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The Australian was convinced. “Australia could have avoided two decades of wars on climate change if the Howard government had advanced its majority vision of an Emissions Trading System (ETS),” new documents reveal. Historian Chris Wallace is not so unequivocal in this assertion, but observes nonetheless The conversation that a “working consensus among ministers” is discernible, “with one exception, that an Emissions Trading System (ETS) was not only a possible but likely route through which Australia would eventually fulfill its international environmental obligations. ”
These opinions came in light of the release by the Australian National Archives of the 2000 cabinet documents. Climate change skeptics are not in the ascendancy; the Australian Greenhouse Office is working on a variant of the ETS and requested funding for its operations in the May budget.
This is far too optimistic reading. The Howard government had already argued in December 1997 at Kyoto (Conference of the Parties COP3) that the growth of greenhouse gas emissions would be allowed at 108% of its 1990 base. With Iceland and Norway, it has was one of three countries to have achieved an increase in emission levels from its 1990 base. To this could be added Australia’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, while Prime Minister John Howard always bragged about his environmental measures, including the establishment of the Australian Greenhouse Office.
How to achieve even Australia’s singularly generous goals was a source of concern among ministers. Environment Minister Robert Hill’s submission in May to his colleagues drew attention to two projects – the Kogan Creek coal-fired power plant in Queensland and Comalco Alumina – which together would account for 25% of the growth in emissions authorized by the Kyoto commitments.
Efficiency questions have been raised: the Kogan Creek power plant would only be half as efficient as a gas version. Hill suggested imposing a variety of conditions, one of which would be a commitment to reduce carbon resulting from the projects. Three ministries – the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, the Treasury and the Ministry of Finance – denied the idea. In PM&C’s brief response, it was “desirable to clarify future greenhouse policies as early as possible in order to reduce the uncertainty faced by investors in projects like these.
But there was a looming figure, an aggressive paladin for the resource sector skeptical of the climate change discourse. Nick Minchin was the Howard government’s Minister of Industry and Resources. He had big, aggressive dreams for gas. Its objective: to blunt any emissions trading system through extensive compensation programs in carbon-intensive industries.
This does not mean that no ETS would have been seriously deficient either in its philosophy or in its implementation. At COP6 in The Hague, a vocal lobby for the commercialization of greenhouse gases, groups seeking to corporatize the apparent reduction in emissions through free trade environmentalism, were in the spotlight. These included the International Chamber of Commerce and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The Kyoto Protocol risked becoming a charter favorable to businesses.
Australia’s less than heroic contribution to The Hague has been important in ensuring that no deal is reached between participating countries, in large part due to disagreements between the United States and the European Union. Hill was tasked with further easing his country’s light burden of environmental responsibility, with a brief that would seek additional carbon sinks already agreed to in the Kyoto negotiations.
The minister would “minimize the cost of implementing Kyoto and the impact on Australia’s trade competitiveness.” If the specter of disproportionate costs to Australia were to emerge during the COP6 negotiations, Hill was to become a committed saboteur, working “with like-minded countries to block consensus or, failing that, make a position statement. of Australia ”. Australia, as a member of an umbrella group comprising Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Iceland, Norway and Iceland, duly endorsed the US proposals for the use of carbon sinks.
The fact that Minchin would not even agree to a market model for emissions trading suggested an encampment, an ideology of a pre-heliocentric nature. Most ministers in the Howard government have, on some level, accepted the severity of human-induced climate change. But an investigation of Minchin’s views over the years reveals how his activist stance on climate has become the orthodoxy of Australian governments from Abbott to Morrison. Along with Abbott, he is a fan of carbon dioxide, “more a friend than an enemy of the flora and fauna of the earth.” Climate change was a natural process of complexity requiring “careful and cost-effective adaptation”. He is not convinced “of the theory of anthropogenic global warming”.
In July 2013, Minchin launched Taxing the air: facts and mistakes about climate change. Written by Bob Carter and a host of other skeptics, including Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth, Minchin was “flattered” to be asked to launch a book that he said should be “in every school, every university and every library. community ”. Carter was “a formidable and leading voice in the fight against the alarmist scares we have all been subjected to about the theory of anthropogenic global warming.”
In 2009, Minchin was a cardinal knife bearer in the Liberal Party coup against then leader and future Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull was an ETS convert; his replacement, a certain climate change denier Tony Abbott, was not. Abbott became Prime Minister in 2013, promising to dismantle carbon pricing systems. Australia’s climate change policy, imperfect though it is, has been effectively and completely abandoned.
In 2021, Minchin’s legacy continues firmly and quickly. Australia maintains an almost manic ambivalence in reducing emissions. The mining lobbies remain extremely strong, the environmental portfolio of the Morrison cabinet weak. The government’s lack of ambition has led it to keep Saudi Arabia and Brazil company by being excluded from the latest UN climate action summit. This trend was already established at the start of the new millennium.
Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He teaches at RMIT University in Melbourne. E-mail: [email protected]
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