the reins at state parliament.

The first is over the change in cast. All the key players who put together those announcements are now out the door or redeployed. Berejiklian is gone, and Barilaro is also quitting politics. Constance, also behind the rapid electrification of Sydney’s bus fleet, is trying his luck at a federal seat, while Kean looks likely to be shifted to the state Treasury when Perrottet gets the top job.

So who replaces Kean as energy minister? And will Kean as treasurer be as engaged on climate and the clean energy transition as he is now? And will Perrottet, once anointed, turn out to be just an obliging Covid-buddy for Kean, or has he really changed his spots? Everything else about Perrottet — his views on abortion, and support for Donald Trump and letting it rip on Covid — points to his being a key player on the far right of Coalition politics.

If Perrottet were to honour those recent commitments — on climate, emissions, renewables and EVs — that would be a first from the far right in Australia. And as head of the country’s biggest state economy, with the biggest coal fleet in town, it would be a game-changer in Australian politics. It’s one thing for a moderate like Kean to shine the light on the clean energy future, but quite another for a Catholic conservative. It may come down to whether Perrottet ultimately loves Tesla because he thinks it would be a fun toy or because it points to a prosperous and blessedly fossil-free future. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The federal National Party has just twenty-one Canberra MPs and they’d all like to be leader. The secret Coalition agreement that governs the division of spoils between the Liberal Party and its rural-based partner evidently guarantees that whoever leads the National Party is deemed competent enough to be Australia’s deputy prime minister. Get one job, you get the other — with a substantial pay hike thrown in.

As you’d expect, a desire to be deputy PM has caused quite a bit of unpleasantness in the National Party over the years.

Currently the Nationals are led by Barnaby Joyce, a man who combines the oratorical skills of the late Joh Bjelke-Petersen with the calmness of demeanour associated with former National Bob Katter. When Joyce rose again to reclaim the top job earlier this year, the two biggest losers were Michael McCormack, the man he replaced, and the member for the Victorian regional seat of Gippsland, Darren Chester, who had been a relatively successful veterans’ affairs minister. More than a third of the federal Nationals have lucrative ministerial positions, but Chester is no longer one of them.

Darren Chester entered federal parliament back in 2008 via a by-election triggered by the retirement of former Nationals minister Peter McGauran. He isn’t especially well known outside Gippsland and Canberra, but after a decade or so in politics he’d no doubt like to be.

Brought up in the Victorian coastal town of Sale, the fifty-four-year-old Chester is the classic local boy made good. Before entering parliament, he worked as a journalist in the Latrobe Valley and as chief of staff to Peter Ryan, leader of the Nationals in Victoria. In his spare time, he keeps in shape by running marathons, and he was once described by a DJ on Traralgon FM as “the George Clooney of Gippsland.”

In National Party terms, Chester is what passes for a dangerous moderate. When he announced his support for marriage equality in 2015, he had to fight a major stoush in his local party branches.

But his career hasn’t been free of some of the more mundane controversies that afflict Australian parliamentarians. In January 2016, for example, he copped some flak for his use of taxpayer-funded travel allowances. According to media reports, he claimed nearly $900 for a work trip to Melbourne that also allowed him to purchase an investment property and attend a soccer match while visiting the Big Smoke.

So, there you have it: Chester is handsome, personable, media savvy and battle-hardened, but it’s the age-old story: he voted for the wrong candidate — and paid the price.

In fact, Darren Chester has had the misfortune to be sacked twice by Barnaby Joyce in the space of just four years. Some Australians might regard these shaftings as two badges of honour. But for Chester — who is not without ambition — they must surely have stung.

Joyce first dumped Chester from his job as transport and infrastructure minister in a cabinet reshuffle in December 2017, and promptly awarded the portfolios to himself. In due course, Joyce was forced to resign from both the ministry and the deputy prime ministership, consigning himself to the backbench in February 2018 after a number of his personal failings came to light, not least of which was an allegation — which he denies — of sexual harassment.

Joyce’s main rival, the member for Riverina, Michael McCormack, took on the dented crown of National Party leadership. Among his supporters was Darren Chester.

The wheel turned again, and in June this year Joyce returned to the National Party leadership like a Lazarus on steroids after taking out the hapless McCormack in a party-room ballot. (Keep up — there’ll be a quiz later.) For his sins, Chester was punted to the backbench again. This time he lost veterans’ affairs and defence personnel. Joyce rang him with the sad news while Chester was out walking his dog.

Obviously expecting the call, the now ex-minister, who is well known as a lover of canines, didn’t feel any need to kick his pet pooch after he got off the phone. In fact, the phlegmatic Chester says the two men had a “matter-of-fact conversation.” Interviewed later about why he was sacked, though, Chester slipped in a sharp one, right up to the hilt.

“I wouldn’t normally comment on private conversations,” he said. “But I’m gonna say the conversation I had with Barnaby was so incoherent yesterday, I couldn’t actually explain what he was even saying to me.”

As Antonio says in The Tempest: “What’s past is prologue.” Chester announced on Sunday this week that he would be undertaking a sort of trial separation from the National Party.

“My decision,” he told the media, “follows months of frustration with the repeated failure of the leadership to even attempt to moderate some of the more disrespectful and offensive views expressed by a minority of colleagues.” It was a clear reference to his colleague from north of the Tweed River, George Christensen, who described the Victorian police who had to deal with violent anti-lockdown protesters as “thugs [who] should be arrested.” Christensen was not immediately reprimanded by Joyce.

Chester has also come out strongly as a proponent of Australia’s achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. “I think the Nationals have a great future if we represent the mainstream regional values,” he says, “and that’s not the extreme right wing that others seek to represent.” Setting aside the efficacy of this target for a moment, it still means he is out in front of Barnaby Joyce’s current position.

“I continue to support the Coalition government,” Chester said on Sunday, “but want some time away from the Nationals federal parliamentary party room to reflect on a number of significant issues.” He still intends to contest the next election as a National Party candidate but said he would reassess his position when parliament resumed in mid October.

Could he be contemplating running as an independent in Gippsland? Might he shift to Victorian state politics? Or are his eyes still on the main prize: leadership of the Nationals in Canberra?

Since he got the boot in June, he has been remaking himself as the National Party’s anti-Joyce. In a Herald Sun op-ed he published soon after getting the sack, he argued that the future of the National Party is at a tipping point. “If the more hardline Nationals MPs lock into a climate denial agenda,” he wrote, “they can wave goodbye to the generation of voters who will shape the future of Australia.”

The bush is changing, he argued. “In Gippsland, I represent more nurses than farmers. My region is a food, fibre and energy powerhouse but health and education services actually employ more people.” He pointed out that younger rural voters support policies that actually deal with climate change; as do the many city people who’ve moved to the country in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Farmers are getting into renewables, he says; some are even earning good money from wind turbines.

It’s a very different picture of rural Australia from the one painted by Barnaby Joyce, though it would be familiar to Chester’s colleagues in the NSW government, which toughened up its emissions-reduction goal this week. Political rivalries are always personal, but sometimes they’re based on genuine policy differences as well. •

The post Time out for a rural moderate appeared first on Inside Story.

Judging by the bemused looks in his audience, few were familiar with the musical oeuvre of Sesame Street circa 1970. But it was not really them that Johnson was seeking to convince. It was his own Conservative Party and his own government back home. For the prime minister has found himself facing an acute difficulty as COP26 approaches.

It’s not merely that Johnson has something of a reputational problem of his own. Only six years ago he was a paid-up climate sceptic, accusing global leaders of being “driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear — as far as I understand the science — is equally without foundation.”

Given that Johnson’s entire career has been one of political shapeshifting according to the views of his audience and his prospects of personal advancement — he’s the socially liberal mayor of London who became the figurehead of the Brexiteers’ “Leave” campaign — Johnson’s conversion to climate advocate has surprised no one. His problem, rather, is that being green is actually proving much more difficult than he had bargained for when he blithely offered to host the crucial UN climate talks a couple of years ago.

His rationale was that Britain needed to show after Brexit that it remained a big international player: no longer central to Europe, but still a “global Britain.” What could be a better signal than leading the world in tackling the climate crisis? Unfortunately for Johnson it is now clear that Britain is almost completely failing to do that.

At home, the Conservative government boasts that Britain is the first major country to put a “net zero” emissions reduction target into law: under the amended Climate Change Act, the government is obliged to achieve this by 2050. It has also adopted one of the world’s most ambitious medium-term targets, a cut in emissions of 78 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. (Of this, 44 per cent had already been achieved by 2019.)

But setting targets is the easy bit. Meeting them is more difficult. And here Britain is well off track. As the government’s independent Climate Change Committee has been warning for some years, policy has lagged well behind promises. In its latest report on the government’s progress, the committee didn’t mince its words. “This defining year for the UK’s climate credentials,” it declared, “has been marred by uncertainty and delay to a host of new climate strategies. Those that have emerged have too often missed the mark. With every month of inaction, it is harder for the UK to get on track.”

To respond to this criticism, the government has for some time been promising a “net zero strategy.” But this has been repeatedly delayed amid disagreements between Johnson and his ambitious chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak. The Treasury under Sunak has been preparing a review of the costs of achieving net zero, designed to show that it will hit middle- and lower-income earners hard through higher energy, transport and food prices. The review’s methodology is highly contested. It takes almost no account of innovation, which has already pushed the costs of green technologies — wind and solar power, for example, and electric vehicles — far below the levels predicted when policies to promote them were introduced. In this way, the Treasury’s critics argue, the review will considerably overstate the actual costs of achieving the net zero target.

But this is not really an argument about obscure economic methodologies. It is an entirely political one, for Sunak is pitching himself as the Conservatives’ next leader, and to do that he wants to appeal to the sizeable chunk of Tory MPs and party members who are not at all signed up to the net zero idea.

There are two sources of resistance. One is cost: the genuine anxiety that moving to a net zero economy — even over thirty years — will hurt Conservative supporters, and that any government pursuing it will pay a political price. The other is that it is patently obvious that the only way to make such a transition is for government to intervene much more actively in the economy, through industrial strategy, regulation and taxation, and such a prospect makes most Tories deeply uncomfortable.

This resistance has already spurned a new Conservative organisation, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, designed to rally political opposition and slow down the government’s climate ambitions. Not coincidentally, it was founded by the same backbench MP, Steve Baker, who led the hardline Tory Brexiteers in parliament and harried Theresa May’s government into successive concessions and defeats until Boris Johnson replaced her and acceded to their demands.

These factors mean that Johnson is feeling the squeeze. On the one hand, he needs to go into COP26 with an ambitious domestic plan to achieve net zero. It will hardly do for the conference hosts, desperately trying to persuade other countries to take stronger climate action, to be so visibly unable to produce a plan to do so themselves. On the other, Johnson can’t afford to risk producing a plan that in its implementation could cost the Conservative Party votes among its core supporters — and give Sunak the ammunition with which to succeed him.

This is not, of course, a problem unique to Britain. Some version of this political squeeze is occurring in almost every advanced economy. Most governments accept that they must take stronger action to reduce emissions. Most will say (rightly) that the green transition offers huge opportunities to develop new industries and create new jobs. But all are worried that higher-carbon industries will lose out, and that consumers and households will face higher costs and punish them at the ballot box.

And this is why Johnson has a problem with COP26. The conference in Glasgow is just a month away. But the media triumph that Johnson envisaged when he decided to host it looks increasingly unlikely. On the contrary, he could be facing a PR disaster: a conference denounced for its failure not just by Greta Thunberg but by many of the UN climate negotiators themselves.

And the reason is that, if no major advanced country is doing enough to achieve net zero, the global emissions trajectory is even further off track. With China’s economic growth having resumed after Covid, Brazil experiencing rapid deforestation, and Russia and India largely uninterested in the climate agenda, the collective commitments of governments are not nearly enough to hold the global average temperature rise to the “well under 2°C” goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, let alone the 1.5°C that the poorest countries demand.

The numbers are these. To have a reasonable possibility of being on track to hold the temperature rise to 1.5°C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global emissions in 2030 must be limited to around 26 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or GtCO2e. Announced emissions reduction pledges for 2030 will reduce global emissions to 46–49 GtCO2e. The “emissions gap” of 20–23 GtCO2e, between where the world needs to be and where it is currently likely to be, represents almost an additional 100 per cent of maximum desirable emissions.

If many countries were still to announce their commitments, COP26 might still have a chance of success. But among large emitters only China has yet to make its new 2030 pledge. The European Union, the United States, Japan, Britain, Brazil, Australia and most others have already submitted their “nationally determined contributions,” the UN term for emissions pledges. As COP president, Britain is desperately trying to persuade China to announce an ambitious target — for example, to have its emissions peak earlier, in 2025, and commit to stop building coal-fired power stations. But China has never been amenable to external pressure of this kind, and after the recent defence pact announcement between the United States, Australia and Britain, it is particularly resistant to British overtures. China will make a big commitment. But it can’t bridge the global emissions gap.

So what will happen at COP26? There will be negotiations. But the gap to 1.5°C will remain. And in those circumstances it will be almost impossible for the poorest and most vulnerable countries to agree on a final communiqué, except one that acknowledges the conference has failed. And it will be very hard for the global media to report anything else.

One of the popular stories about Boris Johnson is that as a small child he wanted to become “world king.” Perhaps he thought COP26 might fulfil his dream. Right now it looks as if it could turn into his worst nightmare. •

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Scholz nevertheless presents himself as the contest’s clear winner. His claim rests partly on the fact that his party’s share of the vote, at 25.7 per cent, exceeded the combined 24.1 per cent achieved by the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU. This is only the fourth time in twenty national elections that the Social Democrats have come out ahead. More importantly, though, Scholz points to his party’s gains, and the conservatives’ losses, since the 2017 election, when the Social Democrats won just 20.5 per cent of the vote while the Christian Democrats and CSU attracted a combined 32.9 per cent. Sunday’s result was the worst ever for the two conservative parties.

If gains or losses since 2017 were the only criterion, though, the Greens would be considered Sunday’s undisputed winners, having increased their share by 5.9 percentage points. But as recently as May they were the frontrunners, with the conservatives a close second and the Social Democrats a distant third on 15 per cent. And that was before the devastating July floods in the southwest and west of the country, which reminded voters of the urgent need to deal with climate change, and before the government’s scandalous mismanagement of Germany’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Greens’ candidate for the office of chancellor (and the party’s co-leader), Annalena Baerbock, could partly be blamed for its disappointing 14.8 per cent. Early in the campaign it was revealed that she had failed to declare income she had received in addition to her salary and had made inaccurate claims in her CV. As if these self-inflicted troubles weren’t enough, she released a book containing more than a hundred plagiarised passages (including some taken from a book by her Greens co-leader, Robert Habeck). Baerbock’s popularity — and with it the Greens’ position in the polls — dropped sharply.

Baerbock had good reason to feel hard done by. Her mistakes might well have been written off as oversights, and Armin Laschet of the Christian Democrats — initially her main competitor — had himself published a book containing passages copied from others without proper attribution. A few years ago, what’s more, Laschet resigned as lecturer at Aachen University after he lost his students’ exam papers and botched an attempt to award them marks said to be based on his notes. Baerbock may have exaggerated some of her achievements, but Laschet’s CV entirely omits his fifteen-year period at Aachen University. Voters nevertheless seemed to care more about Baerbock’s transgressions.

Laschet’s downfall came soon enough. He was captured on camera sharing a laugh while listening to German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier extending his condolences to the victims of the July floods. The twenty-second scene — combined with persistent sniping from the sidelines by the CSU’s Markus Söder, who considered himself the better option as the conservative parties’ joint candidate for chancellor — ruined Laschet’s chances of matching Angela Merkel’s 2017 results. Less than a month before the election, the Social Democrats overtook the conservatives in the polls.

Laschet, too, was entitled to feel aggrieved. That’s because his opponent Olaf Scholz seemed immune to criticism. The Social Democrat, who is sometimes referred to as Teflon-Scholz, was not troubled by credible claims that he condoned the Warburg Bank’s failure to pay a €47 million tax debt in 2017 when he was premier of Hamburg. Or, more recently, that he failed to act in a timely manner as finance minister after the financial services company Wirecard admitted it had cooked its books to the tune of €1.9 billion. And during the election campaign, he was barely troubled when his ministry was raided by investigators probing an anti–money laundering unit he oversees.

When the election result became clear on Sunday night, both Laschet and Baerbock put on a brave face. Baerbock pointed to the fact that the result was her party’s best ever in a national election. Laschet stressed that his party had almost caught up with Scholz’s during the final week of the campaign.

In fact, many more parties declared themselves winners than losers. The Free Democrats claimed victory despite increasing their vote by a meagre 0.8 percentage points. Politicians of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, said they were pleased by its 10.3 per cent, a fall from 12.6 per cent, with co-leader Alice Weidel arguing that if the vote for other, smaller parties with similar agendas was taken into account then the AfD increased its share of the vote.

Of course, some parties failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold necessary to gain a seat, a rule designed to keep minor parties out of the Bundestag. None of them would have been surprised by the fact. They include Die Basis, a newly formed party that tried to attract those opposed to masks and vaccinations to protect against Covid-19, which scored 1.4 per cent. The Freie Wähler, a party currently represented in two of sixteen state parliaments and led by Bavarian deputy premier Hubert Aiwanger (who also refuses to be vaccinated), won a respectable 2.4 per cent. Another 1.5 per cent of voters opted for the larger of two animal rights parties. And 1 per cent chose Die Partei, a party founded by the editors of the satirical magazine Titanic, which pokes fun at the programs and politics of traditional parties. Altogether, more than four million Germans voted for parties that failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold.

Of the parties represented in federal parliament, only the left-wing Linke openly admitted defeat. Its vote fell by almost half, from 9.2 per cent in 2017 to 4.9 per cent. But it snuck into the Bundestag thanks to a clause in the electoral laws that allows a party to circumvent the 5 per cent threshold if it wins at least three electorates. By holding three of the five electorates it won in 2017, it just survived as a political force — as it had in 1994, when it scored only 4.4 per cent but won four seats directly.

Another peculiarity of Germany’s electoral laws made it possible for a party that won no direct seat and attracted only 55,330 votes to be represented in the Bundestag. That’s the centre-left Südschleswigsche Wählerverband — a party appealing to ethnic Friesians and the Danish minority in Germany’s far north — to whom the 5 per cent rule does not apply. It won its first seat in federal parliament since 1953.

Stefan Seidler, the politician representing Germany’s Danish speakers, will be one of 735 members occupying a chamber designed to accommodate a parliament of 598 — 299 of them directly elected, 299 nominated by the parties. Germans have two votes: one to elect their local member and one to determine the overall composition of the Bundestag. If the number of direct seats won by a party surpasses the number of seats it has been allocated according to that party’s overall share of the vote, then all other parties need to be compensated for those extra seats. This topping-up has become routine because the number of seats directly won by the CSU regularly surpasses the number of seats calculated according to its percentage of the overall vote. In this election, the CSU won all but one of Bavaria’s forty-five electorates (the Greens won the other) but attracted only 31.7 per cent of the vote.

A focus on the overall election outcome obscures sharp geographical and demographic differences. In electorate #19, which comprises Hamburg’s western suburbs, the Greens won about 30 per cent of the vote and the Social Democrats about 25 per cent, with the AfD managing only about 3 per cent. In the East German state of Saxony, by contrast, the AfD came first on about 25 per cent, despite a fall from its result four years ago. No other party reached 20 per cent.

Among the 260,000 young people who took part in a national under-eighteen straw poll, the Greens came first overall. The AfD came sixth, with about the same number of votes as one of the animal rights splinter parties. In the two East German states of Saxony and Thuringia, however, the AfD won that poll.

According to an exit poll, two-thirds of over-sixty-year-olds voted for either the conservatives or the Social Democrats (with the vote being roughly evenly split). About half of those under twenty-two voted for either the Free Democrats or Greens, again with the vote evenly split. Only a quarter of young people for whom the 2021 poll was their first opportunity to vote chose either of the two major parties.

Further complicating the picture is the fact that neither of the two major parties can claim to speak for a sizeable proportion of the population. In fact, claims by Christian Democrats and Free Democrats on Sunday night that only a quarter of the electorate voted for Scholz actually overstate his support.

The 14.4 million Germans who chose not to vote won’t be represented in the Bundestag, and nor will the four million voters who opted for parties that didn’t reach the 5 per cent threshold. Of the 83.1 million people living in Germany, about 69.4 million are eighteen or older, but only 61.2 million are eligible to vote. More than eight million adult residents are barred from voting in national and state elections because German law makes it difficult even for second-generation migrants to take out citizenship and acquire the right to vote.

While Free Democrats and Greens don’t share many policy positions, both are committed to making it easier for migrants to become German citizens, not least by allowing them to retain the citizenship of their or their parents’ countries of origin. Both parties would also allow sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to vote, which could again increase the legitimacy of future governments.

Whoever forms the new government will need to try to represent the interests of East Germans and West Germans, young and old, whether they live in rural and regional Germany or in the cities. The new government will need to introduce far-ranging policies with an enormous impact on Germans’ day-to-day lives, and it needs to attempt to win over a majority of the population, young and old, people in the East and in the West, migrants and non-migrants, for those policies. That’s a huge ask.

The task might be slightly more manageable after this election because the new government will itself be diverse. As things stand, it will be made up of Greens and Free Democrats, plus either the Social Democrats or the conservatives. Hypothetically, the results would also allow for a continuation of the grand coalition between the conservatives and the Social Democrats, but both sides have ruled that out.

A coalition of three partners would be a first in postwar German history. Also unprecedented is the fact that the Greens and the Free Democrats have commenced negotiations rather than letting either of the two major parties (which are no longer that “major” after all) take the lead. That makes sense: whatever the final outcome — Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats; or conservatives, Greens and Free Democrats — the differences between the left-leaning Greens and the free-market Free Democrats are the most difficult to bridge.

Taking the initiative also means, once they have identified some common ground, the two parties can play off Christian Democrats against Social Democrats. The result could be that their major coalition partner, whichever that is, will have much less say in the personnel and program of the new government.

The current German government was formed over a tortuous 172 days, drawn out when the Free Democrats decided belatedly that they didn’t want to be part of a Jamaica coalition after all. The only option in that case was for the Social Democrats, who had initially been unwilling to continue their alliance with the Christian Democrats and CSU, to come to the party. Both the Greens and the Free Democrats say they have learned from the mistakes of those failed negotiations four years ago.

This time, all political leaders are committed to taking fewer than ninety-six days — the time from election day until New Year’s Eve. Nobody wants this New Year’s address, traditionally delivered by the chancellor, to be given once again by Angela Merkel.

I’m not holding my breath. After a dispiriting campaign we are probably in for drawn-out and extremely difficult negotiations. Unlike in 2017, neither Greens nor Free Democrats have the option of abandoning such negotiations (as the Free Democrats’ Christian Lindner did four years ago, when he declared that it is better not to govern than to abandon one’s principles).

There is more at stake now than in 2017. This is Germany’s last chance to change course if it wants to meet its Paris Agreement targets. With none of the parties that will sit in the Bundestag offering policies strong enough, the challenge will be far bigger than the task of reconciling ideological preferences and personal egos. •

The post Germany’s arithmetic appeared first on Inside Story.

After the second world war, Germans often cared a lot about how they were perceived by others. They worried a great deal, for example, about the reputational damage caused by the pogrom-like riots in Rostock and Hoyerswerda in the early 1990s. Many were proud when commentators adopted Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy’s description of Germans as “world champions of dealing with the past.” They liked the fact that Angela Merkel was perceived as the only Western leader willing and able to stand up to Donald Trump. Some were even proud when Merkel was praised abroad for her decision in September 2015 not to close Germany’s borders, and for her refusal to flinch when Germany admitted close to 900,000 asylum seekers that year, although they might have had misgivings about Merkel’s policy when talking to fellow Germans.

Given this history, it’s surprising that the attention paid by people outside Germany to the election that will determine Merkel’s successor has not been matched by the contestants’ references to the world beyond their borders. True, both Christian Democrat Armin Laschet and the current frontrunner, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, recently paid visits to French president Emmanuel Macron. But those encounters were hardly noticed, and weren’t in any case used by either candidate to talk in any detail about Germany’s crucial relationship with France or the Berlin republic’s future role in the European Union.

The candidates’ apparent blind spot was in evidence on Sunday night, when more than eleven million viewers watched a televised debate between Laschet, Scholz and Annalena Baerbock of the Greens. As the only one of the three pre-election debates aired by both the public broadcasters during this campaign, it was widely seen to be the most crucial event in the lead-up to the election. During its ninety minutes the candidates made brief comments about the foreign policy credentials of the left-wing Linke, but otherwise didn’t mention Germany’s role in the world and their own ideas for the European Union, for Germany’s relationship with China, Russia and the United States, and for the country’s relations with the developing world. Not once.

The absence is also reflected elsewhere in the campaign. The only posters I have seen that refer to foreign policy — yes, posters are still important in German election campaigns — have been Linke posters in East Germany demanding “peace with Russia.”

While correspondents for the international media have been trying to fathom what a government led by Scholz or Laschet would mean for the rest of the world, the politicians engaged in the campaign, including international law graduate Baerbock, seem oblivious to the wider world. That’s not because the world has been of no concern recently. The scandalous mismanagement of Germany’s withdrawal from Afghanistan by three senior government ministers — Social Democrat foreign minister Heiko Maas, Christian Democrat defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and the Christian Social Union interior minister Horst Seehofer — could have been one of the key issues of the campaign. It wasn’t. The fact that Germany leased planes in June to evacuate Afghans who would be in danger following a Taliban victory, but then cancelled the evacuation because Seehofer’s ministry objected to Afghan employees of the German military entering Germany before the completion of all relevant paperwork, received barely any attention.

The absence of the European Union and foreign policy from Sunday’s debate is partly the responsibility of the two journalists who chaired it. But it’s also a reflection of the stature of the three candidates. It makes even Angela Merkel, a skilful diplomat but hardly a foreign relations visionary, look farsighted.

In one sense, though, the three candidates’ failure to mention other countries comes as a pleasant surprise. All three acknowledge that Germany must do its share to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement. They might differ about how to do that, but none of them follows the lead of other world leaders by declaring that Germany’s approach relies on what China, the United States or other major emitters of greenhouse gases do. No mention was made on Sunday of Polish coal-fired power stations or Finnish and French reliance on nuclear energy. Emissions in Russia weren’t cited as an excuse for a lack of ambition by a future German government.

Part of the reason the candidates didn’t try to shift responsibility is that the country’s highest court committed the government to a comparatively ambitious German target earlier this year. The court found that Germany’s existing policy would unduly restrict the choices available to today’s young people after 2030. In a press release, the court said that:

fundamental rights are violated by the fact that the emission amounts allowed until 2030… substantially narrow the remaining options for reducing emissions after 2030, thereby jeopardising practically every type of freedom protected by fundamental rights… The legislator should have taken precautionary steps to ensure a transition to climate neutrality that respects freedom — steps that have so far been lacking.

The ruling forced Merkel’s coalition government to legislate to bring forward its climate neutrality goal to 2045 (rather than 2050, as in the legislation passed in December 2019) and its emissions-reduction goal to 65 per cent (rather than 55 per cent) by 2030.

So far, so good. The bad news is that a detailed study conducted by DIW Econ, the German Institute for Economic Research’s consulting company, has found that the 2021 climate protection legislation would not ensure Germany’s compliance with the Paris targets.

That study wasn’t concerned with the gap between the climate neutrality law and what the German government had committed to in Paris (although it identified such a gap); rather, it asked whether the election manifestos of the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Linke included measures commensurate with the revised legislation’s targets. It concluded that a government formed by any of the first three of those parties — assuming they were in a position to implement their programs — wouldn’t even come close to meeting the targets. Perhaps more surprising was the study’s finding that the measures envisaged by the Linke would also fall short. And the Greens? The study found that their measures, while more effective than those of the other four parties, would also be insufficient.

Climate change is the election campaign’s most important issue. That’s particularly the case after the floods in the west and southwest of the country in July, which claimed 180 lives and swept away houses, bridges, roads, rail tracks and other infrastructure. The repairs and rebuilding will, on current estimates, cost about €30 billion. Yet all main contestants in this election campaign pretend that climate neutrality can be achieved without any impact on consumers’ hip pockets and without changing the way we move around, eat, work or build our houses. Christian Democrats and Free Democrats even maintain that neither new taxes nor new public debt will be needed.

Angela Merkel’s departure could have been an opportunity for Germany to talk about its place in the world and how to tackle the enormous challenges of global justice and climate change. It could have been an opportunity for all contestants to agree that procrastination à la Merkel is no longer an option.

While the composition of Germany’s parliament is determined by the percentage of votes won by parties that exceed the 5 per cent threshold, 299 seats are decided in individual electorates, where the first-past-the-post system applies. Electorate #158 (Sächsische Schweiz–Osterzgebirge), in the southeast of the country, gained notoriety in the 2017 election because it was one of three electorates won by the candidate of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

A debate last week between six of the candidates vying to win electorate #158 was even more dispiriting than Baerbock, Scholz and Laschet’s encounter on Sunday night. When it came to climate change, the Green and Social Democrat candidates, perhaps trying to appease the local audience, were even reluctant to endorse their own parties’ manifestos. The Greens candidate went as far as declining to rule out building new nuclear power stations to compensate for the decommissioning of coal-fired generators. (Perhaps in an attempt to reciprocate, the pro-nuclear AfD candidate then demanded more bicycle paths.)

Nearly all the questions from the audience came from local politicians or supporters of minor parties that hadn’t been invited to the forum. Towards the end of the debate, though, a seemingly unaligned audience member — a teacher in a vocational school — put up his hand. His students had instructed him to ask the candidates how they thought Germany would meet the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target. He hadn’t come unprepared: he had read the DIW Econ study and knew that whatever the parties were offering wasn’t going to be enough. He also had first-hand experience of the frustration of young people, many of them too young to vote. The candidates acknowledged that frustration, but not one of them had a satisfactory answer to the question.

Given the reluctance of politicians to promote painful decisions, the teenagers asking hard questions and demanding answers are our best bet. Fridays for Future activists, who have already had considerable influence on German policymaking, are mobilising for nationwide demonstrations on 24 September, two days before the election. “This election provides us with a once-in-a-century choice,” the group’s Luisa Neubauer wrote. “The political decisions taken during the next four years will determine the fate of my generation.”

And while they are at it, maybe Fridays for Future activists could also raise the issue of Germany’s place in the world — not in order to provide excuses for it to sit on its hands, nor to lecture the world about a German model. Global injustice is one of the key impediments to a sustainable world, and a vision for global sustainability and justice is sorely needed.

In any case, the world may soon look towards Norway, rather than Germany, when contemplating how to tackle climate change and accelerate the transformation of economies. Yesterday, an alliance of parties led by Labour’s Jonas Gahr Støre won the Norwegian election with a mandate — and seeming resolve — to end Norway’s reliance on fossil fuel production and export, with one potential government party, the Greens, demanding an end to fossil fuel production by 2035. That should interest others whose countries rely on the production coal, oil and gas, including the people of Altona, New York and Altona, Melbourne. •

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Sure, farmers were rolled out any time we wanted to make a statement about Australian identity, but I didn’t know any. They just weren’t relevant to us, the vast majority in the city. We talked about them when there was another drought, though I can’t remember seeing them on television much — maybe the farmer look-alike in the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony riding a horse, but that was about it. Farming had nothing to do with my life and that was fine by me.

And then I met The Farmer. I suppose you could fall in love with someone and hate their occupation. I didn’t; I became thoroughly fascinated by his job. As a committed eater, who wouldn’t love a food grower? But, as you can imagine, I had some preconceptions.

My journalism started under the Hawke–Keating Labor government of the 1980s and my political writing started in the 1990s, at the beginning of the recession Australia had to have. The death of manufacturing was showing me concepts like structural unemployment and inflation — which had previously just been theories in year 12 economics — in action.

But I didn’t take much notice of the structural adjustments going on in farming. I was vaguely aware of agriculture, but it didn’t intrude into what I used to think were the exciting parts of politics, like leadership spills or factional intrigue.

It just gets so much more personal when your livelihood depends on it. The Farmer’s mixed broadacre farm is a commercial-sized operation in southern New South Wales that primarily grows sheep and wheat. It is a family farm, bought four generations ago when the large squatter blocks were carved up during one of the land reform periods. The squatters had taken it from the Wiradjuri people, who have lived here for tens of thousands of years. The descendants of those first inhabitants continue to live here and the traces their ancestors left on the land are unobtrusive but unmistakable.

The way Indigenous people fed themselves, the way they survived and thrived, was underpinned by their system of encouraging the foods they prized, and sculpting land for their long-term use. Landscape was embedded in foundational and spiritual beliefs, while intimately woven with life-giving food. The people’s mark was left on the terrain, but land was considered neither separate nor outside of the people.

I was grafted onto a farming culture that has European roots — whose development was based on an industrial model from the get-go. The colonial leaders’ first job was to feed the settlement, then to export the excess to help feed England, the mother country. Farmers were encouraged and protected in Australia, as they still are in many countries. Land was bestowed, stolen or bought, its bounty was for taking and its capacity considered infinite. Like a rubber band, we thought it could stretch without breaking because that was the economic imperative. To feed people.

So it wasn’t my plan to transplant myself from a city to a country culture on a mid-sized traditional farm, but life has a habit of getting in the way of plans. To be clear, I am a journalist, not a farmer. I don’t have an agricultural degree. I am not like a lot of women who are farmers in their own right, yet only recently recognised. Hell, I don’t even do the books. It’s not my thing. I don’t run The Farmer’s operation and he doesn’t write my books.

But somewhere in the last twenty-five years of living on a farm, and increasingly reporting on rural issues, I started to question the economic agenda that was set in train by the Hawke–Keating and Howard governments in those pivotal decades. Australia, like many countries around the world, was outsourcing anything it couldn’t produce at the cheapest possible price. But how was this going to work for food?

I decided to look at this farming caper I had been living alongside for all these years. I wanted to understand how it came to be, and I discovered that by pulling a thread on a farm, I was quickly taken to foundational philosophical questions about the way we live and how we want to organise our communities and society as a whole. Farming remains as central to the questions of humanity and our future as it ever was. We just don’t think about it that much because we think we solved the food problem a long time ago and there are far more urgent questions to get on with.

I wanted to know one simple thing: why you should care about farming. Or, indeed, whether you should.

At its most basic, farmers use soil and water to grow crops and raise animals. In the act of growing, farmers must look after landscapes. Australian farmers manage up to 60 per cent of the country’s land mass and account for up to 70 per cent of its diverted freshwater extractions. So we all have a stake in farmers doing their job well.

The acts of choosing a farming system for a place, growing food and selling it are like trying to weave a large tapestry. They require care, dexterity and a range of skills. If one thread comes loose, things can start to unravel. Farmers feed us, look after the landscape (or not), punch above their weight for exports and contribute to, or ameliorate, climate change. They play a crucial role in the social infrastructure of many rural communities.

Farming both contributes to and is endangered by the biggest existential threats of our time: climate change, water shortages, soil loss, energy production, natural disasters, zoonotic diseases, population displacement and geopolitical trade wars. That means we need governments to get the policy settings right.

Yet no Australian political party is doing serious thinking about how to knit together food, farming and environmental policies to continue feeding the population while mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss. We remain caught in ways of thinking about farming that hark back to 1788. But the growing market pressure on environmental, health and animal welfare issues means farming cannot be business as usual.

For a brief moment, at the height of panic over the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, we got a glimpse of what it’s like to live without basic ingredients on the shelves. Bread, pasta, rice, meat and canned goods disappeared from supermarkets. Small local food producers were overwhelmed as people wanted to source food from elsewhere. Food prices rose and global supply chains could not cope with demand.

After years of market-centric structural change, national production capacity was left wanting, and not just in food chains. Face masks, medical equipment and hand sanitiser were the first priorities, but there was also a flicker of discussion about food security.

The Australian government and national farming advocates reacted with campaigns to snuff out any conversation about holes in our food system. Nothing to see here, they said. Yet this was a live opportunity to look around the world and realise why so many countries consider farming and natural resources to be in their national strategic interest.

As I write, Australia has no national food policy, no national drought policy, a Hunger Games–style water policy, a cursory climate policy, and no vision for how land management and environmental assets should fit with farming and food security in a warming climate.

Nor are there any state or national strategies or guiding principles to govern the competition between our limited high-quality food-production land and residential development, mining and energy interests. Conservation, agriculture and land management are dominated by two loud clubs. One says, lock it all up. The other says, it’s my domain and I can do what I like. I’m interested in a more nuanced approach.

I wanted to think about key questions. What do we want to farm? If we concentrate on a few big exports — say beef and wheat — what diversity do we lose along the way? Do we want shorter supply chains for some critical assets in case of future epidemics? Who do we want to do the farming? Do we want to maintain a balance of big corporations at scale, smaller and mid-sized family farmers, including Indigenous landowners, as well as micro-growers? Do we want our land and water owned and managed by 800 companies or 80,000 companies and families? Do we want to put all our environmental and food eggs in those 800 baskets? How do we want to look after the land and water that we rely on for farming in a changing climate? We all need to care about those questions.

As someone who lives and draws an income from food production, I wanted to think about the whole bloody thing, to consider the chain that leads from the soil all the way to the eaters, because as a country we need to understand how farming fits as one piece in one big landscape puzzle. And I wanted to examine themes that resonate around the globe to know where the trends are and what we can expect in the future.

I was also struck by the contradictory demands made of farmers by governments and eaters. We want clean, green food to feed the world. We want scale because we want cheap food. We want family farmers. We want big global capital. We want lots to export to help our balance of payments. We want farmers to stand on their own two feet. We want farming to be like any other business. We want farmers to use the latest technology. We want them to look after the environment. We want them to look after native habitat for declining species. And now we want them to sequester carbon to turn around both their own emissions and some of the rest of the population’s emissions. I think that just about covers it.

My discovery process has not been linear. Like a beagle on the scent of a bunny, it has zigzagged — through time and disciplines; from science to philosophy to politics to culture and back again. It’s been maddening, confusing and confronting. Many times I’ve thought I have bitten off more than I could chew because the act of farming and its ramifications seem so simple but are so complex.

My view is different from others because a view depends on where you are standing. But I hope it sheds a light on important changes going on in our food system, and where the cracks are appearing. I believe it is an urgent conversation. Australian farming is changing rapidly. If you look across this landscape in coming years and you don’t like some of what you see, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

Essentially, we must find a way to knit together the need to grow and supply food with how we manage the landscape. Australia needs a national master plan for its land and food; we need to know how we are to protect our sacred places and unique species for their longevity, and that of the environment and our rural communities.

Responsibility for food, farming and landscape is shared by a number of local, state and federal government ministers and departments, particularly agriculture, environment, health and home affairs. These ministers and departments, and concerned citizens, need to imagine a food, land and water system that walks the path between wild utopia and human reality. We need to devise a plan that looks at the country as a whole and determines how much food is necessary to sustain ourselves into the future and how diverse our food system should be — in what it produces, who produces it and where they live.

This plan would identify and protect the best food production land and intertwine with the national reserve system that maps conservation areas across the country. It would identify high-value conservation areas and prime agricultural land as no-go zones for developments like housing and mining. It might point to partial development areas and open slather sites. It might map out areas designed for clever future housing that would not impinge on limited high-quality food-production land.

A food plan would be both local and global, with short, stout supply chains into our local communities and regions, and then longer freight lines that share our substantial production capacity with the world but particularly with our near neighbours. The priority is a realistic food price that covers the requirements of a healthy ecosystem and the humans who provide their labour to bring the food to your plate.

The plan would acknowledge our reliance for food security on many different imported components, including fuel, machinery and other inputs. It would identify our weaknesses. It would be robust and transparent enough to link to a natural capital account so we could measure the impacts of food production on our natural world and keep building smarter choices. It would measure the nutrition of the food so eaters could reward healthy food systems and encourage wholefood eating in a world that suffers from both obesity and undernourishment.

And while we are at it, why curb our ambition? We rely on land for so many different things and, as the climate changes, those uses are going to change. Our national plan might also include suitable sites for carbon sequestration projects and renewable energy. It would consider a transparent water policy and a visionary soil policy, with its capacity to balance our carbon budget. Finally, this national backyard plan would be afforded the status of the defence portfolio. That would make it of primary importance for the cabinet, the budget and the nation.

Such a food, land and water plan is, surely, a no-brainer. •

This is an edited extract from Why You Should Give a F*ck about Farming, published this month by Penguin.

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This is the most unusual of German election campaigns. Angela Merkel’s announcement nearly three years ago that she would step down at the end of her fourth term is one of many firsts. Her predecessors were either compelled to resign (Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Willy Brandt) or voted out of office (Kurt Georg Kiesinger, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder).

This is also the first time that three parties rather than two have nominated a candidate for the chancellorship. Laschet’s selection as joint candidate of the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, on 20 April, marked the real beginning of the campaign, and at times each of the three candidates has looked likely to lead his or her party to victory. In April and May, the Greens were narrowly ahead of the Christian Democrats, and Baerbock seemed to be on track to become the second woman to lead Germany. In June and July, the Christian Democrats moved well ahead of the Greens. In August, the Social Democrats, whose hopes had seemed to rest on wishful thinking alone, relegated the Greens to third place and caught up with the front-runner.

It’s the first time, too, that each of the candidates for chancellor is widely considered to be weak — which partly explains why the parties’ fortunes in the polls have shifted as much as they have in the past three months.

The Greens picked Annalena Baerbock, a forty-year-old with a master’s degree in international law from the London School of Economics, in what appeared to be a unanimous decision that was also supported by the party’s other co-leader, Robert Habeck. To begin with, the Greens’ selection of a young woman who has never held a position in government over the more experienced Habeck was widely applauded, and her approval ratings seemed to confirm the choice. But her popularity soon took a dive, first because she had failed to report income to federal parliament (which she is obliged to do as an MP), then because she was found to have embellished her CV, and finally because passages in a book she wrote, rushed into print to support her candidature, turned out to have been plagiarised (from sources that included Wikipedia and a book written by Habeck).

Unlike Baerbock, sixty-year-old Armin Laschet has run a government. He has been the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia — its population of eighteen million making it Germany’s most populous state — for the past four years. He fought hard to be anointed as candidate of the Christian Democrats and its Bavarian sister party. First he saw off a challenge from his party colleague Friedrich Merz, a corporate lawyer who has long been the darling of the Christian Democrats’ conservative wing and might well have been a more popular choice. Then he prevailed against Markus Söder, the Bavarian premier and leader of the Christian Social Union, although polls were giving Söder a far better chance of winning the election. Laschet, who is also prone to put his foot in his mouth, never really recovered from these bruising contests.

The Social Democrats picked sixty-three-year-old finance minister Olaf Scholz, a former state premier of Hamburg, as early as August last year — much to the merriment of political observers, given that at the time the pollsters ranked his party a distant third, only just ahead of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and the Free Democrats. As recently as 7 June this year, the Social Democrats won a paltry 8.4 per cent of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt state election. Scholz carries the nickname Scholzomat; those who wrote off his chances assumed that his automaton-like persona and inability to show emotions wouldn’t endear him to the electorate.

Scholz’s claim to be a viable candidate for chancellor also seemed absurd because he didn’t appear to have much backing in his own party. He had failed in his bid to become co-leader of the Social Democrats in 2019, not least because his comparatively conservative views didn’t chime with those of the majority of his party. Surprisingly, he now has the party’s full support — presumably many members sense that he is the only chance the party has to avoid the fate of the French socialists, whose candidate finished fifth in the 2017 presidential election.

Scholz’s approval ratings are now far ahead of Laschet’s and Baerbock’s. But rather than impressing voters with his own strengths, he has benefited from the mistakes of his competitors. Worryingly, his relative popularity may also reflect the fact that he has positioned himself as Merkel’s most obvious heir. Unkind commentators have called him a Merkel clone; a recent Spiegel article was titled “The Merkelisation of Olaf Scholz.”

Like Merkel, Scholz is overly cautious, prone to prevaricating rather than acting decisively. Like her, he lacks charisma. And since Merkel too has embraced traditional Social Democratic policies, it’s not hard to imagine him following in her footsteps. Even more than the Merkel loyalist Laschet, he appears to guarantee that nothing will change, irrespective of which parties make up the governing coalition.

This is the other first: the abundance of possible coalitions. An average of the last six polls, conducted between 24 and 28 August, has the combined Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union neck and neck with the Social Democrats on 23 per cent, followed by the Greens on 18, the centre-right Free Democrats on 12, the AfD on 11, and the left-wing Linke on 7 per cent. According to the pollsters, no other small party will manage to get anywhere close to the 5 per cent needed for a representation in the Bundestag, the Federal Republic’s parliament.

If these polls mirror the distribution of votes on election day — and taking account of the fact that no other party will deal with the AfD — five different coalitions are possible: a government comprised of the parties that traditionally made up the Bundestag before the arrival of the Greens in 1983: that is, the Christian Democrats (black), the Social Democrats (red) and the Free Democrats (yellow). Because the colours associated with these parties resemble those of the German flag, this coalition is also referred to as the Deutschlandkoalition, or German coalition. The other options have been labelled “Jamaica,” after the colours of the Jamaican flag (black, green and yellow); “Kenya” (black, red and green); Ampel (traffic light) comprised of Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens; and “R2G” (Social Democrats, Linke and Greens).

Some of these options are more likely than others. Both the Free Democrats and the Greens are desperate to be back in government and will negotiate accordingly; this seems to make Jamaica and the Ampel more likely than Kenya or a Deutschlandkoalition. Either of the latter would also be less likely if the Christian Democrats had to be the minor partner in such an arrangement. In terms of a programmatic fit, R2G would be a good option, and would have the support of the majority of members of the Social Democrats, the Linke and the Greens. But neither the Greens leadership nor Scholz fancy a coalition with the Linke, because they consider the party to be too unreliable, particularly on foreign policy.

But it’s another four weeks until election day, and if the volatility of the past three months continues then last week’s polls will mean little. A government led by the Greens, which seemed a realistic option only a couple of months ago, now appears only a remote possibility — but who knows, we could still end up with a chancellor Baerbock.

In trying to gauge the mood of the electorate, I rely on the pollsters. The alternative would be to take notice of the unabashedly unscientific polls I conduct among my friends, whose response to the current offering, like my own, is despairing. That’s not just because the three main contenders to inherit Merkel’s mantle are unconvincing, but also because Germany faces the prospect of a government trying to pretend that no significant changes are necessary — or rather, a majority of voters preferring a continuation of the status quo.

That preference would make sense if the current government’s recent performance couldn’t be faulted. Yet its response to Covid-19 was mired in miscalculation and hesitation. Germany is experiencing the pandemic’s fourth wave not least because too few people have been vaccinated (even though Germany has so much vaccine it has been giving it away to other countries). The government’s other main embarrassment lately has been its failure to evacuate people who have worked for the German military in Afghanistan — not because it was unaware of the danger but because charter flights organised to evacuate local staff were cancelled at the last minute because the ministry of the interior had concerns that its bureaucratic processes would be compromised by the arrival of people who had not yet been issued visas.

But the Merkel government’s biggest failure has been its dilatory response to climate change. It wasted valuable time trying to please all possible constituencies, including the owners of coal-fired power stations and the car industry. Merkel’s achievements — most notably her decision to phase out nuclear reactors after Fukushima and her initial response to refugees in 2015 — are undeniable, but the former environment minister’s reluctance to accelerate the transformation of Germany’s economy is likely to be remembered as an ugly blot that may well define her sixteen years in office.

The fact that more of the same ought not be an option was brought home by the recent floods in the west of the country. More than 180 people died in July when small rivers turned into raging torrents, sweeping away bridges, roads and entire houses. AfD politicians aside, nobody doubts that torrential rains like the ones that hit Germany last month are largely a result of climate change. All parties, again with the exception of the AfD, say they would like Germany to do its part to combat climate change. In fact, since 29 April this year there has been no alternative: this was the day the Bundesverfassungsgericht, Germany’s highest court, ruled that the government is doing too little to ensure that today’s young people inherit a world that is still worth living in.

Yet not only the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats but also the Greens seem to favour a continuation of Merkel’s “don’t rock the boat” approach. In the current campaign, the Greens’ timidity may reflect their low self-confidence in the wake of Baerbock’s stuff-ups. But you need only look at Baden-Württemberg, the state that has had a Greens premier for the past ten years, to be disabused of the idea that the Greens would insist on radical changes if they were part of a governing coalition.

So, is Germany in for more of Merkel? That would be disastrous. At a time when a radical rethink of how we live and how we engage with the world around us is sorely needed, Germany can hardly afford another four years of a government sitting on its hands lest too much action upset one or the other voter.

Perhaps this is also a question of leadership. On Saturday night, some media streamed what the news magazine Spiegel termed “the only true debate”: between Söder of the Christian Social Union and Habeck of the Greens, both of them wannabe contenders who lost out to Laschet and Baerbock respectively. The relative sophistication of the debate — and both leaders’ conceding that far-reaching changes, however unpopular they may be, are necessary — suggested that a government led by Habeck, with Söder as his deputy (or the other way around), may have been a more attractive option than any of those on offer. That’s also because the pair might have pulled enough votes between them to avoid having to offer ministries to the free marketeers from the Free Democratic Party.

Such a scenario is perhaps not as far-fetched as it may seem. I don’t necessarily have in mind the Greens supporters who have been clamouring for a last-minute swap, Habeck for Baerbock, or the Christian Democrats who fear that their party might lose more than a quarter of its vote from the last election, and are imploring Söder to come to the rescue. Rather, I am thinking of a scenario sketched by the Spiegel columnist Sascha Lobo, who pointed out that Laschet might fail to win a seat in parliament, which could then open the door for Söder.

In any case, four weeks is a very long time, particularly in this turbulent period. Maybe there is hope yet. If the matter weren’t quite so serious, it would even be fun to watch the complex saga of how Europe’s largest democracy chooses its next government continuing to unfold. •

The post More Merkel? appeared first on Inside Story.

The most glaring example is the lack of systematic action on climate change. Australia drags the chain on emissions reduction and continues to punt on energy-intensive exports with a dwindling customer base. A price on carbon wouldn’t have solved all our climate challenges, but it would have left us better placed than we are now.

The failure to rein in house prices is another case in point. The tax system has helped turn housing into a speculative asset, pushing funds into property rather than productive sectors of the economy, driving household debt to spectacular levels, and ramping up inequality. Again, reforming the tax treatment of residential property would hardly solve all our housing woes, but it would ameliorate some of the real estate boom’s worst effects.

In a new essay in Monash University Publishing’s “In the National Interest” series, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen argue that carbon pricing and property tax reform have become “pariah policies.” Despite evidence that they would have a net positive impact on Australian society, these measures have become untouchable. Events bolster their case: as we gear up for a federal election, Labor has walked away from its modest reforms to negative gearing and capital gains, and the phrases “carbon price” and “emissions trading” are banned from its political lexicon.

But, Errington and van Onselen argue, weak opposition means poor government: “The progressive side of the two-party divide is too inept to apply pressure to the conservative side, meaning conservatives stay in government without lifting their game.”

The title of their short book is Who Dares Loses. If this bleak declaration is true, then ambitious policy proposals are a recipe for electoral defeat, which appears to be the conclusion Labor has drawn from its loss in 2019. The flip side is that winners aren’t reformers. Having achieved office, governments avoid risking political capital to change society for the better.

Errington and van Onselen set out to “selectively challenge the conventional wisdom” by arguing the case for several “pariah policies,” including a universal basic income, the reintroduction of estate duties, a tax on the family home, a price on carbon, a levy on sugar, and the commercialisation of the ABC. Some of their arguments are convincing, others less so.

The case for a levy on sugar is strong. It would induce manufacturers to produce healthier food and encourage consumers to eat it, reducing the burden of diseases like diabetes and raising extra health dollars to boot. The idea that education campaigns and better labelling can drive this much-needed behavioural change was debunked long ago.

By contrast, the case for putting ads on the ABC is thin. Bizarrely, the authors propose this as a way of countering the decline of quality journalism in Australia. Their argument runs as follows: having lost valuable revenue streams like classified ads, commercial media have cut their newsrooms to the bone; as a result, subsidies for investigative reporting and quality debate must now “reach beyond the current public broadcasters.” So far so good — the case for funding more public interest journalism is strong. But their conclusion — that the ABC, like SBS, “will have to generate more of its own revenue” — is a non sequitur.

Are budget constraints so great that we can only increase funding in one area by reducing it in another? Believing that would be inconsistent with Errington and van Onselen’s support for a universal basic income, at an estimated $125 billion annual cost they claim “isn’t quite as eye-watering” as it may have seemed before JobKeeper.

In order to get more of the public interest journalism and investigative reporting that the ABC still does well, they want to make the ABC more like the commercial media. With the ABC competing for ads, they say, the other networks “would have a market incentive to lift their standard of news coverage, in a bid to steal ABC viewers and their lucrative advertisers.”

The reverse scenario is far more likely — the ABC would move downmarket as it sought to peel advertising dollars away from its (more) commercial rivals. And if it succeeded, the government would quickly cut public funding accordingly.

The “pariah policies” in Who Dares Loses overlap significantly with the reforms identified by the former chief executive of Grattan Institute, John Daley, in his recent report, Gridlock. Daley identifies carbon pricing, the tax treatment of housing, and sugar taxes as areas where government action has stalled. (He doesn’t mention commercialising the ABC.) Other initiatives consigned to the too-hard basket include congestion charging on roads, raising the pension age, introducing an effective mining resource rent tax, broadening (or increasing) the GST and lifting unemployment benefits.

Gridlock sets out to answer three questions. To the first — are twenty-first-century governments more reform-averse than their predecessors? — Daley’s answer is an emphatic yes. The 1980s and 1990s under Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and, initially at least, John Howard were “golden years” for reform. We might argue about the relative merits of measures like floating the dollar, cutting tariffs, deregulating the banks, introducing compulsory superannuation, imposing the GST, and privatising Telstra, Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank, but it is hard to dispute Daley’s contention that recent governments have been far less ambitious.

Daley’s second, more difficult, question is why are contemporary governments so timid? He identifies three obstacles that seem to be stopping governments from tackling major reforms: the lack of popular support for particular changes; the power of the “shibboleths” that mark out loyalties within parties or factions; and the opposition of powerful interest groups. The size of the required budget investment can also be a barrier, but Daley dismisses as relatively insignificant two of the most oft-cited roadblocks — the Senate and the messy division of responsibilities between the Canberra and the states.

But these obstacles aren’t new. The GST was deeply unpopular, but Howard risked electoral defeat to go ahead anyway. Privatising the Commonwealth Bank contradicted Labor shibboleths, but Hawke and Keating pressed on regardless. Vested interests vigorously opposed native title legislation, but it was still steered through parliament.

What’s different today? The glib response is that we’ve stopped electing politicians willing to push through obstacles in the belief that the change is worth the fight. As we contemplate an unedifying electoral contest between “ScoMo” and “Albo,” it’s easy to believe that current leaders don’t measure up to leaders past. That might be an emotionally satisfying answer, but it leaves us hoping forlornly that someone better will eventually turn up.

Deeper answers lie in structural economic and social changes. The echo chamber of social media has driven polarisation and division. The twenty-four-hour news cycle and the professionalisation of politics mean policies are more likely to be shaped by polling and focus groups than by evidence. The shifting and shrinking bases of the major political parties have reinforced polarisation.

Meanwhile, the hollowing out of the public service, the rising power of political staffers and the outsourcing of advice to corporate consultancies have weakened governments’ capacity to generate and implement good ideas. And the “revolving door” that turns a ministerial adviser into a “government relations” professional has picked up pace, as has the “golden escalator” from ministerial portfolio to corporate board or strategic advisory role.

Daley’s third question is obvious: what is to be done? If we want more ambitious, reform-minded leaders, we need to change the system that supports the current epidemic of policy timidity. “Institutional changes to ministerial adviser roles, to processes for appointing and dismissing senior public servants, to ministerial influence over government contracts and grants, and to controls over political donations, campaign finance, lobbying, and post-politics careers would all help to break the gridlock in policy reform,” he writes.

Errington and van Onselen recommend similar changes, and throw in a shift to proportional representation. If New Zealand can change its electoral system, why can’t we? The catch, as always, is that the people we need to fix these problems are a big part of the problem. As Daley says, the institutional changes he proposes “are themselves an example of blocked policy reform.” If our political caste can’t manage to abolish franking credits, let alone create a federal corruption commission, then the chances of substantial systemic reform appear slim.

Daley puts his hope in more independent MPs getting elected to parliament and using the balance of power to force systemic change. It’s hardly a quick fix, but it chimes with the fact that the reform highlights of the past two decades — including the (shortlived) carbon pricing mechanism, the NDIS, the Gonski school funding scheme, and plain-paper cigarettes packaging — mostly came when Julia Gillard was leading a government reliant on crossbench MPs.

Daley’s conclusion suggests the answer lies in getting back to the basics of political organisation at the local level: engaging citizens, listening to their concerns, and involving them in developing campaigns and policies. This is the nuts-and-bolts work that helped the campaign for marriage equality succeed. It is the kind of community organising that elected independent Cathy McGowan in the formerly safe Liberal seat of Indi in 2013, and enabled Helen Haines to succeed her in 2019.

In other words, we need to build democracy from the bottom up, not suffer it from the top down. Electing more independents to parliament seems like a good place to start. •

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Until about five years ago, debates on climate policy lined up the extensive evidence of rising global temperatures and modelling showing worse to come against statistical quibbles and “sceptical” arguments that came down to the belief that “scientists are always predicting disaster but it never happens.”

In 2021, though, we no longer need to look at models to see the effects of climate change arriving faster and more destructively than most of the modellers thought possible. For Australians and many others around the world, climate change has taken the form of almost unstoppable bushfires. For those who have yet to feel climate change directly, the pandemic provides life experience of a long-predicted disaster that has turned out worse than most people imagined.

Even this direct experience has turned out not to matter much to some people. The fact that the New England area was devastated by fire in 2019 hasn’t shifted the denialist/do-nothingist position of its local MP, Barnaby Joyce, and probably won’t cost him his seat at the next election.

The same is true, in spades, of Covid. In the United States in particular, conservatives who have seen friends and relatives die around them continue to insist that the whole thing is a hoax. There’s now a whole genre of stories (reminiscent of deathbed conversion narratives) in which people dying of the disease finally urge their friends to get vaccinated or, occasionally, go to their graves still denying everything.

Despite all this resistance, we have collectively made enormous efforts to control Covid. For the most part, we have accepted handwashing, social distancing, masks, travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns even while being unsure which measures will work and which will turn out to be unnecessary. Now that vaccines have become available, the majority of the population has rushed to protect themselves and everyone else. And there is increasingly little patience for the selfish or misguided minority who refuse, even when given every opportunity to get vaccinated.

The contrast with climate change is striking. We know, from looking at successful examples, that we can greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions at costs too small to be detectable in the aggregate economy.

By 2025, most European countries will have eliminated coal-fired electricity altogether; several have already done so. The main policy instrument used to achieve this goal has been an emissions trading scheme that requires firms burning coal, iron or gas to buy a tradeable permit. The permit price was below €10 per tonne for some years, but has now risen to €50. Since generating a megawatt-hour of electricity using coal emits roughly a tonne of carbon dioxide, the scheme effectively adds around A$80/MWh (or 8 cents/kWh) to the cost of coal-fired electricity, with a smaller effect on gas-fired electricity.

Since the emissions allowed under the EU scheme are currently around 1.5 billion tonnes, the annual value of permits used is roughly €75 billion, or around 0.5 per cent of the European Union’s GDP. This is not an economic loss; it is a transfer from polluters to society as a whole. The actual economic cost is even smaller.

The same point can be illustrated by Australian experience. The Gillard government’s short-lived carbon tax/price significantly reduced emissions. But despite Tony Abbott’s claims about a “wrecking ball” going through the economy, neither the imposition of the tax nor its removal had any measurable effect on GDP or other indicators of aggregate performance.

Ending coal is only a first step. But an extension of the same policies — a doubling of the EU carbon price, for example — would see a rapid replacement of gas-fired electricity with a combination of solar, wind, battery storage and other zero-carbon options. And even if the economic impact were quadrupled it would still be so small as to be undetectable against the background of ordinary economic fluctuations, let alone crises like the pandemic.

If the electricity supply were decarbonised, electrifying the vehicle fleet would eliminate emissions from road transport. Again, we have examples to show how easy this would be. Norway has committed to ending sales of internal combustion engines. Already, electric vehicles account for more than half of the country’s new car sales and around a fifth of the total car fleet. This outcome was achieved with a mix of fairly modest measures, such as exemptions from purchase taxes and parking fees. As the cost of electric vehicles has declined, some of the more generous measures have been scaled back.

A number of national governments have committed to ending sales of internal combustion engines, and car manufacturers have announced plans to switch to producing electric vehicles. But current policies will leave lots of petrol and diesel vehicles on the road well past 2040. Incentives on the scale of those being offered in Norway, combined with a hard deadline for removing internal combustion vehicles from the roads, if announced now, could put an end to transport-related emissions by 2035.

The main economic cost would be the scrapping of vehicles before the end of their usable life. But owners could be compensated with a version of the “cash for clunkers” scheme that ran in the United States a few years ago. This isn’t an elegant policy solution, but when we are faced with the prospect of destroying the global climate we can’t afford to worry about such things.

Other responses, including drastic limits on air travel, might seem more draconian. But we have all put up with near-total bans on international travel, and lots of constraints on domestic travel, imposed with little or no notice in response to pandemic outbreaks. Replacing business travel with Zoom has turned out to be easy. As for recreational travel, a very simple response would be to replace frequent short “getaways” with the longer holidays, taken once a year or less, that were normal in the twentieth century. This would allow trains to substitute for planes in many cases.

We have more time to act on climate than we did on Covid. But that time is running out, and we are not using it well. •

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Global warming has caused the ice caps to melt, and the planet’s weather has gone berserk. Tornadoes “attack” Los Angeles and a huge wave engulfs New York City; then an ice age sets in. And all this mayhem seems to take place over the course of just a few days.

Though cliché-ridden and gloriously silly, The Day After Tomorrow did depend on the thinnest sliver of scientific fact. The plot of the movie is “inspired” — I wouldn’t put it any higher than that — by the real science of abrupt climate change.

That’s why, one morning in May 2004, I was sitting in the Sydney office of ABC TV’s Lateline anxiously trying to contact Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. I was attempting to arrange an interview for Tony Jones about the film’s release, but because it was Lateline we were going to concentrate on something arcane called “ocean conveyor belts.”

I finally got through to Broecker at his home in New Jersey. “Professor Broecker,” I asked, “would you like to get up at six tomorrow morning and drive all the way into Manhattan to talk about the science that tangentially underpins this dumb movie?”

“Sure. And call me Wally — everyone else does.”

Wally Broecker was raised in an evangelical family but dropped his faith — “cold turkey,” he said — in his twenties. After gaining his doctorate at Columbia, he was a fixture at that university’s prestigious Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory for well over sixty years.

As early as 1975 he published an influential article in Science called “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” As he predicted, Earth’s temperatures started climbing the very next year.

Broecker was also the first scientist to identify and understand ocean conveyor belts, the ocean current networks that affect everything from temperature to rain patterns by shifting energy from one part of the globe to the other.

The famous Gulf Stream, for example, carries warm surface water to Western Europe, which is then sent back across the Atlantic as cold water at depth. Without the Gulf Stream bringing the warmth of the Caribbean across the chilly North Atlantic, Europe would suffer from a new ice age.

Broecker then developed the theory that would eventually inspire the makers of The Day After Tomorrow. These conveyor belts, he argued, could be switched on and off — perhaps over as little as a few decades. If global warming led to the melting of the ice caps, and a massive pulse of freshwater entered the oceans, these aquatic conveyor belts would grind to a halt — with catastrophic implications for the world’s climate patterns.

In a geological time frame, this would indeed bring about climate change in an abrupt manner.

That night on Lateline Broecker happily explained this terrifying scenario. I remember thinking, if the ocean conveyor belts did stop working it would be like turning off the planet’s life support system.

Broecker came into Manhattan early that morning to talk to a TV show on the other side of the world because he understood that he knew stuff that people needed to hear. As he once explained, “The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”

I hadn’t thought of Wally Broecker for years. All through the 2019 bushfires I didn’t think of him, nor while I was watching the terrible news of the floods in Western Europe. But then last week I saw this headline in the Guardian: “Climate Crisis: Scientists Spot Warning Signs of Gulf Stream Collapse.”

The source of that article, a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, argues there’s been “a gradual weakening during the last decades” of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — basically, another name for Broecker’s ocean conveyor belt. In other words, here was up-to-date evidence of what he’d warned our audience about seventeen years ago.

Climate scientists have long said that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will lead to increasingly frequent and severe bushfires, floods, heatwaves and cyclones. And they’ve been proven correct. Could Wally Broecker’s fears about the impact of climate change on the oceans also come true?

In a video statement recorded just a week before he died in February 2019 at the age of eighty-seven, Broecker said, “Get serious world. This is a very, very, very serious problem.” •

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Political ideology was also driven by assumptions about what structures would deliver the best results. Labor believed that government delivery of services would solve the failures of the private sector to deliver. The Liberals believed that competition between service providers would deliver better services overall.

During the 1980s and 90s these ideologies broke down in many ways. People on all sides of politics realised that much of the time they weren’t disagreeing about which results were worth having. They were instead disagreeing about a factual question rather than a values question: which structures delivered the best results? Experience showed that well-designed competitive markets, with government regulations to protect the worst-off and prevent exploitation, delivered cheaper and better electricity services than a government monopoly. And so privatisation — well designed — was an idea that all sides of politics could back. Of course, that meant market design was vitally important, but that’s another story.

Today, a new kind of tribal belief is increasingly blocking policy reform, as we show in our recent Grattan report, Gridlock. These are tribal beliefs that some policy positions are simply right. Often these beliefs aren’t based on any consistent view about the importance of one value over another, or about what kind of regulatory structures work in practice. Rather, they’re often the result of history — political battles won or lost, sometimes many years ago.

For example, you won’t find a single Labor parliamentarian prepared to suggest (publicly at least) that changes to the rate or scope of the GST might be a good idea. It’s not a belief based on ensuring the needs of the worst-off are met. A well-designed GST reform package could deliver welfare changes and income tax reductions that would make people in the bottom 30 per cent of the income distribution much better off on average, an outcome Labor has traditionally sought. Having fought and lost two elections over a GST, though, it’s hard to move on.

Among the conservative wing of today’s federal Coalition, you won’t find anyone who thinks government should do anything about climate change. Some of them don’t think that carbon emissions are leading to global warming; some think global warming is a good thing that will increase rather than reduce prosperity; some think the costs of reducing emissions exceed the costs of living with a hotter world. Many believe all three. What unites those beliefs is not a value, or an observation about what kind of policy works best, but a commitment to a particular policy outcome.

To take another example, no serving federal Labor member has publicly acknowledged that there is any argument against increasing the superannuation guarantee from 9.5 to 12 per cent. I’m unaware of any of them having conceded in the past few years that an increase in that rate will lead to lower wages. No matter the conclusions of independent experts, backed by Treasury modelling, that a contribution rate of 9.5 per cent is already pushing the living standards of people on low wages lower than their incomes will be once they retire. No matter the conclusions of distinguished academics, the Reserve Bank and the Fair Work Commission (and many Labor MPs in the past) that increases in the super guarantee are an alternative to higher wages growth. And no matter that the major beneficiaries of increasing the rate will be the top 20 per cent of income earners, who will pay less tax over their lifetimes.

So if these beliefs aren’t about values — or what kind of government works best in practice — what are they about?

Their major function is to mark membership of a tribe. That’s why the need to conform to these beliefs is seen within a party as much greater than in the past. Simply holding the right belief marks you as “us” rather than “them.”

They are “shibboleths,” a word now at least 2500 years old. The book of Judges in the Old Testament tells the story of two warring tribes, one of which got stuck on the wrong side of a river. The other tribe, which controlled the river crossing, set as a password the Hebrew word for an ear of corn. They knew that people from the opposing tribe pronounced “shibboleth” differently. And so, in contemporary English, a shibboleth is a belief that marks membership of a tribe, rather than a consequence of rational thought or a particular value. Indeed, beliefs tend to make better tribal markers if they’re irrational. Otherwise there would be people who believe them because they think they’re true rather than because they identify with the tribe.

Having tribal markers is very important if the tribe looks after its own. If the leaders of the tribe are handing out government appointments, grants and contracts to their own members, they need a way of knowing who is “us” and who is “them.”

Shibboleths only work like this if there are penalties for not holding to the right belief. Another Coalition article of faith is that tax rates should never go up, particularly not taxes on investments. So when the Turnbull government announced that it would wind back generous tax concessions on superannuation, all hell broke loose — inside the party. The party’s broadsheet, the Australian, published article after article denouncing the changes. Major donors said they would never give again because the party had abandoned its “values.” The preselection of Kelly O’Dwyer, the responsible minister, was threatened.

Never mind that these changes were popular — particularly with those who had the most to lose, perhaps because they realised how indefensible the concessions were. Never mind that the proposals were consistent with the underlying policy purpose of superannuation. Never mind that the Coalition disproportionately won votes in the electorates most affected. A shibboleth had been questioned, and there had to be consequences.

Shibboleths are a big problem in politics precisely because they’re not rational. Almost by definition they lead to policy outcomes not based on the evidence. Over the past decade they’ve blocked progress on ten significant reforms recommended by Grattan Institute, particularly in three of the most important policy areas for Australia’s future prosperity: tax, superannuation and energy.

It’s a far cry from the golden years of reform in the 1980s and 90s, when the Hawke–Keating government jettisoned large quantities of party dogma to bring down tariff barriers, privatise industries and reform industrial relations.

So why are shibboleths dictating policy outcomes? Two forces are coming together: shifts in the electoral bases of our major parties; and the professionalisation of major parties so that they become almost arms of government rather than organisations that mediate between the population and government. Both trends are mirrored in other democracies around the world.

As Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have shown, the base of political parties is shifting. Traditionally, right-wing parties were aligned with business owners, high-income earners and people with high levels of education. But now people with high levels of education, including those with relatively high incomes, increasingly vote for left-wing parties. People with lower levels of education don’t belong to unions as much as in the past, now often work as sole traders, and are more likely to vote for right-wing parties.

Because the interests of their core constituencies are changing, policy issues are becoming more fluid within the parties. Issues that defined political parties for decades, such as government intervention in the economy and industrial relations, have converged on largely consensus positions. Social and identity issues such as marriage equality, workplace harassment, migration and racial disadvantage remain more contested. Many of these social issues cross traditional party lines. Bill Shorten has many policy views in common with Simon Birmingham, Joel Fitzgibbon has much in common with George Christensen, and it’s less obvious what policies they share with others in their respective parties. So instead, parties need shibboleths to mark who is a member of the tribe.

And tribal membership is increasingly important because of what political parties do. Politics has professionalised. Many more people have a career that starts as a political adviser, a union representative or an analyst at an aligned think tank and then progresses to preselection, parliament and the golden escalator to a lucrative government-relations role.

The professionals working for each party look after their tribe. Longstanding conventions are being trashed as government appointments to bodies such as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and state government corporations increasingly favour those connected to the party in power rather than those best qualified. Government grants and contracts are often awarded to party donors, and those well connected — which may just be coincidence, but because the processes are increasingly opaque, who would know?

Patronage like this reinforces shibboleths. The rewards for toeing the party line are much higher. Breaking with the tribe can disqualify you from future patronage and jobs.

The disease is hard to cure. Politicians from all major parties have trashed valuable conventions that restrained politicisation of appointments, grants and contracts, and imposed consequences when politicians behaved badly. But there’s no going back. To restore good governance, these conventions will need to be replaced by hard rules policed by genuinely independent and well-armed regulators. The insider world of political advisers needs to be opened up to more people with policy expertise from the public service and fewer people with political expertise from student politics. Limiting political donations and campaign spending, and tightening controls on lobbying would also help to weaken the cosy coterie of politics and its clients.

Unfortunately the patient is not very interested in being cured. The current arrangements suit the major political parties and the professional political class very well. Although the treatments for the disease are well known, and voters strongly support them, the list of excuses for inactivity just gets longer.

History suggests that major institutional changes mostly happen only when there is an ongoing public scandal. Damning auditor-general reports aren’t enough. Only the nightly theatre of cross-examination at a royal commission or an independent corruption commission leads to voters focusing on institutional change rather than their usual concerns of jobs, health and education.

So the most likely path to change is for independent and minor-party members of parliament to insist on institutional reforms when they hold the balance of power. That’s how we got the Parliamentary Budget Office, the most significant institutional reform of the past fifteen years. And it’s an increasingly plausible scenario as the vote for minor parties and independents marches upwards, not least because voters are losing trust that the traditional parties are putting the public interest ahead of their own.

Shibboleths are a cancer eating away at good government. We need institutional change to weaken their tightening grip on our political class. Otherwise, many policy reforms that would benefit the country will continue to sit on the shelf. •

Gridlock is John Daley’s last report for Grattan Institute, where he was the CEO from its creation in 2009 to 2020.

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If McCormack wasn’t anti enough, then we have to wonder what his replacement, Barnaby Joyce, has in store. When the Conversation’s Michelle Grattan asked McCormack back in June whether he would allow the government to adopt a goal of net zero by 2050, he replied, “Well, we’re not going to sell our coalminers out, no way, shape or form, as Nationals. And nor is Scott Morrison… [W]e’re not signing up to anything.”

More than a year earlier his attitude to net zero by 2050 was the same: “I think if you go down that path, what you’re going to do is send factories and industries offshore, send manufacturing jobs offshore.” Yet these very public and very emphatic protestations were not enough to ward off a challenge.

So why exactly was Barnaby Joyce elevated to the role of Australia’s blocker-in-chief? Apparently, because the National Party is now the champion of blue-collar workers in mines, in smelters, refineries and power stations, and in our oil and gas fields and liquefaction plants. As Matt Canavan, seemingly Joyce’s chief backer, went so far as to say, farmers aren’t numerous enough to be the National Party’s most important constituency.

The Nationals claim they will defend hi-vis workers against the global push from a net zero coalition made up of the United States, Canada, Japan, all of Europe, South Korea and China. Canavan told parliament that rather than adopt a net zero target we should “put Australia first.”  This means adopting “policies that will bring back manufacturing… and not be beholden to agreements that are worked out in overseas capitals that betray the interests of the average working men and women of this country… That is what, I know, Barnaby Joyce is focused on.”

But there’s just one problem. The workplaces the Nationals want to protect send almost all their production to markets controlled by governments committed to net zero emissions by 2050. Ninety per cent of our aluminium is exported overseas, and 87 per cent of our alumina. Eighty-five per cent of our black coal production is exported, as is 80 per cent of our oil and 70 per cent of our gas. And where the governments in our markets aren’t committed to net zero, they won’t necessarily escape the carbon price/tax adjustments that the European Union has committed to applying to imports, and that the United States may well adopt.

The global financial markets can see that this means carbon-intensive businesses are no longer worth the risk. The governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Philip Lowe, revealed in June that “a very frequent question” in the international meetings he attends is “What is Australian business doing to decarbonise?” “Many international investors are very focused on this issue…” he said, “and that’s a trend that is only going to continue.”

If you don’t believe the Reserve Bank governor then take it from the fossil fuel industries themselves. One of Australia’s major thermal coal producers, Whitehaven Coal, complained to a parliamentary inquiry that Australian banks’ lending policies “are not tethered to any local emissions-reduction framework and go significantly beyond the current or likely future energy transition arrangements outlined by the Australian government.” Sandy Mak, Lawyers Weekly’s Dealmaker of the Year, told the Australian oil and gas industry’s annual conference that when she tries to broker a merger or acquisition involving any kind of fossil fuel, “a whole bunch of clients… say they can’t do it.” These major clients are telling Mak they will “never get it signed off by the investment committee.’’

The message is equally clear in manufacturing. The chief executive of Rio Tinto, the majority owner of Australia’s alumina and aluminium facilities in Queensland and the Hunter Valley, told investors the company will dump plants whose carbon intensity is inconsistent with its 2030 emissions reduction strategy. No prizes for guessing which ones: he noted that the company’s Australian assets are on “thin ice.”

The industrial might and smarts of the regions and corporations that have adoped an industrial-technological strategy of killing off fossil fuels are truly intimidating. Have a look around you at the technology and manufacturers that define “world-leading” and then ask yourself — where are they betting their chips? Where is California, and especially Silicon Valley, putting its money? How about Korea’s Samsung and LG or Japan’s manufacturing giants? What’s the strategy of German technology and manufacturing leaders like Siemens and Volkswagen?

In fact, look at the corporate strategies of almost all major car manufacturers: Ford, General Motors, Volvo, Porsche and even Bentley are planning for all new car sales to be electric by 2030–35. Even Mercedes, a laggard, expects half of its cars will be electric by 2030. These companies will then deliver the last piece of the decarbonisation puzzle: low-cost energy storage to go with low-cost wind and solar.

Canavan says that China’s behaviour means this can all be ignored. It’s true that China’s heavy reliance on coal and growing oil and gas consumption are serious problems. But the world’s leading analyst of the global oil and coal market, Wood Mackenzie, had this to say about China’s pledge to net zero emissions:

When President Xi Jinping announced the country’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2060 last September, he wasn’t simply indicating that China would adjust its energy mix to reduce emissions, he was giving notice of the complete transformation of its economy and how it produces, transports and consumes energy. For Beijing, energy independence and decarbonisation are inseparable: by winning the clean-energy race, China can cast off the shackles of its reliance on others and dominate the resources and technologies the world needs to decarbonise. This isn’t future gazing. China is innovating, not replicating. Decisive government and private-sector efforts have put it well ahead of the game in virtually all clean-energy supply chains and technologies.

While China consumes a lot of coal, it isn’t much of an exporter of either coal or coal technology. But it absolutely dominates the global market for solar panels, and it is an increasingly important wind-turbine supplier. It is also furiously building up its manufacturing capability in batteries and electric vehicles. With a population whose health will be greatly improved through the rollout of zero-pollution technology, a move to net zero is unequivocally in China’s own interests.

So should we be betting the communities of Central and North Queensland and the Hunter on the hope that every one of these global economic powerhouses will fail?

The reality is that the National Party leader is an irrelevant minnow to the leaders of the world’s biggest economies and corporations. A person powerless to do anything but gum up the wheels of Australia’s effort to better prepare for a new energy future.

Barnaby Joyce is but a minor speed bump in the way of a monster truck poised to mow down Australia’s fossil fuel reliant regions unless we get our act together. At best, we have a ten-year lead time before that truck comes rolling through town in earnest. We need to reshape our energy system to repower mining and manufacturing, so that we are on board that truck rather than under its wheels. •

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Scott Morrison did for about six months after his heroic May 2019 election win. Malcolm Turnbull, on the other hand, never did. As Arthur Sinodinos let slip on Insiders in early 2016, Turnbull anticipated a big electoral win that year followed by a reality check for the party’s right. Voters had other plans.

Tony Abbott possessed that elixir for a few months after the 2013 change of government. But the opinion polls suspiciously failed to show a honeymoon, the 2014 budget was very poorly received — and, arguably even worse, it failed to get through the Senate. It instead hovered in plain sight, a list of horrors the government wished to inflict but wasn’t able to.

What generates party-room authority? Election wins mostly, big ones or ones much better than expected. Taking government from opposition, of course. A perception of electoral prowess, the party believing it couldn’t win without that person.

That was Kevin Rudd for about two years after November 2007, John Howard from 2001 to 2007 and, before that, his first six months or so in 1996. Howard put that early capital to excellent use, dragging his own side towards national gun laws, which boosted his popularity in the electorate. Not long after that a kind of torpor set in. What was he here for?

Tampa and 9/11 eventually answered that question, but it’s hard to find anything much that flowed from his all-conquering final two terms. Perhaps it’s in true believers’ tolerance of the size of government, those record high taxes as a percentage of GDP. Little grumbling could be heard from the party’s right because of Howard’s perceived indispensability and general adherence to right-wing causes.

Paul Keating after his 1993 Morrison-like victory is another example. Bob Hawke, for three terms; Malcolm Fraser for his first two. Gough Whitlam, of course.

Hawke, with Keating, dragged his party to the economic centre, embracing, or at least accommodating, “economic rationalism.” In his last term, Keating did industrial relations, tariffs, competition policy, all things that don’t come naturally to the Labor Party.

Then there’s authority in the electorate. Much of the commentariat believes voters want someone they could imagine going to the footy with; but what they actually crave is leadership, tough love, being made to eat their greens. They don’t like it at first, but once the nasty change is made — and once most people find it didn’t inflict much misery on them after all — they give the leader a tick. Howard’s GST was a great example. Fraser was just the “bastard” the country needed after the excesses of the Whitlam years; the sizes of his first two wins have not been surpassed since.

Rudd never understood that dynamic, or if he did he wasn’t able to overcome his own inclinations: he wanted to be the one always handing out goodies.

In the current decade, Covid tough love has done wonders for our premiers and chief ministers, but the Commonwealth, despite footing most of the gigantic bill, doesn’t seem to have benefited as much.

They can never take Morrison’s 2019 “miracle” from him, and Covid still gives him purpose, but he’s not the prime minister he was two years ago. The lackadaisical attitude to the vaccination rollout, which was actually shared by others for a time, has truly come back to damage the country and the government.

How could Morrison have employed his god-like post-election status two years ago? Most obviously, he could have pushed his party towards reality on climate change. Instead he went the other way, encouraging their delusions with UN-sceptic speeches.

Australia has long been selfish in its emissions commitments (see this Rod Tiffen explainer) but the ideological dimension kicked in in December 2009, when the Abbott-led opposition chose to campaign against a carbon price. The Labor government went to water, and the rest is history. It became a deep feature of culture wars, perceived as a key component of the Coalition’s political arsenal. As with asylum seekers, party supporters and backbenchers demand a hard line.

As for the National Party, the “coalition arrangement,” a relic of a previous century, sees 19 per cent of the party room deciding who will be deputy prime minister, and retaining the capacity to hold the government to ransom.

Everyone now understands we can no longer freeload on climate change, or at least as egregiously as we are used to doing, but the government is incapable of even committing to the unambitious target of zero net emissions in 2050.

For the Labor opposition it’s a conundrum, because taking serious action to the ballot box would hold dangers.

The sooner those carbon adjustments and even tariffs hit us the better. If that’s what it takes to spur action, then so be it.

And if the next election produces a majority government, authority should once again belong to whoever is prime minister. For a time. •

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Testing “public sentiment” in Australia has almost as long a history as in the United States; in September, it will be eighty years since the first Gallup poll, run by Roy Morgan, started gathering Australians’ opinions on a range of issues. Since 1971, when the Australian Sales Research Bureau (for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age) and the Australian Nationwide Opinion Poll (for the Australian) broke the Morgan monopoly, Australian newspapers have commissioned various polling companies to test opinion when public interest in an issue has been “at its height” but also when public interest has barely been engaged.

What is new this year is the arrival of the Resolve Political Monitor. Until now, issue-based polling has been dominated by the Essential Report, whose findings appear fortnightly in the Guardian Australia. In April, to some fanfare, the company that produces the Monitor, Resolve Strategic, run by Jim Reed, began polling monthly for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. Newspoll remains dominant in what it, and most of the political class, sees as the main game — calculating two-party-preferred voting intentions.

Until April, neither the Herald nor the Age had commissioned regular polling since the May 2019 election, when both mastheads — and the Australian Financial Review — predicted a Labor win. All three relied on Ipsos, which estimated that Labor led 51–49 on the two-party-preferred vote, an error slightly less egregious than that recorded by other pollsters, but an error nonetheless.

Resolve, which assures potential clients that it does “the best work,” having been set up “to introduce the advanced research techniques practised by political parties to the communications industry,” wasn’t around for that debacle. Reed insists that survey research questions need to be “understood,” response categories need to be “appropriate,” and there could be “no proxy for proper testing.”

For its latest Monitor, conducted 8–12 June, Resolve was commissioned to “test public sentiment” on Australia’s quarantine capacity, carbon emissions and relations with China, and the uptake of the Covid vaccines. To work one’s way through the Herald’s coverage of the results is to find the odd question without tables or graphs, the odd graph that doesn’t report the response distribution for the sample as a whole, and accounts of the questions that differ between print and online versions if you have sufficient ingenuity to find the two. It is also to become increasingly aware of the poll’s weaknesses (including its polling on individual behaviour around  the vaccine, to which we’ll return); its capacity to mislead readers; and, to the policymakers Gallup privileged, its limited utility.

Some of the weaknesses of the poll should be clear to anyone who has even a passing awareness that polls shouldn’t ask questions many respondents will be in no position to answer. Some of the weaknesses might be evident only to a reader who knows something about how questions should be asked. And some of its weaknesses can be illustrated by reference to other polls — the most recent Essential Media, but also the annual Lowy Institute Poll, whose 2021 poll, conducted 15–29 March, was published in the same week as the Monitor.

QUARANTINE

With the federal government under pressure to allow more Australian citizens back into the country and provide alternatives to the hotel quarantine provided by the states, the Monitor saw an opening: “There has been some debate in the media recently about whether Australia should increase or decrease its quarantine capacity to allow more people to enter the country, and if so how this is best handled,” it told respondents. “On this, which of the following comes closest to your own view?” The responses? “I think the number of people entering Australia should be reduced (36 per cent); I think the number of people entering Australia is about right now (19 per cent); I think we should increase hotel quarantine capacity so more people can enter Australia (7 per cent); I think we should increase purpose-built quarantine camp places so more people can enter Australia (30 per cent); Undecided (9 per cent).” For David Crowe, the Herald’s chief political correspondent, those percentages showed that “there is only minority support for increasing arrivals, even if it is done with more purpose-built facilities.”

But piling the various preferences (fewer, the same, more) and possibilities (“purpose-built quarantine camp places,” “hotel quarantine”) into a single question may not have done justice to what respondents actually wanted — or might have been enticed to consider. Those who wanted fewer arrivals might have been happy to accept the present number if more quarantine places (of either kind) had been on offer. Those who wanted “purpose-built quarantine camp places” may have been equally happy with “hotel quarantine capacity,” and vice versa, had they been allowed to say so — and the response may have changed again if “purpose-built quarantine” had not been described as “camp places.” Some may have wanted to increase the numbers entering Australia but not wanted either more “purpose-built quarantine camp places” or an increase in “hotel quarantine” places.

In the latest Essential poll, also conducted online, in this case on 16–20 June, no fewer than 65 per cent favoured “purpose-built quarantine facilities” as “Australia’s long-term approach to safely quarantining international travellers,” compared with 16 per cent who favoured “home quarantine” (a possibility the Monitor did not entertain), and 9 per cent who favoured “hotel quarantine.” While the two questions are not the same, some of the differences — the much clearer preference for “purpose-built quarantine camp places” over “hotel quarantine capacity,” and the reference to “purpose-built quarantine camp places” rather than “purpose-built quarantine facilities” — are instructive.

CARBON EMISSIONS

According to David Crowe’s lead story accompanying the first results of the June Monitor, “A majority of Australians want the federal government to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 but do not want a carbon price.” Crowe based his conclusion on a question that asked respondents whether their “preferred method for Australia to reduce its carbon emissions” was by putting “a cost on emissions” (preferred by 13 per cent) or by using new technologies (61 per cent). In the print version of the story, the question is prefaced by the words “while both these methods can be used”; but “both methods” was not an option the question went on to offer.

Given the choice, respondents chose “new technologies” over the alternative — the alternative that involved a “cost.” Who would have thought? Not for nothing does the prime minister promote the idea of “technology not taxes.” Surely, he didn’t need the Monitor, or Crowe, to tell him he was “tapping into community sentiment with his vow.” Not many people would choose to pay for a lunch — assuming they might be forced to pay — when they could get one free.

If no one else is paying for your lunch, however, it doesn’t follow that you would not be prepared to pay for it yourself. The possibility that Crowe — and Resolve — had overlooked was that someone who prefers a new technology, especially when their attention is not drawn to any associated costs, may still be willing to have a “cost” put on emissions if new technologies (alone) won’t solve the problem. While the conclusion that people “do not want a carbon price” may have been correct, the reasoning behind it was invalid.

What of the timeline for any “cut”? And how far should the “cut” go? Responding to a separate question — a response that would become the premise for Crowe’s conclusion — 55 per cent of respondents supported “the federal government adopting a 2050 ‘net zero’ emissions target,” a figure revealed in the text of Crowe’s article but not in the accompanying table. The proportion of respondents either opposed to this proposal or “neutral/undecided” (45 per cent) was almost as great as the proportion in favour. In short, there was nothing like the consensus implied by either the front-page headline “Net Zero: Public Is Ready for CO2 Cuts,” or the online headline “Voters Want Australia to Set a Net Zero 2050 Emissions Target, but No Carbon Tax.”

And what did the very large proportion of those who classified themselves as “neutral/undecided” — about a third of the respondents (the report provides no precise number) — understand by words like “adopting,” “emissions targets,” and “net zero” — especially when the prime minister, no less, chooses his words around “net zero by 2050” so carefully? Respondents may have been less clear about what the question meant than the Monitor assumed they would be or the Herald imagined they were.

Perhaps respondents who were reluctant to commit to net zero by 2050 wanted the government to commit to a more modest target but one that could be achieved more quickly. “Asked whether it was more important to concentrate on meeting Australia’s 2030 commitment or to adopt a new 2050 goal [zero emissions?], 42 per cent of voters preferred to concentrate on the earlier target while 29 per cent wanted more importance [sic] on 2050,” Crowe reported; the exact question was published neither in print nor online. The reporting tells us nothing about those who were “neutral/undecided” about net zero by 2050: the 55 per cent who supported net zero may have included those who would have preferred “to concentrate on the earlier target”; but the 42 per cent, for the most part, may have been a different group. As to what, if anything, respondents were told about “the 2030 commitment” — that remains a mystery.

The fact that so many respondents (26 per cent) were “undecided” when asked to choose between “new technologies” and putting “a cost on emissions” may have reflected another problem with this question: it didn’t allow for respondents who did not want Australia to reduce its emissions or didn’t believe that it needed to.

In the Lowy Institute Poll, the majority of respondents (55 per cent) said that the government’s “main priority” in relation to “energy policy” should be “reducing carbon emissions” rather than either “reducing household bills” (32 per cent) or “reducing the risk of power blackouts” (12 per cent). On this evidence, the majority of those who wanted net zero by 2050 may have been prepared to countenance a “cost.” In addition to his reasoning being invalid, Crowe’s conclusion — and Reed’s — that the majority of Australians do not want a carbon tax may have been misleading.

CHINA

Most of the issue questions in June’s Monitor were about China. First, respondents were told that “Australia has taken a number of actions in relation to China in recent years, including those listed below. For each, please tell us whether you support or oppose the action that was taken.” The order of the list, Reed tells me, was randomised or rotated. The options were: strongly support, support, neutral/undecided, opposed, strongly oppose.

Published in descending order of support, Australia’s actions were described in these ways: “Cancelling visas of Chinese citizens suspected of being covert agents” (supported by 71 per cent, opposed by 6 per cent); “Speaking out against human rights issues involving the Uighur” (69–5); “Calling for an investigation into the source of COVID” (66–8); “Launching trade restriction cases against China via the WTO” (63–7); “Reviewing the 99-year lease of Darwin Port” (60–12); “Criticising China on its approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan” (59–10); “Banning Huawei from Australia’s 5G network” (58–9); “Criticising China on its taking over of the disputed Spratly Islands” (56–9); “Cancelling Victoria’s ‘Belt and Road’ agreement” (54–8); and “Warning of the chances of armed conflict with China” (45–19).

The first thing to say about most of these actions is that, unless they were prepared to endorse whatever Australia had done simply because Australia had done it — a point to which we will return — large numbers of respondents would have had little or no basis on which to answer. How many respondents would have heard of or known much about: covert agents and the cancelling of visas; the Uighur; the WTO, even had the acronym been spelled out; the ninety-nine-year lease of Darwin Port; China’s approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan; Huawei or Australia’s 5G network; the Spratly Islands; or Victoria’s Belt and Road agreement, let alone the cancelling of it. And how many would have heard about Mike Pezzullo (secretary of the Department of Home Affairs) or Peter Dutton (defence minister) “warning of the chances of armed conflict”? Most Australians’ knowledge of, or interest in, the finer points of China’s or Australia’s foreign policy is unlikely to be particularly extensive — something that a poll putting words into people’s mouths should not be allowed to disguise.

Just how many respondents had little or no basis on which to answer these questions we cannot say, but the proportions that ticked the box marked “neutral/undecided” provide one clue. The proportions that declined to register a judgement ranged from 24 to 26 per cent (the three actions most widely supported) to 36 to 38 per cent (the three actions least widely supported). These are high numbers; a comparison with the single-digit figure for the “undecided” on the Monitor’s quarantine question is striking.

Those self-identified as “neutral/undecided” in the Monitor no doubt included respondents who knew something of the matter at hand and were genuinely undecided about its merits; but the greater number are likely to have been respondents who hadn’t heard of the matter or given it much thought. And since many respondents will have been unwilling to admit that they knew little if anything about what was being asked, and simply indicated their support for whatever the government had done, the real number of those not in a position to answer is likely to have been much greater than the “neutral/undecided” figures suggest — very likely, over half. Reed himself concluded, on the basis of a quite different survey, that “no matter how inane and ill-conceived your question, and regardless of the inappropriateness of your response categories, a large proportion — perhaps all — survey respondents will try to give you an answer if compelled to do so.”

Had a preliminary question been asked along the lines Gallup once suggested — “Have you read or heard anything about…” — readers (politicians included) would have been much better served; even better, had the substantive question included “Do you have an opinion on this?” or, better still, “Have you thought much about this issue?” Any of these questions may have shown that support for Australia’s actions, not just opposition to them, was the preserve of minorities not majorities; and that the gap between supporters and opponents was narrower than the Monitor figures suggest. Properly pre-tested, these questions may not have been asked at all.

The second thing to say is that the Monitor’s question format lends itself to acquiescence, also known as agreement tendency or yea-saying. Having been told that these were all actions that “Australia” had taken — “Australia” being a cue, for most respondents, likely to carry a high positive affect — and knowing little or nothing about the substance of the actions, a substantial number of respondents are likely to have gone down the list, ticking “strongly support” or “support,” one after the other. Note that in relation to the top nine actions, the range of both “strong support” (33 to 41 per cent) and total “support” (54 to 71 per cent) is quite narrow. Opposition to any of the actions fluctuates even more narrowly (5 to 12 per cent). Both are precisely what we would expect if acquiescence loomed large and cognitive engagement was low.

On what basis would respondents, with little knowledge of these things, dissent? As Reed told the Herald ahead of the Monitor’s launch in April, “What people are thinking about [right now] is how they’re travelling themselves, in their own families and households, as we adapt to life under a global pandemic, and they’re thinking about how our leaders are performing in their response to this extraordinary challenge.”

Had respondents been told that these were the actions of the “Liberal–National Party government,” rather than the actions of “Australia,” respondents would have been given a rather different cue. We might then have expected some respondents to have supported or opposed the ten actions according to whether they were Labor or Coalition voters — more, if Labor objections to any of the Coalition’s actions had been noted; less, if Labor’s support for any of the Coalition’s actions had been noted. Had such a cue polarised the response, it would have narrowed the gap between the proportion that supported and the proportion that opposed the action. While the desire to avoid such a cue is understandable, more thought might have been given to the potential skew introduced by the cue that was chosen in its stead.

Having been taken through this list of Australia’s actions, respondents were then asked: “Do you think Australia should compromise on any of these points if it meant better trade and diplomatic relations with China? Please either pick ‘no’ or choose as many of the options as you like.” Most (56 per cent) of the respondents picked “no.” But “no” wasn’t just one option among many; it was the easiest option — physically, cognitively and emotionally — and in each of these senses the set of options was biased, however unwittingly, in its favour.

Only 12 to 17 per cent went to the trouble of ticking one or more of the other ten boxes, each identifying a different action on which they would be prepared to compromise — the same determined respondents, possibly, ticking more or less all of them. Again, the lack of discrimination — roughly the same low proportion willing to compromise over “criticising China on its taking over the disputed Spratly Islands” and “criticising China on its approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan,” for example — suggests low cognitive engagement. How many ticked no box at all (as many as 27 per cent, potentially, but no doubt fewer) was not reported. The full table was made available online but not in print.

“Some people have said that Australia should not antagonise China as it is a major trading partner with a large military, while others say that Australia should stick to its values, speak up or act against neighbours like China when we feel they are doing the wrong thing. Which of these views comes closest to your own?” This question on China is notable for being the only one that presented Australia’s dispute with China, and what to do about it, in terms of argument and counterargument rather than support for or opposition to a particular government response.

Whether the argument and counterargument were “balanced” is another matter. On the one hand, respondents were presented with a statement about China as “a major trading partner” (an implied risk) with “a large military” (a threat); on the other, they were given a rather longer statement about “Australia sticking to its values” (principled behaviour) against those who are “doing the wrong thing” (unprincipled behaviour). The outcome, surely, cannot have been in doubt: less than a quarter (23 per cent) thought that Australia should “think twice before antagonising” while nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) thought Australia should “stick to values & speak up,” to quote the labels on the pie-chart. On this question, as one would also expect, relatively few (15 per cent) were “undecided.”

Is this a finding worthy of an online headline of this kind — “Australians Wants Nation to ‘Stick to Its Values’ in China Dealings” — in an upmarket daily? Perhaps. But one would have to search quite a way through the annals of polling to find a majority in any country that favoured surrendering to an immoral bully — let alone doing so in the absence of a serious threat of war. Even if respondents imagined that the chances of war were substantial — and the public may be wont to exaggerate such threats — most respondents (75 per cent according to the latest Lowy poll) would have drawn comfort from their belief that “the United States would come to Australia’s defence if Australia were under threat.” Before crafting the question, it might have been a good idea to have considered the pattern of response it was likely to generate, and what — if anything — the pattern would mean.

Having asked about past actions, the Monitor moved on to test the water about future actions. “The Chinese government has said that it may block or place tariffs on other Australian imports in the future. If such trade sanctions were to occur, would you support or oppose the following potential courses of action?” In descending order of support, Australia’s “potential courses of action” were described as: “Focus on finding new export markets outside China” (supported by 79 per cent, opposed by 4 per cent); “Continue to seek a quiet diplomatic solution with China” (63–8); “Take each case to the WTO to try and reverse China’s actions” (56–7); “Restrict or place tariffs on the import of Chinese goods in retaliation” (53–12); “Add export [sic] tariffs on exports to China to compensate affected industries” (53–10); “Push for compensation from China for starting the COVID pandemic” (41–21); “Boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics, to be held in China” (33–30); “Break off diplomatic relations with China, including expelling diplomats” (29–30); “Do nothing so as not to antagonise China and make the situation worse” (15–48).

Here, clearly, respondents discriminated — at least at the top (63 to 79 per cent) and the bottom of the range (15 to 29 per cent). It helped that the two suggestions that were most widely supported referred to actions that no one in Australian public life had opposed: “focus[ing] on finding new export markets outside China”; and “continu[ing] to seek a quiet diplomatic solution with China,” a question that told respondents what Australia was (ostensibly) doing already and essentially invited them to endorse it. It also helped that the two least popular suggestions were actions that no one of any consequence had proposed: “Break off diplomatic relations with China, including expelling diplomats,” and “Do nothing so as not to antagonise China and make the situation worse,” a proposal that might have been understood as rejecting all of Australia’s past actions as well as precluding the search for “new export markets,” and the pursuit of “a quiet diplomatic solution.”

Every proposal that won majority support had to do with trade. Designed to respond to a Chinese tariff wall, proposals that ventured beyond trade — demands for compensation for Covid-19, boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics, or breaking off diplomatic relations — failed to win majority support.

Noteworthy, too, is that without the comfort of knowing what “Australia” had already done, the levels of support for various future actions were lower at both the top of the range (56 per cent) and the bottom (33 per cent) — ignoring the two most popular and the two least popular suggestions — than they were for past actions (69 per cent and 45 per cent, respectively).

One of the most remarkable features of the Herald’s coverage of the poll is that the high “neutral/undecided” responses — and the exceptions — formed no part of its narrative. Overall, the proportion of respondents who classified themselves as “neutral/undecided” was lower in relation to past actions (an average of 31 per cent) than in relation to future actions (34 per cent); but it was still extraordinarily high. The only question that most respondents could relate to in the list of “potential courses of action” was the one that engaged with the wholly familiar and widely accepted idea of finding new markets; here, the “neutral/undecided” dropped to 17 per cent.

“I think the prejudice,” said Reed, commenting on the results of the questions on future actions in relation to China, “is ‘if this gets resolved and China starts buying our beef and barley again, that’s excellent.’ People see value in the trade relationship and they realise there’s an issue here.” This mercantilist framing of public opinion may be correct, but it is not one that sits particularly well with what the other questions on China purport to show. Nor does it fit well with the findings of the Lowy poll, where “Chinese investment in Australia” was also seen as a negative — and a big one (by 79 per cent) — as were “China’s military activities in our region” (93 per cent). Both were seen as “negative” by substantially largely proportions than in 2016, the last time the Lowy poll checked. And if there were still any doubt, one could look at how China’s favourability ratings have tanked across much of the First World.

DOING THINGS BETTER

All of these questions in the Monitor — the one on quarantine, at a time when the government was pondering whether to move beyond hotels; certainly, the ones on emissions, built around the prime minister’s slogan; but also, those on China — could have been written in the prime minister’s office. The fact that they weren’t tells us that those involved in constructing the poll held strong views of their own; the Herald’s Peter Hartcher, in particular, has just written a book on China. On seeing the results of all the questions, Hartcher wrote of his hope that they would “encourage the federal government in standing against Beijing’s list of 14 demands, and Labor to continue to stand with the government.”

Perhaps that was the point of the polling: to show that public opinion backed the prime minister. In this sense, polling that found majority support for “cancelling visas of Chinese citizens suspected of being covert agents,” for “speaking out against human rights issues involving the Uighur,” for the very public calling-out of China on Covid (though the question wasn’t exactly phrased this way), and so on, while at the same time finding majority support for what the poll, without a hint of irony, described as “continu[ing] to seek a quiet diplomatic solution,” could hardly have been bettered.

If providing cover for government policy wasn’t the point — if the Age and Herald would shudder to think of their polling as a form of propaganda — then the two papers need to reconsider how polls should be done. Crafting questions on matters that are keenly contested — questions that are worth asking in an appropriate manner — means having to take account of more than one view.

An important limitation of the Gallup model, which conceives of polling on an issue as a kind of referendum on that issue — a “sampling referendum” Gallup called it — is that referendums typically involve a single proposition with voters limited to either supporting or opposing it. A question in the Lowy poll, which didn’t follow the referendum model, found that while the majority (56 per cent) supported the proposition that “China is more to blame for the tensions in the Australia-China relationship,” and hardly anyone (4 per cent) agreed that “Australia is more to blame,” more than a third (38 per cent) supported the proposition that “they are equally to blame.” No doubt, had the Monitor asked this question, it would have found something similar.

One way of having polling that acknowledges alternative ways of framing issues is to involve those who hold alternative perspectives in the process of constructing the questions. In the case of China, what the Herald might have done was to have Hartcher sit down with someone like Geoff Raby, whose views on Australia’s relations with China are rather different. The fact that Hartcher and Raby barely reference each other in their respective books might make an exchange between them all the more refreshing. Raby is not necessarily better on China than Hartcher; that question isn’t relevant when it comes to constructing a poll. But Raby is at least as well credentialled. On China, as there are on Covid or on climate policy, there are any number of people who could have helped.

The job of the pollster is to work out how to ask the questions, to advise on the use of argument and counterargument as against approve/oppose, to think about the various assumptions the question makes about respondents or the demands it puts upon them, to pre-test or to build in filters, to contemplate the use of split samples, to organise the sequencing/rotation of questions, and so on.

According to its website, Resolve sees its work as “Always quality,” “Always insightful,” “Always practical” — this last, a dig at “academics, researching for the sake of knowledge or debating theory.” But it’s not just academics who might beg to differ. It would be difficult for anyone concerned with standards in the industry to say that the Monitor’s questions on quarantine, climate or China exemplified “quality” or “insight”; and if they fell well short on either, that the results offered something that was particularly “practical.”

The questions in the Monitor on the Covid vaccine — asking respondents whether they had been vaccinated, whether they were “likely” or “unlikely” to get vaccinated, and so on; and seeking reasons why they may have hesitated — were somewhat better. But these were questions of a different order. First, because asking respondents to report on their own actions, past or planned, is quite different from asking them about issues of public policy, even if people are not particularly good at predicting their own behaviour, especially in unusual circumstances, and response categories can still make a big difference. Second, because following up with a list of fourteen possible reasons, which allows for multiple responses, seems to cover almost all the possibilities, even if respondents are not necessarily very good at explaining their own motivations for doing — or not doing — things; a notable absence from the list is “don’t know.”

The Australian Polling Council, set up in the wake of the 2019 debacle to lift standards in the polling industry, and pollsters’ accountability, is not a body that Resolve wants to join, Reed tells me; apart from not wanting to join a club whose members include some he sees as beyond the pale, he doesn’t want to have to divulge “trade secrets.” If Resolve were to join the APC it might be obliged to lift its standards — if the APC can be persuaded to match the demands of the British Polling Council — and to raise its level of transparency not just by making available its computer tables with the questions, answers and question order but also by revealing some of its other “trade secrets.” The Herald and the Age, endlessly concerned with holding others to account, should insist on nothing less.

“We can’t put all of it in the data centre because of the scale of the results,” Tory Maguire, the Herald’s national editor explained, when announcing the launch of the Monitor, “but we will report on as much of it as our readers find interesting.” As it happens, none of the answers to any of the issue questions (or vaccine questions) polled in the last three months have found their way into “the permanent data centre.” How the Herald judges what its readers find “interesting,” only it would know. But as anyone may judge, there is nothing about “the scale of the results” that would prevent the “data centre” functioning as a repository for every one of the Monitor’s questions and the top-line results. What had sounded promising when it was announced pales by comparison with the repository established by the Lowy Institute. It’s not just the Monitor that needs to reconsider what it does; fifty years after breaking the Gallup monopoly in Australia, and showing that there are other ways of conducting polls, it’s also the Age and Herald that need to reconsider. •

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Combating climate change will require one thing in particular, and a lot of it: investment. The Economist estimates that the annual production of electric vehicles will need to increase ten-fold if we are to achieve net zero emissions by 2030. The number of charging stations will need to increase thirty-one-fold. Up to 2 per cent of America may need to be covered in solar panels and wind farms, according to one estimate. Mining companies will need to expand their production of the minerals that go into these technologies by more than 500 per cent.

All up, more than US$35 trillion of new investment will be required if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. Investment by governments will be part of the answer, but only a small part. Despite the best intentions of those who advocate policies like a Green New Deal, the reality is that most of the world’s governments have nowhere near the budgetary capacity required to undertake such investments. Any attempt to do so could have dangerous consequences for financial stability.

This is especially the case in developing countries. They often have large stocks of foreign-denominated debt, underdeveloped financial systems and weak monetary policy frameworks that heavily constrain what their governments can invest in green initiatives. And Europe has its own problems: its lack of an independent monetary policy, its common exchange rate, and its EU-wide fiscal rules mean most European countries will struggle to invest even a fraction of what is required.

The maths of climate change means that investment by the private sector will be critical. This, in turn, hinges on the ability of financial systems to direct sufficient finance to where it is needed.

Other than provide us with the mechanisms for making day-to-day purchases, the financial system has two key objectives. It connects savers to investors — by directing retirees’ savings to fund new projects, for instance. And it ensures that risk is properly priced and allocated to those who can best bear it — such as when insurance companies take on households’ risk and spread it across their balance sheets.

When it comes to climate change, the financial system is struggling on both counts. Not only is it having trouble directing enough finance towards the sustainable investments we need to reduce carbon emissions, it is also struggling to price and allocate risk, with potentially dangerous consequences for financial stability.

The reason goes to the heart of how we regulate our financial systems. Banks borrow money short-term (primarily by taking deposits from households) and lend that money long-term (for mortgages, personal loans and business loans). In the absence of safeguards, this leaves them open to the classic “bank run,” in which many people try to withdraw their money at the same time and a bank can’t unwind its investments fast enough, causing it to collapse.

One way governments manage this risk is to require banks to hold cash and assets that can quickly be turned into cash, such as government bonds. It’s for this reason that governments regulate not only the size of the assets banks need to hold but also the quality of those assets — the stability of their value and the speed at which they can be turned into cash.

This is where climate change comes in. A growing body of research shows that borrowers who have strong environmental credentials are less likely to default on their loans. Borrowers who don’t damage the environment are also less likely to get slogged with a big clean-up bill, and borrowers who take more of an interest in how their business interacts with society and the environment tend — unsurprisingly — to be better businesspeople in general.

It follows that lending money to people and businesses with strong environmental credentials is more profitable and also less risky than lending money to environmental vandals. And when these individual loans are securitised (packaged into assets that can then be bought and sold onto secondary markets) those securities are, in turn, more profitable and less risky.

The problem is that our financial regulations aren’t taking this into account. The global capital rules agreed by the world’s regulators don’t recognise the growing evidence that green loans are safer and more profitable than “brown” loans. As a result, banks and other financial institutions provide fewer green loans and buy fewer green assets than they should. This reduces the amount of finance provided to green projects and green initiatives, and it also makes bank balance sheets much riskier than commonly thought by loading them up with too many environmental sinners and not enough environmental saints.

How can we fix this problem? In short, both the global rules and Australia’s domestic regulations need to change. They need to recognise that green borrowers are safer borrowers, giving banks the incentive to make more green loans, hold more green debt on their balance sheets, direct more private finance to combating climate change, and bolster financial stability across the economy.

A more foundational problem, however, is that we can’t agree on how to measure whether a borrower, investment or security is “green” in the first place. Plenty of metrics and indicators exist, but they rarely align. The free-flowing nature of financial capital means these indicators need to be consistent and agreed at the global level. More and more countries — from Canada to Singapore — are developing their own indicators, but consistency will be critical if global markets are to function effectively.

The G7, G20, Bank for International Settlements and other institutions are exploring these issues. Australia not only needs to be participating in these conversations, it also needs to be actively shaping them. Australia’s carbon-intensive economy could suffer depending on the taxonomies and regulations that get agreed abroad.

While the global financial system is perhaps an unlikely ally in the fight against climate change, the sheer size of the investment required to decarbonise our economies means little can be done without it. Our success in fighting climate change will hinge on whether our financial system is up to the task. Without reform, it won’t be. •

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By then, twelve years after operations commenced on tiny Ocean Island — known to its people as Banaba — the venture had hit a flashpoint. Having watched the landscape being removed piece by piece, the locals “unanimously refused to sell any more land,” wrote the Herald reporter, “declaring that the lands, and the palm and pandanus trees thereon were all they had, and they asked what they should do when the big steamers had taken away all their habitable land.”

Conceding that some readers might sympathise with the owners, the reporter argued that a population of fewer than 500 could hardly be allowed to prevent the exploitation of a product so critical to Australian agriculture and “of such immense value to all the rest of mankind.”

But a solution was at hand. “A humane proposal is afoot to transplant the natives to another island in the Pacific, suitable for the purpose, in order that the valuable phosphate industry may go on unchecked, to the advantage of those industrially engaged in it, and of the people on the land in various parts of the world.”

As Teaiwa observes, “The story reduces the Banabans’ complex connection to their land to basic economics, and clearly the mining was not just for the good of ‘mankind’ but for the profits of the investors.”

The resonances these 110 years later, as the planet heats and oceans rise and Australia clings to its coal-powered economy — even in the cant about how this serves humanity’s greater good — are stark. In a recent presentation, Teaiwa recounted Banaba’s history as “not separate or different from climate change,” but as “the culmination of all the effects of all the resource extraction.” The story of Banaba and places like it, she argued, “can teach us how to observe and understand what happens to people and to the planet when you exploit such resources.”

With communications experts urging the sharing of such stories as our last best shot at salvaging a habitable planet, there’s an urgent challenge here for journalists. Especially for those of us who parachute into places that are not our own as the flashpoints of the emergency play out with increasing tempo and violence. We would like to imagine that the 1912 Herald report is a relic of history, and yet the lens is discomfortingly familiar.

How do we equip ourselves to do a better job? How might we tell these stories more truthfully, holistically, usefully? Opening this conversation with Teaiwa and a network of Pacific climate activists, there’s no shortage of practical advice.

Teaiwa begins her critique where so many outsider stories begin — with arrival. Don’t, is her exasperated counsel. Don’t wade ashore from the tinny. Don’t cross pristine, palm-fringed beaches. Don’t make heart-in-mouth landings at remote/broken-down airports. (I confess priors on both counts.) “And no paradise in crisis.” (Strike three.) “Any entry-point, arrival narrative is just going to reek of every arrival going back to the 1500s,” she says. “Step out of any one of those tropes right away.”

My reflexive defence is that these constructs help lure our imagined reader, ensconced in climate-controlled urban Australia, into raw, remote realities. The outsider narrative allows us to explain the unfamiliar, to weave in context. But yes, in all but the most careful hands, it becomes about Us not Them, sidelining people in their own place. The stories of how climate change is playing out “must centre empowered Pacific people first and foremost — not vulnerable voices, not the voices that everyone thinks are sinking,” says Teaiwa, diving into the heart of another fraught storytelling trope.

She and other Pacific scholars, activists and leaders have for years been calling out the portrayal of doomed “drowning islands,” that ubiquitous rendering of the palm-fringed Pacific emergency. This framing might not be wrong in terms of the unforgiving physics of sea-level rise, but it is distorting, simplistic and fatalistic, they argue, portraying communities as powerless and condemning them to the inevitable. Meanwhile, we with our relentless emissions, consuming ocean islands, wriggle off the hook.

These critiques don’t overlook the catastrophes looming for low-lying atolls and coastal communities. Beyond rising seas and dislocation there’s ocean acidification, depleted fisheries, crop failures, seawater inundation, cyclones, landslides, flood, drought, and vector-borne and water-borne disease. But they also demand recognition of enduring, corroding colonialism. And of the initiative, capacities and leadership of Pacific people facing down those realities. A true telling of these stories would show people as they are — “strong and resilient,” argues Teaiwa. As the Pacific Climate Warriors declare: “We are not drowning, we are fighting.”

Another person I pose these questions to is Fijian climate activist Ernest Gibson. “We have never been victims,” says the twenty-four-year-old, who is a member of the UN Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. “When the world was ignorant about climate change, when the big five pretended our plight was a hoax, when the Pacific was being used as a dumping ground for nuclear waste, Pacific leaders and communities never backed down. So to talk about Pacific people as feeble victims is disgusting.” Journalists ought to talk instead about how the fight continues, “about the tired eyes, the aching feet and the chapped lips that, day in and day out, fight to ensure we maintain the strides we have made and sustain a culture of progress.”

But how to craft a story that recognises these actors and their actions without romanticising or soft-pedalling on the scale of the crisis confronting them? Doesn’t that risk another handball, like the Australian government’s enthusiasm for talking up community resilience — all care and no responsibility for our “Pacific family”?

Teaiwa isn’t persuaded getting the story right is so hard if reporters strive to shake up their own and their readers’ presumptions. “The Pacific has survived World War II, and then nuclear testing,” she says. Also mining, disasters, and depopulation from introduced diseases. “But people are still laughing and singing, they’re composing and they’re dancing… that’s the amazing part. The thing that white people freak out about is climate change and rising seas. And Indigenous people go, ‘colonialism was just as bad’… People want to talk about climate grief. Mate, it’s your grief — we have seen so many bad things in the Pacific for so long.”

Authentic, true stories require a diversity of voices, but outsider reporters struggle to find them, Teaiwa says. She suspects it comes down to hard-wired assumptions about culture and class. “One of the things that white scholars and white journalists get wrong is automatically assuming that powerful and empowered Pacific people don’t exist in the special places that they’re going to.” Encounters are sifted into categories — the “real people” are on the ground, in the village and vulnerable; the elites in the cities are suspect, playing to their own advantage; the political leaders are the fallback, relied on disproportionately for authority and quotes. Paste these together in a story, and it likely has all the substance of a papier-mâché balloon.

Reporters need to reach past those voices pushing themselves forward, and those who obligingly dish up the quote that supports the journalist’s preconceptions. “I would say 80 per cent of Pacific people you try to collaborate with on the ground will try to help and support you in a way they think white people want to be helped and supported,” explains Teaiwa. “So they don’t always feel free to speak their minds and to speak plainly and truthfully about something… We’ve been trained by colonialism and Christianity to do that. Also to be polite — maybe not so much behind the back.”

Of course, she adds, the other 20 per cent “may tell you to F-off right away.” My observation is that proportion is growing, especially in locations where journalists have trodden before.

“The thing to do is to open up the space for people to speak their own mind, not what they think you want to hear,” says Teaiwa. “People need to feel that there won’t be any terrible consequences for being honest.” Thinking about how this might be achieved I recall a 2019 community radio series by Brisbane-based Papua New Guinean journalist Maureen Mopio, No Land, No Livelihood, No Home, featuring interviews with women in the Pacific Islands and Torres Strait about the effects of climate change. I often recommend it to students because of the tone of her questions — curious, empathetic, respectful, patient. Not framed to elicit the presumed response, but inviting and often yielding surprising insights.

Which goes to the glaringly obvious — the home-ground advantage of Pacific journalists telling their own stories. What more authentic way of decolonising journalism than to get out of their way? Since November 2019, the Guardian Australia’s Pacific Project has provided editorial support and a global platform to collaborate on, publish and pay for some 300 stories by a network of reporters living and working across Oceania. Through fifteen months of travel restrictions, with parachute reporters largely locked out, it’s kept the region highly visible — tracking climate dynamics and political ructions ahead of the COP26 UN summit in Glasgow; the spread of Covid across Papua New Guinea and its containment elsewhere; the seismic politics playing out right now in Samoa. In between, dozens of illuminating, surprising, even joyful stories by local reporters in which the word crisis is nowhere to be found. None of this, incidentally, flows from government programs. It all relies on philanthropy from the Judith Neilson Institute.

In anticipation of the easing of pandemic restrictions and eventual return of parachute journalists, including me, to the Pacific, Ernest Gibson has a few more tips:

“Claim your ignorance”: Oceania is a region of mind-blowing complexity.

“Make connections”: Climate change doesn’t exist in isolation; it is linked to a broken system, so join the dots.

“One full story is better than a few fragmented pieces”: Practices, stories, values are all “determined by everything we see, touch, feel, hear and taste. So when you tell our story, do so completely. This may take a little bit longer, it may make the piece more complex — and even seemingly less logical, but it would be true.”

At the top of Gibson’s wish list is more regard for the reality of activists. “Our advocacy work almost never pays the bills. We’re juggling a million things at a time — making sure we have time with our families, learning about our culture (because this is a continuous journey), work commitments, trying to finish degrees, because we still live and work within a system that wasn’t built for our success. So… be patient. Find ways of meeting people where they are.”

In anticipation of the rising tide of climate stories from the Pacific ahead of Glasgow, a final directive from Katerina Teaiwa. “Drowning islands” stories won’t stop them drowning. “All the drowning stories just make people think about the hordes of migrants… This is the country of ‘stop the boats.’” The stories we need are the ones that persuade Australians “to actually reimagine their values, their lifestyle, their paradigm and their privilege.”

Go find those. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Not drowning, fighting appeared first on Inside Story.

This might be a classic high school science lesson, the student guided to learn from observation, but there’s something not quite right about Phillips’s kindly pedagogical manner. She might almost be talking to a child, yet the sixteen-year-old student — who admittedly looks much younger — already has a sophisticated understanding of the causes and effects of climate change.

Thunberg’s 2019 journey “the whole way round the world the wrong way” is documented in a new three-part BBC series coinciding with the virtual summit on emissions control hosted by US president Joe Biden on Earth Day, 22 April. Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World shows the young campaigner combining a high-profile speaking tour with excursions into areas where devastating consequences are all too evident.

In Davos to address the January 2020 World Economic Forum, she takes a side trip up the Piz Cengalo to learn what prompted the massive rockfall that cascaded though the village of Bondo three years earlier. It has to do with that three-degree difference in the temperature of the snow cover, she discovers: the snow is trapping the heat in the ground, causing permafrost to melt and water to flow through fissures in the rock, destabilising the cliff face.

As she moves from one region to another, such chains of consequence fascinate Thunberg. She travels by sleigh into the northernmost reaches of Sweden to talk to indigenous Sámi herders on the edge of the Arctic Circle about the loss of the reindeer herds central to their economy. Lichen, the major component of the reindeers’ natural diet, grows under the snow, and in normal conditions they can sniff it out and dig it up. But when rain falls instead of snow, ice sheets form over the ground and the animals can’t break through.

Scenes from Thunberg’s odyssey are intercut with snatches of her public speeches and extracts from a studio interview. After spending years of her childhood unable to speak to anyone outside her family, her economy of communication seems to have paid off: she has the art of making a clear statement every time she opens her mouth. Seated on a stool in a loose checked shirt with her ever-present water bottle in hand, she makes one crystal clear pronouncement after another.

“Right now we don’t speak the same language as the planet,” she says, and the series shows her unique capacity to heighten awareness of what that means. In the Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies, she talks to a biologist about the loss of vast tracts of pine forest. The mountain pine beetle, a species once controlled by periods of deep frost, is running rampant, its eggs feeding on the tissue inside tree trunks that should be carrying nutrients up through the branches.

As a television guide to such phenomena, Thunberg invites comparison with David Attenborough: the sage and the wise child, both deeply committed observers of the natural world who can ignore the distractions of everyday life and focus on larger realities. Their meeting, at the end of the second episode, also highlights the polarities: Attenborough, the veteran career broadcaster who has clocked up more hours of screen presence than almost anyone else in the business, is perhaps the only person who can offer her genuine reassurance as she battles fierce misgivings after what she feels was a debacle at Davos.

For Thunberg, the meetings with celebrities and world leaders are just part of the job she’s given herself, but the encounter with Attenborough has a special pathos. Both have looked into the abyss, confronting the scenes of devastation that will multiply if climate change is left unchecked, but where Attenborough carries the awareness with the gravitas of long experience, Thunberg seems one step away from panic.

Addressing public forums with thousands of delegates, she maintains a steady composure, her laser-like speeches cutting through the political rhetoric. Alone in the interview room, though, her voice shakes and she seems on the verge of breaking down. She tells her fellow students that “it falls to us to be the adults in the room,” but reveals a child’s unguarded immediacy. Contemplating the damage and distress she has witnessed, she has no filter, and is perplexed at how people can insulate themselves psychologically from such crises.

Her father, Svante Thunberg, who speaks to camera through the series, provides some background. By the time Greta left primary school she knew as much about the climate change research as most world leaders. But when she first delved into the facts at the age of eleven, she became depressed and unable to speak to anyone outside her immediate family. A sustained phase of anorexia set in. When she was preparing to make her first public speech, he said, he was afraid she would be unable to cope. “She’s not strong.”

Svante is an unsung hero of the story — pragmatic, patient, concerned and seemingly always there for his daughter, he accompanied her wherever she went until she turned seventeen in early 2020. His presence in the documentary is one of the many ways it calls the bluff on critics who claim she is a puppet figure managed by publicity-hungry parents.

Thunberg may be psychologically fragile in some respects, but as a public figure she is made of pure steel, a match for political leaders of all stamps, whether they attack her or, like Angela Merkel, invite her in to be patronised. She knows their strategies and answers the rhetoric with hard figures on emissions, rising temperatures and fossil fuel subsidies.

“For reasons I don’t understand, people listen when I talk,” she says to camera from her stool in the interview room. “You are listening to me right now. But I don’t want that.” She wants us to listen to the science as she has been discovering it across Europe and America. China was to be her next destination, but the pandemic proved that even Thunberg’s determination can be blocked by circumstance.

With Australia’s prime minister proving one of the most recalcitrant national leaders at the Biden summit, and recently released figures showing that subsidies worth $10.3 billion were given to Australia’s fossil fuel industry over the past year, viewers might wish she was headed this way. And that very thought might shame us into asking ourselves why the responsibility for bringing about change should rest on the shoulders of a teenager who demonstrates that speaking truth to power is more than an empty cliché. •

The post What does it take? appeared first on Inside Story.

Surely the Germans have a name for it? Sehnsucht, which I gather translates as a sickness of yearning, might get close. “Collingwood?” suggests a sad case of my acquaintance. In my vernacular it’s Copenhagen Syndrome.

It’s the morning of 20 December 2009 and the copy of the Sunday Age carted aboard a flight from Melbourne to Hobart, en route to Antarctica to join scientists at work on the front line of the fracturing ice. “COPENHAGEN COP OUT,” bellows the front page. “The Copenhagen climate change conference last night appeared to have ended in chaos.” Puff goes Hopenhagen, vanishing in so much hot air.

Climate long-haulers can track their moments of rupture further back. “This time I am not holding my breath. This time I am not smiling,” wrote Adil Najam, an international relations specialist and co-author of two epic International Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports (3 and 4), as he nursed his own Copenhagen wounds en route to the 2015 UN “Conference of the Parties,” or COP, talks in Paris.

“I am not a cynic — just old,” he went on. “Old enough to remember the dashed hopes of Kyoto [COP 3, 1997], the purposeful energy of Berlin [COP 1, 1995], the naïve optimism of Rio de Janeiro in 1992 where the UN framework convention on climate change was first adopted, and even the calls for urgency when the negotiation process was first launched by the United Nations in 1990.”

The Paris COP21 turned out not to be another epic fail, at least in terms of aspiration. As to what it delivers, that remains in the balance as we hurtle towards Glasgow COP26 this November, a year late courtesy of Covid-19 and with the core Paris goal of holding heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius now “virtually impossible” in the assessment of the Australian Academy of Science, among others.

The last best hope is a high road of supercharged ambitions to Glasgow. So it is that the pit stop contrived last week by US president Joe Biden was — is — crucial.

Having spent fifteen years, on and off, reporting on climate science and the fallout from warming on nature and humans, becoming all too viscerally attuned to where every fraction of a degree is taking us, watching the predictions play out is a grim business. Not just the big stuff of hellfire summers and cooked coral reefs, but the invisible shifts in the firmament that unhook bees from pollen, bogong moths from pygmy possums, krill from penguins, crops from nurturing seasons, fishers from their catch, children from the meal of the day.

So I’m barracking for Biden’s program. What choice is there? And yet.

I pore over his speech opening the summit, trying to divine solace, something to cling to. He’s not mad, or malign. There’s a 100 per cent improvement.

He’s not just brought the United States back to the climate table, but also upped the ante by pledging to halve its emissions by 2030 (50–52 per cent), inspiring similar moves by Japan (46 per cent) and Canada (40–45 per cent). For the moment let’s avert our eyes, like polite society, from prime minister Scott Morrison, hunkering down on Australia’s measly 26–28 per cent and playing for time we don’t have with vaguely defined technological fixes (an article of faith somewhat dulled when he got stuck on mute).

Let’s contemplate the prospect that while concerted action by other nations won’t restore a friendly, familiar planet — we’re way past that — it may render it “less bad,” as veteran Australian scientist David Karoly optimistically frames it. As in, less circles of hellish.

I keep recalling that scene in Postcards from the Edge, where the Carrie Fisher daughter character (Meryl Streep) catalogues the damage done to her by the Debbie Reynolds mother character (Shirley MacLaine). “I was such an awful mother,” her mother responds. “What if you had a mother like Joan Crawford or Lana Turner?” “These are the options?” responds the daughter, incredulous. “You, Joan or Lana?”

The White House virtual climate summit put a rocket up world leaders with a meticulously crafted enunciation of realpolitik. Biden’s opening speech enlisted a judicious sprinkling of appeals to the better angels (“moral imperative,” “the existential crisis of our times,” a “healthier, fairer, cleaner” planet); an undertone of urgency (“we have to take action,” “time is short,” “we really have no choice”); and a raw soundbite (“the world beyond 1.5 degrees means more frequent and intense fires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and hurricanes tearing through communities, ripping away lives and livelihoods.”)

But most of the eight minutes that would change the world were devoted to the hard sell of global heating not as calamity but as opportunity. The prospect that action will deliver rich nations still more wealth and their leaders the catnip of popular votes. This would be “an extraordinary engine of job creation and economic opportunity,” “millions of good-paying, middle-class, union jobs,” an “economic imperative” and “a strong foundation for growth.”

“The countries that take decisive action now to create the industries of the future will be the ones that reap the economic benefits of the clean energy boom that’s coming.” (That’s only what economist Ross Garnaut has been spruiking to Australian leaders and voters since 2008, but never mind.)

Biden conjured up from his Zoomed lectern visions of shiny, happy future workers capping abandoned oil wells, toiling on assembly lines of electric vehicles, replacing gas stations with charging stops, capturing carbon and pumping out green hydrogen. Farmers on the new frontier tilling carbon into the soil. Deliverance from the flames and a Hollywood ending.

And don’t get me wrong — bring on the renewable economy. I get it. And yet there’s so much missing, obscured, in this vision.

Our new post-carbon prosperity will enable us to “help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change.” Urgent questions of climate justice, equity and reparations are not touched on. The cynicism is gobsmacking.

These would be the same countries rendered vulnerable by shattering histories of colonisation, disenfranchisement and extraction. Countries now being lectured on adaptation and resilience as the spoils of their exploited labour and minerals are returned to them as droughts and cyclones and rising tides.

How unconscionable this looks up close we saw a few weeks ago in Timor-Leste, with thousands displaced and the death toll mounting, Dili awash, and Canberra offering commiserations and support. Given Australia’s “slow-walking” on climate action, straight-shooting development veteran Gordon Peake likened the situation to pumping out water with one hand while running the tap with the other.

Biden’s summit curtain-raiser was also mute on the millions of human lives already and inevitably disrupted, cut short, lost in the gathering momentum of the forces we have unleashed. On the spiralling extinctions of creatures we profess to value, and on the vanishing of wild places.

Cynically, strategically, pragmatically, call it what you will, the architects of this critical intervention have taken to heart the observation credited to Stalin that while a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic. And they’ve taken on board Paul Slovic’s work on psychic numbing, on statistics representing “human beings with the tears dried off.” Both were discussed in a recent Climate One podcast by US scholars Anthony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach, directors of the Yale and George Mason universities’ climate communications programs, exploring what we understand about human perceptions of risk and responses, and how this can be enlisted to get traction on policy.

It ain’t rocket science. Or ice-sheet dynamics. “The most powerful form of communication we have is what we relied on when we were still huddled around fires in the stone age, and that is telling stories,” explained Leiserowitz. “Telling and sharing experiences from one person to the next. Don’t eat that berry, someone in our tribe ate that berry and died… Story is absolutely crucial.”

With apologies to those thousands of scientists slogging their way through countless datasets to find consensus and produce the IPCC’s epic sixth assessment report next year, it seems none of it will cut through as seismically as well-told tales of the travails and triumphs of individuals. Narratives of “polar bears or abstract future generations” clearly haven’t cut it. It’s got to be about us. And it’s got to be framed in terms of the solutions, not the problems.

More cynically, observing the spotlight dwelling on Biden’s farmers and workers, it seems it’s got to be about people recognisably “us,” and the solutions that work for “us.” What does that say about our ability to connect to the humanity of others? If their stories don’t resonate, what’s to blame? Is the failure in the lack of stories, in the content, or in the story telling itself?

Which brings us to the imperative business of what stories are told, and of who tells them. These are questions being asked in and of newsrooms in the context of Black Lives Matter, and which apply equally in climate coverage, recognising the entwined undercurrents of race, colonialism, equity, access, justice, suffering.

The great individual, human story shared at the opening of the Paris COP, the one that lingers in memory and conversations as prescient, transformative, effective, connective, was one that would have struggled to find column space in a mainstream newspaper or digital site. It’s the ordinary, extraordinary  story of a mother of the Marshall Islands, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner. It’s angry, empowered, resolute and authentic. It’s recounted as a poem addressed to her daughter, “a seven month old sunrise of gummy smiles… bald as an egg and bald as the buddha.”

I want to tell you about that lagoon
that lucid, sleepy lagoon lounging against the sunrise
men say that one day
that lagoon will devour you
they say it will gnaw at the shoreline
chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees
gulp down rows of your seawalls
and crunch your island’s shattered bones
they say you, your daughter
and your granddaughter, too
will wander rootless
with only a passport to call home
dear matafele peinam,
don’t cry
mommy promises you
no one
will come and devour you
no greedy whale of a company sharking through political seas
no backwater bullying of businesses with broken morals
no blindfolded bureaucracies gonna push
this mother ocean over
the edge
no one’s drowning, baby

Journalists and editors can’t escape the conclusion that our storytelling has not risen to the task in this make-or-break moment. Sure, there were and are extenuating circumstances. The collision of the devastating digital disruption, with its hollowing out of newsrooms, and the spiralling climate crisis has been magnificently exploited by a fossil-fuelled machinery of denial and delay. Regardless, as Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote in 2018, when the UN sounded the siren on the vanishing prospect of a 1.5 degrees guardrail, “just as the smartest minds in earth science have issued their warning, the best minds in media should be giving sustained attention to how to tell this most important story in a way that will create change.”

There are other voices, other renderings, other priorities. Other mothers. Other options. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Hollywood ending? appeared first on Inside Story.

On 22 April, Joe Biden will hold a virtual climate summit aimed at persuading world leaders to take more ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The US president has correctly identified climate change as an “existential threat,” and his US$2 trillion infrastructure package includes substantial investment in renewable energy and electric vehicles. His climate ambassador, John Kerry, has identified Australia as one of the holdouts, linking us to the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil. “Australia has had some differences with us, we’ve not been able to get on the same page completely,” he said during an interview in February. “That was one of the problems in Madrid, as you recall, together with Brazil.”

Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, appears to have taken the hint: his climate denialist foreign minister has been forced to resign and his government has publicised a letter from Biden offering cooperation on climate policy. Australia could easily end up in a minority of one at the summit, unwilling to move beyond the government’s patently inadequate offer of a 26 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030.

Everyone outside the lunatic fringe of the government’s backbench knows that the final outcome of this process will be a commitment to net zero emissions by 2050. We can do this voluntarily or we can wait to have it forced on us by the trade sanctions being prepared by the European Union and foreshadowed by the United States. Morrison has already inched towards this position by acknowledging that it would be desirable to reach net zero preferably by 2050.

It would make political as well as economic and environmental sense to make the commitment in time for Biden’s summit. At best, it might shift the domestic focus from the scandals besetting the government. Even if that doesn’t happen, it could hardly do any more damage than the daily run of disasters. Some backbenchers might shift to the crossbench, as Craig Kelly has already done and Andrew Laming will probably be forced to do before long. But they won’t vote to bring down the government, and Morrison has survived minority government before.

The big problem is that, having announced a 2050 net zero target, the government needs to map out a policy that might plausibly get us there. The task is made more difficult because the simplest and most economically sensible way of reducing emissions, a carbon price, remains unacceptable to the Coalition.

This month’s release of former chief scientist Alan Finkel’s Quarterly Essay, Getting to Zero: Australia’s Energy Transition, seems to provide the perfect opportunity for the government to reset the debate. Finkel focuses almost exclusively on technology, mentioning a carbon price only in the context of the high price required to make carbon capture and storage economically viable. He is diplomatic about the very limited efforts made by the current government, most notably the Emissions Reduction Fund, suggesting that it could form the basis of a transition program.

Even so, adopting Finkel’s plan would require Morrison to dump some longstanding positions. It would also upset a significant proportion of his base.

Finkel begins by dismissing as “non-starters” two technologies he has previously suggested might be part of the solution. These are “clean coal” (supercritical coal-fired power stations, with or without carbon capture and storage) and nuclear power (including small modular reactors), both of which have plenty of supporters in the Coalition parties.

Finkel’s list of solutions makes plenty of sense but would require Morrison to eat his own words on a number of issues. He summarises his proposals thus: “Step 1: Replace all the existing electricity generation with zero-emissions electricity. Step 2: Generate lots more zero-emissions electricity, so that we can use it for stationary energy [manufacturing, building, mining and so on] and transport. Step 3: Generate lots more electricity, so that we can use it to make hydrogen for those instances where electrons are not ideal. Step 4: Generate many times more electricity, to produce hydrogen for export. Step 5: Produce lots more electricity, to produce goods that embody large amounts of energy, such as zero-emissions steel and zero-emissions aluminium.” All these steps, he adds, can happen simultaneously.

Steps 1 and 2 pose the biggest problems for the government. Step 1 will require abandoning years of rhetoric about the supposed unreliability of wind and solar power, as well as making some significant policy shifts. Step 2 will force Morrison to walk back his silly pre-election jibes about the abolition of the weekend.

But Finkel’s analysis of improvements in battery storage provides Morrison with the opportunity to say that technological change has delivered this part of the government’s “technology roadmap” sooner than expected. And with the vehicle industry itself calling for emissions standards, the time will never be better for the government to embrace the shift to electric vehicles.

The export part of the proposal is also critical. Along with sections of the Labor Party, the government is clinging to the idea that Australia can be the “last man standing” in the global coal trade. But the export of renewable energy, either as electricity or in the form of hydrogen and ammonia, should appeal to the conservative side of politics.

With one exception, Morrison’s track record suggests he will duck the hard decisions, prefer spin to policy, and shift the blame for failure wherever he can. But that one exception is a big one. As the scale of the pandemic became apparent early last year, the government shifted rapidly from its plan for a small-scale, targeted response to the all-out effort of JobKeeper and JobSeeker. In the process, a decade of rhetoric about the wasteful and unnecessary nature of Kevin Rudd’s response to the global financial crisis was thrown out the window.

The climate crisis might not be as fast-moving as the pandemic, but it has caught up with us now. Let’s hope we see the Morrison of March and April 2020 one more time, and not the PR man we usually get. •

The post Finkel’s road to zero appeared first on Inside Story.

Scott Nargar, Hyundai’s “senior manager of future mobility,” stands in the middle of the road holding a remote control. He presses a button; the steering wheel spins on its own and the car rolls backwards until it’s parallel to the kerb. From a nearby apartment window, a black cat gazes unblinkingly at this fusion of the supernatural and the mundane. And I wonder: is this what the future feels like?

Nargar opens the door and hops back into the driver’s seat. “So basically, after that, the car turns itself off, puts itself in park, locks itself and I can walk away,” he says, matter-of-factly. We drive on, and he runs me through the Nexo’s high-tech cockpit: blind spot cameras and pedestrian-seeking auto brakes; ventilated seats and a heated steering wheel.

It all sounds deluxe, but I’m mostly interested in what’s in the Nexo’s tank: pure hydrogen. Hydrogen-powered cars in Australia are rare; this is one of twenty on lease to the ACT government. The car runs on the electricity produced when hydrogen reacts with oxygen in a fuel cell. The only thing it emits is a curl of steam.

The car also filters the air as it drives. We pull onto an avenue leading to Parliament House and zip past cars belching fumes into the afternoon sky. Nargar points to a huge touchscreen display in the centre of the console showing he’s driven 208 kilometres that day. “I’ve purified 153.1 kilolitres of air — which equates to enough air for five adults to breathe for a day. And I’ve displaced nearly thirty kilos of carbon dioxide,” he says.

In May of 2020, carbon dioxide concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere reached a record 417 parts per million, which means for every one million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, 417 were carbon dioxide. These concentrations are growing steadily; in Australia, even Covid-19 lockdowns couldn’t stop the rise. Without radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, says the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a planetary disaster awaits. We must find new, cleaner fuel sources or else perish together. Renewable energy can certainly get us part of the way, but it won’t be enough.

That’s where hydrogen comes in. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in energy circles who disputes that, in theory, hydrogen could eliminate carbon from much of the global economy. How to do it right, and in time to avert climate catastrophe, is the conundrum now before us.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but you can’t see, smell or taste it. It was made in the Big Bang and went on to form stars and galaxies. On Earth, hydrogen is not conveniently available in its pure form but is bound up with other substances. Hydrogen can only be extracted without carbon emissions in one of two ways: from fossil fuels (using a technology that captures and stores carbon) or from water (in a process powered by renewable energy).

Fiona Beck, a researcher at the Australian National University’s Research School of Engineering, is interested in the latter. She and her colleagues have developed a technology that, in essence, converts water into hydrogen using nothing but sunlight. Converted to electricity, solar energy can power an electrolyser that splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. But Beck’s new technology cuts out the intermediary: the solar panels have been re-engineered to create the hydrogen themselves.

“The problem at the moment is that the economics of buying an electrolyser and plugging it into renewable energy is not quite there compared to the fossil fuel methods,” Beck says. “What we’re looking at here is: how do you make it even cheaper, and actually do it all in one?”

Beck’s doctoral student Astha Sharma emerges from a lab. “She is the brains who does most of the actual work,” says Beck, motioning us both back into the lab. Inside, bundles of power cords dangle from hooks, and electrical equipment crowds every surface. On one desk sits what looks like a long black paparazzi lens. “There’s a big arc lamp in there,” says Beck. “It’s like controlled lightning. In a very small area, it’s actually a very large fraction of the temperature of the sun.”

Wearing disposable gloves, Sharma takes a tiny silicon solar cell, about one centimetre wide. Fused to that is another type of solar cell made of a material known as perovskite. She dips the cells into a clear container filled with an alkaline solution, then removes the cap from the lens. A sharp beam of light illuminates the liquid. Soon, tiny gas bubbles fizz from the cells.

“Is that hydrogen?” I ask.

“Yep,” says Beck, and laughs. “It’s actually not very dramatic.”

The project has set an efficiency record for solar-to-hydrogen cells: of the energy the cells receive from the sun, 17.6 per cent can be converted to useable energy — rivalling the most efficient rooftop solar panels, which convert about 20 per cent of sunlight into electricity. So, depending on how the technology develops, the end result may be dramatic indeed.

Alan Finkel, whose term as Australia’s chief scientist ended in December 2020, is head cheerleader for the nation’s tiny hydrogen industry. He talks up our potential to “ship sunshine to the world” — a merry description of exporting hydrogen produced with solar energy. And he proudly claims to be first on the waiting list when Hyundai starts leasing the Nexo to the public.

Finkel spearheaded the National Hydrogen Strategy, published in late 2019. It aims to make Australia a world leader in hydrogen within a decade: under the most optimistic scenario, it predicts that our hydrogen industry could be worth $26 billion to the economy in 2050.

I ask him if the economic calamity brought on by Covid-19 has damaged hydrogen’s prospects.

“I’m actually feeling more optimistic, because there’s so much happening globally,” he says. “We are seeing extraordinary monetary commitments.” He rattles off a couple made just before our conversation in the late spring of 2020:

€7 billion from France and €9 billion from Germany to expand the hydrogen industry in Europe and abroad.

Investment by Australia is far more tentative. Of two dozen or so hydrogen projects announced to date, Finkel says there are only about six “where money is actually flowing and ground has been turned.” At the time of writing, the Morrison government had committed about $370 million to support the hydrogen strategy; state governments have promised further funding, though smaller amounts.

Creating a mass market for hydrogen won’t happen overnight. “Let’s say you’re building demand for hydrogen through transport,” Finkel says. “You don’t suddenly develop hydrogen trucks and cars and develop the refuelling capability and people’s confidence in the regulations and the other stuff that makes an industry. It’s going to take years and years. So demand is the limiting factor here.”

Energy experts broadly acknowledge that zero-emissions electricity can’t solve the climate crisis alone — it simply can’t be used everywhere. Finkel cites long-haul transport, saying planes, trucks, trains and ships are unlikely to ever choof around with tonnes of batteries on board. “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get on a big battery-powered plane at Sydney airport and fly nonstop to San Francisco with 350 passengers,” he says.

Hydrogen will also be needed to replace coal in the polluting steel-making industry. Globally, steel manufacture creates about 7 per cent of carbon emissions; a switch to green hydrogen there would be a boon for both the climate and the Australian steel towns of Port Kembla and Whyalla.

Australia is up against nations such as the United States, China, Brunei and Saudi Arabia in the hydrogen export race. But we have one distinct advantage: proximity to Asia and, in particular, Japan and South Korea, which have both wagered heavily on hydrogen.

By 2030, the Japanese government wants 800,000 fuel cell vehicles on the road, and 900 stations to refuel them. And at the Tokyo Olympics, delayed until July 2021, the flame will burn with hydrogen for the first time.

In December 2019, Japan launched the world’s first ship designed to transport liquefied hydrogen at the port of Kobe. Finkel was there as the 8000-tonne Hydrogen Frontier slipped into the water for the first time. “It hit me that this was the first ship ever made that will allow human beings to transport renewable energy from one continent to another,” he says. “It’s a new era.”

The global hydrogen economy suddenly appeared to be alive and thrumming in Osaka Bay. But the shape of the new world energy order is a huge unknown — not least because the Hydrogen Frontier will ship more than just sunshine. The launch marks the start of a controversial trial project in which hydrogen derived from Australia’s brown coal will be shipped to Japan. Some potential importers of Australia’s hydrogen, such as Germany, won’t consider hydrogen sourced from fossil fuels in the long term, even if some of the carbon that is produced is captured. But, Finkel says, “certainly Japan will, South Korea will, Norway will. It really depends on whether you’re focused on a technology and you hate it, or you’re focused on what counts — atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide.”

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Horsley Park is best known for three things: God, guns and horses. The suburb in Sydney’s southwest is one of Australia’s most devout — about 80 per cent of residents identify as Christian — and it’s home to the equestrian centre built for the Sydney Olympics. It also has a prominent gun shop on the main street. Soon, however, Horsley Park will add another feather to its cap: as a green hydrogen pioneer.

In August 2020, the NSW government approved the $18 million Western Sydney Green Gas Project, to be operated by energy infrastructure giant Jemena. Touted as Australia’s largest hydrogen demonstration, it will generate green hydrogen, mix it into the existing natural gas network and deliver it to about 250 homes around Horsley Park.

Alistair Wardrope, Jemena’s senior engineer, has experience in the hydrogen business that dates back to 2006 when he worked for a British electrolyser manufacturer. I ask if Horsley Park residents would notice any difference if, say, they’re boiling an egg on a gas cooktop and there’s hydrogen in the mix. Wardrope pauses, then eventually answers: “No. If, hypothetically, we add 10 per cent hydrogen, we do marginally decrease the calorific value of the gas. But we’re talking about a very, very small difference. So no. If you’re talking about boiling an egg it might take a second or two longer.”

In terms of a broader transition, blending hydrogen into the mains gas network is considered one of the easiest ways to build demand in Australia. Unlike a hydrogen-fuelled transport network — which would need new vehicles, refuelling stations, and a new tranche of regulations and laws — mixing hydrogen into the gas network requires little more than an electrolyser and a valve.

About 10 per cent hydrogen can generally be blended into the extant gas network without needing to upgrade household appliances. Jemena is trialling a 2 per cent mix and will deploy strict controls to make sure the limit is not exceeded. It’s a cautious approach, for good reason.

In 2018, researchers at the University of Queensland examined public attitudes to hydrogen use and found safety was the top concern. Of course, all fuels are flammable, and hydrogen is already being produced and used without incident. But hydrogen ignites easily, and the public will need convincing it’s low-risk. Hyundai says it fired bullets at the hydrogen tanks of the Hyundai Nexo to make sure they could withstand a prang; I ask Wardrope if Horsley Park residents are worried hydrogen in their pipes might explode.

“The first thing to point out is the amount of gas [involved in the project] in energy terms is a very, very small fraction of what Jemena moves on a daily basis,” Wardrope says. “And Jemena is very well versed in safely transporting and handling flammable gases — which is what hydrogen is.”

The NSW government wants 10 per cent hydrogen running through the state’s gas networks within a decade as part of its plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. If repeated across the country, that would be a fair bit of hydrogen. I ask Wardrope if projects such as Jemena’s might help move the dial — generating enough demand to create a mass market.

“It’s the chicken-and-egg scenario,” he replies. “You don’t have the users because you don’t have the infrastructure, and you don’t have that infrastructure because you don’t have the users. Where we can leverage off existing infrastructure to help break that cycle, it definitely helps.”

But even with public backing, and with the economics and engineering sorted out, the hydrogen shift seems incomprehensibly vast. It touches almost every facet of modern life. It needs to happen over months and years, not decades and centuries. It will take unprecedented political will — and vested fossil fuel interests won’t easily roll over. It will require permanent changes to not only our fuel sources but also the homes we live in, the cars we drive and the foundations of the global economy.

I ask Wardrope if he can see a road to a fully fledged hydrogen society. “I think, if we look at what’s happening around the world, the level of investment is increasing substantially in favour of hydrogen,” he says. “So do I think there will be a transition? Me personally, yes. [But] the jury is still out, it’s fair to say, which is why it’s important to do these trials. In terms of whether it will be a 100 per cent conversion? There is no precedent. But over the years, the network and energy users have gone through multiple energy transitions.”

Indeed, the tale of human energy use is filled with plot twists. We mastered fire and burnt plants to release energy derived from the sun. Agriculture turned the sun’s energy into food, and we harnessed wind to propel boats and grind grain. Since the industrial revolution we’ve liberated energy from fossil fuels — energy trapped millions of years ago in the fibres of ancient plants. Now we’re on the cusp of a new chapter — without carbon dioxide.

But hydrogen’s role in this future is far from assured. Storage and distribution is difficult and may slow the transition: exports, for example, require hydrogen to be compressed, piped, liquefied, sent out on ships and kept ultra-cold — at minus 253°C — in cryogenic tanks.

Producing green hydrogen will also require a huge amount of energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. According to Deloitte, installed electricity generation capacity in Australia may have to increase more than fivefold by 2050 under the most ambitious hydrogen production scenarios.

In road transport, hydrogen fuel cells may be getting smaller and cheaper, but some say they’re no competition for electric vehicles. Tesla founder Elon Musk put it bluntly, deriding hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles as inefficient and “mind-bogglingly stupid.”

And an extra degree of difficulty exists in Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth. Most energy production consumes water; it takes nine litres to make one kilogram of hydrogen via electrolysis. Coastal areas are the most likely sites of hydrogen production; there, desalinated sea water or waste water will probably be used.

Wardrope acknowledges the headwinds. “But when we look at history, in every energy transition there’s been a benefit, a positive outcome for the broader community and the environment,” he says. “History would suggest we are on the right path. We’re looking at the right technologies, but it’s still early days. Which is why we have to start small, but think big.”

Back in the hydrogen-powered Nexo, it’s time for my afternoon drive to end. But in navigating back to where we began, I’ve led the driver, Scott Nargar, off course. I squint at the road ahead, looking for a road sign and cursing Canberra’s lookalike streets.

Nargar, a gracious host, hasn’t tired of showing off the Nexo’s luxury features and barely seems to notice that we’re lost. As I get my bearings, he plays a sample of the car’s inbuilt ambient sounds.

“There’s the sound of the sea, or rainy days,” he says, before flicking to a track titled “Open-air cafe.” “It’s all about enjoying the experience of driving an eco-car.” He skips to a track filled with the chirrup of birds and insects. As we whiz past a supermarket, he asks, somewhat dryly, “Don’t you feel like you’re in a rainforest now?”

Later, driving home in my diesel-chewing hatchback, I wonder about this next junction humanity has reached. Time has handed us the bewildering and unnervingly urgent socio-techno riddle of remaking the world’s energy system. So in labs and universities and factories and boardrooms, people tinker and toil to keep humanity going as is, just without the carbon dioxide. But if hydrogen and renewable energy save us, should humanity just continue as normal after that? At the Australian National University, I put the idea to Fiona Beck. She nods, as if to acknowledge the question is never far from her mind.

“I’m reading Doughnut Economics, which is about how we can’t just keep going with endless growth,” she says, referencing the widely read 2017 book by Oxford economist Kate Raworth, which argues, in Beck’s words, that humanity should live so “we’re not destroying the planet, but not deprived either.”

“We need to electrify, we need to go to renewables, but we just can’t produce renewable energy fast enough. We also need ridiculous amounts of energy efficiency, and [we need] to change the way we use energy,” Beck says. “It’s going to necessitate a change in mindset — away from ‘as much as you can, as fast as you can’ to considering the limits of the world we live in — just thinking about the whole thing.” •

This is an edited extract from “Hail Hydrogen,” in Griffith Review 71: Remaking the Balance, edited by Ashley Hay.

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The pandemic has posed immense tests for governments and political leaders everywhere, and many have failed them. Sharp divisions have opened in many countries over mishandled responses. Decades-long trends of declining confidence in government have accelerated as Covid-linked tolls of death and illness have grown, spreading feelings of loss, fear, insecurity and frustration.

The recently released 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer reported that dissatisfaction with governments — especially in the English-speaking democracies — has risen steadily over the past twenty-five years. Australia was listed as one of the countries in which the trust deficit had grown most.

The finding was consistent with the ANU’s 2019 Australian Election Study, which found that public trust in government was at its lowest point in forty years. Just 25 per cent of respondents indicated that they trusted the government to do the right thing at the right time, a decline of almost half since 2007.

“Across Australia trust in our democracy is on the decline,” the Museum of Australian Democracy’s first Democracy 2025 report warns. “Trust is the glue that facilitates collective action for mutual benefit. Without trust we don’t have the ability to address complex, long-term challenges.”

Since Covid-19 arrived, though, Australia’s story has diverged not only from past trends but also from views across much of the world. The Scanlon Foundation’s most recent Mapping Social Cohesion survey reports that trust in government in Australia rose 54 per cent during 2020 — the highest rate since the survey began in 2007. More than 70 per cent of respondents said the system of government in Australia was working fine, or only needed minor changes.

The reason is obvious. The outstanding success of Australia’s Covid-19 response was politically transformative. Australia’s current mortality rate from Covid — 3.6 per 100,000 population — is lower than all developed countries except New Zealand (where Jacinda Ardern’s government won a landslide election in October). Rates in Britain and the United States, by contrast — at 190 and 165 per 100,000 respectively — are many times greater.

Approval ratings for governments and their leaders in Australia soared in proportion to their Covid success — as reflected in election results in Queensland as well as Western Australia. As the Scanlon Foundation concludes, “The key to the positive findings obtained in the survey appears to be the level of satisfaction with government, the widely held view that effective leadership is being provided in the time of crisis, including financial support to those who have lost their jobs and those whose businesses have been impacted.”

Dramatically lower infection and death rates in Australia, combined with a relatively rapid revival of economic activity after massive government spending, converted political leaders into saviours. The long decline of Australian political discourse into partisan bickering and conflict suddenly halted.

Scott Morrison’s decision to establish a national cabinet in which Covid policy was developed in coordination across all Australian governments was transformative. Australians, used to seeing important national issues bogged down in brawling and grandstanding at meetings of the Council of Australian Governments, suddenly witnessed fruitful intergovernmental relationships. Consensus, compromise and cooperation resulted in lightning-speed decision-making and policy implementation. Old ideological battlelines melted away.

It seemed that the consensus, multi-level government decision-making that had been almost impossible before was now dead easy. Trust between leaders and their governments working together in national cabinet created a new vision of what was possible. Voters’ confidence in the machinery of democracy soared. We were witnessing a new dawn.

Or was it just a moment of sunshine?

If the Covid-caused transformation in political attitudes offered hope of real change, what are we to make of increasingly loud warnings that the coming debates about the challenges ahead are likely to plunge us back into the ideological and partisan conflicts that frustrated national progress and disillusioned voters in the pre-Covid years?

For a new Monash University Publishing project, “In the National Interest,” prominent Australians have been invited to contribute essays about challenges facing Australia in the post-Covid era. Each of the essays is being published as a short book; taken together, they add up to a daunting range of problems confronting policymakers and the political system.

Ideally, these discussions could harness the surge in trust in politics for a new age of reform in Australia. In this new phase, we would not return to the long years of partisanship and the divisive cultural wars that hogtied the reform process after the Howard government’s tax changes early in the century.

The bitter and divisive debates about immigration, multiculturalism and identity unleashed by the emergence of Hansonism, seen as a reaction against the pace of change in the 1980s and 1990s, drove deep and painful wedges into Australian society that have resulted in a lost era of progress and a failure to adjust to a world fast changing around us. Southeast Asia’s growth in economic power and sophistication has created great opportunities for Australia, but also poses grave dangers if we fail to keep up.

In fact, Australia is already failing to keep up. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, which compares the performance of students at fifteen years of age, Australia has dropped fourteen places to twenty-ninth in the ranking for maths. Transparency International has reported an increased perception of corruption in Australia. In his new book, Reset: Restoring Australia after the Great Crash of 2020, economist Ross Garnaut points out that in the eight years between 2013 and 2021 — a period he calls “the dog days” — virtually no increase in household disposable income was recorded (a problem Australia is not alone in suffering).

And on climate change, the 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranks Australia near the bottom. Scientists have warned that unless this country dramatically increases its policy ambition very soon, it will need to increase its effort tenfold in the twenty years from 2030 to meet the global target of zero emissions by 2050.

Each of the contributors to the “In the National Interest” series was invited to “make the case” for reform in areas where they had particular knowledge. The list of concerns is long. Some — particularly in Rachel Doyle’s Power & Consent, a powerful essay on the plague of sexual harassment — are urgently topical.

The four written from the perspective of having been at the centre of Canberra power — Kevin Rudd and Scott Ryan as politicians, and Martin Parkinson and Don Russell as advisers to prime ministers and heads of powerful government departments — present different perspectives on the same problems. But taken together, they outline an agenda for change that is not only daunting in itself but also a particular challenge for our political system.

Rudd opens his book, The Case for Courage, with the following statement: “Over much of the last decade, Australia’s democracy has been slowly sliding into disrepair and despair. Our major national policy challenges go unaddressed.” Warming to his theme, he sees little prospect of change while “the cancer on our democracy that is the Murdoch media monopoly” remains — and hence the need for urgent reform of media ownership laws as a prerequisite to adopting a bold reform agenda.

In Challenging Politics, Ryan warns that an essential piece of our political system — the art of compromise — is in trouble in the new age of social media and political tribalisation. “If we don’t find a way to re-enliven it, we will face deepening gridlock.”

In A Decade of Drift, Parkinson says that what he calls “the collapse of the political centre” over the seventeen years since the 2007 election has left Australia incapable of making vital decisions. As a result, Australians risk being consigned to “declining relative living standards” and “unable to grasp the opportunities provided by living in the most dynamic and exciting part of the world.”

In his contribution to the series, Leadership, Russell reflects on the difference between his experience working with Paul Keating during the great reform era of the eighties and early nineties and the current levels of frustration and disengagement in Australia. But he sees hope in the way the nation responded to the Covid crisis — as it did to the May 1986 “banana republic” crisis, he says. The unprecedented step of creating a national cabinet and the adoption by governments of a “problem-solving approach, not an ideological one” resulted in a quite remarkable acceptance by the community of lockdowns and other protective measures. “This was a complete break with Australia’s recent attitude to government,” says Russell.

The experience of the past year poses an obvious question: can the sense of shared responsibility be applied to the task of ensuring the future health and prosperity of the nation?

The Covid-induced pause in politics-as-usual certainly offered the chance to reflect on the failures of politics and policy during a decade in which the revolving door of political leadership spun six prime ministers in and out. As these books make clear, the backlog of unfinished and uncommenced policy work means there is much to be done.

Beyond the immediate task of getting the population vaccinated and life back to as normal as possible, the backlog of unresolved issues and yet-to-be-tackled reforms is eye-watering. The overriding challenge is the task of navigating the post-Covid economy to stronger, sustainable growth, higher productivity, lower unemployment, higher wages, better living standards and lower debt. Indeed, it is easy to come up with a top ten list of reform areas that need to be tackled urgently.

But there’s much more: the crisis in aged care, growing inequality and disadvantage, Indigenous disadvantage and representation, population policy, tax reform, education funding, water policy and the Murray-Darling basin, women in the workplace, domestic violence, national security, trade and relations with the increasingly argumentative superpowers, infrastructure, and government integrity and corruption. And these are just the most urgent, bar one very big one.

Asked by pollsters what they consider to be the most pressing issue facing Australia — after the Covid crisis — the majority of people consistently nominate climate change and the threats it poses. Climate change policy is the example that proves the point about the failure of politics over the past decade. The fierce but largely fruitless battle has been background noise to an era of stalled reform.

Martin Parkinson provides a depressing narrative of the twists and turns in climate policy failure. Decarbonising the Australian economy, he says, is the key to stimulating new jobs, industries and export opportunities. He dares to speculate that maybe the success of managing Covid — the transparency shown in describing the challenge, the creation of the national cabinet, the obvious recognition and embrace of experts’ advice — will help to embed these aspects in our policy debates and turn around the trust deficit. If so, it will be to the benefit of all Australians. “It would be an extreme irony,” he writes, “if a medical emergency created the circumstances for a renewed vigour in tackling the challenges ahead.”

Until a few weeks ago, Parkinson’s dream of a post-Covid return to middle-ground political consensus seemed to have a chance. But the ugly mix of sex and politics has plunged political debate back into the rancour and partisanship that have poisoned political dialogue for years. Marches by women demanding action have rattled the federal government. Scott Morrison’s judgement has faltered, and problems with Covid vaccine rollouts have begun to cast doubt over the notion that the next election is all but certain to return his government.

The opportunity to look well ahead and think longer-term about the most urgent reforms — especially climate change — may well have been lost. With the WA election result shaking the national political foundations, the government’s focus is likely to be no further than the next federal election. The political vibe of Covid crisis management — of rising trust in politics and leaders — may already have been wiped out. •

The first seven books from the “In the National Interest” series have been released by Monash University Publishing.

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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“Solutions are found by people willing to participate and experiment,” she writes, “not by picking supposedly good solutions in advance and trying to make them work.” Raise your expectations, she urges. Ask more of people. Test assumptions and get involved. Most particularly: expect more from governments.

Mazzucato lives with her family in London, where her busy schedule includes giving quite a bit of policy advice to governments. In conversation via Zoom, she is relentlessly on-message. No matter what diversions I throw up, she stays with her pitch, which is about optimism.

Even before Covid-19 intervened, she says, capitalism was in crisis. The questions were stacking up but the system had no answers. Mission Economy poses questions, examines the evidence and proposes a variety of ideas with a common starting point: what’s the purpose in our actions? When I ask Mazzucato what her purpose was in writing the book, she shoots back, “Making people believe in politics and policy again.”

Seen by many as an economics iconoclast — especially since the publication of her best-known book, The Value of Everything — Mazzucato might spook people unused to the conversational style of, say, New Jersey. Some might think that her Italian heritage (she was born in the Veneto) adds a potential for volatility. But what I find during our conversation is an open mind pushing hard towards solutions that work. Maybe the fact that her physicist father is still hoping to solve the challenges of nuclear fusion gives a clue to her temperament.

Mission Economy uses NASA’s moonshot project as both a metaphor and an (extensive) example. The metaphor is about finding solutions to big challenges and giving purpose to what we do: like meeting the Covid challenge, or taking on the UN’s sustainable development goals, or avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Critiques of capitalism often follow well-worn paths, but Mazzucato takes a different way. Capitalism only works, she says, when public and private purpose align around a goal big enough to engage most people. The key is the willingness of governments to take risks, not simply fix what’s broken, and to find ways of working with a purposeful private sector. Government needs to be well organised and fit for purpose — and that purpose must be clear in both the design and delivery of policies and programs.

“Change can happen,” she says. “But it will only happen if we rethink a lot of assumptions about where wealth creation comes from, where innovation comes from. But we also need capacity in governments — there is this over-consultification, consultants are everywhere — and we need to be very bold about that.” NASA made very good use of outside consultants, she says, but today’s consultants are parasitic rather than symbiotic.

When she began writing Mission Economy, Mazzucato didn’t anticipate the enormous challenge the pandemic would impose on governments. But she is keenly aware of its relevance to her pitch.

“Covid was the perfect test case of how things could go wrong, in the same way that the climate crisis, which was very much on mind, was a perfect test case. The multiple crises that we seem constantly to go through — the financial crisis, the Covid crisis, the climate crisis — they are all showing that we have the wrong types of organisations in both business and government.”

There’s no point talking about these big challenges, she says, if we’re not willing to lift the competence of the organisations tackling them. Finding the right structures is really what the book is about.

But haven’t some private companies already embraced the principles she espouses, I ask. Isn’t it populist governments that seem to think the message is more important than the outcome?

“I agree with you that some private companies are on the frontier,” she says. “Many, most, are not. Similarly, there are governments that have got their act together — that have a mission-oriented approach and especially mission-oriented organisations. And others haven’t.”

To illustrate how a “purposeful ecosystem” might look, she points to the “bold and confident” conditions the French government put on its assistance to companies during the pandemic: “Both Renault and Air France had to commit to lowering their carbon emissions in order to receive a penny from the French government. That’s very different to what happened in the UK, where EasyJet got a bailout for free, no conditions attached.”

Mazzucato emphasises again and again that the society we get is the one we choose. Her argument is that we aren’t aiming high enough — and we aren’t demanding good enough results. Capitalism is an outcome of public and private activity, she says, and it’s essential that they are aligned in purpose. “Unless we can design purpose into those relationships then we get what we have in the United States. It’s not enough having companies doing the right thing.”

No matter how competent they are, governments have tied their own hands by sticking to fixing failures in the economy. Mazzucato wants to see them take a much more positive role. “What I’m talking about is the co-creation and co-shaping of markets. And the explicit admission that you are going to have to make bold, proactive investments. To be an investor of first resort, not just last resort. Risk-taking. Not just de-risking.”

Mazzucato’s view runs against the common belief that government isn’t about any kind of mission. “That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she says. “The more you bash government, the more you rid it of resources, the more you think it’s not purposeful so it doesn’t need the capacity to do the things I’m suggesting, the more bogus the government you get. So you end up with the view that it’s not good enough to do anything; so let’s privatise everything.”

Today’s obvious mission is climate. What is the connecting point between the recognition of the issue and the acceptance of a public mission?

Mazzucato lays out a series of specific missions that would together compose an effective response to climate change. “It’s a design challenge. It means changing how we do industrial strategy. But that doesn’t work unless we have leadership that says we are going to make this happen — urgently. Urgency matters. Urgency is when you see money coming out of the woodwork,” as it did in the Covid crisis.

But it’s not about big plans. Rather, Mazzucato is drawn to the solutions that come when communities can see the challenge and can act on it. “These things have to land in places,” she says. “Real places where things happen.” Big missions become many smaller missions and much more citizen engagement. “We need dynamic capabilities within the public sector, which we don’t have. We have it in the private sector, because in that case it’s seen to be a value creator.”

Mazzucato likes to point to the cases where governments surprise us in a good way. Vietnam, for example, had learned much from the SARS virus, creating organisation and capabilities that were hugely valuable in tacking Covid-19.

As our conversation is winding up, I ask Mazzucato whom she is writing for. Public servants, politicians, regular citizens? “The book was really meant for everyone. I was hoping it might make people believe again that when we’re serious about stuff we can do pretty amazing things.” •

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This is the feel of a city being remade. Jackhammers, excavators and earthmovers dig up and demolish. Heavy machinery moves in and out of construction sites across the city, breaking up bitumen and disrupting traffic, ushered along by weary traffic wardens whose authority is proclaimed by hi-vis gear.

The tumult was set in motion last year. With the cities furloughed and workers told to stay home, governments at all levels got busy announcing policies to speed up planning and development approvals. “By fast-tracking assessments,” said NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, “we will keep people in jobs and keep the construction industry moving, as we ride out the Covid-19 pandemic and set our sights on economic recovery.”

Anything “shovel ready” was good to go: just cut through the red tape to make sure the job numbers don’t plummet. Here in New South Wales, more than $100 billion in infrastructure spending was announced in November: $30 billion to be spent in 2021 alone, $14 billion of it on Sydney-based transport projects. In Canberra, the territory government promised $4.3 billion over four years.

The Victorian government earmarked more than $10 billion in its November budget for landmark transport and infrastructure projects like the Suburban Rail Loop, and speeded up approvals for other significant new developments. The Queensland government pledged more than $13 billion for big infrastructure schemes like the Building Acceleration Program, which offers interest-free loans for new projects.

While it made a smaller contribution than many were seeking, the federal government also stepped in, with $11 billion allocated in its latest budget for infrastructure spending and targeted incentives for construction projects.

Using infrastructure spending as an economic recovery tool makes a lot of sense, especially when the construction sector is as important as it has become in Australia in recent years. Without most of us realising it, the sector has reached the point where it employs around one in ten Australian workers.

A construction workforce of that size means our cities must be dug up, revitalised and rebuilt at an ever-quickening pace. Otherwise governments risk dire job-loss announcements from the industry’s powerful lobby groups, like the Master Builders Association’s declaration last June that hard-hat companies faced a “valley of death,” with the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In the language of media-friendly announceables, keeping the construction pipeline flowing means not just jobs but also “better services” for communities, including better roads, better bridges, better rail and, potentially, more — and therefore more affordable — housing. What’s not to like?

Quite a bit, it turns out. Using construction to keep the economy buzzing has downsides we hear much less about.

“Shovel ready” projects often proceed without proper consultation, as state governments override local planning processes. Some local councils are receiving more infrastructure investment than ever before, but they lack the resources to properly plan and consult. Cutting through red tape and “green tape” is, of course, code for sidelining environmental and community-impact assessments.

Alarmingly, public-benefit tests for many fast-tracked projects also fail to consider the environmental impact of construction itself. Construction accounts for almost 40 per cent of global carbon emissions, and many worry that rapidly scaling up the industry threatens nations’ ability to meet their Paris Agreement targets.

In Australia, the construction sector generates the same amount of waste as all households put together; it is also in the top three most waste-intensive industries in the country. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, for every $1 million in value generated for the economy, construction generates eighty-seven tonnes of waste. The sector’s rapid growth means this problem is increasing at a truly alarming rate: since 2016–17, construction waste grew by as much as 22 per cent.

Making matters worse, Australia’s construction sector is a laggard in adopting innovative techniques and using materials efficiently. Globally, the Construction 2.0 agenda — a push for modern, emissions-limiting building practices — continues to accelerate, with a focus on new materials and technologies to better manage building supplies, reduce waste, improve working conditions and reduce environmental harm. Simply throwing money at the sector to keep workers on the tools feels like a very Australian way of managing our way out of a crisis, particularly when investment in research and development remains notoriously low.

For Australia’s cities, the focus on construction also represents poor long-term planning. A new wave of “circular economy” industries is emerging with a focus on recycling building waste materials into new building products like the “green ceramics” being developed by the University of New South Wales’s Veena Sahajwalla. But the new apartments, new freeways and new transport corridors are swallowing potential sites for light industrial or mixed-use development and leaving little space for these industries to grow.

We tend to think of “innovation precincts” as hubs for technology and knowledge workers, like the Australian Technology Park in Sydney. In fact, cities need innovation in the very nature of building — especially in managing construction waste and using materials efficiently — to meet the challenges thrown up by accelerating urban growth.

It’s hard to make space for this kind of innovation precinct when our methods of measuring the value of land tend to favour short-term over long-term value. As the industry website The Fifth Estate recently reported, residential land is priced at $2000 a square metre, double the value put on industrial land. Rezoning favours the outcomes with highest short-term yield.

These are complicated issues. But how the construction industry is allowed to operate and how we think about the waste it generates tell a big story about how this country plans to meet its targets under the Paris Agreement and deal more energetically with the climate emergency.

Meanwhile, seemingly oblivious, the earthmovers and dozers and diggers are being kept busy, the waste keeps piling up, and the emissions continue. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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There was nothing too remarkable about the actual words. Plenty of others were saying the same — though not too many Liberals and fewer prominent Liberals, particularly members of the Morrison government. The following month Kean revealed that senior Liberals, including members of federal cabinet, were privately urging stronger action on climate change, and advised the federal government to drop its reliance on emission credits held over from the Kyoto agreement to meet its 2030 emissions target. That was too much for Scott Morrison.

“Matt Kean doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he declared. “He doesn’t know what’s going on in the federal cabinet and most of federal cabinet wouldn’t even know who Matt Kean was.”

Aimed at a fellow Liberal, it was quite a put-down. It was also a bit of a stretch, considering that Kean is leader of the Liberals’ moderate, or small “l,” faction in New South Wales, fancies himself as a future state premier and misses few opportunities for publicity. Any federal MPs who hadn’t heard of him would have been way behind with their homework.

As for federal cabinet, bound by solidarity and secrecy, it is a sure bet that ministers are talking much more frankly to Kean than they are in public, and those most likely to be doing so are fellow moderates. Yes, they do exist in federal cabinet, including near the top of the tree — their ranks include Simon Birmingham and Marise Payne — even if their voices are muted and their influence on policy limited. This has been the lot of moderate Liberals ever since John Howard first became opposition leader in 1985.

Prominent moderate Peter Baume, a minister in the Fraser government, resigned from the Liberal Party in 1996 when Howard became prime minister because he didn’t want to be associated with a conservative government. Others, like Ian Macphee, lost preselection to conservatives. Still others, like Robert Hill, environment and defence minister in the Howard government, and Christopher Pyne, a minister in every Coalition government from Howard until 2019, tried to keep the moderate flag flying by working within the government. And then there was Philip Ruddock, a critic of Howard’s stance on immigration in opposition who, as immigration minister, implemented some of the harshest policies Australia has seen towards refugees.

Much of the recent public debate about the Liberals and Nationals has focused on right-wing MPs who typically oppose marriage equality and other social reforms, are climate change sceptics, if not deniers, and may doubt that Covid-19 is as serious as most people think. They have been particularly adept at leveraging their small numbers to hold the government hostage, with climate change the outstanding example. But moderates are a larger group, and some Liberals who wouldn’t use that label are also increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress on urgent issues confronting the government, including climate change.

Christopher Pyne (centre) — shown here in 2019 with fellow Liberal moderates Marise Payne and Simon Birmingham — has been active in the pushback against the party’s right. Dean Lewins/AAP Image

They might not be as vocal as the Craig Kellys and Barnaby Joyces, but they are showing signs of growing assertiveness. One indication is the growing support for two Liberal-aligned organisations applying pressure from outside — the Blueprint Institute and the Coalition for Conservation.

Blueprint’s chief executive and co-founder, Harry Guinness, was a policy and political adviser to Julie Bishop when she was foreign minister and deputy Liberal leader. His responsibilities included foreign aid, climate change and environmental sustainability.

Last summer’s bushfires were the catalyst for Guinness — self-described as “definitely philosophically a small ‘l’ Liberal” — and colleagues to set up Blueprint as a pro-market think tank. “With the bushfires there was a genuine sense that the time had come, after a decade of messing around with climate policy and not doing justice to what is really the biggest economic challenge of this generation and the next generation,” he tells me. “It is clear there needed to be more research and a more compelling story coming from the right of politics, getting beyond the energy reliability and the affordability issues.”

Guinness’s first employee was Daniel D’Hotman, a Rhodes scholar he met at Oxford University, where Guinness obtained a master’s degree in international development. The contrasts between Britain, which has a strong bipartisan policy on climate change, and Australia struck them both. “I was inspired by the UK,” says Guinness. “It’s pretty remarkable what has been achieved. Or maybe it’s remarkable what has happened here. If you think of the history of conservatism and the philosophy it has, it makes sense for a conservative party to be stewards of the environment and protecting the economy and thinking ahead.”

A recent Blueprint report argues that net zero emissions are inevitable by 2050 or even earlier, and the longer we delay the costlier it will be. As a first step, it says, we should commit to halving emissions from coal-fired electricity this decade.

Apart from climate change, Blueprint is conducting research and publishing papers on early learning, childcare, unemployment insurance and other social policy issues, and on economic policies including tax reform. Guinness says it has a budget of less than $1 million a year from donors who are anonymous “at this stage” but is diversifying to corporate sponsorships and membership contributions that will be made public.

Guinness has attracted a stellar cast to serve on Blueprint’s Strategic Council, including two of the Liberal Party’s most senior moderates, Christopher Pyne and Robert Hill. Another member is Bruce Baird, a senior minister in the NSW Greiner government who, having moved to federal parliament, was kept on the backbench by Howard. Two other former state ministers from the sensible side of the NSW Nationals, Wendy Machin and Adrian Piccoli, have also been enlisted.

Even more heavyweight is the team of “ambassadors” — Malcolm Turnbull, Lucy Turnbull, Robert Hill, Nick Greiner and Philip Ruddock — assembled by the Coalition for Conservation. Compared with Blueprint, it takes a more direct advocacy role, and also organises events, including the webinar last year that brought together Turnbull and former British prime minister David Cameron to discuss “the UK Conservative leadership on climate.”

The Coalition for Conservation’s chair is Cristina Talacko, whose many other roles include director of the Export Council of Australia, vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party’s Women’s Council, and secretary of the state party’s environment and energy policy branch. She tells me that C4C, as she refers to her organisation, started five years ago under the name Conservatives for Conservation. About two years ago, it changed names because “calling ourselves conservatives was putting off a lot of the moderates or middle group.” Combined with the growing momentum of the climate change debate, the decision seems to have worked: C4C has grown from about 500 signed-up supporters two years ago to 2000 last year, with numbers now standing at somewhere around 5000.

“We couldn’t talk about climate change in the very early days: it was seen as a very ‘left’ or costly thing to discuss for Liberals,” says Talacko. “The feeling was that you have to choose between the economy and the environment. We changed that perspective because we are showing that the only way to grow is to grow sustainably.”

As for the vocal group in the government that opposes action to reduce emissions, she says that “you can count them on your fingers and that is a good thing.” She adds that her organisation has helped to create “more of a safe space” for the voices of the centre in the party to be heard. C4C’s latest webinar brings together Liberal backbenchers Katie Allen and Trent Zimmerman with advocates for electric vehicles.

Talacko has also helped lend a sense of urgency to the debate. “The Liberal Party has always been known as the party of business, and its progressive leaders are seeing these opportunities and are ready to capitalise on them. No Liberal will want to be responsible for preventing Australia from seizing the next big economic opportunity.”

Recently she has advocated setting a net zero target “while it is still a choice, not an ultimatum,” citing moves in Europe and the United States to impose carbon levies on international trade from countries that are dragging their heels on climate change policy. While Scott Morrison is inching towards adopting a target, he is still focusing on the costs of doing so, rather than the opportunities it creates. “Fossil fuel reliant jobs are few and at risk, while jobs in renewables are growing at a higher rate,” says Talacko.

One sure sign that the debate is shifting is a recent publication by the Menzies Research Centre, the Liberal Party’s official think tank. Its latest policy paper includes a lengthy introduction from executive director Nick Cater extolling the substantial contribution the farming sector can make to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “An increase in the organic carbon content of soils of just 0.5 per cent, for example, would have the same effect as closing Australia’s coal-fired power stations for three years,” he writes. (Others argue that the potential is much greater and that most or all of Australia’s total emissions could be offset by increasing soil carbon.)

Cater certainly isn’t the first to promote the benefits of sequestering carbon in the soil. But it isn’t the kind of advocacy you’d expect to hear from him. A former editor of the Weekend Australian, he continues to write a weekly column for the daily Australian in which he has revealed himself to be anything but a small “l” Liberal, let alone a climate change activist. He has railed against the “Armageddon industry,” and in 2017 wrote that “time has helped illuminate the dewy-eyed naivety of the climate change policy Rudd took to the 2007 election.” That policy was to sign the Kyoto accord, which Howard had refused to do, and to put a price on carbon, which happened to be Howard’s policy at that election, as well as Labor’s, although Cater forgot to mention that.

Cater also promoted the favourite far-right conspiracy of the time: “The science of global warming offered the intellectuals another chance to organise the world as they wanted it to be, to take charge of human affairs and to bypass the irksome process of democracy… It was an opportunity to settle old scores by refighting the lost battle of the Cold War: the fight against free markets.” Strange then that Rudd’s, and Howard’s, plan to adopt an emissions trading scheme was based squarely on free-market economics.

If even Nick Cater has begun  barracking for action on climate change, then you could say the debate really has moved on. What’s next — the Nationals taking up the cause? Actually, they already have. Not Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan, of course, who are campaigning against a net zero target because “if the Nationals supported net zero emissions we would cease to be a party that could credibly represent farmers.” Nor the deputy prime minister and Nationals’ leader Michael McCormack, who has to publicly support his government but thinks we should exempt agriculture if we adopt a target.

Another National, NSW agriculture minister Adam Marshall, thinks that idea isn’t so flash. “Ring fencing farmers from a net zero carbon target is nothing but political point-scoring based on the needs of those who think in timelines that are based on their political needs, not the future of agriculture.” He wonders how farmers can help shape policy and take advantage of the opportunities it opens up if they are excluded from the target. “What I want is for farmers to be paid for the valuable environmental benefits they bring to the table for New South Wales, for biodiversity, carbon, renewables, sustainable agriculture and so many other untapped potential income streams. By cutting them out you’re cutting them off.”

Farmer bodies long ago left the federal Nationals in their wake. The National Farmers’ Federation has a target of net zero emissions by 2050. Meat and Livestock Australia and the grain industry are aiming for net zero by 2030, and the pork industry by 2025. The National Party used to be the farmer’s friend but these days you have to wonder: carving out industries may be in the interests of the coal and other fossil fuel interests that donate generously to the Nationals, but it is not in the interests of farmers.

With net zero emissions targets promised by most developed countries and every Australian state government, Liberal and Labor, with public opinion in favour of stronger action, with US president Joe Biden foreshadowing a comprehensive set of policies to tackle climate change and British prime minister Boris Johnson announcing a green industrial revolution, how long can the Morrison government hold back the tide?

One of the last occasions the moderates took a significant public stand was in 2006 when three backbenchers, Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent and Judi Moylan, crossed the floor of the House of Representatives to vote against the offshore processing of asylum seekers. When Judith Troeth threatened to do the same in the Senate, Howard withdrew the legislation rather than face defeat. It turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for the moderates, with the Gillard government enacting the same policy six years later.

Since then the moderates have been on the back foot. But the stirrings in the ranks suggest that reports of their death have been exaggerated. The big test will be the future course of national climate policy. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Wherever they live, these sacrifices would be easier for the well-off. They may even enjoy the challenge of building a house and going off-grid. Getting around in electric cars should be easier because there would be so much less traffic, and although carbon credits would be expensive the wealthy few would be able to enjoy Paris and Venice as they used to be enjoyed, without having to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi.

That’s one of four paths to 2050 that Per Espen Stoknes describes in his new book, Tomorrow’s Economy. But there’s a problem with that scenario: green de-growth might appeal to environmental purists, but if humanity set out on such a path it would prove to be unsustainable, because it involves a significant rise in unemployment and worsening inequality.

Stoknes wants us to understand that the choice between fulfilling our economic aspirations and preventing destructive climate change is a false dichotomy. Worse: it’s a dichotomy that reinforces political polarisation and therefore stymies meaningful action on greenhouse gas emissions and other serious environmental problems.

We don’t have to choose between the two, he argues: we can enjoy economic growth while dealing with climate change. In fact, the industrial transformation involved in reducing greenhouse gas emissions will itself be a source of growth. What counts is the type of growth. But we’ve been conditioned, whether we’re on the “left” or the “right,” to associate economic growth with the destruction of natural resources.

Stoknes’s argument is hardly radical. The big financial services company Goldman Sachs, for example, points out that limiting global warming will require up to US$30 trillion in green energy infrastructure over the next twenty years, all of it boosting GDP, and this investment is already under way. We might observe that it is only in politically backward countries like Australia that the dichotomy still holds strong sway.

But Stoknes contributes more to our understanding than simply advocating green growth. He shows how our accounting systems — particularly our national accounting systems, with their emphasis on GDP growth — hold back our thinking and creativity.

Again, this is hardly radical. Anyone who has studied basic macroeconomics knows the shortcomings of GDP as an indicator of wellbeing. It measures only monetised transactions; it fails to take account of natural resource depletion; and many things that are detrimental to human wellbeing show up as contributors to GDP growth. Pollution-induced illness, for example, does wonders for stimulating activity in healthcare, thus boosting GDP.

But the kind of economic activity captured by GDP has assumed primacy in government policy. To confirm that, we need only consider the hoopla around Australia’s twenty “recession free” years until the coronavirus spoiled the game. (Note that even a recession is framed in the positive language of growth, as two quarters of “negative growth.”)

A Marxist would attribute the focus on GDP to the power of those who profit from financialisation, but Stoknes looks at it from a psychological perspective, drawing on his experience as a psychotherapist before he moved into business and economics. Put simply, we are creatures who find growth fulfilling: growth is good, and the idea of living in a world without growth is unappealing to us. As he explained in a 2017 Ted Talk on apocalypse fatigue, we’re not going to be persuaded to adopt the ascetic “de-growth” lifestyle by warnings of disaster.

“Is a healthy type of growth possible,” he asks, “and if so, what kind of therapy will it take to lure our economic minds away from destructive growth and toward healthy growth?” His case for green growth is couched in conservative language: it’s a matter of avoiding waste while still providing for life’s comforts in ways that don’t have a negative environmental footprint.

More specifically, Stoknes asks how we can think about growth without assuming it involves the depletion of natural resources and damage to life-support systems. To do this, he takes the reader on a short historical tour of economic ideas.

For a long time, he says, humans were concerned about how to allocate physical capital and labour efficiently, with natural resources considered plentiful enough not to worry about — until we realised that they too were limited. Here, he is mainly updating the Club of Rome’s 1972 work on limits to growth, using recent data collected by ANU’s Will Steffen and his colleagues tracking twenty-four indicators of unsustainable demand for natural resources — in primary energy use, tourism, tropical forest loss and ocean acidification, to name a few. In 1972 the world population was 3.9 billion; now it is 7.8 billion; and almost every human on the planet, in rich or poor countries, is demanding more natural resources than he or she did in 1972.

Although we are aware of it, we still aren’t accounting for that depletion of resources. As the economist Partha Dasgupta points out in a report on the economics of biodiversity released last month by the British government, even though we now recognise our negative impact on ecosystems, we tend to believe that human ingenuity can overcome nature’s scarcity. We are very concerned to see our human-made capital allocated efficiently, and we take great care to keep track of labour productivity. But where do we account for natural resource productivity?

This is where Stoknes gets into the economics of decoupling growth from natural resource depletion. Put simply — as he does on a two-by-two matrix — we can have “growth” or “de-growth,” and our path can be “green” (with a shrinking environmental footprint) or “grey” (a growing environmental footprint). Most countries are on a grey growth path, but if a country can improve its GDP while using fewer natural resources then it can get itself on a path of green growth.

Importantly, green growth isn’t confined to the realm of theoretical models: Stoknes reports that Sweden — measured by its carbon footprint, at least — has been on a green growth path for all of the twenty-first century. (When a Norwegian compliments a Swedish achievement it must be credible!)

In what he acknowledges to be a recontextualisation of Thomas Piketty’s famous formula showing how the return on assets (r) is greater than economic growth (g), and hence that inequality will grow unless other action is taken, Stoknes introduces the symbol rp for the change in resource productivity. According to his simple formula, if rp > g then green growth is happening.

It’s a neat presentation, but how can resource productivity be improved? If the world is to enjoy real economic growth of at least 2 to 3 per cent a year, and if we are to meet zero emissions by 2050, the annual rate of resource-productivity improvement has to be very high — in the order of 5 to 6 per cent. Resource productivity is certainly improving, but for most technologies — fuel use in internal combustion engines, for instance — we are in the zone of diminishing returns, at nothing like the rate necessary to meet 2050 greenhouse gas targets.

On top of that, as Stoknes points out, technologies that improve resource use have rebound effects. If we get better at squeezing more useful energy out of gas or coal, demand will rise, partially or wholly offsetting any improvement in resource productivity.

At this point some would say there is no way out while we stick with capitalism, a system that valorises growth based on resource exploitation. But Stoknes believes capitalism is redeemable. Like Dasgupta, he wants us to change our focus from labour productivity to resource productivity. This, he writes, is the necessary “paradigm shift toward a better version of capitalism.”

The term “paradigm shift” has been grossly overused in recent times: the philosopher Thomas Kuhn would turn in his grave if he knew how it has been misunderstood. But Stoknes is indeed calling for a fundamental change in the way we think about economics, and that is because we have still not integrated natural resources into our economic models. He sees the transition to an economy based on resource productivity as yet another wave of innovation — a Kondratieff wave “riding on top of digitalisation” — that is qualitatively different from simply applying digital technologies to existing business models.

His focus is on meeting greenhouse gas targets. Indeed, a shortcoming in his work is that he doesn’t give much attention to difficult trade-offs within resource use. Sometimes, for instance, the green benefits of hydro power will have to be traded off against the green benefits of farmers and fishers engaged in sustainable food production. Elsewhere, we need to take account of the stress imposed on the environment by mining lithium for batteries for electric vehicles.

This kind of trade-off is complex unless some common metric can be found. While some environmental costs and benefits can be translated into monetary terms, analytical methods such as contingent valuation and discounting are based on arbitrary assumptions about people’s trade-offs across time. But Stoknes gives plenty of examples of where resource-productivity considerations have brought extraordinary results, in projects ranging from breweries to buildings.

One firm he mentions, a carpet manufacturer, managed to achieve more than 100 per cent resource productivity (at least as far as CO₂ is concerned) by sequestering more carbon than it uses in its supply chain. “Why aim for just zero emissions,” he asks, “when we could aim for a climate-positive impact instead?”

Stoknes goes further than most of its advocates in recognising that green growth is not necessarily equitable growth. Widening inequality in income and wealth is already fuelling resistance to structural adjustment; and unless it is handled well it can indeed worsen inequality. So he develops another two-by-two matrix with growth–de-growth on one axis and fairness–unfairness on another axis, and even a three-dimensional two-by-two chart bringing in his green–grey dimension.

His approach to growth is in favour of what economists would call a Pareto improvement: for green growth to be politically acceptable there must be no losers. To avoid anyone going backwards in absolute terms, income must be redistributed within a growing pie.

Stoknes’s 3D model deals with each of the dimensions. In tackling climate change, the green dimension will be achieved by fundamental changes in energy production and in food production and distribution. Growth will come about through new governance and economic models in “developing” countries, and equity will be achieved through Pareto redistributions and investment in education, gender equality and health. These ideas about equitable growth align closely with the work of scholars including Thomas Piketty and Robert Putnam.

Although Stoknes wants innovation to be supported by appropriate pricing — the case for a carbon price is such a no-brainer that he hardly mentions it — he also calls for a strong role for government. The private sector can’t do it on its own: “Just imagine what might happen if the broad majority viewed government as being more entrepreneurial than bureaucratic, more stimulating than stifling, and more guardian of your personal freedom and safety rather than overreaching invader.”

In his optimism and practicality his views could hardly be further from those of Australia’s federal government, immobilised by its inability to think beyond the economy–environment dichotomy. •

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Prime minister Bob Hawke and Keating, his treasurer and successor, won support for tough reforms — holding down wages and instead giving workers universal healthcare and superannuation, subjecting once-universal welfare benefits to income and asset tests — because Australians felt themselves to be economically vulnerable. Being a big agricultural exporter was no longer a ticket to wealth. The elites of left and right agreed: we had to reform, work harder, change our game.

Ross Garnaut was at the forefront of that reform surge. He was Hawke’s economic adviser, then Australian ambassador to China and, from a prestigious base at the Australian National University, an influential advocate for free trade and enmeshing Australia in the Asia-Pacific. His 1989 report advocating scrapping tariff protection for manufacturing to make other industries more globally competitive was crucial to the government’s decision to do just that, which saw 130,000 manufacturing jobs wiped out.

At the 1996 election, John Howard swept Keating away, pledging to make Australians “relaxed and comfortable.” He led one last big reform, the introduction of the GST, and that was it. Reform gave way to media management, giveaways to voters, culture wars designed to wedge opponents, and help for vested interests. In this century the only big economic reform worth the name came when the crossbenches forced the Gillard government to adopt a carbon price, which the Coalition then scrapped on coming to office.

Garnaut played a key role in that reform too, after Kevin Rudd (one of his junior diplomats in Beijing days) asked him to write a report weighing up Australia’s climate change options and Julia Gillard brought him into the final negotiations on how to make a carbon price work. But the return of the Coalition in 2013 saw him back on the outer, as any prospect of serious economic reform disappeared.

While Bill Shorten’s period as leader raised hopes that Labor in government could renew its zeal for reform, a government led by Anthony Albanese looks no more likely to take tough decisions than a Coalition one. Those who see urgent need for reforms seem to be talking to ourselves; those able to do anything about them are simply not interested.

Ross Garnaut is undeterred. His new book, Reset: Restoring Australia after the Pandemic Recession, is a wide-ranging almanac of reform proposals to give Australia a better future: on economic, social and environmental fronts. At times, he seems to be talking directly to the Morrison government, as if hoping that it has Australia’s long-term interests at heart, despite evidence to the contrary, and could be persuaded to embark on politically difficult reforms to secure them.

Appeals to revive the spirit of the Hawke–Keating government under this government frankly seem like a waste of breath. But it is the fate of reformers to debate reform options in their own minds and with those they respect, and Garnaut’s book is full of them, all focused on creating an Australia with full employment — as soon as possible — rising standards of living, sustainable finances, and world-leading new industries based on renewable energy.

Most of the media coverage of the book has focused on Garnaut’s proposals for macroeconomic reform: lifting the growth rate by reshaping and reducing taxes, and financing those changes by issuing new government bonds bought directly by the Reserve Bank. This would further increase the federal deficit, at least initially, and loosen monetary policy to levels comparable to other Western countries, leading indirectly to a lower Australian dollar, and a more competitive economy.

Restoring full employment by transforming our international competitiveness is one of the two key themes of the book. But the other is equally central: to achieve this will require business and government to rapidly develop Australia’s new international competitive advantage in renewable energy and the products dependent on it: the hydrogen economy, ammonia and fertilisers, metal refining, and downstream processing in products such as steel and aluminium.

The macroeconomic agenda is the logical place to start. And for an economist known as a voice of orthodoxy, Garnaut’s proposals show how far that orthodoxy has moved since 2008.

He cuts through the spin we hear about Australia’s economic performance in the past decade, in what Garnaut likes to call the “Dog Days.” As I too have argued, it was unimpressive, whether compared with our past experience or with our international peers. Unemployment stalled above 5 per cent, underemployment swelled, real wages stagnated as never before, and GDP growth rates looked okay only because they were inflated by high immigration.

Without a policy reset, Garnaut argues, that past is what Australia risks going back to as we emerge from this recession. He gives the government high marks for dropping its deficit fetish after Covid-19 struck, when it successfully pumped money into households and business to stimulate spending. But like other economists, he argues it switched its focus too quickly to reining in future deficits when the bigger job is to get people back to work.

He boldly, and rightly, assails the misuse by the Reserve Bank, Treasury and others of the concept of the NAIRU (the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”), an estimate of how low unemployment can fall without causing rising inflation. The NAIRU makes good theoretical sense but in reality is impossible to calculate accurately when no such events happen. In 2012 the US Federal Reserve estimated the limit for the United States was 5.5 per cent. Yet by 2019 unemployment was 3.5 per cent and inflation almost non-existent.

Except for Western Australia during the labour shortage of the first resources boom, wage growth has not driven up inflation in Australia since the 1980s. Treasury’s estimate of the NAIRU as 5 per cent, and the Reserve Bank’s estimate of “4-point-something” are equally phoney. As Garnaut says, “We simply don’t know, and we won’t know until unemployment falls to a level at which wages rise at an accelerating rate.” He suggests aiming for a 3.5 per cent unemployment rate, and then lower unless inflation is “accelerating dangerously out of the top of the Reserve Bank’s target range.”

To get to 3.5 per cent unemployment by 2025, he estimates that Australia needs to create 1.2 million new jobs in just four years. That is a huge task, considering the headwinds we face: “the huge legacy of public debt, a smaller capital stock per person (because of low business investment)… major losses in export industries… reduced productivity… the effects of climate change, an ageing population… [and] lower population and workforce growth.”

Garnaut makes a second bold but correct call: don’t return to high immigration levels. In the past decade or two, net overseas migration has averaged 1 per cent of the nation’s population every year, mostly from people coming (or staying on) here to work, and taking jobs that in the past went to school leavers or graduates, whether in service stations or in IT and the like.

I have written about this several times. Between 2008 and 2016, roughly three-quarters of all net growth in full-time jobs went to new migrants. Of the 474,000 full-time jobs added in that time, only 74,000 went to workers born in Australia, while 168,000 went to workers born on the Indian subcontinent. Treasury looked at a different set of years and found similar numbers.

“Immigration now lowers the incomes and employment prospects of low-income Australians,” Garnaut concludes. “Integration into a global labour market [has]… contributed to persistent unemployment, rising underemployment… stagnant real wages [and]… a historic shift in the distribution of income from wages to profits.” Temporary worker migration in reality is not focused on solving skill shortages, as promised, and migrant workers are frequently exploited, as Age journalist Adele Ferguson has shown.

Garnaut argues for halving the annual net immigration rate to 0.5 per cent: in round figures, 125,000 a year rather than 250,000. Of all his reform proposals, it is one of the most viable politically.

To create those 1.2 million jobs by 2025, both fiscal and monetary policy must be set unambiguously to expansion. The Reserve Bank, Garnaut says, needs to accelerate as hard as most other central banks in the West are doing to bring the dollar down and make Australian producers more competitive. (He notes that Australia might still be making cars had the Reserve understood the damage it was doing to our competitiveness by failing to halt the dollar’s rise during the resources boom. In the new age of electric vehicles, there is no one left here to make them.)

I would add one caution, however. We can’t ask the Reserve to correct the damage from bad government policies: only governments can do that, and none of our recent governments has wanted to. So low interest rates once again are igniting an explosion of tax-driven investment in rental property that will deprive growing numbers of Australians of the chance to own their own home, perhaps forever.

On budget policy, Garnaut empathises with the Coalition’s desire to start reducing the deficit to minimise the debt it will bequeath to future governments — but concludes that this is not the time for it. The government, like the Reserve, should still have its foot on the accelerator, not the brake, and he has two big ideas on how to go about it:

• The complex tax and welfare system should be simplified to (mostly) one flat tax rate and one big welfare payment. The payment would be what is variously called a universal basic income or negative income tax — Garnaut prefers to call it the Australian Income Security, or AIS — which would guarantee all Australian citizens (except those too rich to qualify) a tax-free payment of about $15,000 a year, topped up with further payments for those who are aged, disabled, unemployed or parents with dependent children.

Conversely, all income from the first dollar would be taxed at the rate of 37 per cent up to $180,000, and 45 per cent above that. The combination of the AIS and the tax would make this more egalitarian than it might appear. Garnaut argues that it would provide a stronger welfare net, provide greater incentive to work, simplify tax and welfare administration, and provide an immediate (but temporary) boost to demand.

• Business taxation would no longer be levied on profits, but on cashflow. This would make all investment spending immediately deductible against tax, providing a permanent incentive to higher investment. But interest payments and financing costs would no longer be deductible, except for banks and financial firms, and payments overseas for royalties, marketing and management fees would be deductible only if they were incurred directly in producing the firm’s output.

Conversely, however, companies with a negative cashflow would receive a cash credit, effectively paid for by other taxpayers. For those other taxpayers, that is a risky part of the design. A similar promise of a blank cheque for losses was one factor in the downfall of the Rudd government’s mining tax in 2010.

Garnaut argues that a cashflow tax would provide an incentive to investment, especially on risky projects. (BHP’s plan to build a fast rail line between Melbourne and Sydney in the early 1990s fell over when the Keating government declined to give it such tax treatment.) He also claims that removing deductions for interest payments and payments for imported intellectual property (often to a related company) would remove “the main opportunities for corporate tax avoidance and evasion.”

It’s an idea that’s been around a long time without any country adopting it. The Republicans in Washington flirted with a version of it a few years ago, but Donald Trump killed that idea.

• Garnaut also raises a third suggestion that is much easier to implement and could provide the right sort of stimulus: dump the convention that requires cost–benefit studies of infrastructure projects to use a discount rate of 7 per cent per annum above inflation to estimate the future value of projects in today’s dollars. At one time, that vaguely matched reality, but it was long ago. In an age of minimal interest rates, the convention is inaccurate, unscientific and harmful to good decision-making.

Frankly, it seems unlikely that any Australian government will implement either of Garnaut’s two big tax and welfare reforms in the near term. The Morrison government’s derisory cup-of-coffee-a-day increase to Newstart despite widespread bipartisan support for real reform shows its aversion to tackling the hard work of economic restructuring. Anthony Albanese seems to want people to like him, above all, and thus to avoid conflict — which unfortunately is an inevitable by-product of reform.

In Garnaut’s view, the Australian economy is facing so many headwinds that business as usual will not generate the jobs required to restore full employment. We need to try a new tack: to rephrase Ken Henry’s famous advice to the Rudd government: “Go hard, go early, go renewables.”

As he spelt out in his 2019 book Superpower: Australia’s Low-Carbon Opportunity, Garnaut sees Australia’s vast land mass and solar radiation as a resource that no other country can match in the dawning age of renewable energy. Just as our coal and gas resources gave us a huge competitive advantage until we began pricing them at global parity, we can produce solar and wind energy more cheaply and plentifully than any comparable country. This could become our leading export industry of the future, as coal exports diminish and gas exports flatline. In his words:

There is no comparable opportunity for profitable expansion of business investment in other trade-exposed industries. Getting carbon right becomes an integral part of getting economic policy right.

The transformation should begin on a large scale now… It is feasible now to replace most of Australia’s large imports of ammonia-based products (such as fertilisers). Building supply from new plants in rural and provincial Australia that rely on renewable energy and hydrogen — at prices competitive with high-emission alternatives — can happen in time to contribute to full employment in 2025.

Zero-emissions electricity at prices within the range required to keep established mainland aluminium smelters alive is possible now. By contrast, aluminium smelting at Gladstone, Newcastle and Portland would not survive through the 2020s with continuous coal-based power supply.

[With budget subsidies]… the first commercial-scale hydrogen-based iron-making plant can be built as part of the movement to full employment. Make a start on commercial-scale plants, and more business investment will follow.

In Garnaut’s view, the hydrogen economy is not for the distant future, it is something we should start creating now. British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, with whom he has worked, last month launched a feasibility study for an industrial-scale hydrogen-fuelled steel plant at Dunkirk. Three separate consortia are progressing plans to build renewables-powered hydrogen plants in the Pilbara to supply domestic and Asian markets. He sees traditional coal and gas centres like Gladstone becoming centres of hydrogen production and metal refining using renewable energy.

Not all agree. The day Garnaut’s book was released, BlueScope’s chief executive, Mark Vassella, said it plans to use old technology to update its Port Kembla steelworks, warning that “green steel” might not become mainstream for another twenty years.

But many of Australia’s heavy industrial plants will not last that long. And as the laggard of the Western world in reducing greenhouse emissions from industry, Australia now faces the prospect of tariffs in Europe and North America to force it to speed up its transition.

Garnaut argues that green steel, green aluminium and green fertilisers will command premium prices in the renewable era. Australia should be a first mover in using its wind and solar resources to produce them.

He is practical, not religious, in his outlook. Unlike the green lobby, he sees gas playing a prominent role in Australia’s future, backed by carbon capture and storage in areas where that is geologically feasible. But renewables, not gas, are the main game — and our economic flagship of the future.

One subject that appears rarely in this book is China. When Garnaut has been one of Australia’s foremost experts on China for almost four decades, that is surprising, but also a sign that we live in dangerous times.

When he does touch on China, he is careful but clear-eyed. He advises Australian firms to look to develop other markets, especially in Southeast Asia, and warns that ultimately China will look for other sources of iron ore, and of so much else that it once bought from us.

The one passage in which he does address Sino-Australian relations directly is, in my opinion, worth thinking carefully about:

There does not seem to be any early prospect of the restrictions in Sino-Australian trade lifting to leave clear air. There are real issues of Australian security to be managed. There are real Chinese responses to Australian initiatives. Australia and China will respond from time to time in ways that are influenced by the shifting dynamics of US politics and international engagement.

What might be possible is a narrowing of restriction to the minimum necessary for meeting clearly defined and essential security interests, as analysis and the passing of time causes us to see them. This will make heavy demands on Australian knowledge and analysis. It will take subtle and intense diplomacy.

It will require Australians to adjust to the realities of living in a perilous world, in which peace and prosperity, and our effective sovereignty, depend on understanding the world as it is and not as we wish it to be.

This is a world that has been inhabited by other countries of modest size alongside great powers since the beginning of the nation state. It is a world that is understood from history by our Western Pacific neighbours South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand — and by the neighbours of great powers in Europe and Central and North America.

There is pain and wisdom in these words. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Morrison is sometimes depicted as a more transactional, flexible and opportunistic leader, reflecting his background in marketing, whereas Howard was generally seen as remarkably consistent in his views. Yet many of Morrison’s and Howard’s positions are surprisingly similar. As immigration minister, Morrison built on Howard’s resistance to asylum seekers arriving by boat. Howard had his “mainstream” Australians (often code for Anglo-Celts in traditional gender relationships); Morrison has his “quiet Australians,” the people who are not “shouty voices on the fringes telling us what we’re supposed to be angry and outraged about” but get on with working hard to support their families. Both Howard and Morrison attempted to appeal to a wide range of Australians, including traditional Labor voters.

The pair also share socially conservative beliefs. They both opposed marriage equality, with Morrison being one of the few parliamentarians who absented themselves from parliament when the legislation was passed following the postal vote survey. Howard’s Methodist background may seem more conventional than Morrison’s Pentecostal one, but both have been influenced by American conservative religious values rather than forms of Christianity that place more emphasis on “social justice” concerns.

But Morrison’s religious views often reflect more recent debates than those prevalent during the Howard era. Morrison has railed against “gender whisperers” seeking to raise transgender issues in schools. He has denounced gender-inclusive notices on toilet doors in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet as “ridiculous” “political correctness.” The Morrison government might have been more supportive of facilitating equality for women than the Howard government but, like Howard, Morrison dismisses feminist critiques of government economic policy as divisive.

Morrison’s attitudes also reflect the apparent influence of the “prosperity gospel,” an American version of Christianity that sees wealth as a God-given reward and poverty as a penalty for the less deserving. Under Morrison, Howard’s mutual obligation requirements for unemployment benefit recipients have been reinforced by a “fair go for those who have a go” mantra. Morrison’s relatively early winding back of more generous Covid-19 related JobKeeper and JobSeeker benefits, along with the small size of the permanent increase to JobSeeker and its strict job search requirements, suggests that he retains his previous views.

Morrison’s attitude to welfare payments gel with his general economic views. Prior to the pandemic, his economic policy reflected a neoliberal, free market approach that was similar to John Howard’s. Both men see tax cuts for business as a way of stimulating economic growth, although Morrison advocates even greater challenges to Australia’s progressive income tax system (which requires those on higher incomes to pay a higher percentage of tax).

Nonetheless, there are significant differences between Morrison and Howard’s views as prime ministers, as well as between the challenges they face.

Clearly Covid-19 has contributed to major, though possibly temporary, shifts in Liberal Party economic orthodoxy. The role of government has grown, and so have budget deficits. But it is a sign of Howard’s stature within the party that Morrison consulted him about going massively into debt to tackle the economic impact of the pandemic. Both he and treasurer Josh Frydenberg were reassured by Howard’s agreement that “no ideological constraints” should be applied at such an unprecedented and dangerous time.

Some social attitudes have also changed since Howard’s day. Howard famously refused to apologise to the stolen generations of Indigenous children, for example, whereas Morrison recently gave an ungrudging apology that built on Kevin Rudd’s apology of thirteen years ago. But it remains to be seen how far the Morrison government will go towards reconciliation, with a clearer government position on Indigenous Voice proposals expected towards the middle of 2021, after the current consultation process.

It is often forgotten that differences also exist in relation to climate change. Despite his reservations about the arguments, Howard went to the 2007 election pledging to introduce an emissions trading scheme and thereby a price on carbon. By contrast, the Morrison government has been happy to suggest that Labor’s relatively modest climate change policies will destroy the economy and cost working-class jobs.

Howard and Morrison also face a very different era in international relations. Howard repeatedly argued that Australia could retain a predominantly Anglo-Celtic identity and values while maintaining good relations with its Asian trading partners. He also suggested that Australia would play a major role in facilitating good relations between China and the United States. A combination of Western-centrism and economic reductionism led to the widespread assumption that the West would remain economically dominant and that China would increasingly liberalise as its economy developed.

Instead we face major challenges to Western economies from Asian competition and an increasingly authoritarian and assertive China under president Xi Jinping. US tensions with China continue to rise. Australia–China trade, security and diplomatic relations are at a many-decades low, with major implications for the Australian economy.

The pandemic has also revealed serious problems in international supply chains and Australia’s manufacturing capacity, especially an overreliance on Chinese manufacturing and a lack of government support for Australian industry. Morrison has acknowledged a “sovereign capability” crisis and pledged to tackle it. But it isn’t clear how well his government will be able to do this, particularly given the Liberal Party’s traditional reservations regarding government intervention in the economy. Pro-business industrial relations reform is part of the package but Morrison is being more cautious than Howard was when he introduced his electorally costly WorkChoices legislation.

Even if managing the pandemic goes smoothly and vaccinations help bring Covid-19 under control, Morrison faces major challenges. Many workers and businesses will continue to feel the impact of the pandemic and will oppose moves to reduce government support in order to rein in government debt. Rebuilding a strong Australian economy will not be as simple as sometimes suggested. By contrast, the Howard government had the benefit of a major mining boom and a massive increase in government revenues.

So, despite some key similarities, Scott Morrison faces very different circumstances from those John Howard faced. Howard famously asserted that “the times will suit me,” and in many ways they did. Morrison is riding high in the polls and, despite the various scandals, is still the favourite to win the next election. But there’s no guarantee the times will continue to suit him. •

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After one of the most turbulent weeks of his political career, though, there is no sign of the embattled Kelly. A large picture of the four-term MP stares out from his office window against an image of the Australian flag in which the Union Jack seems the most striking symbol. Blinds to the street are drawn, and the office looks closed.

“One thing about the Liberals is they don’t have long memories,” says Ian Hancock, historian of the party’s NSW division, when I ask him later about the implications of the rumoured challenge to Kelly’s preselection. “But a long memory in the Liberal Party comes into play when things are going badly.”

For the seat of Hughes, that would be about now.

An outspoken climate change sceptic from the party’s right, Kelly has troubled Scott Morrison’s government even more over his social media campaign against its Covid-19 strategy. The drama came to a head on 3 February when Labor’s Tanya Plibersek confronted Kelly in a Parliament House corridor and accused him of spreading “crazy conspiracy theories.” As a bevy of cameras recorded their confrontation, Plibersek reminded Kelly that her mother lived in his electorate, and declared she didn’t want her exposed to people who refused to be vaccinated because of Kelly’s campaign. So compelling was the encounter that the BBC ran the footage on its main news page.

It was only then that Morrison carpeted Kelly and told him to toe the government’s line. But the dispute kept mounting. On 12 February, Facebook was reported to have removed one of Kelly’s posts in which he opposed children wearing face masks during the pandemic.

The row has raised speculation that Kelly could face serious competition for preselection before the next federal election, which could take place as early as the second half of this year. Just days earlier Kevin Andrews, another seasoned Liberal right-winger, had lost preselection for his safe seat of Menzies in Melbourne. With the Liberal Party more polarised than ever, and the government holding a lower house majority of just three seats, questions are being asked about the likelihood of even more preselection clashes.

Ian Hancock doesn’t rule them out. And he argues that safe Liberal seats could be at more risk of challengers than marginals, at least based on trends from recent years. He cites a version of advice attributed to Enoch Powell, a former British Conservative politician. “For God’s sake win a marginal seat,” Powell once said. No one will challenge you while it stays marginal, and “you can then put your stamp on it and make it a safe seat.”

Over the past eight years, independents have captured two seats long considered impregnably safe Liberal: Indi in Victoria and Warringah in Sydney. After Zali Steggall defeated former prime minister Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019, she put her stamp on the seat by campaigning strongly for action on climate change on behalf of voters fed up with Abbott’s climate denialism.

“These are the sorts of seat the Liberals won’t lose to Labor but to an independent who’s got presence in the electorate,” says Hancock. “Warringah will now be hard for them to get back.” Simple arithmetic dictates that safe seats are more vulnerable because it’s often easier for an independent to get into second place before preferences are distributed.

Hancock sees two forces at play in Kevin Andrews’s preselection loss. Andrews had been the seat’s MP for thirty years, and some Victorian Liberals reckoned it was time for generational change. “This is a very strong thing in Liberal history,” says Hancock. “You don’t hold on to a safe seat if you’re going nowhere.” And enough Liberals saw Andrews as too conservative. He was remembered as the Howard-era immigration minister who cancelled the visa of Mohamed Haneef, an Indian-born doctor, whom Australian authorities had wrongly accused of being linked to a terrorist act in Britain. More recently, he was seen as a strong Abbott supporter.

In Hughes, variations of the forces of change in those other Liberal seats could now determine Craig Kelly’s fate. Hughes (named after former prime minister Billy Hughes) was once solidly Labor, until the transformation of tradies from employees to small businesspeople helped turn it Liberal in the mid 1990s.

The seat embraces the Royal National Park, south of Sydney, and adjoins Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook, facing Botany Bay, on its eastern side. Kelly, a former small businessman, has held Hughes since 2010. Moves were made to challenge him for preselection at the 2016 and 2019 elections, but Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, as respective prime ministers, intervened to stop them. Kelly won the 2019 election with almost 60 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. That was before anyone had heard of Covid-19.

If Kelly faces another competitive bid to take his Liberal candidacy, the most likely challenger would be Kent Johns, who tried to win preselection at the last two elections. Johns has a broader political background than Kelly: once a Labor mayor of Rockdale City Council, he joined the Liberal Party when he was elected to Sutherland Shire Council, where he has been a member for seventeen years, including twice as mayor. He’s also a former vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party.

Johns is avoiding any limelight for now. But the local paper, the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader, says he’s “poised” for another preselection battle and his supporters “are confident he has the numbers to beat Mr Kelly.” Since the political explosion over Kelly’s Covid-19 crusade, three more potential preselection challengers have been reported. And an online community group, We Are Hughes, says it’s searching for an independent candidate to take on Kelly, using the electorates of Indi and Warringah as models. The group will highlight the popular complaint that Kelly seems to spend more time promoting himself and his views on social media and sympathetic radio and television shows than he does in his electorate.

“If a high-profile independent campaign does get under way in Hughes, then I predict Craig Kelly will not be the Liberal candidate,” ABC election analyst Antony Green recently tweeted. “The Liberal Party felt loyalty to support Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019, but I doubt they will have the same view on Craig Kelly.”

A Liberal figure in Hughes takes a similar view of Kelly’s prospects if a preselection challenge happens: “Either a moderate will win or a right-winger will win. That right-winger won’t be Craig Kelly.”

Ian Hancock claims no specific feel for the twists and turns of Hughes. But from his broader perspective, he sees the responses among some Liberals to Kelly’s outlandish views as a sign that the party’s factions will play a key role in the future of Hughes.

In New South Wales, he says, the right faction revived under Bronwyn Bishop, a “factional player, a winner-take-all person” prominent during the Howard government, who herself fell victim to a preselection challenge in 2016. But that’s now changed: “The so-called moderates have come back in New South Wales. They’ve become better organised and they may want to get rid of Kelly.”

Indeed, Kelly’s views on climate and Covid-19 are so outside the mainstream that even Morrison may be too wary of the potential electoral damage to save him a second time. If so, Kent Johns could stand a chance. He’s considered a Liberal moderate, and supports a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

To Hancock, though, another scenario is equally possible. “The factions could agree to do a deal before the election: leave Kelly in Hughes, and in return give the moderates another seat elsewhere,” he says. “The Liberals have learned from Labor to do these factional deals. I wouldn’t have thought Kelly’s days are done. It would be unwise, and a poor reading of Liberal history, to write him off. He’s a man who takes a stand on what he believes. Don’t forget that some Liberals like that.”

On one point, Hancock is pretty certain. “I’d expect any Hughes preselection contest to be held later rather than sooner,” he says. “It would be a case of ‘let’s get through this disaster and hold off for a while.’”

Hancock’s writing about the Liberals gives him a wide authority for such analysis. His biographies have covered the lives of party figures including John Gorton, a former prime minister; Tom Hughes, a former attorney-general in Gorton’s government and still, at ninety-seven, a respected legal figure; Nick Greiner, a former NSW premier; and Ainsley Gotto, Gorton’s former private secretary, who went on to a successful business career.

Hancock is working on yet another biography that will give him an even longer view of the workings of Australian conservative politics. His latest subject is Josiah Henry Symon, a father of Federation. “He arrived in Australia from Scotland in 1866 at the age of twenty with just two boxes of books,” says Hancock. “He went on to become a senator and a master criminal lawyer.” It’s a career that couldn’t be more different from that of the divisive member for Hughes. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Over the past thirteen years the plan for a carbon price has gone from bipartisan policy in 2007 to a reviled, broken promise — a “carbon tax” — barely three years later. (That “tax” was reviled at least until it was introduced in 2012, when its hip-pocket impact barely registered.) After the enfeebling governing arrangement with the Greens came Labor’s seven-plus years in opposition, about which the less said the better.

So the federal opposition won’t take anything very meaningful about climate to the next poll — and who can blame them? After all, they would quite like to be in office again, and as they were reminded in 2019, complicated policies with big price tags are perfectly fine at elections — as long as you’re not on the side proposing them.

Still, Australia’s contribution to global warming, while sky-high per capita, is tiny in absolute terms, and the good news is that Joe Biden’s election as US president seems to have generated momentum for international action. Just this week came reports that Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, has “directed British government departments to come up with options for carbon border levies.” Biden and the European Union have already mooted such approaches.

So while Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese are on a unity ticket that we don’t need to price our carbon, the big international players are saying: no worries, we’ll price your carbon for you — or at least the carbon implicit in what you export — and our governments will pocket the proceeds, thank you very much.

One of the objections to a unilateral carbon price like the one we had from July 2012 to June 2014 (generating revenue of around $10 billion annually, which was ploughed back into people’s pockets) is that it delivers an advantage to competitor countries with laxer environment standards, enabling them to make and sell widgets more cheaply than we can. A concurrent Australian carbon border levy/adjustment/tax, on the other hand, would have evened the playing field by putting a tariff on those goods entering our country.

Under some versions of carbon border adjustments, we would have taken our carbon price off our exports to recalcitrant countries, and off our exports to other countries where our goods compete with goods from the lax country. These policy accessories would have lessened the impact of our carbon price on us, but gone some way to forcing good behaviour on others.

So the fact that these heavy hitters — making up more than a third of the world’s economy — are contemplating such action is potentially great news for the planet. And because Australia is part of the planet, it’s good news for us, albeit with the downside of billions of dollars going to overseas governments via border adjustments every year instead of into our own coffers via a carbon price, entirely due to our own stubbornness.

All going well, other countries will price their own carbon in response, and price others’ too.

Some scream “protectionism!” but the protection is for the planet and its inhabitants against the often catastrophic consequences of ever more climate change. (Is “catastrophic” too strong a word? It seems appropriate for our 2019–20 bushfires.) Others screech “distortionary!” but that is the whole point — to push human behaviour towards producing less greenhouse gas.

In the past, Australian political parties used to get away with keeping ambitious plans under wraps during election campaigns before plonking them on the table midterm. Despite much mythology, the trick was less about the giants of the past explaining the need for reform than about pushing legislation through the Senate and making it law well before people next attended a ballot box. Most of the blessed Hawke and Keating and Howard–Costello reforms (the GST the obvious exception) arrived by this path.

But that’s getting harder and harder, partly because journalists increasingly insist leaders “rule out” policies during election campaigns, and also because of swelling crossbenches in arguably the most powerful upper house in the parliamentary world. The days of policy just needing the agreement of the self-consciously centrist Australian Democrats are long gone.

So, all going well, Australia will have a carbon price, leading to lower emissions, but it will be levied on us by the rest of the world. Our government (that is, we) will miss out on the revenue. One day, maybe, our political system will allow a government to behave rationally and we can price it ourselves. •

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Over the next few weeks we’ll be featuring selections of summer reading from our twelve years of archives — and, of course, highlights from 2020, the year of bushfires, Covid-19, a government that’s taking a long time to wake up to the looming post-carbon reality, and much else.

We’ll be back in full swing at the end of January. In the meantime, have a happy and safe holiday season. •

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With summers cycling closer, hotter, longer — sweating dread — I’ve lately been rummaging through my closet of high Holocene winters: soup on slow combustion stoves, spencers and stockings, coal briquettes, puddles that crack underfoot, frost over paddocks and breath hanging in air, chilblains — remember those? Cold will still come, of course, in extremis, supercharged by wild shifts in the firmament. But the winters of my memory belong to a vanished epoch, and I’m bereft.

This isn’t nostalgia, but rather a condition environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht has identified as “solastalgia,” derived from solace (the lack of it) and desolation: “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.” A fortifying wander back through the geological continuum promises some perspective. Comfort, cold or otherwise, is surely too much to ask.

The plane from Melbourne is scarcely up and it’s down again in Launceston. A two-hour drive west and we’re pulling up on Tasmania’s Central Plateau. The southerly from the Antarctic is brutal but the plateau — the island’s highest landscape — is washed in eye-watering, pale sunlight, the kind that doesn’t warm so much as cook unprotected flesh. On a wide, wild plain not far from Lake Mackenzie, three figures are at work in the middle distance. They’re ecologists mapping environmental refugia, locations where topography, geography and climate have contrived a sweet spot within which besieged species find nurturing conditions for survival.

Even a day or two will do me, in my own search for refuge. Walking out to them, I’m lagging in the sure-footed wake of Ben French, a young ecologist who has enthused about the bush, the threats posed to it by climate change and his PhD subject — a rescue strategy for Athrotaxis cupressoides, Tasmania’s endemic pencil pine — for the length of the ride from the airport. The venerable tree’s majesty is rather lost in translation from the Latin. It dates back 150 million years, one of the oldest surviving plant lineages on Earth.

“There’s just something about them,” says French. “Something charismatic…” He’s struggling for the words, as I will, and do. Google the images of the late, legendary nature photographer Peter Dombrovskis — “Pencil pine at pool of Siloam, Walls of Jerusalem National Park, Tasmania, 1982.” You’ll see our transcendent, gnarly, haunting, humbling, portentous, gobsmacking problem.

The ground beneath my boots feels rubbery, otherworldly — and it is. Sphagnum peat can take millennia to form. It belongs to the same Gondwanan landscape as the pencil pine — the understorey and overstorey of the same primeval narrative. It deserves worship, not clumsy intrusion. It sighs and shifts as I pick a route across spiky hummocks and between clumps of vivid green, velvety cushion plants — up to 1000 years old, sorry, so sorry! — weaving around littered lumps of dolerite and basalt; occasionally stumbling into the sucking quagmire that threads the entire plain.

The bog — but really, who could call it such? — extends over an area the size of several footy grounds, enclosed by stands of snow gums (Eucalyptus coccifera) and a tumble of Jurassic cliffs. It’s a rare, precious ecosystem — a steeping sponge cake of decomposing plants and mosses that purifies and regulates water flows, nurtures biodiversity, and works heroically to cool the planet and mitigate humanity’s spiralling atmospheric crimes. Barely 3 per cent of the Earth’s surface hosts peatlands, yet they soak up and store more carbon than all the world’s other vegetation combined. Damage to these carbon sinks is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and they are being whacked by ever more severe droughts and rampaging firestorms. Which is why efforts to try to restore them, like the one under way here, are imperative.

Everywhere, this plain sprouts ghostly clumps of knee-high, ash-grey antlers — the remains of Richea scoparia, an alpine heath that ordinarily paints a sublime springtime palette of pink and red and creamy yellow across the highlands. But these specimens won’t bloom again. They were roasted in January 2016 when, after a record-breaking spell of heat and drought across the island, dry lightning strikes ignited even these historically non-combustible wetlands. Wildfires consumed almost 20,000 hectares of World Heritage–listed wilderness that summer. And that was merely the curtain-raiser. Three years later, in the summer of 2018–19, blazes sparked by massive dry lightning storms burned another 95,000-plus hectares of wilderness. Months later, these areas are still a no-go zone.

The bog is pockmarked with fire damage of various degrees. The only colours flowering in the rubble of rock, blackened trees and singed earth are fixed to tall rods planted in the ground by the field team — plastic squares of luminous orange, yellow, green, blue that will be used to plot aerial surveys. The crew, huddled in protective layers, is hard at work. Researcher Scott Nichols is doubled over, closely inspecting sphagnum mounds within the patchwork of survey squares. He calls out coordinates to Aimee Bliss, one of two research assistants, who scrawls them on a data sheet along with his diagnosis: “Healthy,” “Damaged,” “Killed.”

Sphagnum is a bryophyte — the oldest of all land plants, and likely the surviving link between aquatic and land plants. The building block for the peatlands ecology, it has no defences against wildfire. The healthy specimens clinging on here, Nichols explains, are mostly edging the puddles in the bog. Understanding in granular detail the response of peatlands to fire is critical to informing evolving efforts to try to preserve and rehabilitate them. His data sheets document vegetation and animal scats, peat depth and acidity. Drone shots will add the microtopography of slope and aspect.

In the next phase Nichols, Bliss and the last of the trio, Cameron Geeves, will peg small canopies of shade cloth over some areas — sphagnum doesn’t like ultraviolet radiation — scatter fertiliser to stimulate growth, and transplant cuttings of healthy growth to burnt areas. Then they will wait and watch and, over years to come, send in the drones to see what, if anything, works.

It’s painstaking, physically battering and psychologically bruising work — these are, after all, lovers of the natural world; scientists with an unblinkered understanding of what is unfolding. I’ve met many like them over fifteen years, on and off, reporting on climate science, and observed the tenor of their distress rising with the temperatures and the parts per million. This is, surely, a doomed endeavour?

No, declares Professor David Bowman, the storied scientist whose work has brought me here, and who is overseeing these projects, when he strides into the picture, a six-foot-something, sixty-one-year-old dervish of energy and flapping Gore-Tex, hollering questions and opinions over the wind. His forty-year scientific career has earned him recognition as one of the world’s foremost fire ecologists. This trial may not save the bog, he concedes. But that won’t constitute failure. What we may learn is that “if we lose one of these bogs, it’s basically gone forever.” Then the work would need to shift: identify unburnt bogs and “make sure they never get burnt.”

But how would this be possible? Bowman starts reeling off strategies that smack of environmental heresy. “It might be getting people with whipper-snippers and cutting a fire break around it. It might be getting solar-powered pumps and irrigating it during the summer. I have no bloody idea.” He expects many people will label such ideas as ridiculous. “But everything’s ridiculous now.”

Bowman was the lead author of a paper published by a cohort of distinguished Australian ecologists and biologists in 2018 urging a radical overhaul of conservation strategies in the Anthropocene, a shift to what they call “renewal ecology.” The noble Edenic ambitions of existing conservation efforts, of recovering ecosystems, were now futile, they argued. Environmental change was “inevitable and irrevocable.” The rate, scale and magnitude of the global crisis demanded hitherto unimaginable efforts to manage ecosystems to maximise the prospects for both biodiversity and humans. Whipper-snippering the wilderness, if that’s what it takes, to salvage what is salvageable.

Renewal ecology is about pushing back, “saying we’ve got nothing to lose,” says Bowman. “The precautionary principle made perfect sense in a non-Anthropocene environment, but once you are in the Anthropocene… it’s pointless. ‘Oh, something bad might happen.’

“No. Something bad is happening.”

As the chunk of the fragmented, fecund supercontinent of Gondwanaland we recognise today as Australia meandered northward, eucalypts and acacias capitalised on warmer, drier conditions, evolving to tolerate and even regenerate through wildfire. Gondwanan survivors like A. cupressoides clung on in damp, cool niches. Tasmania became the lifeboat for paleoendemic species, treasures that today underwrite the World Heritage status of the island’s wilderness.

When Aboriginal people wandered into the scene via a land bridge around 35,000 years ago, they brought fire to manage the landscape — a practice that has long intrigued Bowman. In all their thousands of years of occupancy, he says, Aboriginal fire regimes caused little disturbance to the Gondwanan forests. But since European colonisation, one-third of the island’s pencil pines have gone. Around half the specimens on the Central Plateau were lost in a single summer, 1960–61, when graziers set the bush alight to renew grasslands for their livestock. Until the 1990s, most wildfires were the result of deliberate or inadvertent human ignition. They still are, though these days humanity doesn’t need to strike the match.

Fire scars left on ancient trees and other paleo clues show that lightning has ignited Tasmania in deep history, but this occurred only rarely until 2000. Since then, dry lightning fires have become an almost annual event. In January 2016, after some of the driest and warmest months on record, eighty dry lightning fires ignited across western Tasmania. On 15 January 2019 — a single day — over 2000 strikes sparked more than sixty bushfires. Bowman likens what played out to “an alien spaceship coming in and just attacking the island with lightning bolts.”

While there’s been wide speculation that lightning activity is increasing, continuing work by scientists indicates that this is likely not the case. The lightning has always been there, they argue. What’s changed is that these bolts find the kindling for an incendiary new regime. As the planet heats, the rains produced by the low-pressure systems that nurtured the ecosystems of southern Australia over the aeons have been drifting south, falling into the sea, while evaporation is increasing. “Ongoing climate change is making dry spells longer and more frequent, increasing the fire prone area of Tasmania,” scientists explained in the Conversation in the wake of the 2019 fires. “Almost the whole state is becoming vulnerable to dry lightning.”

Leaving the sphagnum crew to their work, we set out across the singed landscape of Eagle Valley towards a site that the scientists unromantically identify as “Unburnt South.” First we must traverse a swathe of desolate, burnt country, dropping in on locations where French has been doing some research gardening, planting pencil pine seeds under a range of conditions he will monitor for years to come.

Bowman, a hiker since his teens, is as weather-beaten as the country, but moves across it at a cracking pace. He launches into a running, unfiltered commentary on the scene. “It was horrible,” of course, what happened here, he says, surveying scorched rocks and trees. “But it was amazing, there was so much learning and science, and then you are reframing thinking and breaking it down and building it up… Do I really believe that we can restore these systems? Well, as the world’s warming, it’s probably a 1000-year program to be planting seeds. It’s an amazing gesture.”

Lightning ignited what became the Mersey Forest Fire Complex on 13 January 2016, and over the next week blazes raged and merged, outrunning the capacity of local and interstate crews to respond. The firestorm gained such power it was spotting up to nine kilometres ahead as it exploded up Devils Gullet — a deep, narrow glacial gorge — and onto the plateau here at Lake Mackenzie. The peatlands smouldered until May.

Images shot in late January by photographer Rob Blakers, who built his reputation capturing the beauty of the Tasmanian wilderness, revealed the shattering scale of the loss — one of the world’s most treasured ecosystems reduced to a patchwork of char and toasted cushion plants. “The Central Plateau is littered by the gaunt skeletons of burnt pencil pines,” Blakers wrote in the Hobart Mercury, a tragedy that “brings grief to anyone who has a sense of what the living tree is like.” Bowman told the Age/Sydney Morning Herald that the vanishing of these trees was akin to “losing the thylacine.” He pulled no punches: “I think I would be being unethical and unprofessional if I didn’t form the diagnosis and say what it is — climate change. Under the current rate of warming I think this ecosystem will be gone in fifty years.”

That quote captured something of a seismic professional and personal moment, Bowman recalls. For years, he’d been tissue-wrapping his commentary with the customary caveats of science, “always sort of dancing on the spot… ‘Oh well, you know fires and the historical context, we can’t really say what’s climate change.’ And I just said, ‘This is what climate change looks like it. This is it.’ I just was over it.”

He argues for interventions like planned burnings, recognising that this looms as a “philosophical rupture” with the concept of self-sustaining wilderness, one that offends many conservationists and greens. But the vulnerability of the bush in the Anthropocene “has raised profound philosophical questions, and ongoing political discussion, about acceptable responses to the impacts of climate change on this World Heritage area.”

Ben French summons us to look at one of his sites, where he’s sown pencil pine seeds that happened — in a bit of cosmic good luck — to have been collected by the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens for their seed bank not long before the fires. “I’m trying to capture all the variability within a site,” he explains, dispersing seeds between sphagnum hummocks, some up on the top, some down on the wet edges of the bog. Half of them are protected by small teepees of galvanised mesh, the remainder are at the mercy of herbivore grazers foreign and domestic — wallabies, wombats, rabbits and possums the lead culprits.

“Jo — you’ve walked between the markers!”

“Oh shit — did I just kill it?”

French assures me not. His anxious expression says otherwise.

Athrotaxis cupressoides can take fifty years to reach just a metre in height. Individual stems have been aged at over 1000 years, though it’s suspected they may be much older. The pencil pine and the King Billy pine, A. selaginoides, are a rare pair, the only extant species of their ancient genus.

Relic Gondwana: a glade of Athrotaxis cupressoides, or pencil pine. Jo Chandler

“Let’s imagine this works,” says Bowman. “Let’s be really optimistic — say some of these seeds take, and they germinate into little seedlings, then Ben will come here when he’s my age and say, ‘I did that.’ That would be awesome.” The other possibility, he expands, is that “we learn that it is just not going to work.” We learn that to salvage the species we’re going to have to find locations where it survives “and we’re going to irrigate it, and we’re going to have bloody fire breaks, and we’re going to save these things because we love them… It would be quite possible, theoretically, to excavate a pencil pine, dig it up with a crane, put it on the back of a truck and take it somewhere and plant it.”

The idea of translocating vulnerable species — plants and animals — out of harm’s way, once the solution of last resort, has gained pace and reluctant acceptance in triaging the Anthropocene emergency. Bowman raises the prospect of moving pencil pine specimens to botanic gardens, or cultivating them somewhere like Macquarie Island, where conditions may suit them for a while yet. This is the same guy who controversially argued in a Nature article a few years ago that one option for managing remote Australia’s multiple ecological problems was to bring in elephants and rhinos to control invasive, highly combustible gamba grass. “Of course, introducing large mammals cannot solve all of Australia’s ecological-management conundrums,” he wrote. “But the usual approaches… aren’t working. The full spectrum of options needs to be canvassed in an open and honest way.”

After an hour or so marching in the footprint of the inferno, surrounded by the agonies of ashen limbs reaching into blue sky, we finally find our way into Unburnt South. Indigo pools of water are surrounded by mounds of heath and greenery and stands of pencil pines. Surveying the growth under one of them, French leans in and gently teases out a young wild-sown pencil pine shoot — barely up to his first knuckle, it requires the keenest eye to find.

There’s a dense glade of A. cupressoides gathered in the lee of a cliff, a cathedral of surviving Gondwana. Stepping inside, it’s a tangle of moss and lichen, carpets of russet and yellow under labyrinthine branches. They’ve meandered over centuries of unhurried life, bulging joints wrapped in the wrinkled flesh of grey, flaking bark. The foliage, tendrils of delicate green, utterly unlike the familiar dressings of nearby eucalypts, turns to shades of pink and burgundy where it falls into the litter of magnificent decay.

The tree trunks are crowded close, sometimes leaning in unison, then suddenly individuals turning towards… what? It’s been discovered only lately that these are clonal organisms. “They’re all connected by underground stems and root suckers,” explains Bowman. “When you get your eye in, you can see they grow in clumps, or they grow in lines, and they’re very, very, very old.” How old surviving clones like these might be is difficult to say, but as explained in a Nature paper Bowman co-authored, at least some individuals may be survivors from the first seedlings that established on freshly exposed ground following the retreat of the ice sheet after the Last Glacial Maximum. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility they’ve been in situ for 10,000 years just spreading out,” he expands.

Perhaps this glade is a single organism — communicating, socialising and supporting itself via an intricate web of hidden roots and fungal filaments, conspiracies of insects and the chemistry of scent. Science has only lately begun to crack the coded language of trees, the social network of what’s being dubbed the “wood wide web,” which enables the forest community to share resources like water, to protect and care for its members and to warn them of dangers.

Shafts of sunlight insinuate themselves through the canopy, illuminating spiderwebs and bouquets of burnished moss that look more like they belong to the seabed than the forest floor. The light is dreamy. Breathing Gondwana, this inheritance of tens of millions of years of growth and renewal and survival provides some powerful solace. Wanting nothing so much as to lie down in this faerie dell and quietly metamorphose, I recall the theory that trees pump out perfumes to protect themselves from intruders. A. cupressoides is wafting something seductive, sedative. It’s all I can do to return to my time.

Following our trio of lengthening shadows back out across the fire zone, the Anthropocene — or the Pyrocene, as Bowman’s US colleague, Stephen J. Pyne declares it — feels all the more achingly impoverished. But Bowman weighs in with an unexpected take. Ecology is complicated, he observes. Climate change adds to that complexity. “It’s shape-shifting, like those games people have with the strings between their fingers… The same stuff can be rearranged and you get different outcomes.” Many of these may seem to represent an undoing. But there are other shapes to conjure.

American environmental activist and deep ecology scholar Joanna Macy talks about the epic collision now playing out, of “The Great Unravelling, under the pressure of the destruction caused by the industrial growth society” versus “The Great Turning… the transition to a life-sustaining society” built on new and sometimes very old ways of holding the land, generating energy, producing food. “The awesome thing about the moment that you and I share is that we don’t know which is going to win out. How is the story going to end?” So she said in an interview a decade ago. I wonder if she still believes the outcome is in the balance.

“The problem with the Anthropocene is that it can be presented as an end-of-times end, whereas really what it is is a threshold,” says Bowman. “It’s going into a new state, things are reassembling.” We need to try to find a different, more optimistic lens, he argues, or to at least be striving to learn from what is unfolding, to not see everything through the prism of what we’re losing or have lost. It will take another conversation or two for it to dawn that while I am flailing about in stages three, four and five of my grieving (anger, bargaining, depression), Bowman has long since graduated through testing and acceptance and is craning his neck towards the sunlit uplands.

“Okay, I’ve got a confession to make,” he says, pulling up and gesturing to a stand of casualties of the wildfires. “Even those dead pencil pines to me have a fantastic beauty about them. It’s killed, and it’s sad, but I can’t get angry about the fire… this was nature, nature started it.”

But it’s not, I object. It’s deeply unnatural — “nature kicked in the arse by human-driven climate change.”

“Yes, there is the stupidity,” he concedes, and pushes on. “If you say, ‘Okay, we want to make war with the climate,’ then the climate is going to win. It’s just going to crush us… [But] I can look at this and I go, ‘Well, you know it’s changing. It got burnt. It’s sad, but it’s regenerating, and there is going to be life here, and it’s still a beautiful landscape’… Even if all the pines get killed, it’s still beautiful.”

French agrees to the extent that yes, “the fact that it’s copped a beating and has changed doesn’t mean it is a write-off.” But the young man is less phlegmatic about what is playing out. “I find it really tragic, personally. It’s an area where I’ve spent a lot of time. Which I’m really attached to. I love pencil pines.”

“So do I,” Bowman interjects.

“I find it hard to be optimistic about it, going forward,” says French. “I find it quite upsetting.”

We rejoin the sphagnum crew for the night in a hut on the parched shores of Lake Mackenzie, sharing a vat of spicy vegetables stewed on a wood stove by lamplight. We’re stripped to our sweaty thermals, boots and socks drying by the hearth. Outside it’s bitterly cold, and the intergalactic views stretch from horizon to horizon. Inside it’s cosy and convivial, albeit a little ripe.

As a non-scientist and serial intruder on fieldwork, I love the raw exhaustion and intimacy of this downtime, where scientific problems and camp menus are deliberated with equal weight; where clever, curious and often unconventional beings are cloistered with their histories, preoccupations and foibles away from the distractions of the workaday world. It’s in these moments I’ve often found the most revelatory morsels for my notebooks. But this evening is just the warm-up.

Next morning, we take a short drive to the lookout over Devils Gullet, a platform levitating above sheer grey cliffs “carved out by ice and water moving off the plateau,” a sign advises. It allows 180-degree views over 200 million years of history: the “intrusion of hard dolerite rocks from deep within the Earth,” the uplift of the plateau, the advance and retreat of the ice sheet half-a-dozen times over the past two million years, the most recent glaciation peaking around 20,000 years ago. And, in all directions, the scars of the inferno that tore through here three summers gone. Spectral forests stripped of their canopy.

“Doesn’t it break your heart, to see all that burnt?”

“No, not really,” Bowman shrugs. “They’re eucalypts — it will regenerate. In fact, I’m surprised how much it has regenerated.” The lesson of so many years exploring biology is that “life is spectacularly resilient… I have no concern about life.” Which isn’t to say that it will be life as we know it.

Bowman describes the intensity and pace of the fire as it powered along this gorge in 2016. The fallout could have been much worse. One small shift in the wind and we would have lost the last, large remaining refugium of A. cupressoides, a forest called Dixons Kingdom in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, hiding out somewhere south of us. Climate models have underestimated aspects of fire behaviour in the Anthropocene, he says, and are having to be recalibrated in light of the real-world fallout of just one degree of warming. “I’ve always found the whole thing vaguely hilarious,” he says. “People think that climate change is going to be staged. It’s actually punctuated by these incredible… thresholds, stresses. And then boom, it just changes.”

Our comprehension of the Anthropocene falls short on so many fronts. We broadly blame humanity, but not all humans are equal in their contributions to the mess. “Aboriginal cultures lived here pretty sustainably,” he observes, and adapted as the ice ebbed and flowed across the landscape beneath us. “There’s a cultural dimension going on here, and I think that’s the struggle that we’re involved with. What sort of society are we going to have? How are we going to adapt to the planetary constraints?”

By now we’re on the road, swerving around dead animals. Tasmania is unhappily recognised as the roadkill capital of the world, littered with bloodied carnage — possums, wallabies, pademelons, rabbits. Once these were kept in check by thylacines, and by Indigenous hunters, and then colonial trappers trading their pelts and meat. Today, the apex predators wince, ride the sickening bump and keep driving. Even in country cherished as World Heritage wilderness, so many cascading layers of disturbance. “If I was a good person, I would stop and drag that off the road,” Bowman says of the next casualty, a wallaby. He’s not being sentimental. Endangered Tasmanian devils and quolls come to feast on the dead, only to get taken out by the next vehicle. But we push on, we’re on the clock — he has a phone conference, and I have a flight to catch.

“What do the Gaians do?” asks Bowman.

I’m stumped. Who?

“The Gaians are the society that comes after the Anthropocene.”

I admit I’ve not heard of them.

“I made them up. It’s just an idea, for fun.” He’s conjured up a population for the next Earth, named for Gaia, the Greek goddess of the Earth, who was famously also appropriated back in the 1960s by James Lovelock to capture his theory of the planet as a living, self-regulating organism.

Bowman’s Gaians “are the people who come out the other side. And you have to ask the question… what do they do? What animates them? What is their belief? I know they are going to exist, but I don’t know what they do.” He’s workshopping some ideas. Even in humanity’s darkest moments, “art somehow survives, people still value things.” Ultimately their life’s work, their cultural work, will be about ecological restoration. “Because their survival will depend on it. Everything will be about restoration. It’s not about living with nature — it’s tending and restoring nature because the system will have been crashed so badly.”

Bowman’s not alone thinking about these next Earthlings. In her 2016 book Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, University of Melbourne geographer Lesley Head has a chapter pondering “The Anthropoceans,” and how they (we?) remake ourselves and our world. They will “have emotional work to do” in the fallout, “they will practise hope rather than feel it,” they will toil physically much harder for the basics of life, they will have to be good at sharing, they will understand the many ways we are “embedded in the processes of the earth” but not “green” as we now know it. Like Bowman, she argues that the traditions of preservationist, conservationist environmentalism “are insufficiently powerful to deal with current and projected reality.”

By now we’re off the plateau, following the instructions of our iPhone navigator to our last stop before Bowman drops me in Launceston. In between directions, he is workshopping his thesis, wondering out loud about how the Gaians will manage questions of justice, how they will organise their resources, what the family unit might look like. “I’m pretty certain that it’s going to be more a matriarchy, more female dominated.”

He’s hazy (evasive?) on what will play out between our reality and theirs. He’s firmly directing his gaze somewhere past that conceivably apocalyptic horizon. Having witnessed the growing distress and anger of scientists who understand what we have done and where we are heading, I’m inclined to diagnose this as an insulating, self-care mechanism. Psychological refugium? I’m content to join him there, for now.

“Let’s be a bit more optimistic and assume that we get through the Anthropocene. Obviously, you know, capitalism will end and everything is going to change, like it already has. What will they [humans] do?… The narrative of the utopian stream or strand in the crisis we are in is not being tended.”

What if, he says, the Gaians look back at the work of people like the ones we’ve just left behind on the plateau nurturing sphagnum and pencil pines, “and understand that humans had this capacity not only to destroy nature but to tend nature, and then the nature that we have is not about a binary — it’s wilderness or not wilderness. It’s us. It’s our expression.”

Which is not to say it isn’t going to be hellish. “These people are going to be shit-scared. The storms that are coming are just mad… The capacity of an energised climate to create mayhem well… the insurance industry’s noticing what that’s like, and it hasn’t even started yet.”

And yet, he’s feeling “weirdly optimistic,” partly because we owe that to the generations who will live with it — among them his students, working up there on the plateau. And because, as this terrifying next Earth looms, “as the shit hits the fan, now we can get on with it. We can snap out of our torpor and break out of our denial because it’s the denial that is causing an amazing amount of the anxiety. People are so anxious.”

We pull up at a bushland property in the Liffey Valley at the foot of Drys Bluff, a steep precipice at the northern edge of the Central Plateau. We’re visiting a native plant nursery where Sally and Herbert Staubmann have conjured hundreds of pencil pine seedlings, some from seeds collected by the botanic gardens team, some from seeds they have collected themselves under permit, some from cuttings they’ve cultivated. These are the stock that will be used by Ben French and Scott Nichols to expand their restoration trials up on the plateau.

Herbert Staubmann, Austrian by birth, came to Australia as an electromechanic with Siemens. “I worked in Darwin for a while on big motors and generators in a tin shed before the wet season. I met a Swiss guy who worked in a nursery and I said, ‘I’ve had this — I want to work outdoors.’” Having given up machinery to get his hands dirty in horticulture, he found his way to this piece of magic country where he fell in love with Australian eucalypts and with Tasmanian-raised Sally.

While their nursery is a substantial operation, producing bulk quantities of some 400 varieties of natives, mostly Tasmanian endemics that they sell to councils, farmers, the hydro, and parks and wildlife authorities, it sits seamlessly within the wildscape. Plants are raised on unfenced terraces; native creatures are encouraged to roam and graze beneath, birds to come in and control the pests; and stormwater drains are lush with rushes and sedges to keep the frogs happy. The couple are proud of what they have built here over twenty years. There’s a rare aura about them, a contentment and gentleness, humility. Perhaps that is the gift of tending to seasons, to nature.

The couple show us their crop of A. cupressoides — rows and rows of what look like fragile green corals set in small black pots. They fuss protectively, plucking out invisible weeds, explaining how they’ve been experimenting with different techniques to try to raise sturdy specimens sufficient to meet the needs of the scientists. Cuttings are so far proving the easier option, but Herbert suspects that, long term, plants grown from seed will do better out in an increasingly hostile world.

“I sow them in autumn, let them germinate outside, leave them out over winter,” Herbert explains. “I’ve never had them dampen off — meaning succumb to a fungal infection.” But this year, trying to hurry things along to provide seedlings to Ben French, he put them for a spell in the propagation house “and they just started keeling over — I got them out and salvaged what I could.”

Sally Staubmann chimes in: “I think the strongest ones are the ones that come up outside over winter. That’s my theory.”

Herbert spent all the previous day roaming up on the plateau looking for seeds, returning with a tiny bagful to show for his efforts. “I’m not very confident that there’s a lot of viable seed,” he explains. “They seem to be aborting early — see the small ones here? I need to put a couple of those under the dissecting lens to see if there is a viable embryo in there.”

They’re excited to be part of the research effort, the restoration trials, to play a part in efforts to preserve A. cupressoides into the future, but they’re mindful that they are in a trial-and-error race against time and more than a bit anxious about how it will all turn out. “The important thing for Ben’s project — for your project — is to get these to a good size,” Herbert says.

Bowman reassures them. One way or another the trials will yield a result — he’s not worried about that. As he’s tried to impress on his students and field crews, failure is also success in what it teaches about how to go forward. But Herbert and Sally Staubmann are plainly more sentimentally inclined, hoping to see the survival of at least some proportion of their precious progeny. Herbert pulls up a punnet to show me what a plant sown from seed a year ago now looks like, forefinger prodding the soil to find the barely-there growth. “You’re looking at a couple of seed leaves in their initial stage, that are narrow and long… so they’re slow.”

I tell him I saw some wild-sown seedlings up on the plateau with Ben French yesterday.

“You actually found some? Some germinating seeds? Wow.”

It’s time for us to go — beyond time, so it’s a hurried round of farewells. The Staubmanns wave us off, smiling broadly. They are both small in stature, wearing skin and clothes weathered by the elements. They remind me of garden gnomes.

“What did you think of that?” Bowman asks as we pull away. The couple have already vanished into the landscape that they have contrived and preserved: architects and inheritors, consumers and custodians.

“It’s them.” The realisation falls out of my mouth. “They’re them. They’re Gaians.” •

This essay appears in the new anthology, Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the Face of Environmental Crisis, edited by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner and Jenny Newell, published by NewSouth.

The post Weekend in Gondwana appeared first on Inside Story.

Last year, former prime minister Kevin Rudd described this idea as a “hackneyed phrase that has become part of the self-affirming psychology of our wider national inertia.” Recent events have shown him to be correct.

Apparently with the aim of pleasing the Trump administration in the United States, the Australian government took the lead in pushing for an inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, in terms generally seen as seeking to pin blame on China’s initial response to the emergence of the virus in Wuhan in December last year.

Given that Australia has suffered less than most other countries in the pandemic, there was no obvious reason to take the lead in this matter. Unsurprisingly, given its increasingly aggressive “wolf warrior” stance in international matters of all kinds, China retaliated. Beginning by escalating an existing dispute over barley, China has restricted imports of all kinds from Australia, including coal, wine and beef. The exception, so far, has been iron ore, our most valuable export and the one China can least do without.

We have at least had the sympathy of other countries, some of whom have also been bullied by China, in this fight. There was even a suggestion of an initiative to buy Australian wine to make up for the loss of the Chinese markets. But sympathy goes only so far. The United States has been eager to meet China’s demand for more barley to replace the Australian product.

Unfortunately, any consideration we might have gained as the victim of Chinese government bullying over the pandemic response has been thrown away because of the government’s refusal to respond to the even larger crisis of global heating. With the adoption of a 2050 net zero emissions target now becoming the norm for developed countries, the Morrison government has been paralysed by the fear that any action would provoke a backbench rebellion. As Rudd observed in 2019, “The current government’s attitude to our place in the region and the world is driven by one organising principle, which is the extension of domestic politics by other means.”

In the domestic context, having killed off Labor’s carbon pricing policy just as it was beginning to reduce emissions, successive LNP governments have relied on dodgy accounting and grandly titled but ineffectual gestures, including the Emissions Reduction Fund, the Energy Security Board, and the Low Emissions Technology Roadmap, to give the impression of action while doing nothing to offend the extremists among its supporters.

The assumption has been that this meaningless symbolism would work at the international level as well. In the lead-up to the weekend’s Climate Ambition Summit, and following discussions between Morrison and the joint host, British prime minister Boris Johnson, the government assumed that the world was so eager for our participation that any kind of concession would be sufficient for a warm welcome. The concession chosen was to finally abandon the claim that we were entitled to meet our 2030 target with surplus credits from the Kyoto round that finished in 2012.

Much to the government’s fury, Morrison did not receive the expected invitation to speak, which was extended to seventy other world leaders. Australia was lumped in with the worst climate offenders: Brazil, Russia and Saudi Arabia. To make matters worse, China was given a prominent role, reflecting a desire among the summit organisers to encourage that country’s positive steps — especially the recent announcement of a net zero target for 2060 — and play down more negative developments, such as the surge in coal plant permits issued by provincial governments.

The affronts will keep on coming as long as our do-nothing stance is maintained. Yesterday it was reported that the Britain’s Labour Party has demanded that the British government opposes Matthias Cormann’s nomination as secretary-general of the OECD. The only ground cited was Australia’s foot-dragging on climate policy.

To return to the boxing metaphor, China is a heavyweight and can’t easily be pushed around. The rest of the world can reward positive developments there, but it can’t enforce them.

Australia is a lightweight, and we are fighting out of our class. If we want to succeed on issues like our trade dispute with China, we can’t afford to poke our potential allies in the eye by suggesting, as Scott Morrison has repeatedly, that our climate policy will be determined by our own national interests and not by our obligations to the rest of the world. •

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Biden’s win means that just about every major advanced economy has committed to driving net emissions down to zero by 2050 (or 2060, in the case of China). Every major advanced economy except one, that is — the one led by Scott Morrison, who declares that he won’t commit to such a target without a plan for how to achieve it and an understanding of the costs.

This prompts two obvious questions. Didn’t your government sign up to the Paris climate agreement more than four years ago? And why on earth haven’t you developed a plan and carried out an economic assessment yet?

The odd thing is that it really shouldn’t be that hard for the government to commit to net zero by 2050. Morrison himself has said that net zero is “absolutely achievable” and that a 2050 deadline is “desirable.” Energy minister Angus Taylor has said the government wants to achieve net zero emissions “as soon as possible,” though he refused to commit to doing it by 2050.

But the reality is that it isn’t politically costless, at least not among his own colleagues, as the Australian Financial Review’s political columnist Phillip Coorey reminded us earlier this month. In fact, the Coalition is probably more fragile on climate change than Labor. You need only look back at what happened to Malcolm Turnbull to understand how fragile.

Fitzgibbon might point to what happened in his own seat at the last federal election to highlight the potential electoral costs of a progressive stance on climate. His seat is ground zero for thermal coalmining in Australia, and Labor suffered a negative swing of 14.2 per cent there, with most of the lost votes flowing to a coalminer representing One Nation, who managed to win 21.6 per cent of the vote. Similar results were seen in other coalmining and gas-extraction regions, in seats normally seen as marginal, across Central and North Queensland.

These swings against Labor don’t just reflect concern that emissions reduction policies would hurt employment, of course. But the fact that the Coalition chose to campaign so hard on this issue in Central and North Queensland suggests that party polling had revealed it to be an important factor.

It’s on the question of jobs that perceptions and reality have most obviously parted company. The reality is that greening Australia’s energy supplies won’t come at the expense of very many jobs in coal or gas, simply because the production of these products is primarily driven by exports. Just 24 per cent of Queensland and New South Wales’s thermal black coal production is consumed domestically, while the figure for metallurgical coal (the main product in Queensland) is a tiny 2 per cent. For gas it’s 30 per cent.

In fact, analysis by my firm, Green Energy Markets, indicates that employment in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in 2019 significantly exceeded employment in either coal or gas. And the employment advantage in clean energy becomes overwhelming once you compare it to employment in gas and coal production intended for domestic consumption.

Sources: see below.

Australian coalminers face little threat from policies aimed at reducing Australia’s carbon emissions. Those who are employed in coal and gas power stations most certainly do, but these power stations simply don’t employ enough people to turn an election. The number of people employed in coal-fired power stations across Queensland adds up to just under 1400. For gas power stations it’s 250. If concern about emissions reduction policies really was a major factor in turning Queensland seats to One Nation and ultimately the Liberal National Party, it was because voters were made to believe that the threat to jobs from emissions reduction is far greater than it is. The Stop Adani campaign probably made an important contribution to this misunderstanding.

Those figures give a lead to those of us pushing for a fast transition to renewables. Back in January, I wrote that greater electoral support for emissions reduction would only come with a shift away from campaigns framed around stopping or shutting down polluting facilities. Crucially, emissions reduction policies need to be tied in voters’ minds to the construction of new clean energy projects, and the attendant transmission lines, that they could readily understand would create work for tradies and lower-skilled workers.

Unfortunately for economic efficiency, an emissions trading scheme doesn’t fit that bill. It’s difficult to explain why trading permits or certificates is a more effective way of reducing emissions, and better for voters’ wallets, than directly funding clean energy projects. Tony Abbott and many of his colleagues exploited this confusion to foster suspicion that emissions trading was less about the environment than about raising tax revenue.

Joel Fitzgibbon hasn’t publicly articulated a way forward for Labor that would enable the party to maintain its advantage on climate change while recognising the concerns of working people. Luckily, it’s into this void that the unlikely saviour, Gladys Berejiklian’s NSW government, has emerged. The state’s energy minister, Matt Kean, and its deputy premier, John Barilaro, have somehow worked through their differences to produce a plan that state and federal Labor parties would never have been brave enough to conceive.

The politics of climate change policy in Australia has been the story of good people trying to vainly break the nexus between energy and carbon emissions by delicately tweaking and working within the existing market-oriented structures, usually heavily guided by the incumbent industry and regulatory organisations. Instead of trying to unpick this Gordian knot, Kean and Barilaro decided they would cut straight through it with a sharp instrument. Their Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap, released this week, will supplant the existing market by setting up new government authorities to rebuild the electricity system anew, much as state governments did four decades ago.

The scale of the plan might be audacious, but it will probably strike the person in the street as plain common sense. The owners of four of the state’s five existing coal-fired power plants, representing 87 per cent of capacity, have indicated they intend to close them between now and 2035. At the same time, they say they will have trouble financing replacement plants because of regulatory uncertainty about carbon emissions. Kean and Barilaro have therefore laid out a program to remove the investment uncertainty and underwrite the construction of the renewable power plants, energy storage and power lines needed to replace the coal plants before they close.

The plan carries a real risk of creating white elephants, with electricity consumers ultimately carrying the can for any mistakes. But the risk of leaving the electricity system a prisoner of the culture wars is far greater.

Politicians opposed to climate action can hardly complain about this lurch away from markets (although the NSW proposal will uphold and support private-sector ownership). They are the ones — Tony Abbott among them — who have talked of sending in the army to seize control of privately owned power stations and nationalise them. They are the ones — Matt Canavan and Angus Taylor among them — who have proposed that governments build and own new coal- and gas-fired power stations in their preferred locations because they’re unhappy the private sector doesn’t consider them to be wise investments.

For federal Labor, the NSW plan provides a template for a national scheme that would allow it to present climate change policy as a great big construction bonanza rather than a great big tax.

Another element to this strategy can also help Labor in the Hunter and Central and North Queensland. Emissions reduction policies and technology plans do pose a real and significant threat to coal and gas workers, but they are not the plans put forward by Labor. Rather, they are the policies of governments in places like Germany, Britain, California, South Korea, China and Japan, as well as those of president Joe Biden.

According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, Europe’s demand for coal is less than half of what it was back in the 1990s, while in North America it is 40 per cent lower. Renewable energy has recently overtaken coal in power generation in the United States, while in Britain it is rare for the electricity system to use any coal at all. In fact, Britain is using less coal now than it did in 1769, when James Watt patented his steam engine.

In Asia, on the other hand, demand for coal imports has been growing significantly, and this is what has underpinned the viability of Australian coalmines. For thermal coal, though, this growth has come to an end. According to the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, India, China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are all expected to reduce their thermal coal imports between 2020 and 2025.

Thermal coal’s future involves a steady erosion of jobs and wages as companies face a bitter battle to survive in a contracting market. With China’s economy evolving towards services, and with countries beefing up their emissions reduction efforts, metallurgical coal will confront the same fate by around 2030. Neither Labor nor the Coalition has any power to stop this.

If it remains wedded to a strategy of backing coal to the grave, the Queensland branch of the Morrison government has no help to offer these communities. The new coal power station in Townsville or Collinsville perpetually promised by the Liberal Nationals would be horribly inefficient if it needed many more than 200 people to keep it running.

Labor still has a task ahead of it to explain why the fate of coalmining does not rest with it or the Coalition. Unlike the Coalition, though, Labor can offer an alternative. Thousands of jobs would be created by a two-step program of decarbonising Australia’s electricity supply and then exporting clean energy products. The new jobs would offer opportunities to a wide array of people, but with the bulk needing either a trade-related skill or relatively modest levels of education and qualifications — in other words, the same people who currently see coalmining and minerals processing as their best opportunity for secure and well-paid employment, and who turned away from Labor at the last federal election.

All this means that if Labor chose to follow Fitzgibbon’s advice and mimic the Coalition on climate policy, it would give away what could be a great source of political advantage in Queensland. •

Sources for chart: Employment in the coal, oil and gas industries is based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’s March 2020 Labour Market Survey. Employment in coal power generation is based on Green Energy Markets research on employment by each power plant. Renewable energy employment is derived from the Green Energy Markets database of renewable energy projects in construction and operation in conjunction with employment factors per megawatt from the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures. Energy Efficiency Employment is taken from Green Energy Markets.

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Contrary to Scott Morrison’s blustery claim — “I tell you what, our policies will be set here in Australia” — most of the important decisions about our energy future will be made elsewhere, by governments in Washington, Beijing and Brussels, and by energy companies and financial institutions headquartered in New York, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo.

Their decisions are reflecting the widening realisation that the world must abandon coal sooner rather than later, that our reliance on oil must also end and, increasingly, that gas is part of the problem rather than of the solution. As many commentators have noted, commitments to net zero emissions by China, Japan, South Korea and other major emitters, as well as the election of Joe Biden in the United States, have left the Australian government increasingly isolated. A recent New York Times article linked Scott Morrison’s climate denialism to that of Brazil’s authoritarian demagogue Jair Bolsonaro, someone who certainly won’t be welcome at the White House after 20 January.

Yet the government and its supporters are working on the assumption that commitments by most of our trading partners to net zero emissions by 2050 (or 2060 in the case of China) are rhetorical gestures with no real-world implications. Whatever Coalition ministers might say, they are assuming business as usual, particularly in relation to coal and gas.

The plausibility of that assumption has been gravely undermined in recent weeks by a series of announcements from the heavy engineering companies that build coal-fired power stations. After adverse publicity for their involvement in the Vung Ang 2 project in Vietnam, Samsung and KEPCO announced they would take on no further coal-fired projects. General Electric, Black & Veatch, Siemens and Toshiba have all made similar pledges over the past two weeks.

These moves reflect two main factors. First, many of these companies have global brands that are being tainted by their association with coal. Samsung stated as much in its announcement. Second, just as the pipeline of coal-fired power projects has shrunk, many existing plants have been operating at a fraction of their capacity. With the added pressure of the pandemic, the argument for getting out of coal now rather than later has proved overwhelming.

A couple of dominoes remain standing, but they are likely to fall soon. The biggest remaining Japanese firm in the field, Mitsubishi Heavy, faces the same problems as Toshiba and Samsung, with the toxic reputational effects of coal damaging its entire Mitsubishi brand. Other parts of the corporation, such as Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, have already dumped coal assets, taking big losses in the process. In South Korea, the Doosan Heavy group, which is involved in Vung Ang 2, is deeply indebted and facing intense pressure to pull out of coal. In India, Bharat Heavy and other firms are operating at 50 per cent capacity, the result of a shrinking pipeline of projects and intense competition from China.

At this stage, indeed, it is only China that is keeping the global coal industry afloat. Provincial governments have embarked on a program of building coal-fired power stations as a form of fiscal stimulus. Finance for new coal projects depends heavily on Chinese banks and on Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. And, with the withdrawal of most of their competitors, Chinese heavy engineering firms like CITIC will have the business of building coal-fired power plants all to themselves.

This is a major foreign policy problem for Australia. As the Xi regime becomes more repressive domestically and more aggressive internationally, our economic dependence becomes more and more problematic. Our differences with China have already led to informal trade barriers being imposed on a wide range of products, including coal. Moreover, as its announcement of 2060 zero emissions indicates, the regime is capable of rapid policy shifts. If Xi decides to mend fences with the Biden administration, firm action to stop uneconomic coal-fired projects would be an easy first step.

Labor needs to make a choice between following the government’s line — according to which we have already done everything we need to — or committing to a policy framework consistent with the Paris agreement’s goal of holding the increase in mean global temperatures well below 2°C. Until now, the policy has been as non-committal as possible in an attempt to satisfy the majority of the party’s supporters, who want strong action, and those who pretend that inaction is a serious option.

Joel Fitzgibbon’s resignation gives Labor the chance to resolve the issue. By aligning Australia with Biden’s pro-climate position, it can regain the initiative and avoid the prospect of global isolation. •

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Yes, the US presidential election saw a centre-left candidate win office from opposition with a strong climate policy. But was it “central”? Maybe. Biden managed not to let it get in the way of the voters’ main task, which was to kick out the dreadful incumbent.

That presents a pretty good template for the job of most oppositions in democracies: voters need to be inclined to toss out the government, and the other side gently tills this fertile soil. Nothing too scary; don’t make yourself hard to vote for. Afterwards, the victor gets to tell the tales of conviction and derring-do, of how the battle was fought and won, for journos to internalise and repeat.

An ambitious climate policy was necessary to keep the Democratic ship together, to keep the left wing on board and keen to turn out, but political life would be easier for both the Democrats and our own Labor Party if global warming were not a thing.

In the particular case of Fitzgibbon, who quit as shadow resources minister this week, it’s difficult to determine exactly what he doesn’t like about Labor policy, as there’s little there to speak of. Zero net emissions by 2050? This is why he spat the dummy?

The member for Hunter warned this week against “demonising coal workers.” Okay, that’s good advice — on the off-chance his party’s leadership was considering adopting this strategy. He’s on firmer ground when he says that winning the next election should be prioritised over policy purity, but actually he’s saying more than that. His favoured approach would be little or no action on climate change.

He also reckons that “Labor can’t form a government without winning at least two central-north Queensland electorates… and a couple around the rim of Perth,” which is obviously untrue in any literal sense, given the existence of the other 147 seats. What he means is that you can’t win without miners and mining communities, but that’s not right either. There just aren’t enough of them.

It’s true that people shouldn’t be thrown on the scrapheap in the change to renewable energy. Important policies often produce losers (usually short-term) and winners (often the country as a whole, eventually), and mitigating the plight of the former should be prioritised and hasn’t been sufficiently in the past. That’s not what he’s on about either. He simply doesn’t want to see coal phased out.

But something more fundamental is at play, a fight for the soul of the party. These barneys tend to be heavy on rhetoric and light on facts and figures. Clichés abound. It’s not really about those four mining seats, or any seats. It’s about something otherworldly: about Labor once again being the party of “the worker” rather than “progressives.”

And it’s not really about winning elections, although Fitzgibbon and others pretend it is. The same criticism was levelled at Labor when it was led by Gough Whitlam. The “dregs of the middle class,” as Kim Beazley Snr famously complained a year before the party took office for the first time in twenty-three years. The same criticism was levelled across all five of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating’s consecutive terms. Hawke’s finance minister Peter Walsh was the highest-profile proponent of this friendly fire: the party was selling out the working class for eastern-suburban trendies in Sydney and Melbourne. Sure it was good politics, said Walsh, but it was immoral.

But when Labor is losing elections, the “straying from its original mission” meme can seem to have explanatory power too; cue the banalities about “battlers” and “the base.”

Here’s the deal, as ol’ Joe might put it. Labor hardly ever won federal elections before Whitlam. Success comes from appealing to that largish cohort called Australians, in all their various shapes, sizes and backgrounds. Chasing a particular section of the electorate is a recipe for misfire. Remember 2004, when Mark Latham was going to bring back the outer suburbs — after all, he personified them, didn’t he? On election day those areas led the charge — to the Howard government.

Fitzgibbon’s “blue-collar” voters, depending on how you define them, are a shrinking cohort, still predominantly vote Labor, and any depletion has had a minor effect at the ballot box.

Glorifying the old days when Labor won a big majority of “tradesmen”— as if a salaried plumber in the 1960s is the same thing as a self-employed one with a couple of offsiders today — is pretty pointless as well.

When Fitzgibbon goes to bat for miners on between $150,000 and $200,000 a year (his characterisation) he really gives the game away. Labor was formed to fight for the interests of people on double the median full-time wage to the detriment of those below who would benefit from a growing renewables sector?

One major sleight of hand in all this is the assumption that the last election result was in any non-trivial way due to Labor’s climate policy. Those with memories longer than goldfish might recall it was the opposition’s politically ambitious economic agenda, burdened by franking credits and negative gearing — and with a fictitious “death tax” thrown in — that took centre stage, with global warming a supporting act. (If the opposition had offered a smaller target, climate policy might have attracted more attention.)

Parties trade off policy and politics. This or that might be a great reform, but it’s not something we should take to an election; maybe once we’re in office. When you’re in government you can (or could, under more agreeable Senates) spring change on voters and trust they’ll have forgiven you by the next election. These days, of course, with journalists demanding so much be ruled in or out, it’s more complicated.

Global warming will largely be taken out of Australia’s hands anyway. If the world acts, overseas demand for our minerals will dry up. If we continue to be laggards on the domestic front — insisting on coal-fired power stations, for example — other countries will price the emissions into our exports or even hit us with tariffs. It’ll be a bit like ending White Australia; we were dragged into the second half of the twentieth century by international pressure.

It should also be like cutting tariffs three decades ago: a general bipartisanship with cynical politics restricted to the edges. (Keating boasts about his political courage now, but he was quick to capitalise when the Liberal opposition proposed something more adventurous.) The fact that Australian action can’t directly deal with the climate problem within our borders facilitates a level of irresponsibility. It doesn’t help that powerful sections of the Coalition, inside and outside parliament, encouraged by News Corp, are off with the denialist fairies.

For the next election Labor should, like Biden, promise enough to make clear it’s the only party serious about climate change but that it also remains a safe option to vote for. Identifying that sweet spot is the hard part. •

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