Tony Abbott’s subservience to climate denialists might be his undoing

The conversation on global warming has been stalled because a shrinking group of denialists fly into a rage when it’s mentioned. It’s like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace.

The question arises of whether an Abbott government, by pacifying the anti-science activists, will provoke the broad and diverse body of the “climate concerned” into a phase of much more intense activism?

The power of the fragment: why politicians have turned their backs on climate The Conversation, Clive Hamilton 3 Sept 13 A recent Vote Compass poll shows 61% of Australian adults want the federal government to do more to tackle climate change; 18% want it to do less. This figure, consistent with many polls over the years, squares with various developments in Australian politics but contradicts others…….

The truth is the Australian public does not know what it wants its government to do on climate change. A large majority wants it to do something, but the government seems to lose support whenever it does anything. The only notable exception (and perhaps because many people don’t know it exists) is the Renewable Energy Target, first introduced by the Howard Government as a sop to public anxiety.

For any political leader unwilling to exercise leadership on the issue, trying to respond to climate change leaves them uncertain which way to turn.

The confusion and fretfulness over how to respond to global warming is an expression of the uniqueness of climate change among environmental issues. It ought to be simple: the science tells us that to have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to the widely accepted target of 2C, rich countries such as Australia (and especially Australia) must reduce their emissions by 25-40% by 2020. They must continue to reduce them until they are at least 90% lower by the middle of the century……..

While most Australians are concerned about climate change they are not concerned enough to take on strident deniers in everyday situations. Al Gore recently put it this way

The conversation on global warming has been stalled because a shrinking group of denialists fly into a rage when it’s mentioned. It’s like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace.

We see most starkly the power a rampant faction can wield in the Republican Party in the United States, where those who led it a decade ago are saying: “What happened? How did we allow the Tea Party to capture our party?” They were not willing to resist those fired-up people and now they have to figure out how to take their party back. Because the Tea Party is like a poison that, until it is sucked out, will prevent the Republicans ever regaining their former influence……

The reasons for exasperation will come thick and fast from the new government: the appointment of charlatans to senior advisory positions, evisceration of the federal climate change department, winding back legislation, including the Renewable Energy Target, rising emissions as the Direct Action Plan fails, and Australia taking a spoiling role at international meetings, especially the crucial Conference of the Parties in Paris in 2015.

Taking the long view, perhaps a reactionary government is what climate activism needs to reverse the equation of influence, to force the polity to leapfrog the half-measures we have seen so far. After all, it is what the science demands.http://theconversation.com/the-power-of-the-fragment-why-politicians-have-turned-their-backs-on-climate-17640

September 3, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | election 2013

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