Climate change will upend Australian politics — and that may be a good thing
Plucky little Australia has set itself the ultimate test. The world’s driest inhabited continent is also the Saudi Arabia of coal, exporting hundreds of millions of tons a year to be burned overseas. Who will win — fossil fuel interests, or the farmers forced off the land?
Or, more broadly: what will the lived experience of climate change mean for Australian politics?
In short — major upheaval. We are only at one degree of warming, and the effects are arriving far quicker than we expected. Carbon dioxide belches forth at a furious rate, thickening the earth’s warming blanket. As a result, you can glimpse the outline of our future politics in recent news.
The record-breaking drought gripping the eastern states, followed by the record-breaking floods killing up to half a million cattle. Bushfires in precious places that should be too wet or humid, like the Tasmanian Gondwanan forests and Northern Queensland
Hundred year old fish die gasping for breath in the Darling, while the nation’s environment minister is all but invisible. The Great Barrier Reef steadily bleaches and dies. Scientists pose increasingly wild ideas to cool the reef. Rare animals in Queensland’s wet tropics desperately search for cooler areas that no longer exist. Brumbies die en masse in the scorching centre of the continent.
The human toll, too, has begun. Drought stricken farmers go deeper into debt. Some go bankrupt. Some commit suicide. Some are leaving, seeking places like Tasmania where water is still reliable. Our Prime Minister prays for rain. As if this were any other drought. As if there were no human influence in it.
This week’s election is expected to be particularly devastating for the Nationals, for decades the default choice for the bush. The reason for the apparent turn was summed up in National leader Michael McCormack’s herculean struggle to answer a simple challenge by Waleed Aly: name a time when he’d sided with farmers over miners. The bush is ready to rebel.
When we think of climate change as a threat, we think sea levels rising slowly, dying polar bears, migrants seeking refuge out of salt-doused Bangladesh. Sad things far away.
This year has shown us that the reality is far closer to home. We are the world’s literal canary in the coalmine. What climate change will mean for the land of drought and flooding rains is simple: food shortages, water shortages, and rapid conversion of farmland to dustbowl. Marginal grazing lands will go first. But the fight over the Murray Darling’s water — the watershed that feeds the nation — will only intensify as droughts become more common and more severe in the traditional agricultural areas.
The political challenge will be particularly acute for our right-leaning parties — the Liberal/National coalition — who have, to date, kept any real action on climate change at bay. A few fig leaf announceables here, massive coal exports there. This fiction cannot hold. It will not hold. The Turnbull–Dutton tussle for power is often framed as moderates versus hardliners. But it is as easily framed as climate action versus mining interests.
Labor, too, will have its own turmoil. The interests of the mining unions go directly against the urgent need to keep coal in the ground. In our favour is the fact that coal mining jobs are relatively few, and that we are ideally placed to mine the future, with a lithium and cobalt rush well underway in Australia to fill the vast predicted demand for lithium ion batteries.
What we will see more broadly is heightened regionalism — the interests of coal-rich areas against the rising tide of climate anxiety in our major cities. Even though coal power is on an inexorable decline, unable to compete on cost with solar and wind, increasingly firmed by batteries, coal is not dead. Our coal exports earned major miners a record $66 billion last year. And the gargantuan coal reserves in the Carmichael Basin which Adani and Clive Palmer want to mine are, accurately, described as a carbon bomb.
What can we expect to see as climate change ramps up in earnest? First, the Overton window will shift — the parameters of debate. Canny right-wing populists will seek to pin the unrest not on the ultimate cause but on closer outlets — immigrants who consume food and water, who can be blamed for existing. Left-wing populists will call for forced nationalisation of the coal companies, for radical, urgent change. The mining companies — a powerful — and hugely wealthy — lobby — will fight to retain the status quo, digging up as much bottled sunlight as they can before the party is over. But the battle lines will no longer be miners versus environmentalists. It will be miners versus farmers and, increasingly, the cities.
For the major parties, the near future poses an existential threat. They will have to either partner with emerging populists or steal their agenda. Otherwise, they risk being shouldered aside, as we’re seeing in Europe’s populist backlash against migration and EU centralisation.
Australia is an island, but an island will be no defence in the years to come. As the climate catastrophe accelerates, our region will be destabilised, with water shortages extremely likely for our two regional population giants, China and India. We found out last year that the world’s Third Pole — the Himalayan glaciers that feed many of Asia’s largest rivers — is melting rapidly. Closer to home, Pacific Islanders will seek refuge from islands sinking beneath the waves.
The good news is that we will act on climate. The acceleration of climate change means it has gone from an abstraction — a curse on our children — to a direct threat to many of us right now. In fires, in floods, in food shortages, in drought, in sea level rise — the change is upon us. Every crisis brings opportunity.
If Labor takes office at this election, a likely immediate path to avoid the minefield of energy policy is to pick winners and avoid the poisoned carbon tax altogether. If our government provides incentives to take up electric vehicles, people will not look back. EV running and maintenance costs are vastly cheaper than petrol, and range anxiety is over. Electric buses are making huge inroads into air pollution in places like Shenzhen in China, which has switched its entire fleet and all taxis.
Coal power is already dying in Australia, undercut by solar and wind. Once firmed by batteries or hydro, we can power our nation easily — with plenty left to export by sub-sea cable to coal-dependent Indonesia, or shipped to Japan once converted into green hydrogen. Dirt-cheap renewables will allow us to cheaply desalinate water and drought-proof our cities, though watering the dying hinterland will be harder.
By far the hardest challenge politically will be weaning us off coal exports. The plunging costs of renewables and the increasing inability of coal to compete may help.
Things will have to get worse before all of us can grasp the nature of the change. And then we will have a very brief window to bring about a survivable future — for my children and yours.
