I have a confession. I love coal. Especially brown coal. I love how when you crack a piece open you could find a perfectly preserved fossil leaf of a distant relative of an Antarctic beech as if it had been perfectly pressed between sheets of paper a few months earlier.
I love that when you look at brown coal under a microscope you can see a melange of pollen grains and interpret exactly the sort of waterlogged rainforest that once covered the La Trobe valley and imagine a time where you couldn't walk down the street of Morwell lest you be attacked by a 100 kilogram marsupial lion.
But I don't love burning coal. I have this quaint notion that burning coal is evil. I fear that continuing to burn coal now consigns each successive generation for hundreds and hundreds of years to escalating and irreversible levels of danger and suffering. And as a person who likes to think suffering of others is not a good thing and should generally be avoided if at all possible, I have a view that we should stop burning coal now. I see it in pretty black and white terms. But I know others like to argue differently.
For much of the last 20 years or so in Australia conservatives in Australia have pinned the notion of societal decline on the notion of 'moral relativism'. Moral relativism is a charge often laid by conservatives against progressives that progressives are mushy-headed and try to make everything about shades of grey when everything really should be black and white.
For instance when a progressive looks at conflict in the Middle East or the rise of groups like ISIS, they point out the role of US foreign policy in creating the situation and that this should moderate any Western involvement. Whereas a conservative will just see bad guys who need to be stopped regardless of how the situation developed.
The charge of moral relativism has been laid against progressives in debates about marriage, and about multiculturalism. John Howard, when commenting on the decay of society, once said, 'We sort of sanitise the language and we no longer talk in terms, of black and white terms, terms of right and wrong. The idea that you can just have total moral relativism in any society is ridiculous'.
However when it comes to climate change and coal, it is the so-called conservatives that suffer from this mushy-headed moral relativism. Rather than seeing the issue as an existential one, they choose to muddy the debate by pointing out that coal can be good depending on the context in which it is used.
"Conservatives can't cry moral relativism on issues they care about and then seek to obfuscate on issues where their vested interests are threatened."
We used to hear that coal is necessary because it is the only source of cheap power, but now that renewables are cheaper, we are hearing less and less of that. So the debate then shifted to being that coal power is the only reliable source of power and its continued use is required to keep the light on. We hear that Queensland coal is good for the planet because it is cleaner than others coals.
We then hear that we must keep burning the dirtiest coal on the planet, that fossil-laden brown coal from the La Trobe Valley, because otherwise those communities will have no jobs. (The same people argued against the continued support of the Australian car industry, despite greater levels of jobs to be lost.)
And on coal exports, we hear that Australia has a moral obligation to supply the poor of the world with our lovely cheap, reliable coal to lift them out of poverty, while discounting the reality that it is easier to deliver localised solar power to shanty towns and slums than roll out any old-fashioned electricity grid.
These arguments seek to muddy the waters of an inherently and increasingly black and white issue: that climate change is dangerous and burning coal will only lock in the damage now so that it will impact generations for millennia. These arguments are based in no deeper morality or set of principles other than the defence of vested interests.
In this regard they mirror the last ditch defences put up against the abolition of slavery. In 19th century England, slavery wasn't solely seen as a right and wrong issue. Elites questioned whether the slaves were really that badly treated anyway, worried about the impact of abolition on the English economy, and wondered aloud whether freeing the slaves was worth the damage to local communities around the slave-trading ports. History showed that this was all garbage, and likewise history will show that these arguments for burning coal are the same.
Conservatives can't have it both ways. They can't cry moral relativism on issues they care about and then seek to obfuscate on issues where their vested interests are threatened. Climate change is an issue that affects us all, and if there is any single issue where a black and white view is necessary, it is this one.
Tim Beshara is nature conservation professional currently working in politics as a media adviser for a Greens Senator. You can find him on twitter as @tim_beshara