For some reason the Tony Abbott’s moves to abolish the three
climate change agencies brings back to mind a Soviet-era joke which runs
something like this:
Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and
Brezhnev are travelling together across the Soviet steppes on a train. The train breaks down in the middle of nowhere and comes to
a shuddering halt.
Lenin declares, “I shall go up
to the front of the train and make a fiery speech urging the drivers on in the
name of the Revolution”.
Stalin waves his hand
dismissively and says, “No, that will never work. I shall go up to the front of
the train and have the drivers shot for their crimes against the state, and we
will get new drivers”.
Khrushchev says, “No, we don’t
do that anymore. I shall go up to the front of the train and tell the drivers
they had better get the problem fixed or we will send them to a labour camp”.
Brezhnev says, “Why don’t we
just pull down the blinds – then we won’t know whether the train is moving or
not”.
In the countdown to the new year our media are full of retrospectives looking back at what happened in the year that is coming to a close.
Last year in Looking ahead at 2010 I commented that the start of a bright and shiny new year is perhaps a good time for those who are presumptuous enough to think that they know a few things to put their money where their mouth is and attempt some forecasts of what the year ahead will bring.
Forecasting remains a hazardous business, but I think I should repeat the exercise. Reviewing Looking ahead at 2010 I think I had a reasonable hit-rate on my forecasts, to the extent that for the year ahead I think I should just record last year’s (in italics) and provide some updated commentary:
(1) There will be no progress towards an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Settlement building on the West Bank will resume, the slow ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem will continue, and Gaza will remain strangled by Israeli sanctions. There will be hand-wringing in Washington, but not much else.
Not much new to be said there: at the present time no-one even pretends that there is a peace process in prospect. The Netanyahu Government has made plain that settlement building is more important to it than either peace or its relationship with the Obama Administration, Netanyahu is engaged in a contest with Avigdor Lieberman for leadership of the Israeli right, and the Israeli left has all but ceased to exist.
The two-state solution is dead, with no possibility of resurrection, so by year’s end things will be much the same as now only somewhat worse.
(2) The “surge” in Iraq will by year’s end be a proven failure.
Iraqi politics will continue to fragment. The return to Iraq from Iran of militant Shi’a cleric Muqtadar al-Sadr testifies to that. He has not returned to Iraq to facilitate the process of bedding down either its internal politics or its relationship with the US.
(3) It will be even clearer than it is now that there is no possibility of “victory” or “success” in Afghanistan, and the US Administration will be busy positioning Hamid Karzai and everyone around him to take the blame for the failure of what was a doomed enterprise from the start.
An old colleague of mine used to say that the opportunity of a lifetime had to be grasped within the lifetime of the opportunity. If the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 presented us with the opportunity of a lifetime to do something or other, the lifetime of the opportunity certainly did not last through eight years of neglect. If there was ever a chance, it is now far too late. The failure to establish any clear objective for the invasion did not help.
Enough said.
(4) There will be modest efforts to salvage something from the wreckage of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, but we can be sure that whatever action is agreed will be far too little, far too late. For a long-term hold, buy shares in engineering companies that are very good at sea walls.
The Cancun outcome marked a step forward, but one which sits firmly within the established framework of far too little, far too late. Engineering companies that are very good at sea walls remain a sound investment.
(5) Spin doctors will find creative ways to present all of the above as success, or at least as meaningful progress. Modern governments never do anything that is unsuccessful.
No change likely here.
(6) Pakistan will look more like Afghanistan than it does today. The US Administration will continue to pressure the Pakistanis to take actions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas which will prove disastrous sooner rather than later. There are good reasons why those areas were directly administered by Delhi during the Raj, and why the tailor made administrative regimes were continued from 1947 in the successor state, Pakistan.
At the outset of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 a lot of people would probably have agreed that if Afghanistan ended up looking a bit like Pakistan in 2001, that would be success. The net effect of our efforts will in fact be to make Pakistan look a lot more like Afghanistan.
The recent assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer by a member of his own bodyguard, without any other member of his bodyguard attempting to prevent the murder or apprehend the assailant, serves to illustrate just how powerful the forces of Islamic conservatism are in Pakistan, and how deeply they are embedded in the armed forces.
(7) Nothwithstanding Pakistan’s travails, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence will continue to intervene unhelpfully in Afghanistan, with a view to Pakistan establishing itself as the dominant power in Central Asia. Much of the money to fund this will be diverted military assistance funding from the United States.
No further comment needed.
(8) There will be a very significant evolution of the Iranian political system. It is hard to see this happening without a lot of blood being shed, because neither side can afford to give up. In the next few months there will be increasingly heavy handed efforts to suppress the reform movement, but the reform movement has such momentum, and so many members of the urban classes are so sick of the current regime, that it is hard to see the current leadership being successful in reimposing order. There are grounds for cautious optimism, but don’t mortgage your house to bet on it.
This is the main item on which I was too optimistic. My view is that Ahmadinejad has such control over the apparatus of repression that things will deteriorate for the reform movement for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Iran has had over a century of elected representation in a national parliamentary body, it has an educated middle class in the major cities, and I do not believe that the regime can maintain itself in power in the long run simply by means of repression.
(9) Whoever is running Iran will remain firmly committed to the development of an independent nuclear energy program, and in so doing will reduce the lead time for Iran to develop and deploy a nuclear weapons capability. Nevertheless, the Iranian regime will refrain from committing to a nuclear weapons capability.
I remain of this view.
(10) The United States will not succeed in establishing any sort of effective sanctions regime against Iran (for which we can all be thankful).
Such sanctions as are established will cause hardship to ordinary Iranians without having much impact on the regime, and no impact on its policies. As I have remarked in previous posts, the Iranians will not accept any settlement which they regard as humiliating, and they will not accept a position of second class international citizenship regarding the independence of their nuclear energy program. They will not accept what the United States wants, and the international community would not be prepared to impose upon Iran such draconian hardships that the regime – any Iranian regime – would be likely to change its mind.
(11) As we emerge from the depths of the Global Financial Crisis, the full meaning of the crisis will become clearer, as we begin to appreciate the consequences for the United States and the United Kingdom in particular of the massive sovereign debt they have incurred. It will become evident that there can be no return to “normal”, that a new “normal”, meaning a substantial realignment of economic power and political influence, is in the process of being established.
The state of affairs in Europe speaks for itself.
Far from believing in signs of recovery in the United States, I think the consequences of US debt and deficit are still playing themselves out. US politics are in such a toxic state that I do not foresee any effective action to repair the nation’s public finances. Meanwhile, it is trying to shrink its defence budget to help meet its rising interest bill, but that shrinking of the US defence budget is contingent upon greater success in its military adventures than I can foresee.
(12) Some of the above predictions will turn out to be profoundly wrong (I just don’t know which ones). Actually, not too many of them turned out to be profoundly wrong, but it is always a danger to be acknowledged.
Last year I did not venture any predictions about domestic politics, mainly I think because up to that point my primary focus had been international. So much happened on the domestic front during the course of 2010 that there was much to write about, and this year I will venture some observations about the outlook within the national polity:
(1) As discussed in Can Gillard last?, I think that it will be established fairly early in the year that Julia Gillard does not have what it takes to be a successful Prime Minister, and on the balance of probabilities I think that there will be a change of Labor leadership before the end of the year.
(2) A change of Labor leadership will not necessarily lead to the Government falling – the independents and Greens have a strong interest in seeing the Government go its full term. Some deft footwork on the part of a new Labor leader should enable Labor to continue as a minority government.
(3) The Government will fail to break out of its current obsession with the 24-hour media cycle, and its thinking will continue to be dominated by focus-group think. It will try to give the public what it thinks it wants, not what it needs.
(4) As a result, the Government will botch the following major policy issues during the course of the year:
- Putting a price on carbon, and indeed the establishment of any effective climate change action
- Establishing a Minerals Resource Rent Tax regime
- Design and implementation of a Murray Darling Basin Plan
- Tax reform
(5) The Government should undertake a thorough review of the Defence White Paper and its defence policy settings, but will not.
(6) Kevin Rudd will continue to be driven more by his overwhelming need for publicity and his desire to upstage Julia Gillard than by any concern to pursue Australia’s foreign policy interests. He will continue to display pedestrian thinking, poor management of his agenda, and poor judgement. In sum, he will continue to demonstrate that he is a disastrous appointment as Foreign Minister.
On the evening of 9 November 2010 Professor Ross Garnaut delivered the 2010 Cunningham Lecture to the Academy of Social Sciences. In it, he laid out an update case for action on climate change.
Most of the paper is a technical economic discussion about discount rates and their interaction with uncertainty and with the relationship between Australian and global mitigation. As such it is not an easy read, but it well repays close study.
Garnaut concludes his lecture by asking in very persuasive terms, “What if the mainstream science is right?”
I will conclude the lecture by answering briefly a simple question: what if the mainstream science is right? What if the science supported by the overwhelming majority of scientists who are qualified in the various disciplines related to climate, is broadly right? What if all of the Academies of Science in all of the countries of scientific achievement, are not deluded, or enticed into error by the availability to their members of certain types of research grants?
If they are broadly right, we would probably see a threat to our prosperity rather larger than any of the issues that do the rounds of public discourse on long-run economic development. The threats would manifest themselves in large problems in a few decades, and as the dominant problem well before the end of this century. The challenges beyond this century are difficult to reconcile with continuity in modern human civilisation.
If the mainstream science is broadly right, later in this century we will probably not be squabbling about whether a 37 per cent reduction in allocations to Murray-Darling irrigators is too much; but rather working hard to improve the chance of there being any water at all to allocate.
If the mainstream science is broadly right, defence and immigration would probably have radically different contexts. Probably, because there is uncertainty. It may be worse than this, or better. There is no reason to think the chances of better are higher than the chances of worse.
We should think about it, because there’s a chance that the mainstream science is right. When we think about it, those of us who are not climate scientists would need reasons beyond the current state of knowledge to think anything except that they are probably right. Certainly more likely to be right than people who have not spent the months and years and decades learning the subtleties of this complex area of knowledge. I hope that we here at least — members of this other learned academy that takes seriously the development and testing and accumulation of knowledge — can agree that there is enough of a chance that the mainstream physical and biological science is broadly right, to invest in understanding the implications for human society. After all, ours is the Academy that Australians look to for knowledge on how the immense pressures that we are in the process of placing on our societies may change human life on earth.
If we thought about the respective credentials of those who line up with the mainstream science, and those who are prepared to take their chances with information from other places, we would think that this issue was at least one of the fateful public policy matters of our time.
Nevertheless, as Professor Garnaut observes earlier in the lecture, notwithstanding the strong basis of community understanding and support, when push came to shove, the private interests seeking to block, blunt or slow down action prevailed over well developed community views. As he observes in the concluding phase of his remarks:
If there is to be success in the second attempt to introduce efficient, economywide approaches to substantial reduction in emissions, there will need to be a stronger and clearer message from the independent centre of the polity.
The Treasury seems to have prepared some pretty blunt advice on climate change policy for an incoming Coalition Government, according to an article by Sid Maher in this weekend’s edition of The Weekend Australian (see report Big new tax only option, Abbott told here).
I have been involved in the writing of these briefs for an incoming government and their presentation to the new Ministers. They are, properly, scrupulously polite. On the whole they take the announced policies of the incoming government as a given, and direct themselves to how those policies might most effectively be implemented. Only rarely are incoming governments briefed that the policies on which they have campaigned are, in effect, ill-advised, and when it does happen, as in this case, it is usually with good reason.
According to Maher, the briefing book prepared for an incoming Coalition Government warned that the commitment to reduce national emissions to 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2010 “cannot be achieved without a carbon price unless significant economic and budget impacts are to be imposed”.
The article goes on:
"A broad-based market mechanism which prices carbon, driving large-scale abatement through long-term investment in low-emissions technologies and changes in behaviour by both producers and consumers across the economy, is the only realistic way of achieving the deep cuts in emissions that are required," Treasury said.
"A market-based mechanism can achieve the necessary abatement at a cost per tonne of emissions that is far lower per tonne of emissions than alternative direct action policies."
The briefing said the sooner an emission trading scheme could be implemented the better. "Too much time has already been wasted - for which the Australian community will necessarily pay a high price."
Appropriately for parties that describe themselves as conservative, the Coalition parties, when it suits them, loudly proclaim the virtues of markets, often preceded by the word “free”, but this position seems to be ideological (faith-based) rather than analytical (derived from established principles) because they seem to struggle to understand what markets do, actually. What Treasury is trying to tell them in the above paragraphs is Economics 101: the function of markets is to allocate resources efficiently, the corollary of which is, if you want to allocate resources efficiently, you will need to rely on market mechanisms.
Respected economist John Quiggin, ARC Federation Fellow in Economics and Political Science at the University of Queensland, had a column in the 5 August edition of The Australian Financial Review that explored Tony Abbott’s claim that a $40/tonne tax on carbon would double the price of electricity. In the process Quiggin had a swipe at a compliant media that permits politicians to get away with such claims. The column is reproduced on Quiggin’s blog. He begins:
It’s often said that a country gets the government, and the media, it deserves. Looking at the current election offerings of the major parties, and the coverage presented by the media, it’s hard to see what we could have done to deserve this. The parties have offered gimmicks like cash for clunkers and unverifiable immigration targets. The media have eagerly focused on leaks and manufactured scandals, with no attempt to inform us about the choices before us.
A striking example is the free pass that has been given to Tony Abbott on his repeated claim that a $40/tonne tax on carbon would ‘double the price of electricity, on top of recent 35 per cent increases’. Five minutes with a calculator and a recent electricity bill would have shown any reporter who bothered to check that this claim is nonsense.
Read the full article here, and access John Quiggin’s home page here.
On Thursday 5 August Professor Ross Garnaut delivered the David Hamer Oration at the University of Melbourne. The address was entitled Climate Change, China Booms and Australia’s Governance Struggle in a Changing World.
Professor Garnaut’s address is recommended reading for anyone with a serious interest in the process of public policy formation in Australia, and while it is foundering. The theme is set by the following paragraph:
For the outcome of the political process to be conducive to broadly based prosperity and to the preservation of democratic institutions, there must be knowledge of the effects of various policies; education of the democratic polity in that knowledge; restraint in the use of political power to achieve sectional economic objectives; and restraint in the use of economic power in the political process. A successful democratic polity is built around analysis, public education, tolerance and restraint. The presence of these qualities in the polity allows leaders who are concerned to follow some conception of the public interest to appeal to the democratic electorate over the heads of vested interests, which otherwise have a privileged influential place in the policymaking process.
One of the key points in his speech is the abandonment of productivity enhancing reform, and with it the practice of basing policy on rational analysis:
There has been no successful major step in productivity-raising reform since the tax changes associated with the introduction of the GST in 2001...
Economic policy since the GST has been characterised by change rather than productivity-raising reform. The use of independent analysis and transparent discussion of policy reform has become rare; when independent studies have been commissioned by Government, they have tended to be sidelined at the decision-making end of policy-making; and the capture of major economic policy decisions by short-term political processes and operatives has become endemic.
Since 2002, there have been some major policy changes with ambiguous or negative effects on Australian productivity and incomes. Australian leadership of an historic Asia Pacific shift from multilateral to preferential trade, led by the US-Australia free trade agreement, is an example. The serious damage to the terms of Australian access to regional agricultural markets is a predictable consequence of the corrosion of multilateral trade. These and other costs of change were obscured from public view by flawed analysis and process at the time when critical decisions were made.
He concludes:
It is time now to lay the foundations for staying afloat as we move forward into new and more turbulent seas.
Meeting the two large challenges ahead of us [climate change and refocusing economic policy] requires the restoration of the political culture of the reform period. It requires the rehabilitation of the independent centre of the Australian polity. It requires restoration of the role of transparent, independent authoritative analysis of policy issues, and public education on the results of sound analysis.
The laws of economics cannot be repealed by ignoring them—any more than the laws of gravity, or of climate science.
Independent analysis may discover truly awful choices; better to face them in knowledge, than to choose blindly under pressure from interests that know their sectoral implications.
Good outcomes in the difficult years ahead above all require firm leadership built around clear articulation of the public interest.
Leadership, transparent independent analysis and public education are the means through which sectional interests will be confined appropriately to legitimate supporting roles, rather than being given central roles in formulation of public policy in the national interest.
Leadership is an essential missing ingredient in contemporary public policy.
Omitted, all the voyage of our lives is bound in shallows and in miseries.
The full text of Professor Garnaut’s oration may be accessed here.
In Joint forum on climate change on the Australia21 blog I gave my extemporised summary of a high level group meeting on climate change and Australia’s response to it which was held at the Australian National University on 12 July.
The meeting, hosted by Australia21, Universities Australia and the National Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable Development, included some of the nation’s leading climatologists, economists, climate policy experts and representatives of Australian business.
The question under discussion was “What are the best available policy options for reducing greenhouse emissions in Australia in the context of the Copenhagen result and the delay of an Australian CPRS [the government’s proposed emissions trading scheme]?”
The formal report of the forum has now been issued, and copies have been forwarded to the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Australian Greens . The executive summary appears below. The full report may be downloaded from the Australia21 website here, and the covering media release may be accessed here.
Executive Summary
Australia21, Universities Australia, and the National Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable
Development combined to host a high-level forum of twenty-seven experts in Canberra on 12 July
2010. The meeting was held in the context of a forthcoming national election. This Australia21 report provides an overview of the forum discussion and outcomes.
The purpose of the meeting was to define how Australia could most effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in the aftermath of the Copenhagen discussions and the deferral of the Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). The participants included climatologists, economists, social scientists and policy experts from a range of national institutions and businesses.
A brief review of the scientific consensus about climate change and Australia’s response to date reaffirmed that climate change is a public policy issue requiring urgent attention. Furthermore, far from being a world leader on this matter, Australia is now lagging behind many other developed and developing nations in producing mechanisms to mitigate and adapt to global warming. Yet the Australian electorate seemingly remains impatient for effective action.
The science clearly indicates that there is likely to be increased danger with increased warming and that in the face of grave risks and uncertainties associated with rising emissions Australia must move towards becoming a resilient society. There is the likelihood that feedback effects that are relatively unpredictable in their timing of onset could lead to ‘tipping points’ that would produce irreversible changes to our landscape and ecosystems, and place additional stresses on Australia’s regional and urban infrastructure and its food production systems.
It was concluded that plans for adaptation, mitigation and transformation must be developed in our national response to these changes, recognising that the climate of the future will hold the likelihood of ‘high impact-low probability’ events, of which the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a striking example.
Much of the discussion centred on the potential role of carbon pricing in constraining greenhouse emissions and the practicability of various pricing approaches, including different ways of moving from where we are now, to a situation where a carbon price would result in trading of emissions entitlements as well as real reductions in the nation’s emissions - which are still continuing to rise.
A known and predictable price will offer business a clear understanding of the future costs they face, and will also facilitate investment in innovation in non-polluting energy production. Pricing could be introduced without disturbing the budget bottom line and made appealing to the public and industry, if the property rights on emissions are distributed effectively.
There was firm agreement that a new national narrative on emissions reduction should be developed, and on the importance of depoliticising the debate so as to reflect the magnitude of the environmental, economic and social aspects of changes to our climate.
While regulation for energy efficiency and strategic roadmaps for alternative energy technologies are vital elements of climate policy development, the meeting concluded that Australia should develop a pricing and market mechanism to win the support of the vast majority of Australians. A pricing and marketing mechanism will reduce business uncertainty and increase incentives for investment, at the same time as it contributes to rapid and essential reduction in emissions. There are a number of ways this could happen, and it should commence now.
An independent institution to manage a carbon price could assist in informing a carbon market and in educating the community. Any such institutional structure should be at arm’s length from the political process in much the same way as the Reserve Bank manages monetary policy.
The group is concerned at the way this policy is currently being handled and urges all political parties to work together to produce an effective carbon pricing policy. All political parties should engage in the scale and management required to create Australia as a low carbon society – and to bring it into the centre ground of national public policy.
The forum has offered its support to all parties to assist them to build an attractive and common pricing mechanism into their policy platforms.
The Prime Minister’s announcement today concerning climate change is beyond disappointing.
After telling us here that the price of inaction is too high a price for our country to afford, she goes on to announce two pieces of inaction:
- the creation of “an independent, properly credentialed source of information and expert advice – a Climate Change Commission – to explain the science of climate change and to report on progress in international action”.
- the establishment of “a Citizens’ Assembly – to examine over 12 months the evidence on climate change, the case for action and the possible consequences of introducing a market-based approach to limiting and reducing carbon emissions”. This is because she wants us to have “a real debate involving many real Australians”.
It is hard to know where to begin in commenting on this limp bit of decision avoidance, but here are some observations:
(1) We already have a community consensus on climate change, established in the 2007 Federal Election. Both major parties promised us in 2007 that if elected they would introduce an emissions trading scheme, and of course the Greens were in favour. If ever there was a mandate for a government to actually do something, this was it.
To the extent that the mandate proved “fragile” it was because the Government, having joined the Garnaut inquiry process while in opposition, shredded the consensus established by Professor Garnaut’s widespread consultation by consulting everyone all over again and in the process initiating a rent-seeker’s picnic. It is hard to escape the impression that Kevin Rudd thought that the Garnaut Inquiry, initiated as it was by Labor State Premiers, was a wonderful idea for wedging John Howard but not one he wished to act upon when he found himself in office – he was motivated by politics not, as he claimed, by evidence-based policy.
(2) We already have a Citizens’ Assembly – it is called the Federal Parliament. We elect its members through a regular, open democratic process and delegate to them the power to make decisions on our behalf.
Why is it an improvement to have a couple of hundred of our fellow citizens selected by some mysterious process to decide on our behalf whether and when we are all ready to “move forward” on climate change? I am ready now.
And what is this reference to “real” Australians? I was born in this country, as were my parents, grandparents and a string of ancestors before them going back to 1822, so I think I am entitled to think of myself as a “real” Australian, but I suspect that having a couple of university degrees and senior level policy experience disqualifies me from being considered “real “ in this context. An odd position for a Prime Minister who proclaims the virtues of education to take.
(3) Why do we need a new “independent” body to “report on progress in international action”? Why can’t it be done by our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade with its network of embassies in every country that matters on this issue, plus the Department of Climate Change?
(4) Why do we need an “independent, properly credentialed source of information and expert advice” to explain the science of climate change? To the extent that we need to explain this issue to the public (and we do), isn’t that the job of the Minister for Climate Change and her Department – perhaps with a few tens of millions of dollars worth of government advertising thrown in?
(5) To the extent that we need an “independent, properly credentialed source of information and expert advice”, what about the Prime Minister’s Science Advisory Committee, led by the Chief Scientist of Australia, the very able Professor Penny Sackett? What about the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), one of the most trusted public institutions in Australia?
(6) Why is it that every time we want to consider a new issue (not that this one is new), we have to set up a gaggle of new bodies that have to start from scratch – recruiting staff, finding a place to sit, printing business cards, designing their letterhead etc.?
(7) We already know everything we need to know about this issue – about the science, the timescale within which we need to act, the various policy choices for pricing carbon. What we need now is a government that is prepared to take some decisions – to get on with the responsibilities of government.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott will hoist high on the masthead of his election campaign two promises based on fundamental misrepresentations of reality.
The first is a promise to “stop the boats”, based on the proposition that the current trickle of frightened humanity arriving on our shores during the northern dry season constitutes some kind of a problem, and has some sort of connection to the issue of “a sustainable population” for Australia. Both parts of that proposition are palpable nonsense (boat arrivals are a tiny fraction of total arrivals) and it is hard to imagine that Tony Abbott really believes either of them. If he does, heaven help us.
Another part of this particular misrepresentation is the notion that a government led by Tony Abbott would have carte blanche to do “whatever it takes” to stop the boats from coming. He really should read the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, the 1967 Protocol and the handbook Refugee Protection: A Guide to International Refugee Law, a guide produced jointly by the International Parliamentary Union and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention, which sets out in considerable detail a contemporary view of how the Convention is supposed to work in practice. These documents make clear that asylum seekers have considerable rights that are well grounded in international law, which means that no Australian Government can design policy starting with a clean sheet of paper.
The second misrepresentation of reality is the promise that there would be no carbon price imposed on consumers. Oddly for a man who claims to be a conservative, and to represent the party of small business, he seems deeply suspicious of markets, preferring to rely on the Marxist-Leninist approach of centrally planned direct action implemented by the national government. This will be done with your tax money, dear readers, which indicates that Tony Abbott, bored by economics as he confesses himself to be, is unfamiliar with the notion of opportunity cost. In exchange for the projects selected by Tony Abbott and his colleagues, you will be getting less of something else.
The deeply misleading aspect of Tony Abbott’s approach to climate change is the suggestion that he can achieve his stated target of reducing Australia’s emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2020 without consumers feeling a thing. He cannot; the measures he has in mind are simply not commensurate with the scale of the problem. Perhaps Tony Abbott is bored by numbers too, because on this one they simply do not add up.
To put it in a nutshell, Tony Abbott is going to the Australian people promising:
- To fix a non-problem, and
- To refrain from doing anything serious about one of the biggest problems the nation faces.
Today’s edition of the prestigious weekly scientific journal Nature has an editorial on the subject of climate change.
It addresses a number of issues: the public impact of the scandals associated with the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia in the UK; the need to continue to engage the public in clear and direct language; and the need for transparency and the avoidance of hype.
On the University of East Anglia issue, the so-called “Climategate” which has brought denialists such comfort, the editorial says:
Despite the scandals over leaked e-mails at the University of East Anglia, UK, and flawed data in the most recent assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific evidence for global warming remains strong. The question, then, is to what extent have the controversies eroded the public's trust in climate science or, worse, in the scientists themselves?
There has undoubtedly been some slippage. But a closer look at the data across multiple polls shows that, broadly speaking, the public trusts scientists, believes in global warming and wants governments to do something about it. The public seems to have done what the mainstream media could not: it has kept the scandals in perspective. The scathing verbal attacks on climate science and scientists are actually coming from a relative handful of critics, and they do not reflect a broader resurgence of scepticism.
On where we go from here, the editorial concludes:
The science isn't complete and never will be, but it is sufficiently robust that broad conclusions cannot be undermined by questions about any given datum point. From this perspective, the fact that climate scientists can't predict exactly how bad the impacts might be could well be the best argument for action.
Read the complete editorial, A question of trust, here.
In a letter to the editor published in today’s edition of The Australian Financial Review, former Treasury Deputy Secretary Des Moore, now Director, Institute of Private Enterprise, writes about Prime Minister Gillard’s comments on the need for a “lasting and deep community consensus on climate change”, and concludes:
Gillard would demonstrate her capacity as a leader if she established an independent public inquiry to test her belief in the need to reduce emissions of CO2.
I have news for Des Moore. An independent public inquiry on the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been in progress for over 150 years, through the normal processes of peer reviewed published science. To the extent that any science is ever settled, the core science of global warming is; it is very basic undergraduate physics, which has been confirmed experimentally for over 150 years. The arguments and uncertainties are about the secondary effects and the consequences.
- A paper about the warming effect of the planet’s atmosphere was first published in 1824 by the great French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier, with a follow-up paper in 1827. Fourier established the concept of a planetary energy balance, a balance between the planet’s heat gain and its heat loss, and proposed that the atmosphere shifts the balance towards higher temperatures by slowing the heat loss.
- Beginning in the late 1850s, the 19th century Irish physicist John Tyndall FRS undertook reliable experimental work which established that the warming effect was due to the absorption and re-radiation of infra-red radiation by a number of gases, notably water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane.
- A quantitative analysis was undertaken in the 1890s by the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, who was the first to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes would cause global warming.
- The black body temperature of the earth – the temperature at which it would stabilise if all incoming radiation were absorbed and re-radiated - is 5.5 °C. Since the Earth's surface reflects about 28% of incoming sunlight, in the absence of the greenhouse effect the planet's mean temperature would be far lower - about -18 or -19 °C instead of the much higher current mean temperature, about 14 °C.
- Given all of this, I think that the onus is on the climate change deniers to explain to the rest of us why adding about 30% to the burden of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would not raise the temperature of the planet.
The theory is supported by a great deal of direct observation and measurement of global warming and of the secondary effects of that warming.
If Julia Gillard were to announce an independent inquiry into “the need to reduce emissions of CO2”, most reasonable Australians would draw a perfectly reasonable conclusion that she had taken leave of her senses.
There is a legitimate role for economists in the climate change debate, but their role begins where the science leaves off. Science can tell us what we need to do; economics can tell us the most economically efficient ways to do what we need to do. We would all be better served, however, if people whose training is in law and economics rather than science would refrain from raising confusion about matters which they are equipped neither to understand nor debate. The economics is challenging enough; leave the science to the scientists.
