On Borrowed Time Page 11

  Chris Mitchell inherited a newspaper that had accepted the consensual core of climate science. Although under his watch the Australian never formally abandoned this position, for nine years its editorials welcomed the anti-climate science challenges both of unqualified scientists and totally unqualified laypeople, consistently denied that the science was “settled”, consistently failed to draw the distinction between the core theory of climate science that was consensual and the climate scientists’ predictions about the future that were not, and expressed grave and growing doubts about the solidity even of those parts of climate science that were entirely consensual. By 2010, as we have seen, the longstanding if intermittent and inconsistent covert denialism of the Australian was perilously close to becoming overt. Mitchell’s December 2010 claim that his paper had provided consistent editorial support for the findings of the climate scientists is simply false.

  What, then, are we to make of Chris Mitchell’s other claim, that his paper had offered “longstanding support for a global response to limit greenhouse gas emissions”?

  Throughout the Mitchell years the Australian maintained, although not even here consistently, rather abstract support for eventual global action on climate change so long as the international price for carbon was modest and the plan was accepted by every major economy in the world. But when it came to practical schemes for global action that currently had international support and any chance of actually reducing emissions, the Australian was firmly opposed. By 2005 virtually all countries in the world had ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Of all the developed countries, only the United States and Australia had not. Kyoto was truly “the only game in town”. The Australian was not merely an opponent of Kyoto. Its hostility was ferocious. On 29 July 2005, it described Kyoto as “power grabbing by the nations of old Europe – unrepentant polluters all – against the high-growth economies of the Asia-Pacific”. On 13 December 2005, it described Kyoto as “madness” and as “rubbish”. And on 4 August 2006, it called it “punitive”. In essence the Australian opposed Kyoto because it did not require the booming developing economies like China, India and Brazil to cut their emissions. Its opposition was, however, extremely dishonest. The Australian almost invariably suggested to its readers that the non-involvement of the developing countries represented a permanent state of affairs. In truth the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol ended in 2012. After then it was hoped that, in a second stage, the developing countries would be drawn in.

  As an alternative to Kyoto, the United States and Australia, under George W. Bush and John Howard, dreamed up a scheme called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. The Partnership did not set mandatory emissions reduction targets. It did not include “Old Europe.”. It did not aim to set an international price on carbon. Rather it proposed to reduce emissions principally through technology and technology transfer. At the inaugural meeting of the Partnership, in Sydney in January 2006, the Australian enthusiastically endorsed it. This support was not surprising: the Australian almost invariably supported George W. Bush’s foreign policy. Moreover, one of the most consistent articles of faith of the Australian was that technology would solve humanity’s dilemmas, which of course included the possible global warming problem.

  As a putative scheme to reduce global emissions, the Asia-Pacific Partnership was almost self-evidently a fantasy. When the idea of the Partnership faded away with the election of Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama, the Australian returned to its support for a tepid international agreement, where the price on carbon was low, where all major economies were involved, where no mandatory targets were set, and where the sinister attempts by the impoverished countries of the world to use an international treaty to oversee a process of global wealth redistribution were properly resisted. When the Copenhagen conference more or less collapsed, the Australian was not at all dismayed. “Copenhagen was the last hurrah of zealots,” it argued, “who have embraced climate change as a matter of faith, warning unbelievers they are dooming the planet, without offering any practical solutions.” The lack of concern about what happened at Copenhagen is easy to explain. In several editorials the Australian had shown sympathy for Bjorn Lomborg’s argument that any international action against climate change was a waste of money and destined to fail.

  With its hostility to Kyoto, its support for the fantasy of the Asia-Pacific Partnership, its pleasure at the collapse of the Copenhagen conference and its attraction to the Lomborg idea that any global action would prove futile, the Australian’s record does not even remotely support Mitchell’s claim that it had consistently advocated global action to limit greenhouse gas emissions

  What about Australia? Throughout the Mitchell years the paper argued consistently that Australia should primarily look after its own economic interests. We contributed only 1.4% of global emissions. Nothing we could do would make any real difference. Acting alone or first or in advance of others was not wise. Even the idea of good global citizenship was suspect. The Australian was a tireless defender of the coal industry. “Mr Howard,” it argued on 16 June 2004, “has seen the energy future and it consists of coal.” This was a position from which the paper never wavered. The Australian regarded those who asked questions about the future of coal – like Bob Brown or Tim Flannery or James Hansen, who described coalmines as “factories of death” – as economically irrational and politically disordered. It regarded not only Australia’s future, but also the world’s, as tied inexorably and rightly to an accelerating consumption of coal for centuries to come. Although it was enthusiastic about Australia’s natural gas, it regarded only nuclear power as an additional form of energy that would grow in significance in the future.

  For these reasons the Australian argued that the greatest international contribution Australia could make to the problem of global warming was to export more of its uranium, including to India, despite the fact that it had not signed the non-proliferation treaty; to allow itself to become a global nuclear waste dump; but above all to become a world leader in the search for a “clean coal” solution to the problem of global warming. Usually the Australian used the term “clean coal” to describe geo-sequestration, a process for which it retained a confidence, though its enthusiasm appeared to diminish over time. Sometimes, however, extraordinarily enough, it described Australia’s black anthracite coal as “clean”. Australia, it argued, must never be reticent or ashamed about opening new coalmines or exporting more coal. For those who had plans for alternative energy sources, like solar, wind or tidal, the Australian had nothing but pity and contempt. Those sources would never support base-load electricity. It also opposed all mandatory renewable-energy targets as economically irrational.

  Until the middle of 2007, the Australian was vehemently opposed to the Labor Party’s determination to ratify Kyoto. Kyoto was job-destroying and a meaningless symbol. Rather suddenly, on 29 October 2007, it shifted ground. It now believed that “the nation and the government might as well have collected the brownie points” by ratifying Kyoto.

  Before 2007, the Australian expressed doubts about any stand-alone national emissions trading scheme. On 2 November 2006, for example, it argued that a Labor proposal for an ETS would “lose jobs and investments to foreign markets”. When the Howard government experienced an eleventh-hour pre-election ETS conversion, the Australian, however, offered its support, so long as the emissions reduction targets were extremely modest and businesses were generously compensated. In general it also supported the Rudd government’s ETS proposals, especially as they became increasingly modest over time. At moments like the one when it thought that Rudd’s ETS could no longer be distinguished from Howard’s, or the one when Rudd’s starting date was delayed from 2010 to 2011, the Australian cheered. The main criticism it made of Rudd was for his mistaken view that global warming was a “moral” issue and for the attacks he occasionally unleashed against the denialists in the Liberal Party, for example in his November 2009 Lowy Institute speech, where the Australian r
egarded “his hyperbolic rhetoric” as “polarising”.

  Throughout 2009 the Australian was enthusiastic about Kevin Rudd’s refusal to negotiate with the Greens over the ETS and about Malcolm Turnbull’s success in weakening it so that business interests were accommodated. It continually warned Rudd not to legislate in advance of the Copenhagen agreement. It was momentarily alarmed in November and early December 2009, when the denialists in the Liberal Party rebelled against Turnbull. On the ETS, it argued, Turnbull was “absolutely correct”. The Liberals were facing their greatest crisis since 1949. If the Coalition moved to the right, it would be “smashed” at the next election. The Australian’s principled support for a minimalist, market-based, business-friendly ETS did not, however, last long. In November 2009 the Australian had warned that if the Coalition opposed the ETS, it would be reduced to “dinosaur status”. By May 2010 Abbott’s destruction of the ETS was earning him the Australian’s praise. “By blocking the ETS, the opposition prevented Mr Rudd from taking Australia out on a limb, recklessly exposing the nation to economic risk.”

  On one question the editorialists at the Australian were completely consistent – their loathing and contempt for anyone who thought radical action on climate change was needed. Here the Australian did not show why the arguments of those calling for radical action were wrong. The fact that the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was higher than it had been for 650,000 years and that it was increasing at an accelerating pace, or the concerns of climate scientists about the rate at which continental ice sheets, glaciers and the Siberian permafrost were melting, were, quite simply, never discussed in the Australian’s editorials. The only time Antarctic melt was mentioned – at the time of the collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf – the tone was breezily dismissive. The only time the melting of the Himalayan glaciers was mentioned was over the IPCC’s error. Instead, all the Australian offered concerning the fears of the “deep greens”, a.k.a. the climate scientists and environmentalists, was abuse taken from the standard songbook of the contemporary Right.

  Here some detail is necessary. Those calling for radical action to curb greenhouse gas emissions were “greenhouse hysterics” (29 July 2005), “antediluvians” (9 August 2005), “prophets of doom” (14 January 2006), “neo-Arcadians” (31 March 2007), “deep-Green Luddites” (8 June 2007), “hair-shirted greenhouse penitents” (22 June 2007), “carpetbaggers” (17 December 2007), “utopian fantasists” (19 October 2009), “the hessian-bag brigade” (31 October 2009) and “zealots” (30 December 2009). According to the Australian the “deep greens” displayed “a head-in-the-sand mentality” (1 December 2006), a “revivalist fervour” (27 August 2008) and a “mindset” that was simultaneously “medieval” and “totalitarian” (14 June 2006, 12 March 2010). Such despicable people “would sell out the economy and their grandmothers” (27 May 2009). Tim Flannery was “a well-documented global warming extremist” (9 February 2007); Bob Brown would “not be satisfied until everyone is taking cold showers in the dark” (14 March 2007); while Al Gore was an “alarmist” afflicted by “hyperbolic visions of gloom” (15 February 2007, 29 March 2007). On 2 October 2008, the Australian asked: on “what planet” do these “deep greens” live? It did not occur to the Australian that the obvious answer to this question was that they lived on the imperilled Earth.

  How could the madness of these green totalitarians be explained? Not surprisingly, the Australian went straight to the clichés of the contemporary Anglophone Right. The deep greens had transferred discarded old religious impulses into environmental extremism. It pointed to “that radical and disproportionately loud fringe of greenies and leftists who treat environmentalism as a religion for whom humanity’s sinful, decadent ways threaten to bring down the wrath of nature or the gods and must be changed”. In addition, however, the paper, which remained frozen in its editor-in-chief’s unreconstructed Cold War mentality, consistently regarded the deep greens as nothing but the communist Totalitarian Enemy reborn, whose secret hope was not to save the planet but to destroy capitalism and the Western way of life. The Australian argued that environmentalists who called for radical action to curb greenhouse gases formed what it called “the new frontline for anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation campaigners”. Most importantly, however, it claimed that all such people were suffering from the disease of political correctness, the standard accusation of contemporary neo-conservatives against the politics of the Left. In its editorial of 5 December 2009, the Australian defended the arch climate change denialist Ian Plimer. In one passage all three strands of its case against those calling for radical action can, rather neatly, be seen – their embrace of an absolutist politics as a substitute for abandoned religion, their disguised anti-capitalism, and their censorious political correctness.

  For too long, the debate on climate has mirrored the debates in this country in the 1990s, when any challenges to multiculturalism or the narrowly defined version of Aboriginal reconciliation were labelled right-wing or racist. Scientific sceptics, such as Ian Plimer, know how difficult it is to advance an argument against the quasi-religious fervour of climate change believers. That the passion and dogmatic belief that once defined organised religion have been replaced for some people by a commitment to reversing climate change is not surprising. As a response to what some see as excessive materialism in the West, fighting for the planet has become a way to scale back development, restrict free markets and redistribute wealth across the globe.

  There was a significant problem here. Virtually every climate scientist is convinced that radical action to curb greenhouse gas emissions is vital. In creating a new post–Cold War enemy camp – made up of climate scientists and environmentalists favouring such action – the Australian had broken with the values lying at the very centre of the Enlightenment, namely Science and the authority of Reason. At moments in its editorials the Australian half-recognised the implication of what it was saying. On one occasion it wrote disparagingly about “the scientist as savant” and on another about “the shortcomings of relying on experts”. But in general the war on science was probably inadvertent. The Australian’s wild, prolonged and abusive attack on the despised “other” it called the “deep greens” or the “true believers” was, then, not merely an assault on the ideal of civility in debate. It represented a great betrayal of the very values the newspaper imagined it embodied and upheld.

  The Australian’s total coverage of climate change under Chris Mitchell’s watch cannot, of course, be captured by an analysis of the paper’s editorial line. A more complex methodology is needed. What follows is an explanation of the one I employed. By the use of a Factiva newspaper database formula print-outs were obtained of all the climate change articles published by the Australian between January 2004 and April 2011. All the articles were read. Editorials were extracted for separate analysis. Letters to the editor were excluded, on the perhaps doubtful assumption that they represented a fair sample of the opinions of readers rather than editorial choice or prejudice. Climate change-related articles in the very many energy-industry supplements the Australian published – on oil, natural gas and coal – many of them edited by the former executive director of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, Keith Orchison, were also excluded. Pieces contained in the “Cut and Paste” section and its predecessors were, however, included. Everyone who reads the Australian knows that daily mockery of opponents is one of the most potent means by which the paper’s ideological and political agenda is advanced.

  The remaining articles were divided into three categories. The first was formed from the news items and opinion columns written in support of the consensual core of the climate change science or the findings of the IPCC, or which supported the Kyoto Protocol and Australia’s ratification of it, or which supported an Australian response at least as “radical” as the ETS mooted by the Howard government in 2007 and the Rudd government between 2008 and April 2010. I called this category “favourable to climate change act
ion”. A second was formed from the news items and opinion columns that opposed the consensual core of climate science, or the findings of the IPCC, or that opposed the Kyoto Protocol or Australia’s adherence to it, or that were opposed to an Australian response at least as “radical” as the ETS prefigured or proposed by the Howard and Rudd governments between 2007 and early 2010. This category was called “unfavourable to climate change action”. A third category was formed of climate change news items or opinion columns that were concerned with other matters or were simply neutral. After this third category was excluded, some 880 articles remained. Of these, about 180 were favourable to climate change action and 700 unfavourable. According to my calculations that means that under Chris Mitchell’s editorship the Australian’s news items and opinion columns opposed action on climate change by a ratio of about four to one. Even if some of my judgements about the category in which some particular articles should fall were to be disputed – for example, I placed most but not all of political editor Dennis Shanahan’s reports in the unfavourable category while Paul Kelly’s contributions fell into both – I am convinced that no one who was objective could arrive at a ratio of less than three to one for news items and opinion columns unfavourable rather than favourable to my extremely, perhaps excessively, modest definition of what constitutes support for climate change action.