Morrison et. al. In Mid-Whirl In Their Pathetic Attempts To Come Up With Australian Climate 'Policy'
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If Morrison can emerge from his discussions with the Nationals with a net zero commitment, viewed substantively, this “advance” is who cares on a number of levels. While the Coalition has been busy building its bullshit complex on climate action to win domestic elections, much of the rest of the world has moved on from weighing mid-century commitments (that were actually agreed to in-principle when Paris was signed) to the imperative of driving urgent action this decade. Action now. That’s what the science tells us needs to happen. Any net zero commitment Morrison emerges with will be rhetorical. There are no plans to legislate it.
The price of landing an in-principle agreement with the Nationals, on current indications, will likely be excluding agriculture from heavy lifting on abatement (but not from the income streams associated with carbon sequestration), and a bucket of sweet something or other for the resources sector – hopefully some distance south of Pitt’s coal bank of mum and dad. The price will also be a rigid political narrative that technology (rather than caps on emissions and sensible market-based mechanisms to actually reduce them) is what delivers the decarbonisation by mid-century. The same Nationals who told their constituents in 2019 that they were all the way with fossil fuels and nothing needed to change can’t go back home three years later and say they were lying. They have to be able to say that technology is now the magic fairy dust that solves everything – you can have your fossil fuels, and decarbonisation too.
As well as all this lead in Morrison’s saddlebags necessitated by the demands of the junior Coalition partner – the requirement to negotiate with a factionalised, combustible party room that, like a bunch of lovelorn adolescents, either loves or hates Barnaby Joyce, as if this was a faultline that actually mattered – there is also the obvious contradictions in the Coalition’s positions.
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Shortly after he vanquished McCormack, Joyce discovered what to do about climate policy was actually a contested issue within his own ranks. The resurrected leader was told by a number of colleagues, forcefully, to pull his head in, and ever since, Joyce has fronted, by and large, as a humble if persistently incoherent vessel of the Nationals party room. Man for others. Living to serve. So the trajectory of the next couple of weeks is genuinely hard to predict. But this much is certain: if Morrison can’t land his proposition, if the mid-century target gets vetoed by the junior Coalition partner, the Nationals will be running the government’s climate policy, and everyone will know that. That will weaken Morrison’s prime ministership, if not kill it – and that fact gives the prime minister every incentive to do whatever it takes.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/09/the-frenetic-fan-dance-of-the-fools-tells-us-the-coalition-has-reached-crunch-time-on-climate