Antinuclear

Australia’s Labor government failed to make the case for climate action

The reducing of the climate policy debate to a battle over a tax helped sceptics build doubt about the science and the case for carbon pricing. This week’s news might have had a bigger impact had Labor not squandered the advantage it once had on climate policy

Losing sight of climate shift in battle over tax, The Age, August 1, 2012 Labor’s narrow focus lost support for carbon pricing. AUSTRALIA and the US are isolated strongholds of scepticism about global warming. It shows in debates about whether recorded temperature rises are real, never mind the extent to which human activities drive such change.

Now a leading US researcher funded by sceptics to challenge climate science has been ”converted”. Yet so poorly has
the Gillard government prosecuted the case for its carbon tax that it may not benefit from the news.

US physicist Richard Muller commanded respect among sceptics three years ago for identifying issues with climate research that ”threw doubt on the very existence of global warming”. Backers of his research at the University of California included oil and gas billionaires Charles and David Koch, who believe warming is a hoax and provided a quarter of the Berkeley project’s funding. Last November, however, Professor Muller announced that rigorous analysis of worldwide data by his dozen researchers had forced him to conclude: ”Global warming is real.”

Now he has shed other doubts. The evidence convinced him ”prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct”: average land temperature rose 1.4 degrees over the past 250 years and 60 per cent of the rise was in the past 50. Critically, ”humans are almost entirely the cause”……

Julia Gillard and her colleagues
presumably believe it is a national responsibility to help slow
climate change; why else risk the backlash against July 1’s new tax?
Yet Labor’s tactical geniuses focused on a negative – easing the pain with compensation – rather than stress the case for carbon pricing and the many positives of clean energy. Carbon, climate change or clean energy hardly rate a mention in government advertising.
Given the failure to explain why this is much more than a
revenue-raising tax, is it any wonder voters resent it? The
Age/Nielsen poll finds it has been less painful than voters feared –
52 per cent said they were no worse off, up from 37 per cent who
expected that in late June. While 51 per cent had expected to be worse
off, only 38 per cent say they are.
The 60 per cent opposition to carbon pricing is a measure of the
failure to make the basic policy case. The reducing of the climate policy debate to a battle over a tax helped sceptics build doubt about the science and the case for carbon pricing. This week’s news might have had a bigger impact had Labor not squandered the advantage it once had on climate policy. http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/editorial/losing-sight-of-climate-shift-in-battle-over-tax-20120731-23cxp.html#ixzz22LBUgVoU

August 1, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News