As Bowen jibes the Coalition on climate, he still lets it dictate policy

Labor is having a fine old time with the latest Coalition split on energy. As the Liberals and the Nationals go to war one more time, and the last remaining Liberal moderates get ready to submit again — who wants a seat in parliament anyway? — the government is bringing the yucks.

On Monday, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen had the lines ready to roll in response to Barnaby Joyce’s net-zero bill.

The Coalition’s having a big review of net zero. The National Party’s appointed a very thorough independent reviewer in Senator Canavan. Who knows what he might find! He’s gotta take submissions. He’ll be taking submissions from the regions, presumably. Somebody from the regions said this: ‘It’s my strong belief that rural and regional Australia has a lot to benefit from the move to net zero. I certainly hear that from farmers and my rural communities. I’m so excited for my rural communities and for the country, and, as a whole for the future, I think that the net zero by 2050 aim is perfect.’ The now-leader of the opposition said that in 2021.

Appointing Matt Canavan to review net zero was “a bit like putting Coldplay in charge of kiss cam — it doesn’t necessarily lead to a happy marriage!” You can just imagine the high fives in Bowen’s office when they came up with that.

Labor can point out the Coalition’s many and varied inconsistencies and stupidities on climate, but it ought to be careful about cherry-picking quotes. You never know what inconvenient coupling the kiss cam might settle on.

Appearing on the ABC last night, Bowen was asked about former Labor climate adviser Ross Garnaut’s prediction that we would fail to meet the government’s renewables target for energy generation.

“Ross Garnaut is a long and strong supporter of a carbon tax,” Bowen said. “We don’t agree with that … He has a different view about carbon taxes to me and the government. He’s never thought — he’s always thought that that was the right policy response. That’s not our view.”

Except, a decade ago, Bowen had a different view. As shadow treasurer, he said, “We continue to believe firstly that climate change is real. Secondly, that it’s caused by humankind, and thirdly, the best way of dealing with it is a price on carbon. We continue to believe that…”

Well, not anymore.

Contra Bowen, a carbon price isn’t just something you can have a polite disagreement over. It’s not an arcane subject for armchair debate between academics in the economics common room. A carbon price is the most efficient method of reducing CO2 emissions. Our failure to adopt one is costing us every moment of every day, because we’ve adopted grossly inferior carbon abatement mechanisms to try to do the same job.

The resulting cost to us is much higher and the outcomes are poorer. We’re right in the middle of a “productivity debate”, and no one is pointing out the painful reality that we’ve opted for a decidedly unproductive way of reducing emissions.

Ask the Productivity Commission: when then-treasurer Scott Morrison went to the commission in 2017 and asked for suggestions about productivity reform, the first of these theatrical rituals over pretending to fix our productivity issues, it replied that he should impose a carbon price.

But News Corp and the rabid right within the Coalition killed off a carbon price, and in due course, Labor killed it off too out of fear of the Coalition. To this day, Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce thereby continue to dictate our climate policies because Labor lacks any courage on the issue.

What do we have instead? Two Coalition policies: a safeguard mechanism that was mainly about safeguarding big polluters’ right to inflict CO2 emissions on us, which remains profoundly flawed even after Labor’s “reforms”, and the discredited system of Australian Carbon Credit Units, based on Coalition-era “soil magic”, which have zero scientific credibility.

In hard policy terms, it’s Tony Abbott, not Chris Bowen, who is climate minister.

And that’s separate from the complete lack of distinction between the enthusiasm of the Coalition and Labor for fossil fuel exports, although Labor has brought a stronger game to taxpayer subsidies for them.

Labor may point to its higher emissions abatement targets — except that it was too scared of the Coalition to announce its 2035 targets before the election. Nor has it released the National Climate Risk Assessment, which continues to gather dust even after the election.

Bowen spent much of the ABC interview hosing down expectations that Australia’s 2035 targets would be bold or ambitious. “We agree a good, strong target is good economic policy,” Bowen said (in which case, why not a carbon price?), “But it’s also got to be achievable. It’s got to be a target which we can set out and achieve. Anybody can set a high target with no plan to get there. That’s not the approach our government has taken.”

So don’t get your hopes up for a sudden outbreak of climate action despite the government’s thumping election win and the Coalition having yet another civil war over whether basic laws of physics are real. The government can bring the laughs to question time, but the joke is on us, and especially on our kids.