Climate warmongers

Well, it turns out a bit of nice rhetoric and an unambitious target weren’t enough for Labor to end the ‘climate wars’. Who’d have thought?

Labor has made a big deal out of its promise to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030. Never mind the government’s not doing enough to reach that target, and even if it was, still wouldn’t be on track to meet its obligations. Meanwhile, Peter Dutton promised last week to scrap even Labor’s interim 2030 target if elected. This, of course, made Labor diehards lose their minds. To them, Dutton is a regressive con artist trying to huff and puff and blow the house down. They're willing to overlook that when it comes to the climate crisis, Labor has built its house from something lighter than straw.

On climate, the two parties have more in common than not. Both say they’re committed to net zero by 2050. Both seem unwilling or unable to do the work to get there. Both are intent to ignore that net zero by 2050 may not even be enough to achieve the Paris Agreement’s overarching target of limiting warming. Neither will recognise that Australia’s role as one of the world’s leading peddlers of fossil gas makes domestic emissions reductions more or less moot. Both put their faith in unrealistic, far-off techno-fixes, be they carbon capture and storage or nuclear power plants.

On the western front, there’s even less difference between Labor and Liberals. WA is the only state without a 2030 emissions reduction target. Premier Roger Cook spouts deranged lines that sound like they’ve come from Woodside’s PR department about how WA needs to emit more to save the planet.

The media frames small differences between the centre-right Labor party and the further-right Liberal party as epic ‘climate wars’. Meanwhile, substantive debate on the real politics of climate change gets relegated to the sidelines. ‘Climate action’ has been sold to us as nothing more than business-as-usual with coal swapped out for renewables, nuclear or even gas. Labor has implemented tax cuts for the rich, despite needing to do the opposite to pay for meaningful climate policies. Both parties have promised to deregulate massive, multinational gas companies that make billions from shipping our resources overseas without having to pay royalties. Basically, turbo-charged capitalism has been allowed to ever-more efficiently do what it does best: destroy stuff so a far-off few can profit.

Is the climate movement doing as much as it could to push back? Back in 2019, the high-water mark for climate activism and the heyday of School Strike 4 Climate and Extinction Rebellion, there was a sense that everything needed to change, that we needed unprecedented collective action, and that we needed to talk about big transformations. Since then, for good strategic reasons, grassroots activists have largely shifted their focus towards making achievable, first-step demands and targeting particular projects. Maybe it’s time to go macro again.

In last week’s 4 Corners episode about community opposition to wind farms, Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Kelly O'Shanassy said she wasn’t sure the climate wars were over (in an interview recorded before their widely-proclaimed resurgence). “I think they have a new focus and that's renewable energy,” she said. If that’s the case, the battle lines have been drawn up strangely. Environmentalists are often siding with massive energy companies in their support of renewable developments.

While 4 Corners spent plenty of time mapping out disputes between country town next-door neighbours and was at pains to point out that anti-wind activists were censored by Facebook for misinformation, it could have gone further in unpacking why so many ordinary people (not just those with ties to shady right wing astroturfing outfits) are so suspicious of the way renewable energy is being rolled out.

What I found in my recent audio investigation into offshore wind, for which I interviewed some of the same sources as 4 Corners, was that people up in arms over wind farms were often anti-elitists sceptical of big, foreign companies coming in to build huge industrial developments. They worried these corporations would take advantage of local communities and ecosystems. Many of those I spoke to weren’t entirely opposed to renewable energy. The renewable solutions they liked were localised and decentralised, like small-scale solar grids. In other words, solutions controlled by communities, not corporations.

The renewable transition offers us an opportunity to do things differently. First Nations Clean Energy Network co-Chair Karrina Nolan pointed towards this in her response to the most recent Federal Budget’s 'Future Made in Australia' clean energy package. “Focusing funding on industry subsidies and incentives and building more layers of government, the Budget falls devastatingly short in addressing the urgent and long-term energy security needs of First Nations,” she said.

“Simply, there is nothing in the Federal Budget for First Nations in the clean energy transition.

“And it’s not like the government doesn’t get it. They know the road to a rapid and just transition runs through First Nations land and waters.

“In order to activate investment in Australia’s superpower ambition significant additional investment in First Nations capacity, consent, collaboration, co-design and co-ownership needs to be made through loan guarantees and tax incentives, funding criteria and specialist programs.”

It’s not just First Nations communities that could benefit from being involved in the energy transition. All communities should have a chance to be involved in energy production. Community involvement would lead to better outcomes, too. If we want to roll out renewables responsibly, surely we should entrust their deployment to communities who know and care for the places where they’ll go.

The conversation about renewables and communities is just one of those we need to have to work out what to do about looming climate collapse. These are inherently political discussions, but some would prefer them to be otherwise. In a recent Guardian article in which ‘climate elders’ were asked to respond to Dutton’s rejection of a 2030 target, Western Australian climate scientist Dr Bill Hare said that “Climate policy isn’t a left/right issue.”

“Look at Texas – that hotbed of Marxist bedwetters – that is exploding with wind and solar because it’s good business,” he said. “Peter Dutton and his party appear to be opposed to those opportunities for Australia.”

With respect to Dr Hare, I don’t think these comments are accurate or useful. The climate crisis is intensely political, because, to work out how to address it, we need to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Renewables can be great for business, but if they’re deployed within an unregulated economic system in pursuit of endless growth, as per the right’s prerogative, we’ll just end up using more energy overall, including fossil fuels. Texas might be exploding with wind and solar, but it’s also just set record highs for production of both oil and gas.

More than a decade ago, Naomi Klein wrote that climate deniers weren’t wrong when they said the climate crisis gave the left the perfect reason to do everything it already wanted to do, including redistributing wealth and reigning in corporations. Recently, Joshua Citarella, a researcher who studies online political communities, made a similar point about the cutting edge of the political right. “Today, impending environmental crisis has become the new rationale for halting immigration, closing national borders and limiting industrial development in the global south,” he said. “Climate change has become the excuse for the Right to finally do what it has always wanted. Political conflicts of the 21st century will no longer be a dispute over the ‘realities of climate change’ but instead what to do about it.”

If we're to survive the decades ahead while maintaining anything resembling a functional democracy, climate policy is shaping up to be the ultimate left/right issue. There are debates to be had over economic growth, climate refugees and immigration, how we relate to technology, and what kind of economies are fit for the age of climate crisis. By narrowing the climate conversation to squabbles over emissions targets and which fanciful technologies to deploy, our two-party duopoly has us stumbling towards catastrophe. As Joshua Citarella’s fascinating research shows, some politically engaged members of Gen Z are well aware there are difficult times ahead. They're imagining all kinds of creative responses that stem from a broad range of political ideologies. These young people know the climate crisis will be the battleground for all the political fights to come this century. It’s time to get on with it: to draw up the maps, gather the troops, and ready the cannons for the real climate wars.