Dr Guy Pearse on Howard the denier and destructor

27th Oct 07


From Kim Bax - Mum and Environment compaigner.

Dr Guy Pearce, author of HIGH & DRY speaks at the I2th annual Sunshine Coast Environment Awards

27th Oct 07

Howard tells us:

• We’re told we will meet our Kyoto target, but not that it is an emissions increase target which, thanks mainly to land clearing cuts, enables us to increase emissions 27%;
  
• We’re told there’s $3.5 billion being spent on climate change but not that, on an annual basis, twice as much is being spent on government advertising; more than a million dollars a day. And, on day one of this election campaign he spent ten times as much as his entire climate change budget in just one round of tax cuts.
  
• We’re told banning incandescent light bulbs leads the world but just how world-leading is it given we need over 800 measures on that scale to cut our projected emissions in half by mid century?;
  
• We’re told Australia is being prepared for the impacts of climate change but not that eleven times as much is being spent on the war in Iraq as on Howard’s entire greenhouse adaptation program?;
  
• The Prime Minister says we’re on track to be an energy superpower but on his watch Australia actually started paying more for energy imports than we make from energy exports;
  
• We’re told uranium and LNG are saving the global climate but this looks decidedly shaky when you factor in the far greater emissions caused by our coal exports which are projected to double by 2030;
  
• We hear the Asia Pacific Partnership is a superior alternative to the Kyoto Protocol, but it rings hollow when you consider the AP6 requires no emission cuts of any country this century;
  
• We’re told clean coal is just around the corner but not that coal-fired electricity providers reckon they don’t expect it to be commercially viable on any meaningful scale until at least 2020?
  
• We’re told nuclear is the clean green saviour but not that John Howard’s own inquiry into its potential, found that even with a dozen nuclear power stations our emissions would still be 90% above I990 levels by 2050?
  

I joined the Liberal Party in I989, I remain a member and I never imagined campaigning for the defeat of my own party. But a continuation of John Howard’s response to climate change is also unimaginable and it’s something I can’t support. My politics haven’t changed a great deal since I989 but the Liberal Party’s greenhouse policy sure has.

In I990, the Liberal Party led by Andrew Peacock had a policy to reduce Australia’s greenhouse pollution by at least 20% by the year 2000. It was promising bigger cuts sooner than the Labor Party and was proud of the fact that it embraced national emission reduction targets first. That 20% emission reduction target was a commitment John Hewson retained as leader of the party in the early I990s. John Howard has taken a very different and dangerous direction. But before I get into that, a bit about my background.

I spent most of my career either working in or around the Liberal Party. Since about I994, I’ve also been immersed in environment policy, especially climate change; writing speeches for the first Howard government Environment minister, consulting to the Australian Greenhouse Office, lobbying for various industries, and as a PhD researcher.

With a political career in mind I hoped these were good career steps; environment policy specialists are thin on the ground in Liberal ranks. Instead, I found myself unable to ignore my party’s shifting response to climate change, the industry lobbying behind that push and the way we were deceiving the public about the consequences.

Much of this was revealed through my PhD research the conclusions of which were very unwelcome to me as a Liberal Party member. I raised my concerns with various senior Howard government people but to no avail and ultimately I made the fateful decision that it was unethical to self-sensor my research for political reasons.

Plan A, right up until mid 2005, had been to move my young family back to Queensland and more specifically to the Sunshine Coast hinterland, where I had the strong support of senior Queensland Liberals to run for federal parliament. But Plan A was finished as soon as I decided against self-censoring my PhD. In early 2006, some of my findings were aired on the Greenhouse Mafia episode of Four Corners. From then on, it was clear my party was complicit rather than oblivious. As expected, the shutters came down on me and any prospect of a political career.

So I decided to write High & Dry. If the party didn’t want to know that our greenhouse policy was being high-jacked, let alone the implications, then the whole story of how John Howard came to confuse the national interest with polluter interests needed telling.

Of course, if you believe John Howard, it’s a story that needs no telling because Australia ‘leads the world on climate change.’ But behind the smokescreen, the reality is very different:

• We’re told we will meet our Kyoto target, but not that it is an emissions increase target which, thanks mainly to land clearing cuts, enables us to increase emissions 27%;
  
• We’re told there’s $3.5 billion being spent on climate change but not that, on an annual basis, twice as much is being spent on government advertising; more than a million dollars a day. And, on day one of this election campaign he spent ten times as much as his entire climate change budget in just one round of tax cuts.
  
• We’re told banning incandescent light bulbs leads the world but just how world-leading is it given we need over 800 measures on that scale to cut our projected emissions in half by mid century?;
  
• We’re told Australia is being prepared for the impacts of climate change but not that eleven times as much is being spent on the war in Iraq as on Howard’s entire greenhouse adaptation program?;
  
• The Prime Minister says we’re on track to be an energy superpower but on his watch Australia actually started paying more for energy imports than we make from energy exports;
  
• We’re told uranium and LNG are saving the global climate but this looks decidedly shaky when you factor in the far greater emissions caused by our coal exports which are projected to double by 2030;
  
• We hear the Asia Pacific Partnership is a superior alternative to the Kyoto Protocol, but it rings hollow when you consider the AP6 requires no emission cuts of any country this century;
  
• We’re told clean coal is just around the corner but not that coal-fired electricity providers reckon they don’t expect it to be commercially viable on any meaningful scale until at least 2020?
  
• We’re told nuclear is the clean green saviour but not that John Howard’s own inquiry into its potential, found that even with a dozen nuclear power stations our emissions would still be 90% above I990 levels by 2050?
  

And we’re told renewable energy can’t replace baseload power when it is already doing that elsewhere in the world.

Once you strip away the spin, the truth emerges; the cumulative impact of Howard’s policies after eleven years is that our emissions are on track to rise 70% by mid century. While he loudly claims that by slowing emissions growth he is doing the equivalent of taking fourteen million cars off our roads, the emissions growth he is allowing have us on track to add the equivalent of at least seventy million cars by 2050.

It’s been all about moving money and people between the carbon lobby and Howard’s circle of trust. When you look at who funds the economic advice produced by the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE) you find our worst polluting industries bought their way onto committees overseeing some of this as recently as last year. Some of the same industries pay hundreds of thousands to hire ABARE (not based on independent assumptions but on the paying client’s own assumptions), some even donate money to ABARE’s overall research program, all of which helps ABARE meet an external funding requirement.

Look behind the scientific advice produced by sections of the CSIRO, and the CRSs who have been in John Howard’s ear on clean coal and you find polluter funding.

Look at who funds the think tanks and front groups denying the science and warning of doomsday, were we to cut emissions, and you find the carbon lobby writing more big checks. And it’s the same with the hired guns; the economists, lobbyists and other policy gurus who have had the ear of the Prime Minister.

Look at who funds he Liberal Party itself and you find millions of dollars from the same polluter interests, being channeled from our worst greenhouse polluters, much of it through the back and side doors to avoid public scrutiny. And the career paths follow a similar trail as the money. A constant rotation of personnel between carbon intensive industry, federal bureaucracy and the Liberal Party builds careers for quarry visionaries and ensures they have the inside running. And it has thoroughly corrupted my party’s response to climate change.

Taking care of much of this day to day is a small group of Canberra based lobbyists working together under the banner of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network- otherwise known as the ’greenhouse mafia’.

We’re in this position because John Howard was sold what I call a ‘quarry vision’ of Australia’s future. A flawed belief that cheap fossil fuel and the mining, metals and fossil energy sectors are not just the key to our current prosperity but the key to our economic future and protecting them at all costs is the underlying goal of our greenhouse policy.

Meanwhile as is so apparent in a place like the Sunshine Coast, 90% of GDP, and 95% of jobs in our economy are not generated by these ‘quarry industries’. John Howard might talk up carbon capture as the way to clean up coal but it is he who has been captured by the carbon lobby and their quarry vision for Australia.

So how did they sell that vision to John Howard? To find out, we need to go inside John Howard’s Greenhouse policy ’circle of trust’, a concept many of you will be familiar with from the movie Meet the Fockers. It is only a shame Robert De Niro was not there with the polygraph in this case too.
When you look closely at the Howard government’s greenhouse policy - how it evolved, where the arguments originate - you find that he has consistently listened to relatively few sources. They are key political allies inside the Liberal Party; the Bush administration; a few government departments and a few agencies like ABARE; Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation(ANSTO), the chief scientist, and sections of CSIRO focused on clean coal technology.

He’s listened to; a small group of conservative commentators; a few conservative think’ tanks; the work of a small group of innocuous sounding lobbyists and economists; firms like ACIL Tasman, CRA International, and ITS Global. He’s heard the top end of town mainly through an equally innocuous sounding lobby group called the AustralianIndustry Greenhouse Network.

When you listen closely to these sources, you hear a complementary mix of denial and delay. Deny the scientific basis for action and/or delay emission cuts by Australia. What I found over a decade of work was that denial and delay were two sides of the same coin and the coin was coming from the same source as most of the pollution.

The AIGN represents about a dozen industry associations and a similar number of multinationals, mostly foreign owned. They account for Australia’s most carbon intensive industries: Coal, oil, aluminium, steel, cement, carmakers, and a few others.

In my PhD research I interviewed over a dozen senior past and present AIGN executives. They referred to themselves as the ‘greenhouse mafia’ and it was soon clear why. They run the country’s greenhouse policy remotely on behalf of the few industries they represent. They explained, in great detail, how they fixed the game time and again.

They said they’reverse-managed’the greenhouse ministerial committee; to stop emissions trading, to prevent Australia ratifying Kyoto, to avoid greenhouse emissions triggering federal environmental approval processes and to water down the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target.

They told how they reverse managed the broader business community into towing the line of the biggest polluters and how they got included in Australia’s official delegation to international greenhouse negotiations. They even told, on tape, how they were able to get inside the bureaucracy and help write cabinet submissions and ministerial briefings and costings on greenhouse policy.

Before they joined the greenhouse mafia, most of the lobbyists were once Branch Heads, Assistant Secretaries or Ministerial Advisers in the industry portfolio. Their former underlings now ran the relevant sections of the bureaucracy. So, if the public servant looked forward to a well paid industry job later on, it made good sense to go along with the greenhouse mafia bosses.

This dynamic operates right across Howard’s trusted circle; a blurred line between public, private and partisan; a shared belief that the interests of the nation are the same as the interests of carbon intensive industries.

It’s tempting perhaps to think that the PM is a victim in all of this, that he has been unwittingly captured by nefarious vested interests. That was my hope for quite a while. However, the evidence suggests otherwise. John Howard’s greenhouse scepticism goes way back. He said of the UN climate change convention: "We should never have got on this particular truck in Rio in the first place."

Since about I999 Howard started to take control of greenhouse policy because polluters felt his environment ministers were too green. He took over as chairman of the Cabinet committee overseeing greenhouse policy, unilaterally announced Australia would not ratify Kyoto, blocked emissions trading in cabinet twice - once effectively rolling half a dozen of his ministers after consulting a group of high polluting industry executives hand-picked by him. And his 2004 Energy White Paper ticked off the carbon lobby’s entire list.

He let a greenhouse sceptic run his backbench environment committee. He intervened in preselections to keep greenhouse sceptics in parliament. He appointed a coal industry executive as chief scientist, even allowing him to keep working three days a week at Rio Tinto. He hired the same consultants as the carbon lobby to advise him on greenhouse without any open tender and, when he decided emissions trading was unavoidable, he let our Australia’s worst polluting industries design one to their liking, even seconding the head of the AIGN to his department.

Time and again, he goes out of his way to give Australia’s ‘carbon club’ their way.

And one of the real problems has been the people around John Howard.

• His Finance minister is an avowed sceptic and has publicly defended mining industry executives who have denied the science.
  
• His Industry minister is another sceptic. When AI Gore visited Australia in 2006, this minister dismissed Gore’s documentary as incorrect and as nothing more than entertainment.
  
• His Forestry minister is on record saying weeds are much more serious than the problem climate change may or may not be.
  
• The Foreign minister hired as his speechwriter a conservative columnist who still denies humans have anything to do with climate change.
  
• His Vocational Education minister, reckons the science is unproven, the warming we’re seeing mostly natural. He dismisses climate change as a trendy cause for lefties, seized since the fall of communism.
  
• His Tourism minister who seriously suggested shade cloth as a way to save the Barrier Reef from climate change now says wind power is a fraud that belongs in the northern hemisphere, not here.
  

The Chair of Howard’s environment policy Committee launched a document at Parliament House saying climate change is a ‘scam’ and even suggesting those in charge of the (Intergovernmental Panel on climets Change (IPCC) should be jailed, presumably along with the Nobel Peace Prizes they now share with AI Gore.

So, many of Howard’s closest colleagues don’t believe climate change is a real problem caused mainly by humanity and this response has gone totally unchallenged.

The challenge for John Howard of late has been what to do now that the public has switched on to climate change. He’s had to feign a conversion on climate change while still planning to delay emission cuts in Australia. Let’s run through what’s being hatched right now:

First, he’s trying to appear to embrace the idea of emissions reduction targets when in fact he’s backing three types of target that are distant cousins at best:

1. emission increase targets like Australia’s Kyoto target which is non-binding because Australia hasn’t ratified;
   
   
2. regional or global reduction targets that are non-binding; and
   
   
3. targets which will be met anyway, as with the ‘business as usual’ improvements in energy intensity and forest cover which were dressed up as targets in the APEC Sydney Declaration.
   

Next, Howard is shifting the focus onto individuals with the’Climate Clever’campaign- which really ought to be called ‘Climate Conned.’ The more people can be coaxed into obsessing with their own emissions, the less likely they are to realise that emissions would rise 60% by mid century even if Australians cut residential emissions to zero; or that one million of us could take our cars off the road tomorrow and just one new aluminium smelter would wipe out the emissions saved.

Third, Howard’s giving the appearance of backing renewable energy without doing so. He’s merely bundled up the existing renewable energy mandates; the federal one he refused to increase and the state ones he opposed. Then he’s lumped in existing renewable capacity and broadened the eligibility to make clean coal and nuclear qualify. This is now dressed up as a grand I5% renewable energy target when in fact it’s basically business as usual.

Fourth, he’s giving the appearance of embracing emissions trading but saying nothing about the strength of the scheme. Four years before it starts, he’s calling his ETS the ‘best in the world’ but won’t provide any of the crucial details which will determine whether the scheme will actually result in deep cuts in Australia’s emissions.

He’ll say now that pensioners will be compensated for the impact of a carbon price on energy bills but he’s hiding the reason why pensioners will need compensation and that is that he has allowed our worst polluting industries to carve themselves from the scheme’s impact, which according to ABARE roughly doubles the burden of a carbon price on the rest of the community.

So we have an audacious plan to dress up business as usual as ‘leading the world’ and so keen are many in the media to write the ‘Howard back flip on climate change’ story that most of them have bought it.

So, what about Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party? Are they going to be any better than John Howard and the Coalition? Well, Labor has committed to some of the key steps Australia needs to take to have an effective response to climate change.

They have committed to long term emissions reduction target; a 60% reduction in Australia’s emissions by 2050; Immediate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol; and a substantial increase in the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target.

They’ll establish an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and crucially, one which will be consistent with deep cuts in Australia’s emissions by mid-century (this is important because Howard has not tied his scheme to any emissions reduction target). Labor has also committed to phasing out new electric hot water systems from 20I0.

And they have also commissioned Ross Garnaut to conduct the first ever full investigation of the economics of climate change; finally costing the impacts of climate change, and incorporating the benefits of emissions reduction, not just the costs. So there are some good signs from Labor.

But there are also some areas of concern: The lack of detail about the strength of the ETS and the loopholes it may allow big polluters; the lack of a medium term emissions target; the lack of detail on how much they plan to increase the renewable energy mandate; and no major attention yet to adaptation. As well the ALP has its own sceptics and some of its state governments have been vulnerable to the same sort of carbon capture we have seen with John Howard.

With all that in mind, I’m cautiously optimistic about a Rudd government when it comes to climate change but I’ll be even more optimistic if the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate to keep them on track. Whatever happens, this issue won’t be fixed on election day no matter what the result.

So what has to be done to get us back on track? Well, the first thing is to embrace the idea that Australia has to do to its own emissions what it expects of the rest of the world. We have to lead by example.

So we need to abandon the idea that there is some way around binding emissions reduction targets and timetables. We need a long term emissions reduction target consistent with what is required globally and we need a short-medium term target or target range, knowing that once we ratify Kyoto we will negotiate a new binding target covering the next commitment period.

Then we need to establish an emissions trading scheme that sets a price on emissions sufficient to stay on track with these targets and doesn’t carve out our worst polluting industries.

This needs to be complemented with additional measures for the simple reason that emissions trading is not a fix-all. To ensure that emission cuts are not merely outsourced to other parts of the world, we need a much stronger Renewable Energy mandate and energy efficiency regulation in various sectors, especially transport.

Unless we do this we may find we are merely a donor to the global clean energy transition, rather than part of it. While we’re at it, we need a moratorium on new coal fired power stations and we need to start rethinking our involvement in coal mining because this is an industry which could end up losing the race to become a commercially viable low emissions technology in time and we need to be ready for that possibility as a country.

This all needs to be complemented with a nationally led adaptation policy so that the nation can start preparing for the huge impacts of climate change-some of which are inevitable.

And we shouldn’t fall for the myth that doing the right thing will wreck the economy. Few people understand that when John Howard tells us that if we cut our emissions in half it would cut GDP by I0%, what he actually means is that, according to ABARE’s own projections, in 2050 it would be 246% higher than today rather than 28I % higher. Similarly when Howard says that real wages would be cut bys 20%, what he means is that they would only be 8I % higher.

We should also keep in mind that the path we are on, 70% higher emissions by mid century, is simply not a long term viable option so it’s not a very useful point of comparison.

So where does this leave Australians? What can they do. Well here are three suggestions on how you can be Climate Clever without being Climate Conned into ignoring the big picture.

1. Focus on cutting emissions in ways that save money: I don’t buy the idea that we need to cut back on our quality of life to cut emissions. There is too much evidence to the contrary. If you take up just some of the easy options then spend a few dollars a week on I00% renewable energy, you can easily do at the household level what is required globally and be financially better off. If you go to the long version of this presentation on my website you’ll see lots of specific suggestions;
   
   
2. Start your own adaptation planning: Just because government is abrogating its responsibility doesn’t mean we should too and we need to realize that the impacts of climate change affect all sorts of equations in our own lives from where we live to what careers we choose. Once again, on my website and in the book you’ll find more suggestions on what we can do as individuals.
   
   
3. Use your political clout: Our own efforts are wasted unless we also force change at the political and corporate levels. We have to vote on this issue and judge political parties on whether the cumulative effect of their policy is to cut Australia’s emissions in line with the deep cuts required globally; and whether they are preparing Australia for the inevitable impacts of climate change.
   And don’t think your political clout is confined to the ballot box or to this election. We need to keep pushing by joining and supporting environmental organizations at all levels, writing to politicians at all levels and to business leaders too, raising awareness in the workplace, with community groups, and among family and friends.
   

If enough of us are truly’climate clever’ in these ways and not merely ‘climate conned into ignoring the big picture, we will move the bounds of acceptability for governments and industry and make delay less and less viable for the few interests it serves.

And not wasting one’s political clout seems an appropriate place for me to end.

They say you are supposed to get more and more conservative as you get older and I was not a very radical young man. In fact when I was introduced at a Liberal Party meeting by a Townsville City Alderman in 1989 I was described as ’2I going on 40’.

Well in a couple of weeks I turn 40, and if you’d said to me at the age of 2I that, in 2007, I would be working hand in hand with Greenpeace or giving such a politically seditious speech during an election campaign at an event like this, I would have given you pretty amazing odds.

But such is life and such is the gravity of the challenge presented by climate change to this generation and those who follow us. It is forcing many people already, to challenge conventional or partisan assumptions, and, inevitably, it means doing things we never imagined possible to prevent equally unimaginable harm.

Hopefully my own actions of late will help others to seize that challenge and to confront the many other threats to our environment.