From Alan Kohler today:
The Coalition’s conversion to climate change activism seems to be almost complete.
A year ago it was ‘socialism masquerading as environmentalism’; yesterday the government reversed its refusal to contribute to the Green Climate Fund and put in $200 million, and last night Julie Bishop even had the nerve to tick off China and India for not doing enough to stop climate change.
…So from the time, in 2011, that it was clear the Coalition would win the 2013 election, until this week, the Australian owners of fossil fuel assets — coal and natural gas — would have been feeling reasonably comfortable that they had, or soon would have, a government that was working to protect the value of their assets.
That has now changed. The Coalition’s conversion to some form of reluctant, public ‘true belief’, plus what’s going on at the climate conference in Lima this week, changes the game for them completely.
There is an increasing prospect that Australia’s vast fossil fuel assets, a key foundation of the nation’s wealth, will become ‘stranded’.
In fact an agenda item in a ‘draft negotiating text’ in Lima over the weekend referred to ‘full decarbonisation by 2050’. If that phrasing turns into a formal agreement in Paris next year, it puts a finishing date on the coal, oil and natural gas industries.
Exactly right on the assets, but for completely the wrong reason (deliberately, ironically or ignorantly).
The Coalition is not converted. The green fund contribution is minor and the position at Lima is a calculated blockade of existing international mitigation policy. All substantive carbon abatement discussion is based upon calculations of per capita emissions. By insisting that abatement discussion focus on absolute national emissions instead, and there bye pressuring the US and China do more, the Coalition is deliberately acting as spoiler at the conference.
Not that that will not stop the assets being stranded, of course, but credit where it’s due!
