Conventional wisdom says Malcolm Turnbull won't allow Labor's emissions trading bill to provide a trigger for an early election. This week, the Liberal leader hinted he would try to get acceptable amendments next month when the bill is debated in the senate. But why should the party of small government support a scheme that has the hallmarks of creeping socialism, when all the available evidence indicates a changing political and intellectual climate, here and abroad?
At the heart of matter is whether Australia should take a legislated position on cap and trade to the UN post-Kyoto conference in December. You only have to look at Washington's and Beijing's proposals on global warming to see why Copenhagen will turn into a circus.
In exchange for its own carbon cuts, the Chinese government expects the US and other developed nations to cut their emissions by at least 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. Yet the US legislation that only marginally passed the House of Representatives to cap greenhouse gases (with loads of compensation and loopholes for big polluters) translates to about a 4 per cent reduction from 1990 levels -- that is, one tenth of what Beijing demands.
China's leaders also call on the US and other advanced nations to cough up between 0.5 and 1 per cent of their annual GNP to help poorer nations cope with climate change. Yet the entire US foreign aid budget currently amounts to about only 0.17 per cent of GNP.
No wonder the left-liberal, pro-green Los Angeles Times editorialises: "Poor countries are placing such extravagant demands on wealthy ones that no American president, even a strong environmentalist like Barack Obama, could possibly accede."
So, if the Americans won't match the Chinese demands, it is a fair bet that the People's Republic won't be part of any global deal that obliges it to cut emissions. The governments of Canada and New Zealand, moreover, are delaying the implementation of emissions trading pending the outcome of the Copenhagen talks.
In this environment, "going alone is suicide", as Family First senator Steve Fielding insists. We'd inflict collateral damage on our economy in terms of lower growth, higher prices all along the energy chain and exporting a lot of our energy-intensive industries and jobs to those big polluting countries like China and India. Which is why anything less than a universal consensus on drastic, mandatory and enforceable cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions at Copenhagen is futile.
This is not a controversial point; it's a self-evident truth that even Al Gore and Ross Garnaut concede. When the US senate refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol before George W. Bush flashed his Texan cowboy boots on the global stage, the then-VP said Washington would only ratify the agreement if "key developing nations participate". And a year ago, Professor Garnaut acknowledged: "Even the whole of the developed world getting its act together and reducing emissions won't solve the problem."
The point here is that even in an age of globalisation, nation states do not act on the basis of what they perceive to be goodwill, good intentions or moral purity of other nations. They act on the basis of defending and promoting the national interest. What may make sense for a developed country in Europe does not work for a developing one in Asia eager to expand its economy and lift its people out of poverty. One of the consequences of living in a multi-polar world, moreover, is that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. This new pluralistic world has given rise to what New York Times columnist David Brooks has called globo-sclerosis -- an inability to solve problem after problem.
Meanwhile, more and more people are raising doubts about the science of man-made global warming. Much media attention has focused on Senator Fielding's recent attendance at the Heartland Institute's annual conference for climate sceptics. But he is far from alone in raising the temperature.
You know the climate is changing when even ABC journalists start defending the right of climate sceptics to speak out. In a new essay On Doubt (Melbourne University Press), Lateline co-host Leigh Sales says: "Climate change is an area in which we should allow room for doubt. When there is such universal agreement [on the science], doubters have an important role to play, both in terms of the science and the policy responses."
There is a lot to be said for her argument. Science is by nature a calling for sceptics. It progresses by testing hypotheses. Allowing one view to carry the day with no dissent sets a precedent that will stifle honest scientific debate and innovative thinking. So it is heartening that experts are publicly voicing their concerns at how politics has overtaken facts on the subject.
Professor Ian Plimer's sceptical book Heaven and Earth is now in its fifth printing. Writing in The Australian last month, geologist Bob Carter, carbon modeller David Evans, hydrologist-climatologist Stewart Franks and meteorologist-climatologist Bill Kininmonth all came out in unison to criticise climate change minister Penny Wong and her advisers for failing to answer, much less take seriously, Senator Fielding's reasonable questions on the real link between human carbon dioxide emissions and dangerous global warming.
Last week, Fielding earned high praise from the influential US web site RealClearPolitics as well as the Wall Street Journal. And as the WSJ's Washington-based columnist Kimberley Strassel argued, the number of other sceptics is swelling everywhere. The Polish Academy of Sciences recently published a document challenging the science. In the Czech Republic, only 11 per cent of the population believes humans play a role. In the US, where polls show record levels of scepticism, more than 700 scientists disagree with the UN -- 13 times the number who authored the UN climate summary for policymakers. Peer-reviewed academic research has debunked doomsday scenarios about hurricanes, rising oceans and polar ice caps. And so on.
None of this means the sceptics are necessarily right. It's just that, as the English philosopher Francis Bacon put it in The Advancement of Learning in 1605, "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
And there is no doubt that the uncertainties in climate forecasting remain huge. In the 1970s, prominent environmentalists were issuing dire warnings about overpopulation, mass starvation and global cooling. Yet population growth estimates have declined. Biotechnology advances have found ways to feed more poor people than the Cassandras predicted. And global cooling has become global warming.
Remember the costly and fraudulent scares we have recently lived through, from mad cow disease to genetically modified foods. Remember, too, that the global surface temperature has remained virtually flat in the past decade. Bear all this in mind when you see the End Is Nigh crowd try to rush through the senate a contentious bill that could have a substantial and detrimental impact on the lives and opportunities of the Australian people.
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