Can the bush fires cure Australia of its schizophrenia about climate change and coal?

How can any coherent position on climate change be taken by a prime minister who has attacked ‘coalphobia’ in parliament? However, while coal is Australia’s top export, it employs just 35,000 people and is unlikely to deliver many votes

David Dodwell

Published: 6:30am, 17 Feb 2020

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As the world’s economies squirm in the face of the stark practical and political realities of carbon emissions and climate change, few can be suffering climate schizophrenia as severely as Australia.

The mood has not been helped by unprecedentedly ferocious bush fires that have scorched over 11 million hectares, destroyed over 2,000 homes, killed about 30 people and left the nation in shock. Nor has it been helped by the eccentric decision of the country’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, to fly out of the crisis for a holiday in Hawaii.

But there are distinctive reasons for the Australian government to be sitting uncomfortably alongside a dwindling community of climate change deniers, and there are distinctive reasons that might rapidly change.

And I refer to the Australian government as opposed to the Australian people as climate deniers, because I suspect the government is today dangerously out of step with its famously blunt-speaking electorate.

Like so many politicians across the world facing re-election cycles of three to six years, few have been able to reconcile these short election cycles with the climate crisis that is bowling towards us from 30 years away.

I have been in Australia this past week for Apec (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meetings, and if there is a single subject able to distract attention from Wuhan, the coronavirus Covid-19, and why I was not being detained in quarantine, it is bush fires and global warming.

Until as recently as last December, this was a community still keen to distinguish between weather and climate change. It was a community inclined to dismiss the increasingly severe and frequent natural disasters – ranging from typhoons and hurricanes to floods and droughts, and including wildfires in the Amazon, California and New South Wales – as features of normal, natural weather cycles, rather than acknowledge them as evidence of neglectful human abuse of the environment over the past couple of centuries.

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But the bush fires have changed that. So, too, have the awesome thunderstorms that doused fires across Victoria and New South Wales with the heaviest rainfall in decades.

I would not be surprised to see Australia’s political leaders, as they prepare for the next global climate change conference in Glasgow in November, deserting that dwindling group gathered around US administration officials who are still advocating investment in and subsidies to coal and other fossil fuel industries.

But then again, maybe they won’t. Therein the schizophrenia. How can a government possibly maintain a rational or consistent policy line when it has a natural resources minister calling for fresh coal and natural gas subsidies and for making Australia a bigger energy superpower than it already is today, and a minister for energy and emissions reduction who is looking at the formidable challenges of getting to net zero carbon emissions by 2050?

How can it reconcile chief scientist Alan Finkel, who wants to see strong development of Australia’s natural gas resources to provide a transition fuel helping us purge our lives of coal, and Emeritus Professor Will Steffen at the Australian National University, who argues: “We can have no new fossil fuels, no extension of coal, no new gas … all must be banned if you are serious about [the] Paris [accord].”

How can any coherent position on climate change be taken by a prime minister who has attacked “coalphobia” by bringing a lump of coal into parliament, and who meticulously defends the coal and natural resource industries as pillars of the economy that generate a huge percentage of the country’s foreign exchange earnings?

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This cuts to the heart of Australia’s schizophrenia. Look at the country’s exports, and the dilemma is clear. Coal is the country’s leading export earner – generating almost A$67 billion (US$45 billion) in 2018, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The No 2 export, generating A$63 billion, is iron ore (which mostly goes to China, where Australian coal is being used to forge that iron ore into Chinese steel). Natural gas is the No 3 export, with A$43 billion. Throw in gold, aluminium, copper ores and concentrates and a smattering of oil, and natural resources account for about 60 per cent of Australia’s export earnings.

From such numbers, it is easy to believe that Australia must at all costs keep its extractive industries growing. But it is worth remembering that, back in the 1950s, 40 per cent of Australia’s exports were wool, and kids grew up thinking the economy was “riding on the sheep’s back”. Today, the only farm product to sit in Australia’s top 10 export earners is beef, at No 8 and earning A$8.6 billion.

It is also worth noting that, today, Australia’s fourth and fifth export earners are education-related travel services (A$35 billion) and personal travel services (A$22 billion) – proof that there are other strong sources of foreign earnings that can drive growth in the coming decades, without having to rely on fossil fuels.

As Morrison positions himself with voters for the next elections, he might do well to recall that whatever the export earnings coming from coal, the industry underpins just 35,000 jobs – down by 22 per cent from 45,000 in 2012. In a national workforce of 10 million and a national population of 25 million, coal is an industry that does not deliver many votes.

The defence of coal might be more understandable if export prices had not been falling so sharply over the past couple of years, and if the price competitiveness of wind and solar power was not rising so strongly. Many in Australia who might otherwise defend coal have come to believe that the battle is already lost because of the sharp decline in the costs of delivering wind and solar power.

Even those who advocate development of LNG as Australia’s transition fuel believe that this phase may be short if hydrogen can be developed quickly enough, and if small-scale nuclear power can recover political support.

Australia has always seen itself as the lucky country, and it would take some consistently clumsy political leadership for that luck to run out. But the climate challenge is forcing changes of a scale and urgency that make its current schizophrenia easy to understand. It might take severe shocks to the economy to force that change, but maybe the bush fires could count as such a shock.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

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