A predictable response to the Copenhagen fail has been calls from Australian business for *even more* ‘compensation’ as a condition for continued support of the Rudd government’s ETS. I’ll save the domestic politics of the Copenhagen washup for a later post, but I think it’s also worth reflecting on what underlies the sort of political and policy thinking which leads to bills such as the CPRS.
In my previous post, I reproduced Brian Davey’s piece from Open Democracy, which expressed skepticism about the capacities of the political system to deal with complex phenomena, permeating all sectors of the economy and lifeworld, such as climate change. I agree with the diagnosis, but I think that a different mode of politics could find solutions.
There are three similarities between the design of the CPRS and the American Health bill (and for that matter, the US cap and trade bills):
(a) Both started out with an ambit, seeking to find the limits of giveaways and concessions to political and particularly corporate constituencies; rather than from the position of a solution;
(b) Similarly, both come with implicit rhetoric that any action is a good start, and a messy compromise can later be made purer and more effective;
(c) Both seek to accommodate existing interests and shift behaviour only at the margins, rather than constructing a new frame which would require actors to reconfigure behaviours, and create new actors (and destroy or reshape old ones).
In short, this sort of approach to governance is inherently conservative, in that it seeks to match political imperatives to already existing situations, rather than to transform the situation politically. This tends not to work, for reasons which are fairly obvious. Yet, notions like ‘nudge’ and using quasi-markets to achieve social ends are the hallmarks of postmodern progressive policy wonk-dom.
In an interesting parallel, Andrew Norton recently typologised different sets of beliefs on the Australian right, while a number of writers in Salon, riffing off Ed Kilgore’s article in The New Republic, pointed to an ideological split in the American centre-left. However variously characterised, there’s a difference between what Glenn Greenwald calls corporatism and social democracy. Kevin Rudd has often described himself as a social democrat. But I think he’s more of an undifferentiated statist, with a vague notion that the power of the state should be used for doing good. Hence, we don’t have any particularly strong political direction from Labor on climate change (the actual choice, domestically, now lies between The Greens and the Coalition, as the middle path of tinkering begins to fall to bits).
Among other things, the lesson we should learn from the failure of Copenhagen is that a weak and conciliatory strategy designed to buy off as many special interests as possible (particularly through compensation for the right to future profits, which is now – quite bizarrely – represented as if it were a property right) leads not just to a milquetoast solution but also to political failure.
Michael Lind is quite right to suggest that American progressives need to reflect on their ideological differences, exposed by the defeat of Bush, and I think we need to, as well. In so doing, we also need to recover a sense of the possibilities of progressive politics, and not to rest content with a vaguely progressive desire to steer social and economic forces and actors this way or that. The times demand something much more urgent, and something which would require the spending of political capital, some of which needs to be used to take on the vested interests of polluters. But if Australian progressives were to frame the choices more sharply, and offer genuine action on climate change, my bet would be that would pay a political dividend.
Update: The third part of the ‘After Copenhagen’ series, on domestic politics, has now been posted here.
“but I think that a different mode of politics could find solutions”
Yikes Mark thats ambitious and idealistic.
Out with the old and in with the new?
Details?
What, how, who?
they’d get 6 votes in the senate??
Wow, Mark, you’re a fan of Lind? But he’s America’s Robert Manne! (His Up from Conservatism had a profound effect on my thinking about America when I read it a decade ago. It’s a book that predicts what would happen in the second Bush years—or almost predicts it, the unimaginable.)
Thanks to proportional representation and preferential voting we have this system at work already in Australia, at least on the left-of-centre. It gets ugly, but it’s at least functional (though the regular ‘you-pricks-are-stealing-our-inner-city-voters!’ threads here at election time shows how base and unconstructive the relationship can become).
A realignment within the actual Labor Party & union movement is much less plausible (at least a realignment to include Greens on top of the existing eco-rats & so-dems. The old Left is also on the outer, though obviously for different reasons). That’s why there are now some Leftwing unionists in the Green Party. When Julia becomes PM I fully expect her to have to continue managing the issues that have led to this arising.
Anyway, I think the comparision between the Oz ETS and the travails of Obamacare is of limited utility. The ALP here may have been acting in terror of being labelled radical on fighting global warming, but at least they now hold all the cards (and literally all of them, thanks to the Monk.) The US Democrats have had the whole weight of respectable opinion & the electoral system against them, and I think that will continue unless/until Obama wins an LBJ-sized landslide reelection.
Also, the Leftwing freakout against the 5% target was not unmerited (because Rudd and Wong wouldn’t negotiate with the Greens, i.e. people of good faith). The freakout in the US over the (slightly) watered down healthcare bill ignores the fact that there are no people of good faith to the Right of the Democratic Party, and several ‘moderates’ in the party itself who, either out of fear or hubris, are perfectly willing to ignore the coalition of interests Lind says should motivate them. The Left freakout there wasn’t merited, as things really wouldn’t have played out any other way.
wbb @ 2, that’s only five Senate votes at present. But there’s always 2011.
Yes, the only way forward is to vote Green and keep voting Green until the Labor party finally gets the message that people want prescriptive legislation to deal with polluters.
The “Trades Hall” Labor right will be cut adrift, as they should be, to emerge clinging to the creaking raft of the Coalition.
Just imagine if Greens leader Bob Brown could guarantee to Kevin Rudd that a successful Labor/Greens negotiation would mean the result was passed by the Senate – then, and only then, it is possible that Rudd would agree to to a 25 per cent cut on 2000 emissions by 2020 (that’s around 24 per cent on 1990 emissions). But the reality is that Brown’s statement that the Government should negotiate with the Greens ignores the present political reality. Brown is being completely unrealistic. His only chance to have a place at the table was to agree with the compromise deal between Penny Wong and the Liberals and hope that two Liberals would cross the floor. But Brown did not have the political nous to recognise this. He preferred the impotence of purity to actually making a positive step By the way, how many remember the Greens hailing the Waxman-Markey propsal. That’s a solution, based on reducing emissions on 2005 figures, which actually represents a lower cut than Australia’s 5 per cent on 2000 emissions. Ah, the purity!
“But if Australian progressives were to frame the choices more sharply, and offer genuine action on climate change, my bet would be that would pay a political dividend.”
My bet is that it wouldn’t.
On the US, Nate Silver has some nice posts recently that outline in detail: a) that the health care bill as it currently stands represents a big win for progressives compared with the status quo; and b) the bill that some progressives want and seem prepapred to sacrifice the current bill for would be unlikely to pass.
In Australia, the political system is quite different, but again, the government does not control the Senate. Outside of a double dissolution, that means either negotiation with the Greens/cross benchers or the Coalition.
The government has made a political judgement that political support for concerted action on climate change is soft and that actions that quickly ramped up the cost of energy (whether through the CPRS, a carbon tax, or direct action) domestically before most of our trading partners would yield little benefit – environmentally, economically or politically.
So, they have gone for a middle ground that tries to bring as many stakeholders into the tent as possible. The government’s judgement is that despite Abbott’s posturing, they have more in common with the Coalition than the Greens and that it is the Coalition that represents the greater political danger in the medium term. The fact that there has been little backlash against this strategy, either within the electorate ore amongst the interest groups that matter, hardly suggests that it has been politically costly. Do you seriously believe that support for the government would increase if it announced a 25% target by 2020 and required almost all of this reduction to come from domestic reductions (very limited offsets) as is the Greens’ minimum bargaining position?
So, what you say is conservative governance I say is pragmatism. Your approach to public policy, not just regarding climate change, but in other areas as well (taxes, welfare, etc) would see political support for the government drop away sharply. The electorate isn’t a piece of dough that you can shape to your political fantasies at will. Policy can and should push at the edges but also has to work within the constraints of views already held.
That’s a counsel for the sort of gradualism which is so prone to being captured by vested interests (which I know you oppose, LO). It’s eminently possible to frame issues differently, and to lead public opinion. The only option is *not* the big tent one, fond as Rudd and Obama are of it.
By the way, I’d prefer to discuss Senate passage, etc. on a later thread (which I’ll pop up shortly). I doubt that the Rudd government will now move from the position they’ve taken, but what I would have liked to have seen (along the lines I’m suggesting) is a much cleaner ETS model, without tons of exceptions and ludicrous handouts to polluters. That wouldn’t have passed the Senate either, but it might have actually demonstrated good faith in tackling the problem properly, and with an instrument that could be easily explained.
Oh, and the 5% target is a joke.
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/
Gary Sauer-Thompson has an interesting post on the cause of the problem which I thought we were discussing.
Here is a taste:
“For instance, the latest editorial on Copenhagen—Put Australia’s interests first–equates Australia’s national interest with the miners and heavy industry who have long opposed an emissions trading scheme.”
You might be sick, Mark, but the hits keep coming; great post!
I’m similar to LO here, in that I believe democracy as we are familiar with it in the West is inherently conservative, and furthermore you could argue that it’s – albeit blurred – a reflection of the various publics themselves.
What you’re talking about or proposing – to paraphrase Spock – might be democracy, Jim, but not as we know it. I also worry when people start proposing projects or identity for the Left. It’s something right-wingers (ha ha, I’m generalising myself!) do all the time. I actually believe the Left – such as it is – is something that exists only in a temporal space: people come together on certain issues at certain times. But at the very same moment, these denizens on ‘the Left’ may shy away or disagree vehemently on other issues – or maybe deride being ‘Left’ themselves.
I worry that a collective identity is a symptom of the positivism that underlies many problems in political discourses, and further more that the weight of the vision may crush those trying to bear it (a characterisation that I think equally applies to the right). There’s also an inescapable element of silencing to it. Once you self-identity like that, you become vested in the continuation of the identity, and that can sometimes come at the expense of principles, policy etc. You may feel pressure (internal and external) to sacrifice the specific for the general; the now for the future. And I think it can lead to some pretty regrettable outcomes.
The problem with the Monbiot/Klein positions, and the approach of the NGOs generally, is that they are approaching this as akin to a domestic policy issue, where various stakeholders and interest groups compete for policy influence. It is that to some extent, but the failure of Copenhagen indicates to me that it has primarily become a foreign policy issue, where realism is the name of the game.
And herein lies the problem with the Greens’ position, which is that demanding targets so far in excess of what the rest of the world is prepared to offer appears as unilateral economic disarmament, where Australian living standards are cut with no compensating changes elsewhere. If Labor went with the Greens on this position, the Coalition would really have the wind in its political sails, as the Tories kept having in 1980s Britain as Labour kept putting forward unilateral nuclear disarmament.
If we accept that climate pollution reduction targets have become a foreign policy issue, and that realism is the name of the game in foreign policy, then the implication is pretty clear. Some sort of a negotiated agreement between the U.S. and China becomes the benchmark that other nation-states will follow.
If this is the case, then future Copehagens are unnecessary. There won’t be 45,000 delegates or an NGO convention. The dialogue won;t be hijacked by bit players. By this I don’t mean the Sudanese delegation or Hugo Chavez, but bit players like Gordon Brown or the Prime Minister of Denmark, neither of whose countries are significant players at all in the global carbon emissions game. In fact, Australia is a more significant player than Britain, being a producer/exporter of all the relevant energy sources.
When Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband lecture the Chinese on bad faith in foreign policy negotiations, the Chinese think: gunboat diplomacy, the Treaty of Nanjing, the annexation of Hong Kong, the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties blah blah blah. The days when China kowtowed to the British Crown have long since passed, but the Chinese have long historical memories when it comes to being lectured by the British.
The US-China relationship is, however, quite different. Naomi Klein is wrong to think that the Chinese would respect and respond to a large unilateral emissions cut by the US. At the same time, the absence of an offer from the US means there is also little imperative to cut domestic emissions. The answer is diplomacy, and state-to-state negotiations in places that are highly unlikely to be like the Copenhagen circus.
I should add to my point: Obviously this is exactly what happens in political parties, to a greater or lesser degree. My concern is around expanding this into the public as political citizen (though interestingly I would argue we do this as social citizens all the time).
Update: The third part of the ‘After Copenhagen’ series, on domestic politics, has now been posted here.
Copenhagen has exposed the rifts amongst progressive NGOs.
Tod Brilliant’s post at PostCarbon shows some of the bitterness:
This split is exemplified in early reactions to COP15.
@13, Terry, what guarantee is there that a US-China deal would be in the interests of the world? And what guarantee is there that other countries would fall into line? There’d actually be significant incentives not to.
@11, patrickg, interesting thoughts.
A few quick responses:
(a) Democracy is about rule by a majority. The problem is often that the minority refuses to accept the legitimacy of decisions made by a centre-left majority, particularly insofar as they touch business interests and what can be represented as being property rights. Thus centre-left parties in government have a tendency to be more conciliatory and to prefer a ‘big tent’ approach. It’s not the only way – right wing governments have often done outrageous things with very little public support and still managed to get themselves re-elected. It might also be possible for centre left governments to do courageous things and still manage to get themselves re-elected.
(b) You’re right about different publics forming on different issues, but again, this goes to the point of how one calls into being a latent public.
(c) You’re also right about political identity, but I myself don’t have a problem with a collective identity if it’s based on a consistent set of principles, if those principles are understood as a worldview oriented towards justice and equality, rather than a rigid ideology. Collective action is far more important as a force for change, and for reframing debates and issues than we realise in an age where the incentives for fragmentation and individualisation are so powerful.
Ah, now I understand. In that case, I agree pretty much entirely, especially with point a) and c). I’m forever raging against the deeply undemocratic nature of treating corporations like citizens in democracy, and corporate interests as public interests, when this is really very rarely the case, businesses being one of the most undemocratic institutions out there.
Mark, Australia would quickly settle on a target that came out of a US-China deal. So too would the EU, but it would insist upon saying it was its own idea. And a lot of the “G77″ players were in fact proxies for China. Why otherwise would so much attention be paid to the Sudanese delegation? Or the Ethiopians as a US proxy?
My general point is that Copenhagen demonstrated that this has primarily become a game among the nation-states, based on foreign policy realism and power politics. And the more central China is to a resolution, the more this will be the case. China doesn’t do NGO-ism.
Also, if a deal is going to be reached with China, the US and EU need to let go of external verification. There is just no way they are going to have hordes of Americans and representatives of the former colonial powers wandering around their military and industrial facilities counting carbon offsets. That means trusting China, on the basis of realpolitik.
@17 – patrickg, and there’s a neat little critique of the elision of Australia’s national interest with corporate interests here:
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/opinion/2009/12/the-australian-7.php
@18 – Terry, well Barack Obama’s already made the point that they can work out what China’s doing via satellite and other technologies.
While what you are positing may well be a plausible scenario in realpolitik terms, I still have huge doubts as to whether any US-China deal would actually result in the sorts of emissions reductions we need – which is actually the point of it all.
Terry wrote:
Hawke/Keating governments deregulated our economy in essentially a one sided dismantling of trade protection, without worrying about our trading partners, and we all benefited.
Greenhouse gas emissions are no different – we should just be doing it and not worrying about whether other countries go first or not. Currently our bunny-in-the-headlights routine is stifling innovation in favour of old vested interests and in the medium term that is counter productive. We’re a first world nation, rich in technological capability, but squandering the limited time frame we have to develop the next generation of power technology required to get us through this crisis. It will rightly be seen in the future as a tragedy.
Patgrickg said:
At one level, this is obviously beyond serious objection. Corporate interests are by definition private interests. Really a public corporation is a kind of lenders co-op, in which the lenders (shareholders) pool their funds agreeing to risk the lot and to get no dividends unless the people they lend to make a profit. The people who operate the business could have stayed private of course and borrowed directly from a lending institution, guaranteeing the lender a dividend and repayment of principle regardless of profit if they thought they could take the risk of loss on their own and could persuade the lender they were good for it. Sometimes rthough, that’s hard and more expensive. More risky ventures make equity-based borrowing relatively rational. When that happens, the shareholders form the “democratic” pool.
Thios is not structurally much different from other kinds of co-op. A farmers co-op might be set up to house grain and sell it at the best possible price, dividing up dividends by share after members supply grain at below the ultimate market clearing price. The only difference is the asset being lent — in this case grain.
If you own a villa in a strata-titled development you are really part of a housing co-op, in which you pool funds to buy services that would be too expensive to buy privately but which you can share with others at the wholesale price — such as pools and saunas and electronically controlled gates and maintenace and so forth.
In each of these cases, a private interest is served, but it is internally “democratic”.
And really, even the state itself represents, at least notionally, the concept of a large community pooling its funds to buy services collectively at a lower rate than each could buy them individually.
Is the state “democratic”? Rarely, at least in most usages. But that’s because the interests the state is expected to address are very diverse and so you have massive moral hazard/free-rider problems, like what happens when the management of a corporation also owns large swathes of the equity. In most modern democratic states, inequality amongst the “co-op” members means that some mebers can manipulate the managers of the “co-op/state” to serve their interests against other members. Co-ops rarely work well when the members have interests that are too divergent.
Well, the state has a public purpose, and is therefore a different form of instantiated collective action than any number of organisations with private purposes.
Patrickg’s point, surely, is that the granting of quasi-citizenship rights to corporations distorts the policy making process and legitimacy of a democracy which is premised on the formal equality of its members. It’s an argument with which I agree, and I’m confused by your apparent objection.
In particular, the granting of personhood to corporations creates rights which are then able to defeat majoritarian desires on the part of citizens.
See Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood_debate
Incidentally, that’s a very privatised and liberal view of the nature of the state.
<rant>
No we’re not. We’re the lazy, lard-arse Luddites of the South Pacific. We’re great at using technology but we’re hopeless at developing technology … unless its something that dig rocks out of the ground. Hell, what’s the point anyway when the Aussie dollar makes it impossible to compete internationally. About the only thing we can build is houses, and pretty crap houses at that.
We have no need to innovate because we profit enormously from the destruction of the global climate system through coal exports. Nothing will change this. Nothing!
Dutch Disease. Google it.
</rant>
…the Libs don’t want to corner themselves into an untenably immoral position….
‘the only real choice is between the Greens and the Coalition’
I disagree. The Greens and the Coalition each represent doing nothing. Both have advocated strategies based on voluntary action, which has achieved 0.5% emissions reduction to date. It’s the most expensive and least effective option.
So the choice really is between doing something, albeit of a heavily discounted nature (Labor), and doing nothing (Greens and Coalition).
The Greens have shown themselves to be motivated just as much by political expediency as the major parties, only with an extra dose of naivety and political amateurism. Their offer to negotiate is a Clayton’s offer, since they know they have nothing to offer the Govt in return (such as the ability to pass the legislation). They have executed a political strategy which locks them in to being a moralistic one-issue protest party, instead of taking a path which could have taken them into the wedge between the Libs and Nats to become a major political force. The recruitment of people like Guy Pearse and Clive Hamilton demonstrates this. For this reason I believe that Bob Brown, for all his charisma and deserved respect, is a leader of the past, not the future. I see little promise in Christine Milne, who has been hopelessly outmanoevred at every turn by Penny Wong, or any of the other current crop of Greens senators.