THIS week’s budget has been all about tax cuts, but mostly lost in the noise is the government’s position on climate change and our emissions reduction target.
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Lost, because there’s not much there.
Treasurer Scott Morrison promised to “maintain our responsible and achievable emissions reduction target at 26-28 per cent, and not the 45 per cent demanded by the Opposition”. And the reason for rejecting a stronger target? “That would only push electricity prices up.”
Morrison has presented the problem as a simple either/or. We can have a strong emissions reduction target or we can have manageable household power bills, but we can’t have both.
But what if you could keep power prices down for lower-income households and tackle climate change? I believe that if we really wanted to do our best to stop fossil fuel emissions and keep power bills down, we could do it. We could subsidise lower-income households while transitioning purposefully to a post-carbon economy.
The extraordinary mobilisations of governments and ordinary people during the world wars show what we can do if we put our minds to it. If action on climate change was sincerely presented to people as a clear and necessary goal, then I have no doubt people would get on board.
But half-hearted climate change policy just leads to cynicism and puzzlement. People tend to pick up cues from leaders and influencers: if they’re acting like everything’s normal, then everything must be normal.
Sadly, it isn’t normal. While we keep putting climate change in the Not Now Maybe Later basket, global average temperatures keep rising.
At the same time, the government has sought to plug a potential weak point in the Not Now Maybe Later approach to climate change: the Great Barrier Reef. Faster than anyone predicted, the corals are dying.
But the reef is something most people don’t want to lose so it has got some money: $536 million over five years to crack down on coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish and improve the quality of water entering the reef. This is good as far as it goes. But without companion policies for combating climate change, the money will ultimately be wasted.
Symbolically, just a few miles away, plans for the giant Adani coal mine continue to ahead, aided by federal government policy unable to tear itself away from coal and lead the way into a cleaner energy future.