The idea is that there’d be no need for handouts or compensation to rent seekers, and that households and businesses could be compensated according to their needs. The article notes that a full range of market based solutions was never really contemplated, because the international momentum had previously been towards a production based ETS.

Despite the near absence of any reporting in Australian media, and its dissonance with the ‘narrative’, Copenhagen was not without result, and there will still be advantage in, and pressure for, Australia to establish a carbon price.

I’m no expert on the design or implications of these sorts of mechanisms, and I’d welcome input from commenters who can elucidate the nature of a consumption based ETS.

Politically, I’ve been commenting for some time that it’s highly likely that the Rudd government will seek to put something substantive in place on climate change before the election. The challenge will be to explain away the backflip on the CPRS in a more convincing manner, and why a replacement model wasn’t proposed earlier (and here The Greens’ support for an interim Garnaut Carbon Tax should have been leveraged).

Kevin Rudd is said to be disillusioned with the purported strategic geniuses from the NSW Right (Mark Arbib, Karl Bitar, Bruce Hawker, Graham Richardson, et al) whose bright idea it was to dump the CPRS in the first place. This mob never met a focus group they didn’t run in fear from, and their sole solution, aside from policy cave-ins, is leadership change. Worked well for the NSW government, didn’t it?

A substantive ETS which avoids some of the political and policy problems of the CPRS would be just the tonic the government needs, and would usefully focus attention back on Tony Abbott’s ‘Direct Action’ tokenism and denialism. But the challenge will still be to fix the mess already made with the CPRS, which has been exemplary of the government’s tendency to shoot itself in the foot.

Elsewhere: Richard Green at Troppo.

Previously on LP: Communicating climate science.

That Council has recently released its prelimary conclusions.

Wong’s speech is significant for a number of reasons, including the fact that she rebuts the denialist criticisms of the IPCC in detail. As Gary Sauer-Thompson observes:

…development around the Australian coast assumes that sea level and storm events would function as they have in the past and our housing estates, business sites and public utilities have been designed as if the coastline and tidal levels would not change. Such assumptions are no longer valid. The Australian, of course, is not convinced.

Elsewhere: Deltoid [Brian]

The venue was the Hilton Hotel Grand Ballroom, and attendance was about 60% of capacity, that is roughly half the number of people who attended last time I was there, when it was packed to 120% of capacity for the launch of MySpace (remember MySpace? Neither do I…)

At any rate, I am pleased to report that the debate was indeed just that, a real debate, conducted civilly, in front of an attentive and polite crowd, and well moderated by Alan Jones.

It was neither the rabble-rousing denialist circus some feared it would be, nor an embarrassing excursion into Monckton’s many personal foibles. It was instead, a robust, articulate presentation and dissection of the factual content behind Monckton’s denialist propositions. Both speakers were modest, neither hyperbolic, and both approached the question in an open and non-dogmatic fashion.

In two fifteen-minute presentations, each speaker addressed the proposition that “manmade global warming is a real threat”. The substance of the debate hinged, I am happy to say, on a scientific question concerning the degree of climate sensitivity to differing concentrations of CO2. Namely, Monckton has independently calculated a level of climate sensitivity that is lower than the IPCC’s estimate, by a factor of approximately 7-8 times. Dr Lambert showed Monckton’s calculation to be based on a misunderstanding of data provided by a satellite scientist, one Professor Rachel Pinker (2007). Dr. Lambert also showed that Monckton’s thesis depends entirely on the climate sensitivity being a very low estimate, while the other denialist darling, Ian Plimer’s, thesis depends on climate sensitivity being a very high estimate. They cannot both be right, and perhaps both are wrong.

What followed was about 90 minutes of questions from the floor, which again was handled very calmly and coolly by all the proponents. Some of the questions were truly odd, and showed a very low level of understanding of science, and a very high level of paranoia and confusion among the (predominantly old and angry) audience members:

1. One gentleman attempted to suggest that, since a lot of the world’s carbon is in the oceans, it is water vapour evapourating from the oceans, and not fossil fuels, that is causing warming (what is causing all that extra evapouration, he didn’t say). Neither proponent had the heart to tell the gentleman that water vapour is made of, well, water, not CO2.
2. Another questioner thought that the 1976 international treaty banning weather-control devices (anyone heard of this?) showed that nations already had the technology to control the weather, so why aren’t they using it?
3. Another questioner said that our government is being totalitarian about environmental issues, and he lived under Soviet occupation in the former Czechoslovakia, so he should know.
4. Another questioner wanted to know whether Dr. Tim Lambert wanted to stop him from procreating with his wife (ewww).
5. Another questioner wanted to know if continental drift wasn’t the real driver of sea levels.

Contrary to many who worry about functions like this providing a platform for denialists, I think the debate generated far more light than heat (sic). It is a credit to the way both proponents, and the moderator, and indeed the audience, conducted themselves that it was a fruitful and enlightening discussion.

I think perhaps the most important thing that came out of the debate is that it takes a lot of wind out of denialist sails when they meet a real-life supporter of AGW science and realise that we are not trying to drag civilisation back to the stone age, prevent people from having babies, wreck the economy, keep the developing nations in poverty, or any of the other shibboleths that drive the denialist circus. As Tim Lambert explained to the audience, as a computer scientist, he is first and foremost an engineer, and it is an interesting and important engineering problem to work out how to get as many people as possible enjoying a high standard of living, without trashing the planet in the process. That’s all.

It’s also apparent that many denialists have a huge chip on their shoulder about, apparently, “totalitarian” attempts to shut them down or the “refusal” of the media to cover their activities. This despite the fact that they had a full public debate, in a prime CBD location, with media in attendance, moderated by a top-rating radio host. AFAIK, no brownshirts or greenshirts stormed the Hilton and stopped the debate. We all went out for coffee afterwards.

It never hurts to put a human face on one’s opponents, and this forum did exactly that. The denialist audience (and it was about 95% denialist) saw the human face of AGW science: people grappling with data, wrestling with hard questions, and not trying to take away their ability to fly in aeroplanes or have babies. For that reason, I think that today science and understanding were the winners, and so really, everybody won.

THE Rudd government has an unhealthy obsession with Tony Abbott’s obsessions. As parliament prepares to resume on Tuesday for the first sitting in an election year, some Labor ministers are spending so much time reinforcing adverse stereotypes of the new Liberal leader they run the double risk of appearing to be in a panic and of actually validating his policies and leadership.

KEVIN Rudd’s emissions trading scheme is dead but he can’t let it go. Politically he should shift ground to alternative action on climate change, blame Tony Abbott for the failure of a scheme previously favoured by Liberal leaders, and use the global failure to agree on a concerted plan as a reprieve before the election.

There’s some sort of bizarre alternate reality here, where the Opposition is constantly at the centre of events, and any sort of response which doesn’t play to the ‘media narrative’ from the Government is somehow electoral poison.

It’s just nuts. I suspect, in part, it derives from a belief that if the Liberals could unite behind one leader, all would be plain sailing from there on in. In fact, as one week of Barnaby-isms demonstrates, even without leadership speculation, they’re still shambolic. I think there’s still some sort of weird assumption that the Liberals are the natural party of government, and that the electorate are finally waking up to the mistake made in 2007; hence Labor is represented as being panic stricken after a single poll where their two party preferred vote is 52-48. (John Howard’s first term government, by contrast, spent a large part of the time behind in the polls.)

So we also get a bizarre perception that Labor is some sort of immovable object, locked in behind last year’s politics, and unable to shape the political landscape. This is reinforced by constant generalisation on the basis of anecdote – “voters are concerned by debt and deficit”, “Rudd is untrustworthy”, “climate change skepticism is on the increase”, very little of which has much support in any relevant polling. And the descent of Rudd’s own approval rating from its stellar heights is seen as an avatar of doom, without any particular attempt to correlate it with the party vote.

All very odd.

Like I said early in the week, watch the political narrative change.

Sparrow examines how the ground for a populist upsurge of climate change denialism among “the old, the white and the angry” was well prepared by the Howard era culture wars.

Once upon a time, the Liberal Party, an organisation temperamentally suited, after all, to hierarchy, accorded an almost royal deference to Big Science. Menzies presided over an Australia that wondered at atom splittings and Sputnik launchings, and not in the sceptical sense of that word but with genuine awe, with the mysteries expounded by clipboard-carrying oracles understood as evidencing the remarkable advances of the modern age.

Under Howard, however, the party embraced a populist anti-elitism, in which the instincts of ordinary folk always trumped the hoity-toity pronouncements of over-educated know-it-alls. Throughout the culture wars, the high falutin’ elitists in their inner-city apartments, those whining postmodernists confounding the common sense of you and me and the bloke next door, were a perennial punching bag for the Liberals and their mouthpieces.

The climate debate thus arrived with an oppositional script already well-prepared: on the one hand, the fancy-dancing, silver-tongued scientists and ideologues, with their incomprehensible graphs and statistical charts; on the other, the hard-working traditional Australians forced to feel bad about SUVs and air travel by self-righteous scolds.

Slapping down some scientific poindexter became, then, a reflexive defence of values associated with the ’50s, even as it manifested an attitude to the research establishment that Menzies would have found incomprehensible.

He’s also spot on in honing in on the fact that rational argument is incapable of shifting the views of denialists (much as the apparatus of knowledge has to be mimicked with graphs and charts); a mindset driven by affect, emotion and ressentiment, a perceived assault on a way of living and anti-rationalism is by definition immune to persuasion. After all, the frame of ‘the people v. the elites’ rules out the canons of evidence based debate by definition – if you can do that, then you’re one of the dreaded over-educated, latte-sipping tribe.

It is necessary to continue to argue within the rationalist, scientific paradigm, but it’s also vital to recognise that we are talking about two very distinct and opposed modes of being in the world and that the twain will rarely meet. The disjunction between magical thinking and scientific reasoning reinscribes itself because those who are trained in the latter are very often unaware that it is a rare and highly learned skill. The very practice of learning to think rationally naturalises it; and disguises the fact that it is an artifice constructed by human endeavour rather than ‘human nature’. This, then, circles around to the recreation of a feeling of social distance from those who don’t live in the worldview of science.

And that’s what causes a lot of the communicative failures that occur again and again, when incommensurable discourses clash. In fact, respect for science is grounded in status distinctions, as well as concomitant knowledge differentiation, and the erosion of the acceptance of authority pervasive throughout the lifeworld of late modernity erodes the naturalisation of such distinctions, and allows them to be politicised as a cultural war between elites and the folk(s). When you’re at war, dialogue has died.

At the more mundane level of electoral politics, though, all is not lost, because the two opposed constellations of forces are both small minorities within the populace as a whole. (Those who claim to speak “for the people” are also an elite social formation, of sorts.)

Sparrow, again:

Abbott thus faces a ticklish dilemma. On the one hand, the deniers bring a passion that an Opposition sorely needs. On the other hand, the climate sceptics teeter on the verge of overt hostility to the very establishment that the Liberal Party needs to win over. Populists, after all, despise and mistrust not only greenies and EU commissars but Big Media and Big Business.

The Liberal Party, well, not so much.

John Howard managed?—?most of the time?—?to present himself simultaneously as a populist and a man of the establishment. Perhaps Abbott can do the same. But it doesn’t seem likely, at least partly because the rhetorical tenor of the sceptics has grown so shrill.

NB: Related post.

”Because we represent the alternative government in Australia, that does not mean that we are omnipotent and that our views permeate to become the views of everyone else. We have to provide an outcome that represents the aspirations of the Australian people.”

In other words, we’re doing it because we have to pander to the electorate’s views, even if we think they’ve been gulled by a giant fraud.

And he made plain that he thinks this is exactly what it is.

Christopher Monckton:

Speaking to The Age before his speech to the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday, Lord Monckton said he had noted that Mr Abbott was very engaged by climate issues.

Lord Monckton said he told Mr Abbott his $3.2 billion policy to reduce carbon emissions by 5 per cent was unnecessary because carbon affected the atmosphere only one-seventh of what the United Nations said it did.

But Lord Monckton added that Mr Abbott’s policies to encourage tree planting and to help industry save energy would help address ”genuine” environmental problems.

”It is indeed better to have a policy which nods to the issue of climate change for those who still believe, and there are some diehards who still believe, that fixes some of the genuine environment issues that are a lot cheaper than the enormous amounts diverted to this ridiculous climate thing,” Lord Monckton said.

Later Monckton told the National Press Club that human-emitted carbon emissions were not warming the planet, that increased sun activity accounted for recent higher temperatures, and that the draft negotiating text at December UN climate talks had proposed setting up a world government.

No one believes in it.

They’ve come to this pass because of the momentum of the twin drives to dethrone Malcolm Turnbull and the internal politics of climate change denialism in the Coalition and among the so-called ‘Liberal base’.

Abbott’s ‘direct action’ is supposed to provide a point of contrast between bike-riding muscular Tony (and don’t for a minute think all these photos and all the tv vision of him in togs and exercising is coincidental) and that blancmange of a bureaucrat, KRudd. But the Coalition is stuck with the windy rhetoric that none of them actually care for – either because they don’t believe climate change is real, or because they know it is, and this is an epic fail.

That’s another reason why the contradictions in this thing won’t easily be papered over, and selling it will be very difficult.

You can’t straddle both sides of a barbed-wire fence.

The first stage of selling the Coalition’s climate change policy hasn’t gone well. Barnaby Joyce was positively incoherent on Lateline, and wanted to talk about anything but the policy itself. Significantly, perhaps, when asked about his new role, his response was something along the lines of “I’m not exactly fascinated”. Really. Maybe for both him and his boss, being an oppositionalist ‘retail politician’ and mouthing off about anything and everything is a more comfortable space than having to defend a policy position.

That certainly appeared to be the case for Tony Abbott on the 7.30 Report tonight.

His inability to justify the lie about the cost of the CPRS to taxpayers aside, Abbott found out that it’s very hard to straddle the denialist constituency *and* maintain the fiction that he wants to do something to abate carbon emissions. And it’s not going to get any easier for him.

What might have appeared over summer to the Abbotariat to be a tactical master stroke is now meeting political reality. And on the first day that Kevin Rudd found a way of concisely explaining the ETS.*

*Even, if, unfortunately, it doesn’t really punish polluters as much as it should.*