by Chris Becker
Sheriff 2.0 Tony Abbott is hearing but not receiving some powerful signals across the world that his government’s “she’ll be right” stance on climate change cannot continue. Even President Obama laid into recalcritants like Australia, Canada, China and India labeling it as a bigger threat than terrorism in an impressive speech at the United Nations Climate Summit yesterday:
“For all the immediate challenges that we gather to address this week – terrorism, instability, inequality, disease – there’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate,” Mr Obama said.
“We have to answer the call … we cannot condemn our children, and their children, to a future that is beyond their capacity to repair.”
Although that is some usual hyperbole from the orator-in-chief, the response from the Foreign Minister, attending in place of the PM, was typical bureucratese:
“Australia remains committed to reducing its emissions by five per cent below 2000 levels by 2020. This is a bipartisan target. It is an ambitious target because it means that Australia will reduce its emissions by 22 per cent against business as usual levels. This compares well to the targets of other major economies.”
Mitigating climate change is a risk management challenge, but the Abbott government has turned it into a neo-conservative political football trading short term economic growth wrapped in no long term thinking for what could be an immense opportunity, let alone enacting a sane insurance policy.
Frank Jotzo from ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy hit the nail on the head. From Fairfax:
Australia, by contrast, was stuck in what was now considered “old thinking”, in which economic growth was seen as a trade-off for action on global warming.
“That’s not the paradigm being used by China or even the US. They see climate change as an opportunity for economic growth.
Australia’s position was rooted in the view that “coal is king”, an outlook that ignored the fact that Australia would not determine how much coal the rest of the world would use.
When you look a little further ahead, really the strategy for Australia should be to search out opportunities in a low carbon world.
Australia is an energy superpower and can be an energy superpower no matter what type of energy the world chooses.”
There is a choice here, but the political environment in the Lucky Country always favours the easy road. What if we’re finally out of luck?