During the election campaign, LP will be cross-posting selected items from the Centre for Policy Development’s discussion of policy issues, Thinking Points. Readers may also be interested in the CPD’s collection of policy ideas and priorities for the next term, More Than Luck.
This election is proving to be even more dispiriting than the last. Right now, it feels more like a reality TV show than a contest for the national leadership. Mediocrity rules and success depends on a process that places little value on merit or worth. Instead, the prize awaits those who can “cut through” with simple messages and trite slogans.
As we all well aware the Prime Minister is moving forward. Mr Abbott meanwhile claims that he is fair dinkum — and that the Prime Minister isn’t. Is this fair? Gillard certainly seems fair dinkum about moving forward. But surely moving forward is only a meaningful aspiration if you are going somewhere? Like toward a visionary goal, for example. But where is our PM going? At the moment, she’s moving away from her Government’s past mistakes as fast as she can. That is understandable; there have been a few.
And wherever the PM is going, she’s not going alone. In the leaders’ debate, Gillard made it clear that she wants “Australians to come with me”. But it’s hard to imagine what will encourage people to join her without a clear vision of what lies ahead in the “shape of the future”.
According to Gillard, there’s no challenge in our future “that’s too hard” or that we “won’t master it if we do it together”. She claims to be optimistic — and she will need to be, to imagine that our “very special, very precious Australian way of life” can be conserved by the proposals the Government has put on the table with regard to climate change and environmental issues.
The Government’s current proposals — connecting remote renewable power generation to the grid; fitting carbon capture and storage capability to new coal-fired power generation; providing ‘cash for clunkers’; and tax breaks for some energy conservation measures — are so unlikely to have any serious impact on emissions reductions they can hardly be called ‘climate’ policies.
Not that the Coalition is offering anything substantial either. Apart from the rather quaintly named ‘Green Army’, Abbott’s climate policy centre seems to involve not having one — especially one that places a value on the environmental and health costs of pollution (aka a ‘price on carbon’).
There has been little acknowledgement in the campaign to date of the nature, type and scale of the challenges we face as a nation, as a global society, and as a species. Scientists are telling us we have around a decade to restore equilibrium to our planet. But is there any sign from our political leaders (or those aspiring to be the position) of the scale and urgency of this task?
Our leaders seem remarkably unconcerned about their failure to plan for the future. By contrast, Germany, Spain, China, the UK, and Finland all have plans to guide their pathway to low carbon energy supplies as they transition to a ‘post carbon’ society. A nation as dependent on fossil fuels for energy and export income as Australia needs a national plan to transition away from coal and oil. Such a plan should outline the steps we will take to join the global race for deployment of renewable energy technologies — and to capitalise on our unlimited supply of natural resources such as the sun and the wind.
Far from offering a visionary plan for the nations’ future economic and national security however, neither the Government nor the Opposition have any policies that will even enable Australia to meet its commitments under the disappointing Copenhagen Accord. The IPCC recommends emissions reductions for Australia of between 25-40 per cent by 2020 but the policies currently on offer will not even achieve the government’s timid committment of 5 per cent emissions reduction by 2020.
The Opposition claims their policy will achieve the IPCC targets but this is open to debate. Analysis from the Climate Institute earlier this month suggests Coalition policies would instead lead to an 8 per cent increase in emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.
Thank goodness then for signs of leadership from the other player in Australian politics: the Greens.
The only party in this election with any credibility on climate, the Greens have a plan for Australia to transition to 100 per cent renewable energy, and thanks to a new report released by Melbourne University’s Energy Institute, we know this is not only possible that but it can be achieved in a short time frame.
The Government clearly takes the view that it is too expensive for them to fund this transition. A price on carbon is needed not only to make polluting energies more expensive but also to relieve pressure on government coffers. The Coalition’s current opposition to a price on carbon ignores the reality that any action to reduce emissions effectively places a price on carbon, whether it’s in the form of grants or subsidies. Eventually we will all pay for it, whether it is in shifted allocations from other sectors (less health care, anyone?) or a tax hike to cover costs.
In order to get the leverage we need to undertake this new industrial revolution, it is vital to mobilise private sector finance which exists in far greater quantities than government funds. A carbon price will do this by creating disincentives for investing in dirty energy and shift investment to clean. And there are other compelling reasons for doing so — the failure to act on climate change is already costing us $50 billion a year globally in lost natural capital.
Australia is also risking our future economic security. Among the G20 members, we already lag in carbon competiveness, ranking 15th out of 19 countries in an index that evaluates each country’s adoption of credible policies to reduce emissions and their ability to prosper in a low carbon world. Like most, this report warns the longer it takes to achieve this transition, the more costly “economically, as well as socially and politically” it will be.
We are already losing investment to other countries by failing to develop coherent and carefully planned climate policy. One of Australia’s biggest fund managers Colonial First State Global Asset Management told a conference in Brisbane this week that the lack of effective policy in Australia, such as a carbon price, gross feed-in tariffs, or loan guarantees was driving investment offshore to countries such as China where predictable and stable climate and energy policy provide a secure investment environment.
If, as CEO of a company, Julia Gillard demonstrated the same lack of strategic vision for our country’s future that is currently on offer, the shareholders would have every right to question her credentials for the job. Unfortunately for Australians, she’s our CEO and it’s our national capital and assets that are being degraded. Even worse, her aspiring deputy can offer nothing different. It’s little wonder that many shareholders appear to be thinking it’s time to look elsewhere.
That report is um…very optimistic.
People interested in it may want to have a look at this long comments thread on that report.
Amongst the key objections:
1) Its cost estimates for solar towers – a technology that hasn’t been deployed yet – are very, very optimistic.
2) It makes, um, generous assumptions about the minimum generation out of a wind power network.
3) Their wind cost assumptions are based on newer, larger turbines which probably won’t be available until 2015, and whose costs and operational performance remain to be demonstrated.
4) They haven’t done an analysis of the chances of not meeting demand.
5) They’re assuming biomass backup, which is problematic for a whole host of reasons (hint: organic “waste” ain’t necessarily so, and it’s very difficult to move around).
6) Their timelines for deploying plants ignore the realities of organizing finance, getting planning and environmental approvals, etc. etc. etc. The timelines for wind farms have been much longer than they assume into the future.
I’m really struggling to see why LP is giving such prominence to the CPD in these policy threads. Moving to 100% renewables within the timeframe the Greens are talking about at a cost that more than 10% of Australians would accept is a fantasy. No credible policymaker in this area thinks the assumptions underlying the Energy Institute report are credible.
Criticism of the mainstream parties on climate change is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But what you can’t do, or at least it is pointless to do, is criticise them for not implementing policies that are impossible to achieve politically.
Anybody can come up with ideal policy solutions.
But the real skill is in developing policies that move in the direction of your ideals along a sustainable political path.
LO, as anyone who has read Mark’s profile knows, he is a fellow of the CPD.
@2 and 3 – That’s right, LO, and hopefully it also enables feedback and constructive criticism for the CPD’s writers.
Sorry, last time I checked Mark’s bio (which was a while ago) I didn’t notice the CPD affiliation.
So, a constructive criticism for their writers. More empirics and less idealism. What i want to see from progressives is not just a wish list of policies and a whinge about how the majors are ignoring important progressive issues. I want to see them confront, head-on, the actual political landscape in Australia and develop concrete ideas about how to push policy in a more progressive direction that don’t involve Pauline conversions of the average voter.
” No credible policymaker in this area thinks the assumptions underlying the Energy Institute report are credible.”
Two things:
1. I don;t understand who the “Energy Institute” at the University of Melbourne are. Their webpage (http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/institute-staff/) indicates two staff, including one ‘public relations and communications’ expert. The Stationary Energy report was produced by “Beyond Zero Emissions” and at a quick glance I can’t tell how they’re connected to the Energy Institute.
2. The goals described by the Beyond Zero people are, in some ways, not unlike JFK’s 1961 goal of ‘landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth’. We need an outrageous goal on that scale and we need to muster our national effort in support of that goal. Were there any ‘credible policymakers’ in 1961 who thought that was achievable in 10 years? I don’t think science fiction authors thought that was a credible goal in 1961. Can we do move to zero emissions is a few years? I don’t know, but I can surely put my hand on my heart and say that THE ONLY WAY WE WILL DO IT IS IF WE TRY TO DO IT!
LO, I’ve a lot of respect for you, based on your contributions here at LP, but if we constrain all our national priorities to ‘what credible policymakers believe is achievable’ then we’re not going to get to where we need to be in the medium term. Incremental, achievable and credible goals are sufficient (and necessary) for many of our challenges and problems we are facing, but Climate Change requires a comprehensive re-architecting of our society, which any credible policymaker would have to dismiss as ‘unrealistic’.
I often ‘joke’ that I gave up the luxury of pessimism when my children we born, and it’s kind of true. When I was younger, I would sit back and think ‘we’re fscked, there’s no way we’re going to be able to fix this in time’ and I took cold comfort in the fact [sic] I would not be bringing children into this future. Now, decades later, I have children and a burning incentive to fight for the future. The science tells us that it is overwhelmingly likely that our goals must be ambitious, on the scale that the moon landing were ambitious. The problems are diabolically complicated because it’s not just an engineering problem that can be solved in large hangers with numerous men with slide rules, it’s also a human behaviour problem. I don;t have the solutions, and neither do Beyond Zero or the Energy institute or whoever. But until we the face facts that these problems are simply beyond the scope of normal government policies, we are not going to get anywhere.
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Daryl, I see your point and I respect where you are coming from.
I guess my beef at the moment, and often with the left generally, is that it is all dreaming and very little thought about how we can get there through existing political institutions. Those that think climate change is a big deal and are prepared to go as far as proposed in the OP are effectively having conversations with themselves. You see it on LP threads all the time. Endless discussions of how we can drastically reduce emissions cheaply (almost always underpinned by very optimistic assumptions) with barely a thought given to how the average voter might be persuaded to agree with the goal and in particular be prepared to absorb the short-term costs that go along with it. Unfortunately, the goal is not self-evident to many of the people that actually matter for achieving the necessary change in a democracy.
In the end, the moon goal is a bad analogy with the 100% renewable goal. Nobody thought they were going to lose their jobs because the government were trying to put a man on the moon. It could never have been attacked as a great big tax on everything. Americans were free to dream without having to worry about the consequences. And to boot it also dovetailed with the anti-communist political narrative of the time. It was politically costless.
The 100% renewable goal is far more difficult because it is far more contested and will ultimately be far more redistributive. Collective action on climate change is an acute political problem and I want to see the left and the green movement engaged with that challenge.
You may be right in that we need a re-architecture of society, though I myself doubt that meeting the challenge need be quite that drastic. But if you really believe that, you need to start giving some serious attention to how to bring about that change within a body politic that currently doesn’t see things in the same way you do.
Julia and her team want to ‘move forward’ but to where, and tones and his guys want to go back to some golden era that never existed. Nobody seems to want to tackle real issues, things that matter. Power is now the means and the end. I hope that the greens get the balance of this ‘power’ and that will mean something, but even though I too have children, I am extremely pessimistic.
I love the man on the moon analogy, and as with any analogy you can look for the spots it doesn’t fit, or see the larger picture where it does. Leadership is about vision… it is about knowing that whilst you may not have all the answers, if you can engage people in heading collectively towards something, things you never imagined possible will eventuate.
If not now, when? There is a compelling need to address climate change, and no historic precident to fall back on. It’s time to be radical, ambitious… transformational.
This is the time when the “incremental” tactics and strategies of the usual policy makers just aren’t going to cut it. And as for practical… google “transition towns”… peope who are transforming their own local environments because inflexible policy makers are incapable of keeping up with the pace of change required of this challenge.
What are they doing ? Practical stuff…all of it… no pie in the sky but some amazing results born of an ideal. Leadership from below… pushing the “policy makers” when their policies get in the way of what makes sense.