Lenore Taylor, National affairs writer for the AFR is one journalist who seems to be across the issue of climate change.
John Howard’s climate change policy is illogical. Now his Environment Minister has all but said so.
Kevin Rudd’s policy is incomplete. Now his environmental spokesman has filled in one of the many gaps.
Garrett has now said that Australia might sign on to a Kyoto phase 2 agreement even if the developing nations and indeed the US don’t commit to specific reductions or targets.
To me this seemed like a case of foot in mouth given that Howard was bound to leap upon it and say it was a formula for exporting jobs. Howard did not disappoint, ringing up AM as soon as he heard the story to make his point. But Rudd, showing some unaccustomed policy bravery backed Garrett up.
Garrett was emphasising that Australia should become part of a process, a pathway that would eventually result in commitments from developing countries. In an otherwise somewhat garbled interview on AM he said:
The heat in the system is a consequence of the developed countries emissions. They need to commit to reduce. As they commit to reduce, the developing countries come on board. That, additionally with the clean development mechanisms, technology transfers, and a whole series of important international commitments to reduce emissions and to assist developing countries to do the same is the pathway to a lower emission future. That’s a pathway Mr Howard and Mr Turnbull A, don’t agree on, and B, don’t understand. It’s a pathway that Labor is fully committed to, and frankly, that is critical in this next Bali meeting that countries sit down and start to plot out that pathway.
Rudd seemed to support him fully, summarising the position thus:
The challenge is this: one, ratify Kyoto, two, accept targets and three, then leverage the Chinese and the others into accepting targets and that is the way in which it can work. Mr Howard’s way, over the last x years has failed to deliver any outcomes.
Taylor reporting in yesterday’s AFR on the Bogor talks currently taking place as preparation for the Bali meeting in December said:
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told the meeting that developed nations would have to take the lead in committing to greenhouse gas cuts, but insisted promises from developing countries should be voluntary in accordance with national circumstances.
This is no surprise as it’s the line India and China have been promoting. The Rudd/Garrett position represented policy realism.
Now, if you read the SMH Garrett has backtracked, or if you read the Australian he’s committed a gross blunder, has been cut off at the knees by Rudd and his policy credentials are in tatters. It seems that they couldn’t stand up to the withering fire received from Howard and the likes of Downer and Vaile. So yes, we must have definite commitments from everyone.
We’ll see today how this all plays out, whether anyone notices and whether anyone cares.
Disappointing, really.
I think this is a storm in a teacup. It seems to me that the clarrification, is vague and is stating the obvious truth in the matter – that Labor will seek binidng commitments from all. Quite obviously it would be foolish not to.
It looks to me more like the Oz and the SMH have gobbled up the Libs talking points for today and published them. I guess it is more sexy to talk about “backtracking” than sensible policy.
I have to agree with Brian 100% on this one. It’s nice to see that Rudd occasionally has a spine.
As to the point, there’s no chance of playing hardball with the developing nations until the developed countries get their own house in order.
If the EU, the USA, and Japan, having committed to make big cuts, take a united position demanding cuts from the developing countries, it’s going to be very hard for the developing countries to say no.
Despite Garrett’s ‘backflip’, i.e. to say we want developing countries to have binding targets too (probably not a bad negotiating position, no point in giving away your minimum offer), the stark difference in policies is still that the ALP will seek and sign to new binding targets, whereas the Libs will only have ‘aspirational’ targets, that is to say, no targets. But a point apparently way too subtle for journalists.
This little episode highlights Rudd’s cautious shadowing of Howard policies, and leaves one big question exposed: if Rudd wins, will he really stand by all his Howard-style policies, or will he dump the whole damn lot of them as “non-core promises”?
I think many Labor supporters (and Garrett supporters in particular) are firmly hoping the latter is the case. But if Rudd is not going to stand by his policies, and if nobody even seriously expects him to do so, that really makes a mockery of our election, doesn’t it?
Sure, a Rudd government can say that circumstances have changed. And we have all learned to appreciate “clever” politics (aka “lying”). But it is a disappointing state of affairs when we not only expect our leaders to lie to us, but actually HOPE they are lying to us!
By comparison, the Greens are being totally honest… and polling far behind Labor.
Its a sideshow. Garrett seems to have a knack for holding a positions that are basically untenable – like continued support of excessive Govt funding for “clean (dirty) coal” – and now this latest distraction about hypothetical future negotiations. This isn’t bravery, its stupidity.
Everyone has to commit to reductions in greenhouse gases if we are to salvage the imminent planetary train wreck. Finessing future negotiations is a matter for the future.
This doesn’t detract from Howard’s culpability in not ratifying Kyoto and not taking any real action on climate change. Garret should be pounding Howard about this relentlessly, instead he is on the back foot about hypotheticals.
Having sold his soul for a shadow ministry, he can’t even score some political points.
Also worth noting how the GG has “GARRETT BLUNDER” splattered all over the front page, while Mal Turnbull’s planned $5.5-billion move into urban water authorities has also quietly been dumped.
After years of screaming his head off on stage, for minimal results, Garrett is now trying to work from within a corrupt system. IMHO, Garrett’s problem is that he is not very good at lying.
Why doesn’t Labor make the point that China and India _have_ ratified Kyoto – aren’t they meant to start making cuts in a few years? At this rate their cuts will start happening before we agree that they can make them.
The backdown was a shame. They should simply and calmly state that you don’t get to step 3 without step 2, and Howard’s recalcitrance has been delaying step 2 for too long.
Done and move on.
Agree with Brian and Robert, and Joe D also makes a good point which is often lost in media commentary on this issue. And the GG continues to combine comic partisanship with ideological obsession.
I just lost my comment trying to correct a spelling error in a link by clicking on the preview text rather than the box. Bugger!
Interviews on Breakfast with Downer, Don Henry and Michelle Grattan indicate that this one is a minor blip, rather than a major blunder and equivalent to the Robert McLelland affair where Rudd really did cut him off at the knees as the Government Gazette would have us believe. We are now back to the stage where there will be a perception of policy similarity apart from the big negative for the Coalition, the unwillingness to ratify Kyoto.
Lenore Taylor, who I think filed and went to bed before the ‘backflip’ story broke, points out today in the AFR that in Howard’s own terms his proposed adoption of mid-term targets and a unilateral carbon trading system will be job destroying if it is actually designed to have any effect.
What I’m looking for out of Bali is a world per capita emissions target to be achieved by all countries by a given date, hopefully 2030 but at least by 2050. Such a target should be based on the latest science (not the IPCC which is out of date), an appropriate risk analysis and with regard to the precautionary principle. Such a target should take into account the planet’s diminishing capacity to absorb emissions.
If such a target were identified, I think many developing countries would be found already to be in excess of it.
I don’t subscribe to the Government Gazette, but I understand the front page today is packed with stories that scream Labor’s badness, including Paul Kelly thundering about Labor’s policy jeopardising the future of the planet and following Howard on post-Kyoto policy, demonstrating that he too has lost the plot.
Ironically the GG’s online front page has really positive pic of Rudd, Garrett and Labor worthies on the beach with Quicksilvers Chelsea Ingwersen. Subliminally this would more than counter the negative crap they’ve published about Labor. It would be neat if someone could upload the pic onto this thread. My limited skills are not up to it yet.
The bigger story should be what the Courier Mail led with in it’s election coverage, ie Mark Vaile’s climate denialism yesterday. He’s shocked business leaders and out of line with the National Farmers’ Federation. He was in Mackay supporting the interests of the coal industry over the farmers and the tourist industry.
So with Vaile, Minchin and Robb at least as unreconstructed climate change denialists, who in their right mind would vote for this bunch of turkeys.
Graham Bird in a show of pan-avian solidarity?
Joe D, somewhere last night I read someone saying that 170 nations siged Kyoto but only 3 have failed to ratify – the US, Austral;ia and Kazahkslan. I think it was Garrett, but it got lost in the noise. He’s also been emphasisng the Clean Development Mechanism as part of the pathway, but the journos are too dumb to pick up on it, or see the relevance.
He just doesn’t cut through.
Today he’s had a crack at Vaile and differences between Downer and Howard on policy but what I heard on the ABC news just now was Downer spruiking Garrett’s backflip. Nothing more.
The poor bugger just doesn’t know how to play the media game.
Sorry, there was more on that ABC news bulletin. There was Rudd doing a full-blown explicit me-too. “Our policy is exactly the same as the Government’s.”
Brian, I think an important dynamic at work here is that once the election is called it becomes very difficult to have a coherent debate about policy which actually focuses on the substance of the policy, as everything said or done during the campaign is refracted through the distorting prism of the “game frame” by political journalists and commentators who have little expertise or interest in policy issues. This is particularly the case with environmental issues. It’s one reason why Latham would have done much better with his forests policy (although still not well enough to have won the 2004 election against the tide) had he announced it two months before polling day rather than two days before.
You want backbone from the ALP on climate? I never thought I’d say this, but we’ve just seen it. A 20% MRET – true MRET, with only renewables – by 2020 is a tremendous boost – almost as good as our 25% policy.
It blows the naysayers out of the water, and blows the storm over Kyoto into yesterday.
Christine Milne just added a bit to the bottom of her Kyoto blog post here.
Yes, finally some gustsy stuff from Labor. Hooray.
But I still think the whole issue should be bipartisan and out of the political arena. They are playing a political game of chess with the planet’s future.
We don’t need the Garnaut report to inform us of short term targets, basic mathematic modelling will do just fine – and it available right now.
Rudd was solid on the 7:30 report tonight – but he needs to answer YES or NO to at least one question during the entire campaign. Endless blathering “on message” and avoiding answering questions is very off putting. It makes it look like he is trying to hide or dodge something.
C’mon Kevin07, try in front of the mirror: yes, Yes, Yes!, YES!. Just once during the campaign please.
I think Howard is irredeemable.
Labor has endlessly criticised the Coalition for not endorsing Kyoto because it has no constraints for LDCs to enforce emission cutbacks.
Now (after a backflip that suggests Garrett hasn’t a clue what he is doing) Labor states it will not endorse international agreements after 2012 unless the developing countries are constrained to cut emissions.
With no need for qualifications:
Labor’s policy on climate change = Coalition policy on climate change.
No matter how you twist the outcome that is what has happened. Now I think WorkChoices is the only substantive difference between the parties – apart from the fact that most policies were developed by the Coalition and replicated by Labor.
Its almost comic were it no so tragic that these clowns look like being our next government. And you guys are praising Rudd for his bravery and courage.
Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha….its the funniest thing I’ve seen since the clip of Kevin eating his own earwax.
hc, you are (deliberately?) overlooking Labor’s 20% MRET announcement which is clearly superior to Howards crapulous 15% “CRET” which includes the oxy-moronic clean (dirty) coal and a bundling of existing State targets. And you are overlooking Howard’s complete intransigence and negligence over not ratifying Kyoto.
Are you reading direct from JHW’s cheat sheet?
Positing a 20% renewables target without knowing the costs and benefits of doing so is about as stupid as setting a 60% carbon cutback target for 2050 and then establishing the Garnaut committee to work out how large the cutbacks should be. It is totally daft.
Serious, deep incompetence based on a populism that will damage this country.
So your position we wait more years and do more reviews before taking action?
You are reading direct from JWH’s cheat sheet. Tired worn out lines, really.
California, Spain, Germany and Denmark have shown the way. We in Australia are floundering around playing politics and still up to our necks on old king coal.
Peterc, Rudd avoided answering the question (actually two) because he couldn’t. The first was about the backflip. He avoided this by pretending Garrett was saying something he wasn’t, ie that the process would be incomplete without developing country commitment, hence they would need to be dragged back to the negotiating table.
He avoided answering the one about the implications for coal of his MRET because he didn’t have the answer. The main answer is that nothing happens about the export industry by what we do in Australia. It also doesn’t imply shutting down coal plants here because we would be moving from 8% renewables to 20% while the whole market expands by about 20%. That is if we do nothing about energy savings.
hc, Rudd and Garrett understand that if the developing countries don’t do something tangible about reducing emissions, they are only going to do what suits them. We caused the problem and they are not going to be duped into taking the main burden of fixing it. Howard and co have their heads full of shite. Turnbull knows better, but I’m not sure how long he’s going to be Environment Minister. 4 weeks is all we can be sure about even if Howard wins.
Paul, I’m sure you’re right.
tim, Christine has been doing a great job. This is what she said today:
Very clear, very true. This is what she said about the MRET announcement:
An important point about the socalled Garrett backdown is that he wasn’t made to backdown. What happened was that Rudd was fully on board with the initial position. They decided to change tack. Maybe because it wasn’t playing out well, maybe they thought it was wrong to give their fall-back position away at the outset. And maybe they wanted to put that one to bed to create clear air for the MRET announcement, which is a real point of policy differentiation.
Whether MRETs are a good idea when you have a cap and trade regime in another matter. But in terms of perceptions anyone who now thinks both parties are the same must have their eyes shut.
hc, on the 7.30 Report Rudd said:
MMA means McLennan Magasanik Associates. Personally I don’t know them from Adam, but Labor did use them to look at the economic implications. You can read Labor’s press release here.
I must confess I found Rudd hard to follow on the 7 30 report tonight. I haven’t been watching this particular issue in any detail and the speed at which he was speaking made it very difficult to make sense of all the wonkery.
I thought he was very uptight, because he was basically fudging most of the time. The body language was not good.
Not that it was a particularly profound line of questioning from Kerry O’Brien. The whole thing was very frustrating for Rudd, I think, because what could have been a nice clean announcement on MRET had to fight it’s way through a lot of static.
But very much a problem of his own making.
Agree Rudd looked out of his depth on 7.30, and he didn’t give the simple answers that he should’ve on MRET vs coal – that it’ll have essentially no impact per se unless and until you take on energy efficiency as well.
However, hc, what you say about not having modelled the impacts is nonsense. They modelling the economic impact of the target extensively and found it to be negligible.
Of course, this to me says that the target should be lifted! We need to be willing to take a hit if we are to actually stay below 2C warming. That’s what so many people are saying about putting the world on a ‘war footing’ to reduce emissions. But at least it’s a damn good start.
Part of the problem is that the MSM has either not understood or (in the case of the Murdoch press) has wilfully misrepresented what the Kyoto Protocol and its parent agreement, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, require of developed and developing countries respectively and the global politics underpinning this. Shaun Carney, writing in The Age today, is an honourable exception:
Howard scored on hyperbole. Some people I have spoken to heard him say “and Labor has now adopted OUR climate change policy” – which is of course BS, but is a grab that sticks.
Labor needs to get more direct and less evasive. In 2004 Howard succeeded in turning what should have been a strength for Labor (forest policy) into a weakness for them – by confusing, wedging and gazumping.
I agree that Labor is now significantly better than Howard (even if they have a way to go yet) – but they need to get this message across clearly to the public. Rudd artfully dodging questions and Garrett getting mixed up in commentary about potential future negotiating positions just won’t do this for them.
To help guide Labor a bit:
1. The Howard Government is still full of skeptics
2. Howard & co are taking no real tangible action on climate change
3. They are pretending they are, but this is a ruse to confuse voters
4. Howard still refuses to ratify Kyoto and is therefore compromising Australia’s engagement with the next round of negotations (post Kyoto).
5. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are on a trajectory to continue rising under Howard’s policies.
6. We are all dead ducks if we don’t this right.
7. As per Tim’s comments, the MRET has nothing to do with the economics of the coal industry – just ask them.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had in 2003 with the CFMEU Mining & Energy Division official responsible for developing their greenhouse policies. He volunteered the view that Australia would have no trouble sourcing 20 per cent of its energy from renewables and that this wouldn’t bother the union or its members.
Yup, and Tony Maher came out publicly supporting the 20% MRET.
The important thing to note about the ALP’s plan is that we can increase renewables output and flatten demand increases, biting quite substantially into coal’s share of our electricity supply, effectively reducing coal’s output and reducing emissions, before there is any real impact on coal jobs in Australia. That’s because firstly many of the jobs are in mining, most of the product of which goes overseas, and secondly because we can effectively and efficiently reduce coal’s output by reducing the output of individual coal fired power stations, keeping almost all of them running and employing people.
We’d probably see a couple of the oldest and most polluting power stations, like Hazelwood, shut down. But those people employed there could easily be absorbed by the industry in the Latrobe and Hunter Valleys.
Of course, the Greens would like to see far more bite to our greenhouse action than that. Much more agressive energy efficiency, reduction in coal exports, and slightly stronger renewables targets would naturally have a concomitantly greater impact on coal jobs. That’s why we’ve been talking about Just Transitions strategies to help those people employed in coal to get jobs in other industries that would be seeded in their areas.
It’s really very simple. We just need to use our brains…
Tim: and there’s the further point that a lot of our coal exports are coking coal for iron smelting, not thermal coal. As I understand it, there’s no substitute for coal in that process, but there’s plenty that can be done to reduce the emissions from it.
Good comments.
Robert, it seems like it’s about half and half. Guy Pearse points out that we export between 75 and 80 per cent of our coal and that ABARE calculates that our coal exports will almost double by 2030. He makes an interesting point that emissions from our export coal yield 620 million tonnes of CO2 each year, significantly more than our entire domenstic emissions.
So what we do domestically at the margins seems pretty irrelevant.
I’ve decided to attempt new post looking at where we are now with Kyoto, Bali and all that. I’m hoping to get it up later tonight or tomorrow.
That’s right, Robert, as I understand it there is no readily available alternative for coking coal, but there are options for increasing efficiencies.
I’ve also heard tell, although I have no details (does someone else???) of some work being done on spearating the CO2 in the coking process and somehow mixing it with the sludge to form an even sludgier sludge and sequestering a certain amount of the carbon. Doesn’t sound like an ideal solution, but better than nothing perhaps? And perhaps not significantly more sludgy than the sludge from smelting already is?
The other option, of course, is to reduce the amount of aluminium we have to smelt by reducing, reusing and recycling, dare I say it…
The new post is now up. In general comments should now be made there.
I’ve left the comments facility on this thread open in case anyone wants to respond to the questions raised in tim’s last comment.