Arguably the biggest moment in the Greens' parliamentary history is now upon us. The party’s left-wing climate rhetoric will be put to the test as it decides whether to block Labor’s safeguard mechanism legislation—a barely updated policy carry-over from the previous Coalition government that’s more about greenwashing Australia’s fossil fuel economy than reducing emissions.
Federal Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen believes that reaching 82 percent renewables in the power generation industry and delivering a 43 percent reduction in emissions would be “arguably” the biggest Australian economic development since before World War Two.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is widely considered the scientific authority on climate change. It informs government policy, and its predictions about the likely consequences of global warming are frequently invoked by environmental activists to highlight the urgent need for climate action. The IPCC’s contributions to environmentalism are largely positive, but this obscures the fact that even the IPCC is not entirely dedicated to the pursuit of truth, science and environmental protection.
What does Albanese mean by his pledge to “end the climate wars”? One indication came from the Business Council of Australia’s CEO Jennifer Westacott, who recently applauded Labor’s climate commitments on the basis that they “give businesses the certainty they need to get on with the work they’re already doing and do even more”. Perhaps Westacott had in mind the 72 new coal projects and 44 new gas and oil projects Quentin Beresford’s book Wounded Country: The Murray-Darling Basin—a contested history, published in September 2021, is a warning. State officials, politicians and agribusinesses risk turning Australia’s premier food bowl—the Murray-Darling Basin, which covers 14 percent of the Australian mainland—into desert. Earth is overpopulated, but in only one sense: there are too many rich people. The rich are the main drivers of the climate crisis, not the masses of workers and the poor whose existence is commonly blamed for climate change and other environmental problems.