They Can't Deny Forever

The Reality Principle

Reality, according to one science fiction author, is that which won't go away even if you close your eyes. One's denial of scientifically established facts and evidence can lead you to all kinds of interesting mental spaces but this is 2014 and the jury is in - there is anthropogenic global warming going on and it accelerating in proportion to our industrial activity. Putting a cap on emissions or even bringing them down is going to be a challenge given that nobody exactly wants the world economy to slow down in line with such deceleration.

The point being, reality is encroaching upon us rather rapidly, and so governments around the world are rapidly shifting focus towards addressing the problem. This is in stark contrast to Australia where a climate change denialist is firmly in charge of government policy, and he is taking us in the opposite direction to our desired destination of survival and repairing the climate. In that light here's an interesting article that argues that perhaps the world won't let Tony Abbott continue to be Tony Abbott about the problem at the upcoming Brisbane G-20 meeting.

When the world's leading economies meet in Brisbane next month for the G20, climate change will be discussed actively despite Abbott's insistence that it be listed only as "energy efficiency". He'll have the support of fellow sceptic and absentee at Obama's fore-mentioned leaders' summit, Canada's Stephen Harper. 

US and European leaders want it thoroughly discussed. "Mr Obama's international adviser at the White House, Caroline Atkinson, said the G20 economies generated 80 per cent of the world's carbon emissions and should give a political push to 'specific steps' to reduce global warming," The Australian Financial Review reported last week. 

To date the government has got by defending its bipartisan commitment to a 5 per cent cut by 2020 on year 2000 levels. The 2020 target however is not just pale, it is already old news. On top of whatever emerges from the G20, the international community will meet in Lima in December to discuss progress towards post 2020 emissions reductions targets. 

The big players, the US, EU, and China, are preparing to set those targets in the first quarter of 2015 as they move towards the major climate change summit in Paris in December. Copenhagen may have been the dismal failure that gutted Kevin Rudd, but it did agree to limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees over pre-industrial levels.
For Australia to meet its share of that based on our size, that means emitting no more than 8 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2050 – the trouble is, on present emissions, we get to that by 2030. It is just more evidence of the parallel reality in which Australia is living. 

Abbott began this week talking about coal as "essential for the prosperity of Australia and … the prosperity of the world … for many decades to come". 

True enough, but he may end his first term talking about much stronger action on climate change whether he likes it or not after being "reverse Copenhagened" in Brisbane, Lima, and Paris.

You certainly can hope that he sees the expediency in dropping his denialism. After all, the true colours of this man are rather chameleon-like:

Turnbull wrote in these pages in December 2009: "Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and if the amendments were satisfactory passing it, and now the blocking of it," he wrote.

"His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with "Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but..."

There's a man of high principle right there. A true champion of mutability and flip-flopping. There's hope for us all yet in the very eminent faults of his character.