Climate Tasmania

Consorting with the enemy

No-man’s land is a scary place, but it’s better than the trenches. [21 May 2013 | Peter Boyer]

Vica Bayley (centre) and Phill Pullinger (right) front the media with Forest Industries Association representative Terry Edwards. ABC PHOTO

I don’t agree, said the novelist Richard Flanagan. We don’t either, said numerous others in angry blogs and letters to the editor. The Tasmanian Forests Agreement, whatever it does for our forests, has turned environmental comrades-in-arms into bitter enemies.

It was triggered by comments on 1 May from the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. “Now the fringes of the debate need to fall away,” she said, adding that to calm the waters signatories on both sides needed to “silence” those opposing the mainstream consensus.

If Gillard had been closer to this conflict she may have chosen another word. “Silence” harks back to the 2004 Gunns legal action against forest protesters. But once the word was out, the fuse was lit.

Flanagan was quick to react. In a bristling assault on the agreement published on the Tasmanian Times website a few days later, he railed at environmental leaders for signing a deal seeking to silence Tasmanians’ rage against “the destruction of their land and the corruption of public life”.

The deal, he said, empowered a rogue government agency (Forestry Tasmania) and propped up “a dead forest industry” while locking in social conflict and political stagnation for another decade.

“I don’t give a damn for durability clauses and special councils of loggers and conservation police,” he fumed. “And I didn’t agree to be silenced, not by Paul Lennon, not by Gunns, and I won’t be now by The Wilderness Society and the ACF.”

The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss went further, implying that Gillard was acting on advice from the conservationists backing the deal. “It is quite clear why the environment groups involved want to silence protest,” he said. “They know their deal doesn’t bear scrutiny.”

Parliament’s passing of the agreement bill set off a raging argument within environmentalist ranks, focused mainly on key negotiators Phill Pullinger (Environment Tasmania) and Vica Bayley (The Wilderness Society), along with the Green MPs who voted for the agreement legislation.

Former Tasmanian Greens leader Peg Putt, now heading the forest lobby group Markets for Change, castigated the negotiators for trusting the word of Forestry Tasmania — “not something any clear thinking environmentalist would put faith in at the best of times”.

Jenny Weber of the Huon Environment Centre saw the negotiators as “the green-mouthpiece for a forest industry.” They and the Green MPs who supported them, according to tree-sitter Miranda Gibson, had “aligned themselves with the collapsing forestry industry at the expense of our forests”.

Others went further. “Greens suck and are no friends of conservationists,” said one. The negotiators and the four assenting Greens MPs were revisionists and appeasers, “rusted-on Greens”, “willing pawns” and “witless fools”. This on a moderated blogsite!

A few things need to be said about all this. The three negotiating environmental groups did not agree to “silence” anyone. They were involved in the agreement as representatives of their own organisations and never asserted any rights over non-participating groups.

In entering the negotiations all those years ago, the three groups were opening themselves to compromise while investing trust in the process and in the goodwill of opposing negotiators. This is as it must be. It’s what negotiated outcomes require, every time, without exception.

I know three of the four main environmentalist signatories, Bayley, Pullinger and Don Henry of the Australian Conservation Foundation. (The other was Lyndon Schneiders, national director of the Wilderness Society.) I believe they are astute and exacting negotiators whose credentials and commitment are incontestable, and that the invective heaped on them is unfair and unfounded.

Deliberately or not, conservationist opponents of the deal have ignored what Bayley, Pullinger and Henry knew all too well, that negotiation involves venturing out of the trenches into no man’s land.

This is a tough lesson for anyone who has grown close to an issue and feels threatened by perceived opposition or indifference in the wider world. That includes me. I’ve done my share of ranting about our collective failure to wake up to what’s happening to the climate.

Seeing Bill McKibben’s new movie, Do the Math, has done little to calm the nerves. Having committed to contain global warming to 2C, says McKibben, the world’s governments collude with rogue fossil-fuel interests committed to burning enough coal and oil to heat the world to above 5C.

This is bad enough, but as McKibben points out we’re now locking ourselves into acquiring fuels from non-conventional sources, such as oil from tar sands and gas from coal seams, that extend the problem out into uncharted territory.

McKibben has made the not-so-funny suggestion that perhaps, instead of naming cyclones after innocent people like Sandy, Katrina and Larry, we name them after fossil fuel companies. Hurricane Exxon or Cyclone Peabody have a certain ring to them, don’t you think?

But governments aren’t going to treat fossil fuel companies as rogue industries or invoke corporate wrath by allowing storms to be named after them. They just don’t do those things and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. I wish they would, which is why, like Flanagan, I’m often irritated by politics.

There’s plenty of reason to rage about the failure of this or that government or minister to “get it”. In the sorry saga of humanity’s response to global warming, governments’ missteps, missed opportunities and mistakes are legion.

But in the end we have to stop raging and start doing. That must include publicly demonstrating our dissatisfaction with authority, but it must also include contact with that authority and acknowledgment that a small step forward is better than none at all.

We’re all in this together. Self-righteous sermons can be a buzz, but real advances will only be won through engagement.

The price of pollution

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott with Coalition climate spokesperson Greg Hunt. AAP PHOTO

The Liberal-National Opposition believes that carbon pricing is on the way out, but signals from China and elsewhere suggest otherwise. [14 May 2013 | Peter Boyer]

The outlook for emissions trading in Australia is bleak, if you believe what’s we’re hearing from Opposition leader Tony Abbott and his environment spokesman Greg Hunt.

As they see it, we have “outsourced” our tax system, including our trading scheme, by tying our carbon price to that in Europe, currently the world’s biggest carbon market.

The outsourcing thesis is pretty shaky, but their intent is clear: to raise concerns about price volatility ahead of their election in September (if that happens) and their planned scrapping of carbon trading along with most other measures making up the Clean Energy Future package.

The Abbott-Hunt comments were sparked by the European Parliament’s recent decision not to support the carbon price there, which has left its price hovering around $4 a tonne.

Playing on voters’ craving for stability, the Coalition says the carbon market is out of control and the scheme has to go. But it will have to secure Parliament’s agreement to this before July 2015, when Australia’s present fixed-price setup is due to become a full cap-and-trade scheme.

Under the scheme a cap on total emissions is to be set and a specified number of permits traded between polluters. There’s to be a decreasing number of permits available in succeeding years as the national emissions cap is reduced, in theory forcing up the price of the permits.

Treasury had projected that Australian permits would sell at $29 a tonne when trading starts, but because of the depressed European market the price, to be revealed in tonight’s Budget, looks like being only $15.

Part of the problem in Europe is that too many permits were issued when the scheme was being planned 10 years ago, a result of governments over-estimating national emissions. A glut of permits means a lower price.

The other reason is the continuing recession in the Eurozone. Climate measures have been forced to take a back seat to employment and national bail-out programs, which resulted in the recent rejection of a proposal by the UK, France and others to temporarily cut the supply of permits.

The falling European price triggered last week’s deferral of compensatory tax cuts by Climate Change Minister Greg Combet. This is no big deal in itself — just $1.59 a week for people earning up to $80,000 a year — but it will do nothing for the government’s electoral prospects.

Regardless of how effective emissions trading is in reducing emissions, the implications of a failure of the carbon market anywhere are significant. It’s an issue of public confidence, not just in emissions trading but in the capacity of governments to deliver, and that’s in very short supply.

But messages from abroad are mixed. While Europe is in the doldrums, the Chinese economy looks likely to remain strong for some time yet. Australia has focused on Europe because it’s the carbon market leader, but it makes good sense to keep a weather eye on Beijing.

China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, is embarking on a serious of pilot emission trading schemes in at least seven major industrial hubs, each scheme different from the others. The success of these will guide planning for a national scheme planned to start around 2018.

The pilot schemes are a steep learning curve for China and prices are likely to be volatile, but the Chinese are nothing if not businesslike. Their carbon markets will be big by any standards; the total population covered by the pilot schemes is 10 times that of Australia.

The point is, we’re all on a learning curve. Europe’s scheme is faltering because of mistakes made a decade ago. We know a good deal more now because for some years various countries have been running different schemes, but there’s much still to discover.

One thing we have to wrestle with is how the schemes work together, across international borders. Though not the first cross-border arrangement, the Australian linkage with Europe was a significant step towards a global carbon market.

Whether this is the way to go is still being debated by economists — including free-marketeers who seem suddenly coy about globalised trading. If it’s all right for commodities, why can’t the same be said for carbon permits?

There are undoubtedly problems about international trading, but it’s unlikely that any national scheme will want to cut itself off from cheaper abatement opportunities in other countries. That is, unless, after September’s election we take the Coalition path.

The Liberal-National “direct action” policy is to abolish the climate change apparatus set up under Labor, including carbon pricing and, crucially, the national emissions cap to operate from 2015. The Coalition would replace emissions trading with an “Emission Reduction Fund” — a buy-back scheme in which the government would seek lowest-cost quotes for emissions reduction and accordingly pay companies for cutting their emissions after the event.

Greg Hunt claims the process is more efficient than carbon trading because it’s selective — “no money goes out unless there is an emissions reduction, and we only do that on the basis of the lowest cost” — whereas a carbon price mechanism imposes a cost on the whole economy.

But in trying to counter the frequent criticism that direct government action to mitigate emissions is more costly, and seeking at all costs to avoid compulsion, the Opposition’s selective measures run the risk of missing emissions that a whole-of-economy scheme like carbon trading will capture.

I hear what Tony Abbott says about carbon pricing. I know he intends, as the protesters’ placards said, to “axe the tax”. But when push comes to shove, I don’t think he’ll be able to.

• Hobart will join the global screening of “Do the Math”, the new movie by US climate activist Bill McKibben, at 5.30 pm on Thursday in the Menzies Centre’s Lecture Theatre 105 in Campbell Street, Hobart (diagonally opposite the Royal Hobart Hospital).

The hard slog of changing entrenched attitudes

We need to acknowledge the effort and skill that went into achieving the “manifestly imperfect” forestry agreement. [7 May 2013 | Peter Boyer]

Three signatories of the Intergovernmental Forests Agreement: Vica Bayley (Wilderness Society, left), Terry Edwards (Forest Industries Association of Tasmania) and Phill Pullinger (Environment Tasmania). PHOTO ENVIRONMENT TASMANIA

What was that all about?

Did last week’s passage of the Tasmanian Forests Agreement Bill signify the end of the forest wars, as Premier Lara Giddings and federal environment minister Tony Burke would have us believe?

Was it, in the thunderous words of Opposition Leader Will Hodgman and his forestry spokesman Peter Gutwein, an “atrocious deal”, a “dark day” for Tasmania’s future, a fraud engineered by the Giddings government to keep Green MPs happy regardless of the economic cost?

Or was it, as past and present Greens leaders Peg Putt and Senator Christine Milne angrily asserted, a fraud on conservationists, a deliberate “recipe for failure” aimed at having logging resume on land earmarked for reservation as soon as federal money has been secured? Or as Richard Flanagan (“I don’t agree”, Tasmanian Times) contended: did those environmentalists who signed the agreement and voted for its enforcing legislation score “perhaps the greatest own goal in Australian political history”?

After parties to the Forests Agreement accepted the amended bill, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect at least a temporary ceasefire between warring factions. What we got instead, as the parliamentary debate drew to a close, was a mind-bending clamour from all sides. What does it mean when two camps at opposite poles — the Liberal Party and the activist vanguard of the conservation movement — both seem to believe passionately that the enabling legislation strikes at the heart of everything they hold dear? How could this be?

Passion is everywhere in this debate, but all the noise last week came from outside the negotiating tent. After all those years of hectoring and disputation and walk-outs from both sides of the table, the parties to the agreement were quiet, apparently united in accepting the final legislated outcome.

Within the Greens, passion was turned on their own as Milne and Putt took issue with the decision by four of the five Greens in state parliament to vote with the Giddings government, ensuring that all the Legislative Council’s amendments were passed into law.

Those Green MPs supporting the legislation, as their leader Nick McKim explained, were not unreasonably concerned that any attempt by the government to further modify the bill would have stirred anew the upper house hornets’ nest, bringing more long delays and raising the spectre of a complete collapse of the peace agreement.

He pursued and won concessions from Giddings and her Labor colleagues, including a mechanism for resolving disputes and National Parks and Wildlife Service custody of future reserved lands. He worked with Giddings to secure Forestry Tasmania’s pledge not to log those future reserves, and played a role in the acceptance by the agreement’s signatories of all the non-legislated outcomes. His achievement may seem shaky, at least compared with a legislated outcome. but the alternative was nothing at all, undoubtedly the preferred result for Hodgman and his party’s allies in the Legislative Council as it apparently was for McKim’s opponents in his own party.

In his public statements after the event we got a glimpse of McKim’s take on his party’s responsibility in minority government, which was as he saw it to work co-operatively with other Tasmanians to solve problems “rather than lobbing grenades from the trenches”.

This is a genuinely new direction for the Greens. Over decades, the party’s ideological positions were shaped by hostility towards a clearly defined enemy: institutions like Forestry Tasmania and Gunns Ltd, people like Paul Lennon and John Gay. The stance taken on this bill by the majority of Green MPs and the direction this signals is bound to compromise some treasured party positions and aggrieve some stalwarts, but it’s unavoidable if the Greens want to be taken seriously as a party of government. The only option is permanent opposition from the cross-benches

There’s the rub. Neither Milne nor Putt, for all their admirable qualities, has ever administered a government department or sat in a cabinet. The nearest either has come is Milne’s support of minority governments in Hobart and Canberra. McKim has taken that one crucial step further.

“Imperfect” was how McKim described the forest outcome during the House of Assembly debate, a sentiment echoed on the Mercury front page the next day. If ever a single word sums up the political process — all of it, not just the forest debate — that’s the one.

Last week, on the release by McKim’s deputy, Cassy O’Connor, of the “Low Carbon Tasmania” issues paper, I commended O’Connor for its focus on multiple practical outcomes, with detailed rationales and identification of annual emission savings.

This is a small step in the huge task of cutting carbon emissions. It’s true, as critics would have it, that an issues paper does not make a policy, just as a policy isn’t worth a lot until it’s implemented.

But governing effectively involves securing and holding the support of a multitude of shifting, often opposing interests. Advancing climate policy demands big paradigm shifts in the Giddings cabinet. O’Connor’s battle for effective measures is moving too slowly, but against all odds it’s moving.

Climate policy on the national stage has got its own issues, not least the huge amount of trust that’s being invested in a market mechanism to help sort things out. Relying as it does on rampant consumerism, the global free market is an unlikely agent for sustainability.

But whoever governs in Canberra after September, a workable mitigation policy requires that everyone knows the cost of carbon pollution. In government, Tony Abbott won’t shake off carbon pricing in some form any more than Will Hodgman will shrug off the forest wars. If elected, each of them will have to give ground and strike a new bargain with electors. I wish them luck, because they’ll need it.

Stabilising climate, ending ancient animosities in the forests or solving any other big, complex, entrenched problem requires people who, while always keeping the end-game in sight, know how to bargain, to concede ground for small gains, and despite obstacles to keep plugging away. That’s hard work, rarely appreciated and often attacked when it’s happening.

To those who brought the forest agreement to this point, even if it’s not the end of the story, I say well done. I trust that “Low Carbon Tasmania” will eventually — sooner rather than later — get the same dedicated attention.

Climate Tasmania