In Australia's next federal election, I'll vote One, Zero, Zero — Greens 1, Labor 0, Coalition 0. This is the only way I can fulfil my voter duty, while recording protest at the failure of our major parties to offer real policies on the planet's climate crisis. I'm too old to get arrested in direct citizen protests against coalburning — the issue that counts most now.
If enough voters around Australia voted One, Zero, Zero, politicians would get the message. Because such a vote is legally informal, I don't advocate it in electorates where Greens candidates might actually win, as it would be wrong to waste these votes.
Unless Labor and the Greens unexpectedly pull off a compromise emissions trading scheme (ETS) or carbon tax system in the Senate in the next few weeks, Australia will go to the next election with no ETS laws passed. Rudd will blame opposition obstructionism, and fight the election on his preferred ground of health. He will downplay climate policy, while promising that a re-elected Labor government with Senate control would pass an ETS. Don't hold your breath — Labor's record doesn't inspire confidence.
Abbott will promise his brand of 'practical environmentalism': rural soil carbonisation gimmicks, climate voluntarism, no new taxes, no effective regulation of greenhouse emissions. As an avowed climate science denier, he is stroking concerned voters with empty promises.
Rudd's climate crisis denialism is more subtle. He claims to accept the science. But on every practical policy front, Labor betrays our hopes. It shelters coal export and power industries. Industry-scale infrastructure alternatives to carbon-burning are quietly kneecapped (in the case of renewables-based energy) or ideologically condemned (nuclear energy).
Australia white-anted effective international action at Copenhagen, with the 5 per cent ETS target, shameful even before it was corrupted by overseas 'green credits' and special deals for affected industries. There is no progress towards compulsory motor vehicle fuel consumption or emission standards.
Labor throws token conscience-salvers to concerned voters, with its subsidised home solar energy and insulation programs (from which any emissions savings would be swallowed up by a 5 per cent ETS law). Meanwhile we are told by government and industry leaders that Australia 'must' increase its population to 35 million, to take care of our elderly and provide labour for the resources boom.
Under these policies, Australian greenhouse emissions — already the highest in the world per capita — will go on rising in total. Beneath all the greenwash, Australia will remain the most carbon-dependent economy in the world. More and more voters understand this, but major parties don't care. Risk-averse politicians listen to big corporate and trade union stakeholders more than to citizens.
Noisy climate crisis deniers provide a political figleaf for defenders of the profitable energy status quo, creating through intimidation and ersatz-scientific advocacy the illusion of real scientific debate. The media (including the ABC, recently reminded by their climate-sceptic chairman Maurice Newman of their duty to represent all sides of this 'debate') dutifully represent all viewpoints in 'balanced' opinion and correspondence sites. Thus the intellectually bad drowns and drives out the good, further confusing a worried public.
The climate crisis makes me wonder whether democracy can or should survive. Authoritarian China is adopting (within its scale and means) rational and resolute decarbonisation policies, accepting the inescapable policy lessons of climate science. Western democracies seem paralysed into inaction by powerful pro-status quo forces and outdated ideologies on all sides.
On Sunday 14 March, Science Minister Kim Carr jointly released with the chief executives of CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology an eight-page climate data 'snapshot' to debunk climate sceptics. It showed that Australia's manmade climate crisis is happening now, and that mitigation and adaptation are 'important research priorities'. Greg Combet — not the Prime Minister — took a low-key Dorothy Dixer in the House on it. Nobody mentioned decarbonisation. The Fin Review covered the story in a ten-line sidebar story buried on page nine.
Australia's environmental movement is confused, demoralised, divided, and infiltrated by compromised thinking on the importance of staying close to big business and government. Policy agendas are overloaded and weakened by competing second-order issues. The Greens — who know more about climate crisis policy than any other organised group in Australia — are distracted by the business of managing a multiple political party agenda. The overriding decarbonisation objective is blunted.
Australia has nothing useful to contribute now to the world's decarbonisation policy-making. The best thing we can do is stand aside and hope major world powers, led by China (and, I still hope, Obama's USA) set global decarbonisation policy directions that we will perforce have to follow.
Citizens who care — there are many of us — should educate ourselves and our children on the science of the climate crisis, which is not so complicated. Within the boundaries set by the large infrastructural systems on which we depend as workers and consumers, we should try to lead as sustainable lives as we can, while we wait for the penny to drop from climate disasters that must come. It may be too late by then.
Meanwhile, for those of us too old or unfit to paint coal-power station chimneys or lie across coal-train tracks — send a message, vote One, Zero, Zero!
Tony Kevin is author of Crunch Time: using and abusing Keynes to fight the twin crises of our era (Scribe 2009).