Professional Documents
Culture Documents
www.climatecodered.org/2013/09/climate-battle-line-community.html
conservatism and the preservation of the status quo against change: a desire to hold back the sea in the service of the fossil fuel industry, even while recognising that a huge economictechnological tide of change is closing in; a commitment to neo-liberal, deregulatory economic policy: defence of free-market capitalism against higher levels of state intervention and regulation; an instrumental view of nature as a resource for exploitation; championing the interests of the fossil fuel industries economy; an anti-scientific stance, which extinguishes the distance between science and ideology and drives a culture war with a religious component against secular science and environmentalism; and the ethos of politics as warfare, the virtues of confrontation and political extremism and the dumbingdown of politics. In opposition, Abbotts tactics in propelling the climate war have included: formal acceptance of climate change as real, but a downplaying of the human role as making only a contribution, persistent denial of any link between climate change and impacts including more extreme events, all accompanied by a chorus of denialist rhetoric from his caucus; dumbing-down and politicising climate science, and the exploitation of scientific uncertainty; tarring good climate policies with the brush of Labors political incompetence; national chauvinism (along then lines we will not act to disadvantage Australia while others ); utilising the politics of resentment to rally Howards battlers, the fishers, the shooters and the politically marginalised against the professional class and inner-city elites, such as climate scientists, policymakers, The Greens, environmentalists, rich life-stylers; promoting fear of economic loss, describing the effect of climate action, in Abbotts words, as to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of households right around Australia; ruthlessly exploited the myth of cost of living pressures (as GDP per capita grew strongly), in particular that myth that renewable energy was the main culprit for higher electricity prices.
1. A titanic struggle
Before too long, Prime Minister Abbott will have Barnaby Joyce beside him as deputy prime minister and Nationals leader. At heart, both are denialists along with a significant portion of the caucus. Maurice Newman, the former ABC and the ASX chairman who will be the chair of Abbotts Business Advisory Council, propounds the myth of anthropological climate change. Abbotts record includes the science isnt settled, its highly contentious and not yet proven, its cooling, it hasnt warmed since 1998, theres no correlation between CO2 and temperature, and he is hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science. Despite what he says, this is what he thinks and it will inform how he will act. The Abbott government will not be persuaded by reason and is not interested in compromise because this is a battle to be won, and compromise and negotiation are signs of weakness. For this government, fighting enemies is more important than reality-based policy-making. This is about the politics of resentment, fear and revenge, about winning, and about debilitating the enemy. Culture wars are not primarily about policy detail, but about building legitimacy, isolating the enemy and establishing dominance.
Gillards legitimacy, and less about the reality of climate change, and they have been neither willing nor capable of dealing with the substance of the climate impact issues. The past period where the Labor government (and NGOs to some extent in the Say Yes campaign, for example) tried to sell a climate policy without making the story about climate impacts was wrong, wrong, wrong. Brightsiding is a bad strategy. Trying to sell an answer without providing sufficient reason to act doesnt work. Too many times in the past the climate movement has been reticent to connect the dots between extreme weather and climate change. The new Climate Council is but one small step in keeping climate science stories and impacts as public as possible. We can demonstrate the Abbott governments ignorance and incompetence by hammering them over climate impacts on health, climate extremes, bush fires, food, water, inland Australia and the fate of farmers in and outside parliament every day, every which way. The attempts to silence and de-fund climate science research will likely backfire: on campuses, students can fire up in support of their teachers and against the politicisation of the academy.
6. Mobilisation
The largest, most motivated and effective climate action mobilisation in Australia today focuses on coal and coal seam gas (CSG). Overwhelmingly, the resources are devoted to the communities, not Canberra lobbying.
The election campaigns in the seat of Melbourne and Indi championed the power of community organising. Resources such as NationBuilder can be tuned to issue campaigning as easily as candidate electioneering. Your Rights at Work provides valuable insights. In the latter years of the Howard government, and during the first Rudd government, there were powerful expressions of community concern through events such as Walk Against Warming. Sectors including aid organisations, churches, unions, schools and students and grassroots climate groups all participated in a show of solidarity and concern. On the surface, many of those sectors appear to be much quieter now. If the strategic choice is to focus on bringing down the government, rather than cooperating in incrementally improving bad policies, then community and sectoral organisation and mobilisation is the key. At the scale now required in support of climate action, this has not been previously attempted in Australia. It will require a lot of working out, cooperation in planning and execution, sustained unity in action, and a lot of resources. It will need a degree of trust, of sharing, and promoting the interests of the whole rather than the imperatives of the part. It will require that the lessons of the Say Yes review be absorbed, not palmed to one side. It will require all sorts of things that many people say are not possible given the structures, relationships, branding imperatives and skill sets of the organisations and networks that should be involved, large and small. It will require a small revolution in how many parts of the climate movement work. If that really is not possible, then success in the battle is a lot less likely.