The political inversion of the climate change debate

A number of journalists ranging across the spectrum from Fairfax's Annabel Crabb to News Limited stalwarts Dennis Shanahan and Andrew Bolt have identified the apparent contradiction between Rudd's 'I feel your pain' pitch to 'battlers' (or as the Piping Shrike has put it 'The New Sensitivity') and the inherent need for energy prices to rise to combat climate change.

On paper, it looks like a recipe for a Latham-Downeresque implosion. However, it both gives the voters no credit by implying they cannot hold two ideas in their collective heads at the same time and misunderstands the reasons for Howard's demise. Firstly, it is a well-established fact that voters can differentiate between state and federal politics. For at least two terms of the Howard government, large swathes of the country voted for completely different parties at the state and federal level. In fact, where Labor has run into trouble in the past is by dismissing many voters as 'ignorant' or 'unsophisticated'. The key basis of politics is persuasion, and a failure to persuade, while open to inteference from outside forces, ultimately comes down to whether the audience sees an essential truth in your message and your capacity to deliver. Rudd seems to be aware of the dangers of underestimating the public mind.

Secondly, Howard's fall from grace came from Rudd altering the economic debate from the macroeconomic level to the nanoeconomic level. Hence he recognised the problems of petrol and grocery price vulnerability and promised government assistance around the margins. Petrol and food prices operate however as free markets without government command and control influence, so real power here is limited to a 'watching brief', keeping an eye on price fluctuations and opening up the field for more competition.

What Rudd aims to do with climate change is again redefine the economic debate, this time on the macroeconomic level. Setting a price for carbon will integrate environmental costs into the economic system. That is the first step. The second will be for environmental and economic management to be seen as covalent. The third step is to break the nexus between economic growth and environmental emissions growth thus ensuring a political, economic and environmentally sustainable future. Unlike previous reforms such as the GST, support for an emissions trading scheme is consistently over 50%, while opposition sits around 25% with around 20% of people waiting to hear more details. Thus aligning economic and environmental action is what the people want at this point in time.

Unlike petrol and food commodities, the Rudd Government will have the power to set the starting price for carbon, define the parameters of the market and redistribute revenue from carbon permits to compensate the people. This market will afford government a measure of control rather than the watching brief seen in the nanoeconomic field.

The other thing that climate change does is transform energy increases into issues of personal responsibility. It thus becomes almost a civic duty to accept and embrace higher energy prices and encourage a larger share of renewable energy usage. In this climate, the goodwill to government is not dependent on keeping prices down but ensuring there is appropriate action being taken which is manageable on both the national and personal level. So government will both have more power to act and a proportionally lower need to act to ease public concerns.

The critical factors with the climate change carbon transition process will be the quality of the Rudd Government's communication with the people and its capacity to persuade voters that action is in all our interests. On this, expect to see a lot of Garrett and Rudd, and very little of Wong, who will be behind the scenes dealing with business and other large stakeholders.

Something is missing from this picture

The Australian Astronomical Society has just announced the release of a rather obtuse-sounding paper "Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?". This would normally pass into the scholarly ether but for the efforts of numerous global warming deniers to promote it as evidence of 'global cooling'.

The paper contains various observations regarding the orbit of the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn which have been helpfully translated to mean the Earth will experience diminished sunlight in the next decade and a consequent lowering of mean global temperature by 1-2 degrees. This trend is predicted to last around twenty to thirty years.

Precisely why certain blogs have immediately accepted this one paper rather than the weight of scientific opinion that anthropogenic climate change is unclear. However, even if we do accept these findings that a new global dimming is upon us, this only delays the impact of temperature rises from increased carbon in the atmosphere.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report offers a range of scenarios for temperature change, giving a projected increase of between 0.8 and 1.2 degrees C by 2040. It is quite possible that the two phenomena, if scientifically sound, could offset one another. However, the dimming period is predicted to last only 20-30 years which means by 2050 there would be a reasonable chance that the full force of high atmospheric carbon levels would be felt.

In other words, far from evidence that global warming is bunk, the global dimming phase at best offers a temporary reprieve and an unexpected opportunity to make better, more strategically sound long-term decisions.

Rather than use this as evidence for opposing any climate action, it should give us hope that we can adapt out society for sustainable development over the long term. We need to gain a better appreciation of both the dynamics of carbon in the atmosphere and the trends towards higher or lower solar radiation. At the same time, we need to continue picking low-hanging efficiency fruit and researching long-term fossil fuel replacements.

These decisions will be best made with open minds rather than ideological obsession.

Rudd's first statement: in debt according to the voters of Gippsland

By-elections are traditionally unfriendly terrain for governments. They are something like a political Twenty-Twenty match, exaggerating the effect of local issues and suppressing the overall standing of the party leaders. With the government out of election mode, there are few policy handouts to focus self-interest. This leaves the voters to 'judge the government' on its operating machinery, rarely an enterprise the government comes out on top in.

The Gippsland result was consequently never likely to produce a Labor win, however the magnitude of the defeat bears some examination. It is questionable whether Labor's candidate was particularly strong, being neither particularly popular nor having much of a message for people straining under high petrol and food prices. It is possible that he was the fourth or fifth best candidate running. Labor did terribly in La Trobe, Victoria's coal heartland, which was no doubt due to concerns over climate change mitigation taking jobs, living costs and the 'Bundy and Coke' backlash, plus the Liberal candidate was well-known in those parts. It suggests that Gippsland will become a progressively safer seat for the conservatives as time goes on. Indeed, it points to a loss here being catastrophic for both the Liberals and Nationals.

Sheer mathematics may have exaggerated the size of the defeat. There is some argument that the Liberals' decision to field a candidate contributed to some of the anti-National protest vote going to the Liberals and then back to the Nationals via preferences. Certainly Gippsland has a high proportion of former One Nation voters who would not be in broad sympathy with Rudd's agenda on climate change, Asian engagement or reconciliation.

However the effect of these local factors does not excuse Canberra altogether. Following Rudd's election last year, Peregrine made the following observation on the reasons for his high approval:

Rudd's approval rating seems to not be giving him the type of blank cheque voters offered a Coalition government running on 'keeping interest rates low' and border security. It is a loan that he has taken out on promises of taking concrete action on climate change, restoring the position of employees in the labour market, fixing the health system and improving the position of 'working families' on housing affordability, rents, grocery and petrol prices and child care.

The big question will Rudd have the political capital to pay up when the voters collect their debts.

The early evidence from Gippsland is that Rudd might not have spent much political capital but he has not repaid the trust shown in him yet either. The nanoeconomics of petrol and grocery prices are dwarfing all other issues, and Rudd has yet to have any concrete policy achievements on health or housing affordability. On the Gippsland climate change index he is even further behind. Here not only will action be critical, but retraining and business restructuring will be vital as the coal industry plays a major role in this part of Victoria.

In short, Gippsland represents a vote of confidence in the local National candidate and a vote of concern against a government that has not done anything to inspire confidence that jobs will be protected and services will improve. Instead all some voters have seen are long-term aspirations and short-term price rises, things they find even less appealing than Brendan Nelson.

Breaking the economic - emissions growth nexus

The realpolitik challenge of climate change lies in its economics. Although governments and environmental movements alike have long advocated the use of market mechanisms such as emissions trading in concert with traditional regulation and conservation measures, the major stumbling block to building a universal consensus for action is the link between economic growth and emissions growth.

It is axiomatic that, while powered predominantly by fossil fuels, economic growth will result in an increase in carbon emissions. This makes economic transitions from developing to developed countries have an exponential effect on carbon levels and push the atmosphere into dangerous territory. It paradoxically makes the problem more urgent and less amiable to agreement and action. Hence overtly capitalist, free-market theorists and commentators dismiss the need for climate change and heavily critique emissions trading despite its core reliance on market principles.

It is clear that unless this nexus is broken, we will find out exactly how much effect carbon can have in the atmosphere. The key to breaking this nexus comes when our power supplies need to either be replaced or augmented with new installations. That means that renewable energy and low emissions technology such as gas have to be utilised in a way that makes them economic competitors with fossil fuels.

The key tools for this task are a thorough assessment of power station requirements, an emissions trading scheme recognising the true price of carbon, international targets for renewable energy production to stimulate development, international accounting charting a decline in emissions growth versus economic growth, adequate compensation mechanisms for people overly affected by increased prices, vigilant regulators preventing profiteering, removal of artificial barriers supporting coal and oil over gas and encouragement of technology adoption through government initiatives.

We need to attack assumptions such as the supposed inability of renewables (or anything other than nuclear or coal) to produce baseload power. We need to encourage innovative technology and find ways to exploit our geothermal, solar and wave resources rather than our oil. Gas and energy efficiency can set the ball rolling, but wave, solar and wind technology must be facilitated to become more efficient and cheaper.

In short, we need to recast, redefine and adapt our economic structures and the energy delivery systems that power them to subsume environmental and economic responsibility into the one concept. We need to set meaningful targets, design appropriate processes and coordinate action and encourage innovation.

Taking a carrot and stick to Mugabe

It seems that with Mugabe's virtual declaration of war on the MDC, the global community has suddenly started mentioning the 'g' word and the 'R' word. Visions of genocide and the absymal failure of the UN in Rwanda have given a new urgency to measures to rein in the Zimbabwean dictator.

One 'r' word that is key for Mugabe is rejection. Rejected by the international community, he discredits European and American attempts to counsel his behaviour as colonial interference. Rejected by his people, he has manipulated the populace through fear. He has shaken the country like a tree until all the MDC supporters fall out. He cannot accept rejection, so the agents of that rejection must be purged.

Mugabe will continue to menace Zimbabwe unless either saner heads in the ZANU-PF roll him into retirement or his advanced age (or an assasin) catches up with him. A third option is military intervention under the emerging 'duty to protect' doctrine. However it is likely that China would veto an excessively aggressive pursuit of such intervention unless there was broad agreement with its African trading partners. China may not like a human rights mililtary incursion precedent to be set with the ongoing issues in Tibet and Nepal.

A negotiated settlement with Mugabe is not an option. However, a deal for an interim power sharing agreement might be possible under a moderated ZANU-PF. The trick to moderating the ZANU-PF is to allow Mugabe's liberation-era allies the option to give Mugabe a graceful exit and retirement. Zambia has pushed for action, yet South Africa's Mbeki demonstrates a reluctance to push too hard, given his apparent sympathy to some of Mugabe's land-distribution policies.

The international community's role is to freeze Mugabe's influence on the world stage and encourage external nations not to bankroll the regime with either cash or arms. It can also prompt Mbeki to act by offering South Africa either advantageous trade inducements or diplomatic positions on the world stage.

The 'liberation' club could appeal to Mugabe's vanity by reminding him of his advanced years and that his role as 'father of the nation' would best be preserved by not declaring a civil war on his own people. A nation such as Equatorial Guinea, which has done deals with Mugabe in the past, could provide his cronies suitable accommodation. The stick option lies in authorising military action, with a force led by a suitably neutral power such as India under UN auspices, with logistic support from Europe, US and Australia. This could encourage a new solidarity, not between leaders but between people as Africans.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold

Our political culture is in great flux. The admirable work of the Piping Shrike has detailed this in a series of posts as a political realignment. The major parties are catching up to the fact that they have no social base and hence are hostage to the nightly news cycle. This gives an apparent fragility to Rudd's stratospheric polling. However it rather forgets what has happened federally is merely an extension of the decline of state Liberal parties to the point of irrelevance. So much so, that in South Australia the Liberal party is now experiencing defections to the federally moribund Family First. A small group of pundits have either diagnosed Rudd as acting as permanently on campaign or like a political bubble ring - held in a kind of stasis by the vortex of his activity. Presumably they believe that Julia Gillard is the dolphin responsible.

Rudd has decided that the media is for the dissemination of this messages, and his chief conduit to said media is rumoured to have a nasty habit of abusing them. Consequently they are taking it personally and according him very little favourable coverage. It also fits within their frame of reference that budgets mean something to politics and that the opposition is merely dormant, to be revived under the appropriate leader once Nelson nicks one to the slips. Hence Rudd is nothing remarkable and will come down to earth once his honeymoon ends. The thought does not enter their collective heads that this is the new reality. Instead, we hear the Whitlamesque fairytale that Gillard will storm the barricades and burn the Treasury benches to the ground like Boudicea. Some in the Canberra Press Gallery witnessed the Whitlam crash firsthand, no one has ever witnessed a federal government sustain ratings in the high 50s.

Into this breach step the Howard-era acolytes, now spurned by the new regime and left to ply their trade on the fringes of mediocrity. They demonstrate a bitter, visceral resentment of Rudd for removing their great leader Howard. The great citadel of Howard's media support is the Australian, which has now altered its brief from acting as government gazette to Her Majesty's loyal opposition. Loyal to Washington, specifically the neo-conservative, market vision, where private wars and global hegemony are de rigeur. Ad hominem argument suits this band as their voice, their tribe, their man is always right and their opponent is always wrong. Hence distracting bloggers by trolling and pouring vitriol is acceptable in the name of new-age Foucauldian information politics. So while taking down those that support the agendas they oppose, they also fly assorted kites to either make the Liberal position appear mainstream, or change the mainstream altogether and push the polity in the right direction. This ad hominem strategy extends to the truly bizarre and inconsistent criticisms of the Rudd government, one minute pro-business, then anti-business, pro-China, then anti-China.

As the polity has moved right through waves of economic prosperity, the traditional Liberal party's role has become almost irrelevant. With Labor concentrating on technocracy, encouraging education and removing the complexity of business regulation, politics shifts to the nanoneconomics of petrol and grocery prices. The Liberals are left with an emoting leader and little else. Climate change represents the position perfectly. The agreed solution is an emission trading scheme - a market mechanism - yet the free market, user-pay Liberals strain to support it and even now seek to make political capital.

If Labor wins the battle on emissions trading, the Liberals will be split between the caterwauling right and the moderate left. The caterwaulers will most likely head to Family First. How much of the party ultimately survives depends on whether Labor can successfully manage this fundamental change into a new political constituency. If economic management becomes covalent with environmental management, then Labor could well benefit from demographic change and make serious realigning inroads into those leafy seats that polls make so tantalising. If the green barrier dissolves in the political sphere, it will dissolve in the minds of voters. One suspects though that long-term ideological, logical and intellectual poverty will eventually cause the party to split unless strong leadership can hold the strands together.

If, however, the politicians fail to act appropriately, then the results could be apocalyptic for all of us.

Wow! Some action from the ICC

Common sense has prevailed

Perhaps they can get their act together and do something about allowing Zimbabwe to play international cricket?