Any Australian who has paid even cursory attention to this country’s poisonous politics over climate change these past two decades will be familiar with this long and sorry story, but to see it all laid out in sequence, in every depressing detail, is breath-taking.

In ‘The Carbon Club’ (Allen& Unwin), former ABC Four Corners executive producer Marian Wilkinson has written the definitive account of the long and bloody climate wars – the sabotaged policies, the political coups, the disinformation campaigns and the discrediting of climate science that this fossil fuel rich country has become infamous for globally. Brought together in one volume, the effect of this story is to leave one marveling at how a nation as blessed as Australia could be so willing to destroy itself in service of an extractive industry with no horizon beyond its next earnings result.

Wilkinson bookends her account with the biblical fires that engulfed the southeast coast of Australia in the summer of 2019/20. These were fires that no scientist with any self-respect could deny were the result of intensifying global warming. Yet the Morrison government – literally owned and run by the ‘carbon club’ of miners, well-funded think tanks and culture warriors – insisted the fires were due to something else, whether it be arson, poor management,  supernatural forces or just the normal cycle. Most laughably, the acting prime minister dismissed calls for climate action as “the ravings of pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies”.

The rollcall of self-interested obfuscation, delay and obstruction detailed in ‘The Carbon Club’ is almost comical. For instance, Wilkinson tells of an invitation by Coalition MPs in 2015 to three scientists to brief them ahead of the Paris summit on climate change. The three included Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who was among the first scientists to warn of the threat to Great Barrier Reef from coral bleaching. The head of the parliamentary committee, denialist backbencher Craig Kelly, ambushed the scientists by also inviting to the meeting representatives of the IPA and the late sceptic and palaeontologist Bob Carter. This posse proceeded to roll out the crazy uncle theories about climate change being a UN conspiracy and questioning the bonafides of scientists who were among the leading experts in their fields. Upon realising that facts and evidence were not enough to convince these people, the scientists could barely suppress their laughter:

When Hoeg-Guldberg reacted with the giggles, one of the MPs demanded to know what he was laughing at. Hoegh-Guldberg replied: ‘You have got to look at this from our perspective. Mark Howden has come here, he is one of the most excellent agricultural scientsts we have. John Church here is a world-leading ocean scientist. We came here to help you to understand this issue because it’s so important for Australia. And all you can say is that it’s a conspiracy.’

The contortions of the denialists detailed by Wilkinson are certainly farcical. But they’re also infuriating. A country with the largest carbon emissions per capita on the planet and one facing an increasingly bleak future because of carbon change continues to elect politicians who are servants of the industries whose products will destroy our children’s economic and physical legacy.

Of course, the villains here are many and are not confined to one party. The supposedly ‘conservative’ Liberal-National coalition is clearly the worse of the duopoly, but the Labor Party has had its own quota of angry uncles and carbon club lackeys who, after quitting politics, take the cash on offer in the mining industry. For those not motivated by moolah, the prospect of climate change action is purely another tool in the culture wars – a device to climb the ladder politically, secure ratings points or keep donors happy.

What’s even more depressing is that population can’t see it or at least have become numbed to it all. They can’t see that the destruction of the possibility of rational energy policy in Australia is due to special interests who fear the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will threaten their profits or rob them of the pleasure of scratching their ideological itches in public. With sophisticated spin doctors on the payroll, they convince Australians that the community interest is the same as their commercial interests. This is how the LNP ritually wedges Labor which finds itself forever caught between its traditional blue-collar constituency worried about jobs and its university-educated middle class constituency worried about the planet.

(As an aside, it is a mystery why Labor seems incapable of realising that fighting for jobs, justice, equality of opportunity, our commonwealth and the planet are not mutually incompatible concepts. But having seen Rudd cut down after Copenhagen, who’s going to lead? And why all the focus on hard-hat mining jobs and none on the female-dominated occupations in tourism and services threatened by climate change? Presumably this comes down to marginal seats, the power of the AWU and donors’ dollars again. But it’s hard not to conclude there is paucity of imagination among Labor’s communication advisers.)

What’s also not appreciated widely and which is explored in this book in detail are the links between the large, NRA-styled US climate denialist movement and the one here. Wilkinson spends some time exploring the back and forth between ambitious Australian conservatives like Cory Bernardi and the Koch and Mercer-funded denialist groups in Washington. It was these people who supplied the US-made templates for the astro-turfed, media-driven campaigns against the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme.

Aside from the environmental case, the economic arguments for change are just as compelling. We know that the coal and gas industry are doomed. Ask a merchant banker about bankrolling a new coal mine and watch him run away laughing. Ask insurance company executives how they’re feeling about governments sitting on their hands. This isn’t a left-right issue. It’s a humanity issue. Unless we create new industries, built around sustainable and renewable energy, there will be even fewer jobs in the future. Even if you are a climate sceptic (and there is little reason to be one now), you have to see that on a risk management basis at least, the nation should be diversifying away from fossil fuels. If we don’t, our biggest problems won’t be jobs, but living in a country that has been rendered utterly uninhabitable.

To see the truth of this, one only has to listen to former politicians of the centre-right and centre-left – Turnbull and Rudd and Hewson and Carr – who all say now, from painful experience, that the political process has been poisoned for more than two decades; poisoned by self-interested and deep pocketed fossil fuel interests and their myriad court of fake experts, ‘think tanks’, profile-seeking hack ‘journalists’ and outright nutters.

To be honest, reading Wilkinson’s forensic account of the policy disasters of the past two decades made me despair for our political system – the murky role of political donations, the now ritual crony capitalism that makes a mockery of the idea that this is a rationally run democracy, the failure of a Fourth Estate dominated by Rupert Murdoch’s bent newspapers, the system of preselections that recruits hacks who believe in nothing but their own aggrandisement – all of which adds up to the impossibility of change.

The system is broken. Anyone with a degree of intelligence can see that.  Democracy in Australia is not working for the wider public but for vested interests. And the two major political parties are owned by them.

The greatest tragedy is the longer we delay, the longer we fail to attend to our broken system, the less chance subsequent generations have of surviving this nightmare. And it will be a nightmare – dying reefs, longer and more destructive droughts, apocalyptic fires and storms, rising sea levels that engulf entire countries, increasingly unbreathable air, warming oceans, dying fish populations, mass species extinctions, water and food shortages, forced migrations, mounting global conflict – the list goes on. (Read all about it here).

If we fail to act now, if we do not stand up to the corrupt system that is forestalling essential change, subsequent generations will have every right to spit on our sorry graves. Rudd was right. This is not a technocratic issue. It is a moral one.

So read this book. Get angry. And get involved. 

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