The Senate debate about the CPRS is getting close, and with views as diverse as those of Steve Fielding and Bob Brown it’s likely to be a cracker. Unfortunately, while there might be plenty of heat in the debate, whether the CPRS gets up or not will make no difference to global temperatures.

That fact has nothing to do with the tired observation that Australia only accounts for 1.5 per cent of world emissions. When you realise that there are 192 countries in the world, which entitles you to around half a per cent each, 1.5 per cent is actually quite an achievement. And when you factor in that we account for only 22 million of the world’s 6.7 billion people you get a clear picture of just how good at polluting we Australians really are.

The reason that the passage of the CPRS will have no impact on the world’s emissions is simpler than that. The fact is, the CPRS is irrelevant. It is irrelevant to the level of Australia’s emissions in 2020, and it is irrelevant to the world’s emissions in 2020. Both of these levels will be determined at Copenhagen or soon after. The treaty that comes out of Copenhagen will make no mention of the CPRS or its pathetic targets. Why Malcolm Turnbull would stake his leadership on something so meaningless defies logic.

So if the CPRS is so pointless, what’s all the fuss about? Unfortunately, it’s the old story of money, with a little bit of spin thrown in. But before analysing the farce surrounding the CPRS, let’s remove some misconceptions first.

The first thing that needs to be cleared up is that the CPRS targets have got nothing to do with the targets for Australia that will come out of the Copenhagen negotiations. As with Kyoto, Copenhagen will result in a series of different targets for different countries. Australia’s target will be determined by international arm twisting. Our negotiators will be in there arguing for the kind of pathetic targets to be found in the CPRS while other countries will be trying to drag us into the range supported by the civilised countries. The end result will be driven by diplomacy, not the passage of domestic legislation.

The second misunderstanding is that Copenhagen is about creating an international emissions trading scheme. It’s not. It’s about setting targets for countries to meet. How they meet them is up to them. Individual countries can implement domestic emissions trading schemes if they want to but they are also free to have a carbon tax or introduce Stalinist command and control policies. Countries who want to pollute more than their entitlement can trade with countries who want to pollute less. But Copenhagen is about developing targets for countries, not telling them how they should get there.

Thirdly, the world doesn’t give a damn whether the CPRS is passed or not. In Australia we are often told that the passage of the CPRS is somehow central to keeping the whole international push to tackle climate change on track. Without the CPRS the whole thing might crumble. Yeah right. The big countries will sort it out between themselves, the only issue for Australia is which side are we running cover for.

So again, what is all the fuss surrounding the CPRS about?

Let’s start with the money. Once Australia agrees to binding international targets at Copenhagen then something is going to have to change in Australia. Either we can reduce our emissions or we can spend a lot of money buying permits from other counties. The big polluters don’t want to do either as both would cost them money. What the CPRS does is give the big polluters certainty – certainty that they can keep polluting, certainty that they will get lots of compensation, and certainty that the carbon price won’t rise above $40 per tonne.

The point that has been missed in the Australian debate is that if the deal out of Copenhagen means Australia has to reduce emissions, but the CPRS has already assured the big polluters that they don’t have to lower their emissions, then something will have to give. That something will be the Australian taxpayer. If we are silly enough to give the big polluters ‘certainty’ while uncertainty about the outcome at Copenhagen remains then it will be the taxpayer who has to make up the difference. The taxpayer will have to pick up the tab for buying billions of dollars worth of credits from other counties while the CPRS gives a ‘right’ to the big polluters to carry on increasing their pollution.

You can see why the polluters are keen on rushing the scheme through.

And now for the spin. The Treasury modelling of the CPRS tells you all you really need to know about the CPRS. First, Australia’s domestic emissions will be no lower in 2019 than they were in 2008. Second, the carbon price will be so low that no coal fired power stations will be forced to close down. Third, all of the ‘reduction’ in emissions will come from importing permits from other counties.

Put simply the CPRS talks a good game, but it just doesn’t deliver.

The ‘clean energy revolution’ associated with the CPRS does not result in the closure of a single coal fired power station. The ‘transformation’ of the Australian economy does not even include higher petrol prices. And the ‘international leadership’ shown by Australia includes one of the least ambitious emission reduction targets in the developed world.

I can think of lots of reasons why Malcolm Turnbull might not want the leadership of the Coalition, but his party’s hostility to the CPRS wouldn’t be one of them.

“The way the Emissions Trading Scheme is designed, every kilogram of emissions saved by a household frees up an extra permit for a big polluter,” he said.

“So while it’s true this scheme will help reduce households’ use of energy, it won’t reduce Australia’s emissions at all.

“What they do is take those permits freed up by what the individuals have done and sell those permits to the aluminium industry or the steel industry or anyone else who wants them.

This is 100% accurate. The insulation package won’t reduce emissions at all – in fact, it’ll increase emissions slightly, as the insulation will be manufactured and installed before the actual emissions caps kick in in 2012. What it does – aside from stimulating economic activity, which is the point of the stimulus package – is achieve that emissions target more cheaply and easily than might otherwise be the case. That will indeed push down the price of emissions permits for your favourite evil industry of choice (it’ll also do so for organic food shops and pensioners, but that doesn’t ever get mentioned, funnily enough…)

But there’s a simple solution to this. The reason why the government went with such pathetic emissions targets in the first place was due to the fears of the effect on the economy. But we’ve effectively bought ourselves nearly a 1% reduction in annual emissions by this measure. Therefore, as part of the deal, the government should allocate fewer permits than they otherwise would have, such that the cost of permits stays precisely where it would have been absent this measure (this will be slightly less than 1% of total annual emissions, as the government was presumably already counting on some emissions reductions from this source). Treasury should be able to run the numbers reasonably easily. The polluter industries shouldn’t be able to complain, given that it won’t cost them anything they weren’t going to have to pay. And we get actual emissions reductions out of the process.

This should be a no-brainer for the Greens to put on their list for the Senate negotiations – both as a worthy measure in itself, but more importantly to establish an important precedent. If the government takes policy measures to reduce emissions from one part of Australian society, those emissions should not be reallocated to other sectors.

The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more moralistic and authoritarian than the Liberals ever were.

I think that’s far too broad a statement, and could be contradicted with evidence from other policy domains. And needless to say, there were enough Howard Ministers – Tony Abbott being one who immediately comes to mind – who could trump almost anyone when it comes to sanctimonious authoritarianism. It’s more accurate to say, in my view, that the arguments of “communitarians” provide useful cover for left ALP ministers (for instance, Gillard, Tanner and Macklin) to sign on to an agenda which actually derives straight from the Catholic right, and which has more than a little political calculation behind it – both in terms of Senate numbers (and the cohesiveness of the ALP Senate caucus itself) and also in terms of skimming some votes from churchgoing socially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.

A very similar dynamic is observable with regard to the arguments of the Noel Pearsons and Warren Mundines of this world – in that they provide cover for authoritarian interventions in Indigenous affairs (and increasingly in social policy more generally). The basic mindset is the same – worrying about the breakdown of norms and the absence of community. The communitarian stream of political philosophy – which largely developed in the 1990s and has strong affinities with “Third Way” politics – generally bemoans the alleged fracturing of moral values and shared ethics and places the duty on the state of recreating community in its absence. Very often, the practical and political application of such views has more than a tinge of racism about it. The goals set can never be achieved (which is useful politically for the more canny operators), and a lot of the concern is misplaced and wrongly framed, but a lot of damage can be done along the way by state intervention. Also writing in Spiked, Guy Rundle is much more sensitive to the real political dynamics of moralistic social democracy than Miller.

Probably the best way of understanding what’s going on is in terms of the clash between post-materialist and materialist politics. Labor governments need their own discourse to recapture those who “should” vote for the centre-left on economic grounds, and moralism and campaigning about the dire effects of pr0n and binge drinking or whatever provides the missing piece of the puzzle. But it is very much the case that such attitudes – or at any rate similar attitudes – cross the political spectrum, and that’s why it’s far too simple to judge one government as more authoritarian than another. There is a reason why Miller is partially right in suggesting that the left’s response has been “anemic” but again I think she’s too predisposed by her political dispositions to be an objective analyst in this instance. That reason has to do with – yep, you guessed it – the same legacy of 60s libertarianism Hamilton rails against, but it’s a big issue, and one I’ll return to shortly in another post.