Tag Archive for 'Climate change'

Editorial interference by the ABC’s chairman

ABC Chairman Maurice Newman made a few comments yesterday that may go a long way to explaining some of the pressures editors and producers at the public broadcaster may be under – specifically on the issue of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

This collective censorious approach succeeded in suppressing contrary views in the mainstream media, despite the fact that a growing number of distinguished scientists were challenging the conventional wisdom with alternative theories and peer reviewed research.

While claiming some of his best friends were journalists, Newman attacked the profession for uncritical group thinking on a range of issues (Enron, tech meltdown and the GFC) and further outing himself – with language that could only be described as that of climate skepticism.

Of course Newman is welcome to hold whatever views he wishes, that is not the issue.

As Friends of the ABC spokesperson Glenys Stradijot pointed out in a statement, “this looks like an attempt to influence ABC programming to be more favourable to global warming skepticism.

“Mr Newman needs to explain why he took the step of criticising the media’s coverage of global warming and why he addressed that criticism to ABC staff.”

Stradijot also alleged that Newman’s former position as chairman of the Center for Independent Studies (CIS) might be a factor in informing his world view on the subject.

A transcript of Newman’s interview and explanation with Brendan Trembath of the ABC can be found here.

Further reading: The inimitable Stilgherrian and Crikey’s Eric Beecher.

What is truth?

The other day, I mentioned Clive Hamilton’s series of posts on climate change denialism at The Drum. In today’s edition, Hamilton comments:

Indeed, those who study the climate itself rather than the bogus debate in the newspapers and the blogosphere understand that climate science and popular perceptions of climate science are diverging rapidly, not least because the news on the former is getting worse.

Indeed. But there’s something of a perception lurking around here that ’science’ is one thing and ‘politics’ another, which I think is false.

It’s certainly the case that whatever ammunition denialists use against climate science is not itself part of the ’skepticism’ which is said to be integral to the scientific method. Rather than proposing an alternative hypothesis which would better explain the range of observations made, any line of attack is used, no matter how contradictory with others it may be. So, what we have in denialist discourse is all politics, and no science. No scientific method.

It’s important to underline this point. What denialists cannot provide is anything which can approximate to a truth statement. Methodological doubt, Cartesian style, is supposed to be a prelude to the uncovering of a truth, not a rhetorical strategy of dismissal. Climate change skepticism, contrary to the claims of some of its proponents, has absolutely nothing to do with ‘The Enlightenment’. Quite the contrary.

Their other classic move is to hold science itself to an impossible standard. Somehow the findings of climate science have to be unequivocally true. What we actually see, then, in this contre-temps is a debate over what constitutes truth. Statements made by the IPCC, for instance, are couched in terms of Bayesian probabilities, rather than ‘predictions’. It’s the same form of statement as with genetic predispositions individuals may have to particular diseases; having such a predisposition does not imply that one will necessarily develop the disease. Probability is not destiny or fate. But probabilities of 90%, as in the IPCC’s Fourth Report, are very strong indeed.

But asking science to articulate truth, if truth is understood as incontrovertible knowledge, is asking it to do something it cannot do.

Continue reading ‘What is truth?’

Climate change and the coasts

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has given a speech in Adelaide at the first forum designed to address the impact of climate change on Australia’s coasts. This is part of a broader programme of adaptation planning, and this particular meeting follows last year’s report on Climate Change Risks to Australia’s Coasts and the establishment of a Coasts and Climate Change Council headed by Tim Flannery.

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]

Newspoll and climate change opinion II; partisan affiliation, gender and age

As a supplement to Paul’s post, I thought it was worthwhile posting derived tables of the breakdown by partisan affiliation, gender and age, courtesy of Possum. As he says, “Those results are pretty interesting in and of themselves!”… particularly the variance by age and, to a lesser degree, gender.

Continue reading ‘Newspoll and climate change opinion II; partisan affiliation, gender and age’

Turnbull on climate change policy

Former Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull spoke in the House of Representatives today, in debate on the reintroduced CPRS bills. Bernard Keane has a full wrap at The Stump. From Keane’s coverage, it appears that Turnbull devoted most of his time to demolishing Tony Abbott’s plan:

Turnbull tore apart the proposed plan as economically inefficient, environmentally ineffective and unable to meet the task of reducing Australia’s emissions by 5% by 2020.

Update: Peter Martin reproduces the text of Turnbull’s speech.

Shock! Horror! Political journosphere shocked by the ALP playing politics!

Ben Eltham has a wrap up of the week in politics at New Matilda. It’s certainly fair to say that it certainly didn’t go all the Coalition’s way. What surprises me about the commentary we’ve seen in the lead up to and after the resumption of Parliament is some sort of default assumption that Tony Abbott would release his climate change policy, and happily elope with the voters, and that’s the last we’d hear of politics in an election year. Dennis Shanahan is, as always, indicative:

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.

Putting a figure on the Coalition’s shadow carbon price

The politics of the Coalition’s climate policy announcement has already been covered by Mark, but the policy also contains some pretty dodgy accounting, as I argued in my piece yesterday for New Matilda.

Today I thought I’d take some time to unpick those rubbery carbon reduction figures. Continue reading ‘Putting a figure on the Coalition’s shadow carbon price’

The politics of ‘direct action’ on Climate Change

After last night’s round of interviews with Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce, one thing is clear about the Coalition’s climate change policy.

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.

Great big new tax scare campaign game: Two can play

Both the Government and the Coalition are publicly committed to a 5% emissions reduction target. Tony Abbott claims he will get there via ‘direct action’ and avoid the ‘great big new tax on everything’ – his characterisation of Labor’s ETS.

Kevin Rudd today:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is warning voters that the coalition’s approach to climate change will be very costly.

He says the policy, to be unveiled by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on Tuesday, will be a large tax with very little environmental impact.

‘One huge mega tax from Mr Abbott to fund his approach to climate change,’ Mr Rudd told the Nine Network.

When in doubt, muddy the waters?

According to the Abbotariat, the big problem with the Government’s approach is supposed to be that the public doesn’t, on the whole, understand the detail of the ETS. Kevin Rudd is betting that no one understands what Abbott’s proposing either. Labor’s line will be that Abbott’s claims that he can fund over 10 billion dollars of policy (according to the Department of Climate Change’s costings) through unspecified efficiencies are spurious, and that he would have to raise revenue to fund his promises. Labor, supposedly, won’t, because the ETS is meant to be budget neutral.

All this is fairly complex, but we won’t see much of that complexity debated in the public arena during an election year. Kevin Rudd’s playing one of the oldest tricks in the book – make your opponent deny something you claim they’re going to do, and hope that:

(a) they’re perceived as less trustworthy; and/or

(b) obfuscating the issue will make everyone discount it because neither side can be believed.

It’ll probably work.

Continue reading ‘Great big new tax scare campaign game: Two can play’

Limits to growth?

The New Economics Foundation in the UK has released a major report – Growth Isn’t Possible. The Foundation, whose motto is ‘economics as if people and the planet mattered’, questions whether exponential economic growth is possible in the face of the disjunction between its imperatives and the limits of the planet’s biocapacity. The authors, Andrew Simms and Victoria Johnson, observe that the language of orthodoxy and heresy is a significant one in economic discourse; among other things, I’d add, the political imperative to focus on redistribution rather than the justice of distribution (and thus the inequality inherent in capitalist society) itself constrains questioning. Yet the thesis that growth has its limits is the pure province of neither 70s faddism or heterodox Marxists. John Stuart Mill proposed in 1848:

… the increase in wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state.

The NEF report is summarised in this blog post by its co-author and the Foundation’s policy director, Andrew Simms. The report itself is clearly and well written, and marshals an impressive range of evidence and argument about the economics and politics of energy usage. It’s not a quick read, but I’d strongly urge a perusal of, at least, the introductory and concluding chapters. Many won’t want to have the debate it foresees about limits to growth, but it’s one I am sure will not go away.

Rudd government to negotiate with Greens on CPRS?

The Australian Greens have written to the Prime Minister suggesting Ross Garnaut’s interim proposal on carbon trading as a mode of breaking the deadlock on the CPRS legislation.

Details are here.

On SBS news tonight, Kevin Rudd stated he was open to negotiations with all parties represented in the Parliament. The current ETS bills obviously have no chance of passage via Liberal votes since Malcolm Turnbull lost the leadership. It’s intriguing to contemplate Labor reaching an accommodation with The Greens. In many ways, Labor doesn’t need a double dissolution, as it would increase the prospects of non-major party Senate candidate. The current CPRS has also now lost its utility as a political wedge against the Liberals, and in an election year, there may be some value in Labor being able to demonstrate something has actually been done on climate change.

The sticking point, of course, would still be Senators Xenophon and Fielding.

How (not) to do things with graphs

Possum has a cracker of a post up on Andrew Bolt’s infamous climate change graphs.

Go read, as they say.

He also pings the blurring of the opinion/analysis distinction at the ABC, where Bolt seems to wear two hats – as some sort of putative student of climate science and as ballast for the famous right wing balance.

Which begs the question – if Bolt is so easily fooled, why does the ABC or any media outfit attempting to be informative use him? Tabloids I can understand – they’re rubbish from arsehole to breakfast time in the serious debate stakes, it’s entertainment not serious news and analysis. But the ABC?

It’s not only a sad indictment on what passes for quality debate on public affairs in the MSM in Australia, but it’s also a massive slap in the face to the intelligent conservatives and those from the intellectual right who end up having their political views represented in the public sphere by what amounts to a form of mediocrity. A result, mind you, that was always going to be inevitable when the pursuit of “political balance” on these programs transformed into a lazy affirmative action program for pundits with conservative leanings.

Conservatives and those on the right deserve better from our flagship current affairs programs – it’s not like we have a shortage of professionally skilled, media friendly folks from the right. A quick look through the halls of the IPA and CIS demonstrates that pretty clearly.

After Copenhagen IV: What sort of climate change activism?

I made a comment on my previous post that the result (or lack of result) from COP is likely to be both discouraging to many activists and to provoke rethinking about strategy and tactics. In order to stimulate discussion about where things should go now, I’m republishing (with permission under a Creative Commons licence) an article by Rupert Read from Open Democracy beneath the fold [click through for the original with hyperlinks]. I’m not necessarily endorsing Read’s position, but I think the piece might be useful as a discussion starter.

Continue reading ‘After Copenhagen IV: What sort of climate change activism?’

The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary

One of the accusations frequently made by climate change deniers or ’skeptics’ against those who would like to see concerted action taken to ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic global warming is that of being somehow apocalyptic. A related charge is that climate change activism is somehow a screen or cover for an unstated political agenda.

Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is occurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.

There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.

Writing in his recent First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek diagnoses the range of contemporary apocalyptic politics. He quotes Ed Ayres:

We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that “something” is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.

Žižek argues that “the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance”, and cites Ayres again to characterise this effect:

A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.

Continue reading ‘The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary’

Open Democracy’s retrospective and prospective look at the decade/s

Open Democracy has asked a range of its contributors to answer the following questions:

A volcanic decade in global politics ends amid deep unease about the world’s ability to rise to key 21st-century challenges. openDemocracy writers draw breath and look ahead by reflecting on three questions:

1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?

2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?

3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?

Their reflections and prognostications can be found here and here.

Reading through the responses, a number of common themes emerge. One is the rise of China and the end of a unipolar world (and in this context, it’s interesting to observe more evidence surfacing about the snubs Beijing has been giving Barack Obama). Associated with this theme is the end of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, the decline of effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and the rise of the anti-terror security state in the 2000s. Whatever the views of the ideologues of globalisation, it’s difficult not to conclude that the first decade of this century saw the state come back. While much could be written critical of the emergence of international human rights law and international co-ordination which was one of the important trends of the 90s, conversely urgent problems like climate change are insoluble without concerted world action (while the last years of the late decade showed that the global financial sector could be bailed out at all deliberate speed).

Here too, it might be germane to observe that the sort of authoritarian state led capitalism characteristic of the Chinese model has both its parallels and echoes in the West (as civil liberties decline and torture becomes an acceptable subject of public discourse) and that its rise challenges the 90s end of history/democratisation thesis that market activity brings civic virtue in its wake. For many of the writers, the 2000s were a somewhat dark decade, characterised by rising inequality. Notable is a focus on the practice of multinationals buying up huge swathes of agricultural land in developing countries (particularly in Africa); for instance the leasing of almost half Madagascar’s arable land by a South Korean corporation. This issue warrants more attention than it’s received. It’s in stark contrast with pronouncements such as the Millennium Goals, and symbolises the end of the discourse of development and the entrenchment of a core/periphery model in the global economy, aside from its obvious human and ecological implications.

There’s much to ponder here.

Interestingly, only a small number of contributors referred to the rise of social media and the dissemination of the internet as a key development of the 00s. That’s something I’ll take up presently in another post.