future clean tech

No. Absolutely not. And yet the conservative Wall Street Journal yesterday implied that America should, in a column entitled, “Down Under: Can the US Learn From Australia’s Emissions Plan?”

It’s easy to see why the Journal is pumped about Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” (that’s what they’re calling the Aussie ETS): it’s a sop to heavy polluting industry and the conservative opposition that supports it. The amended legislation gives a free ride to the carbon mafia, delaying really significant cuts in CO2 and passing on the residual costs to the average punter. The minimum “guaranteed” reduction is 5% by 2020 – talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Only this time there won’t be an iceberg in sight.

Interestingly, conservative Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull chose to lay his leadership on the line over this issue. His Liberal Party is severely divided over the legislation and the Liberals’ usual political bedfellows, the Nationals, are united against it.

Turnbull is an ideological descendant of the old, pre-John Howard Liberal Party: liberal on social issues, and to a greater or lesser extent conservative on economic issues. Global warming is a social issue with serious economic repercussions (and, what conservatives tend to discount, serious opportunities) and so it is no surprise that an old-school Liberal like Turnbull would support a sort of diluted version of action on climate change – but action nonetheless.

Turnbull’s dilution of the CPRS bill is worrying enough, but the really interesting thing is that much of his party thinks he’s gone too far. Former Prime Minister John Howard was almost singlehandedly responsible for the conservatisation of Australian politics, and the conservative rump of the party Howard left behind is about to commit collective suicide by declaring war on Turnbull for being too progressive. Turnbull, whose leadership is in serious trouble, is probably the best hope the Opposition has of breaking through the Government’s approval numbers anytime before 2013.

There is no lesson for America here. Australia’s electorate is overwhelmingly in favour of action on climate change, whereas the American electorate is somewhat more divided. I’d like to be able to say that Australia offers a warning to conservatives overseas not to oppose climate change action, but it seems like the Liberal Party, much like the Republican Party, is trending rightward.

From a policy perspective, Australia’s recent experience is a total disaster. It represents a triumph of politics over policy. The US and the EU are both looking at 17% and 20% cuts respectively by 2020, which is nowhere near enough. We need to cut 80% by 2020. Australia’s promising 5%. No lessons here.

The Environment News Service reports that leaders of climate-vulnerable island nations met in the Maldives over the last couple of days, headed by Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, essentially to draw attention to the fact that they’re slowly but surely going underwater.

“We are a diverse group of countries. But we share one common enemy. For us, climate change is no distant or abstract threat; but a clear and present danger to our survival,” Nasheed said.

“Climate change is melting the glaciers in Nepal. It is causing flooding in Bangladesh. It threatens to submerge the Maldives and Kiribati And in recent weeks, it has exacerbated drought in Tanzania, and typhoons in the Philippines,” he said. “We are the frontline states in the climate change battle.”

… On Monday, he asked the Vulnerable Countries Forum to join in this effort, saying, “I think a bloc of carbon-neutral, developing nations could change the outcome of Copenhagen.

“At the moment every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first,” Nasheed said.

“This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide,” he told Forum delegates. “We don’t want a global suicide pact. And we will not sign a global suicide pact, in Copenhagen or anywhere.”

This reminded me of an email exchange I had with a good friend of mine who is an engineer back in Sydney, Australia, who questions climate change science. He asked me, on several occasions, “If the planet is warming then why am I constantly freezing cold?” I regard this, of course, as the stuff of conspiracy theory, and told him so, referring him to the IPCC’s website and the various national and international science academies, all of whom agree with the fundamentals of the IPCC’s raison d’être – namely, human-induced global warming.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that my friend wouldn’t even be capable of bringing himself to raise these questions if he lived in a low-altitude island nation.

Two excellent clips showing the contours of the debate going on in the US. Note that even the “skeptics” are simply querying the viability of raising capital during the GFC – they are not questioning the value of switching to clean energy. Particularly, as is referenced, in the wake of December’s disaster at a Tennessee coal plant (which only goes to prove that eliminating coal is an imperative whether or not climate change science turns out to be accurate).

Can Wind and Solar Replace America’s Coal Plants?

Clean Energy – Wind vs Coal

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic: the Republican House Minority leader, John Boehner, told George Stephanopoulos that the idea that CO2 is harmful to the environment is “almost comical”.

George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide… The question is how much does man have to do with it, and what is the proper way to deal with this?

Stephanopolous could barely believe it himself – that a top elected official could still espouse such views just has to be seen to be believed:

Boehner: It’s ‘comical’ to say carbon dioxide is dangerous

The good news is that there’s seriously positive action happening where it matters. As David Niebauer writes at Cleantechblog.com, congressmen Waxman and Markey introduced a cap-and-trade bill in late March that would enable reduced deforestation in tropical rainforests -anywhere in the world – to be purchased as carbon credits. The EPA reckons that the scheme will cost just “pennies a day”.

It seems that finally public policy is catching up with the necessity that I’ve blogged about before – for us to price the externality of rainforest depletion into the economy. And it proves the point that it is virtually irrelevant what the skeptics say: the paradigm shift to the clean economy has reached an inflection point. It’s only going to snowball from here.