“We will not,” Scott Morrison told us last week, “achieve net zero in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities.”
Actually, he might – and that’s the problem.
With his speech, the prime minister sought to package climate change as culture war, as prime ministers have done more or constantly since at least the mid-1990s.
You know the drill: the tedious presentation of environmentalists as effete weirdoes (cue the Bill Leak drawing of a gimp suit), who sip fine wines as they simper about their carbon footprints.
By contrast, Morrison would have us think he snaps his fingers at these Green sybarites and addresses himself only to the suburban working class.
Yet, as Crikey’s Bernard Keane pointed out, the PM delivered his recent remarks decrying elitists in the grand ballroom of the Fullerton Hotel (“luxury and heritage in the heart of the city”), during a Business Council of Australia event the Australian described as “corporate Australia’s night of nights”.
You could not ask for a more perfect illustration of the actual relationship between environmental policy and inner city wine bars. Contrary to what the tabloids would have you believe, the real players in the climate change debate are not shaggy ecologists but bankers, mining executives and other besuited representatives of the traditional ruling class.
In other words, the people determining the response to the rising temperatures are precisely those least likely be affected by them.
For, if there’s anything more certain than the global heating besetting our planet, it’s that the consequences of that heating will be borne overwhelmingly by the poor.
Think back to last year’s bushfires and the smoke that descended on Australian cities. The authorities urged us to stay inside with air purifiers running but as one academic study dryly noted “there are socio-economic factors which make it challenging for financially vulnerable groups to implement these measures and housing standards”.
Infamously, Morrison flew to Hawaii during the worst of the crisis but plenty of ordinary folk had no choice but to keep working outside in the carcinogenic smoke – which, as we now know, are estimated to have put more than 4,000 people in hospital and killed 445.
Almost every aspect of climate change discriminates between the haves and the have nots.
In New South Wales, for instance, the prestige suburbs (such as the harbour and coastal areas) stay the coolest, while the working-class areas of Western Sydney are already notoriously hot. During the 2020 fires, the mercury in Penrith reached a staggering 48.9c – and even today in Australia high temperatures kill more people than floods, cyclones, bushfires, or other natural disasters do.
Experts now say that parts of the west will probably have to be abandoned as warming continues.
So if the PM genuinely wanted to involve the outer suburbs in discussions about climate, there would be plenty to discuss.
But, of course, he doesn’t.
In a recent piece for the Conversation, climate scientists James Dyke, Robert Watson and Wolfgang Knorr argue that, from the very beginning, policy debates about global warming have been dominated by an elite more concerned about financial returns than cooling the planet. Most arguments about net zero remain within that paradigm, they say, relying on technological innovations that most experts don’t consider possible.
“Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5?C,” the scientists wrote, ‘”because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now.”
But reductions on the scale required mean significant social change – and that won’t happen without the participation of ordinary people.
In a recent video, Luke Hilakari, the Secretary of Victorian Trades Hall Council, makes the case for climate action as core union business, pointing out that the changing environment will alter how we work – and, indeed, whether we have jobs at all. That’s why workers need direct involvement in how the future plays out.
Unfortunately, the PM might well achieve net zero in the wine bars of the inner city – or, at least, cook up a plan that promises it. With old-style denialism increasingly untenable, the business leaders in the Fullerton Hotel keenly want a new strategy, one that sounds green but puts off any serious reckoning with carbon dependency for as long as possible.
If Morrison can placate the Liberal base with culture war posturing, he might yet reach an agreement with his friends in the corporate elite.
Unfortunately, as Dyke, Watson and Knorr stress, “the only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.”
That’s not going to be delivered by Morrison clinking glasses with bankers and CEOs. It’s only going to be possible if we fight for it.