Sheehan is far from alone on the political right – and indeed beyond – in taking umbrage at perceived government interference in how he lives his life. He’s also not alone in giving corporations a free pass, lending a somewhat unsettling degree of logical inconsistency to his view in the eyes of those of us inclined to reflect truly critically on power structures in society.

The thought came to me at breakfast this morning, while I was reading Sheehan’s opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald decrying ‘nanny state’ advertisements spoiling his Tuesday night at the cinema – ‘yet another gloomy public service lecture about death and danger’ (on skin cancer), followed by another from the NSW government, this time on speeding.

Our esteemed columnist clearly delighted in the audience’s reaction to this succession of public health messages (on his account, at least): laughter. He characterises this alleged collective outburst of mirth as a moment of poignant collegiality among a group of complete strangers; ‘an outbreak of collective, spontaneous, communal dismissal of the morbid preoccupations of our tax-funded bureaucrats’.

To start with, this anecdote leaves me feeling slightly dubious. I’ve sat through quite a number of said public health ads with a variety of audiences, including cinema-goers, and not once do I recall anybody cracking so much as a wry smile. Disinterest, certainly, but definitely never anything approaching amusement.

There is doubtlessly some justification for the widespread resistance to ‘nanny statism’ in Australia – a stance which is coincidentally often affirmed, validated and reinforced by conservative voices in the media and scholarship (the advocates of the so-called ‘free market’). It is clear to anyone who has travelled abroad for any extended period that life in Australia is to a large degree characterised by phenomena which could accurately be described as nanny-statism. Aside from the ubiquitous public health announcements on television, radio, and in the press; our public spaces are marked by an astounding number of signs and notices seeking to control sometimes even the most insignificant of actions; while petty rules and regulations abound. The following image (not my own), probably says something about the problem:

I referee football at a national level, offering yet another examples to illustrate the pervasiveness of nanny-statism in this country. At the matches I officiate at, the event organisers feel the need to read out over the public address system a raft of rules and regulations by which those in attendance are apparently bound – the so-called ‘spectator code of behaviour’. The effect, of course, is to do little to achieve whatever the bone-headed bureaucrats who took the decision set out to achieve. People feel like their intelligence is being insulted and instinctively adopt a hostile stance to the message contained in the announcement, or switch off entirely. ‘Spectators must do this, must not do that’ is a sure-fire way to get people’s backs up, or make them switch off entirely.

The fact that the footballing authorities think it’s OK to treat people as something akin to irresponsible children is indicative of a widespread mentality within Australian governance, whereby such an approach is not only acceptable but apparently desirable.

Ultimately, Sheehan and commentators of his ilk probably have a point about unnecessary government and bureaucratic interference in people’s lives.

Yet his critique rings largely hollow. Why? Well, it’s a very one-eyed argument. This too is highly typical of the views of those on the right of Australian politics.

Let’s go back to Sheehan’s night at the movies which was so unnecessarily blighted by the whining of the nanny. We are told he was forced to endure two back-to-back government ads seeking to influence people’s behaviour for the benefit of public health. It’s probably reasonable to assume that he has an issue with the use of taxpayer dollars to tell people what to do in what’s likely to be an ineffective and annoying way. That’s another argument which can certainly be made, although the success of previous government intervention in advertising and media portrayals of tobacco smoking is not in question, meaning the discussion is not as simple as Sheehan would have us believe.

It’s also a fair bet that conservatives, in criticising perceived government meddling in their personal affairs, also balk at the sense of manipulation and belittlement. The feeling that their intelligence is being insulted, that they’re being taken for a ride by a bunch a know-it-alls who think they know best.

Again, there’s something to be said for this argument. But this is also where the massive inconsistencies in the typical right-wing worldview emerge.

Right after the public health messages, Sheehan would have had to sit through advertisements of a different kind. Instead of being from arms of democratically elected governance institutions in the interests of public health, these would have been from unelected corporations (or indeed smaller businesses) with only one thing in mind: naked self-interest.

Admittedly, there is no waste of taxpayer money in commercial advertising. But the rest of the right-wing critique of government advertising remains valid. Movie-goers (and indeed all consumers of commercial media) have no say in whether they are subjected to marketing – we are bombarded with it in a never-ending torrent of exhortations to consumption. Commercial advertising seeks to manipulate our emotions and thoughts, to influence our behaviour, often in ways which are manifestly against our own or our collective good – think of overconsumption of junk food, consumer goods with all their attendant environmental impact, and so on. We are led to identify with brands which may represent any number of disreputable entities – supermarket behemoths who have crushed the independent retail and small business sectors in countless neighbourhoods and towns in recent decades, global corporations with highly questionable ethical track records, or lobby groups with their own self-interest firmly in mind (would Sheehan have objected to, say, a Minerals Council of Australia ad against the mining tax, an anti-carbon tax message, or indeed an Institute of Public Affairs-funded campaign against the nanny state?)

Ah, the right will respond, but there’s a little thing called personal choice. We can choose whether to accept or ignore advertising messages from corporations. Maybe so, but then this would imply that we can choose to shut out advertising from governments and their public services, surely? You can’t have it both ways.

Of course, there is some link between consumption and jobs (in manufacturing, resources, retail, transport, etc.). Indeed, that’s about the only positive thing that can be said in consumerism’s favour. But recognition of this fact also offers something of a rebuttal to Sheehan’s bemoaning of the wasted funds spent on ‘public propaganda’. Namely, that every dollar spent filling our heads with unnecessary whims and desires is a dollar that could have been productively invested elsewhere. And if you’re going to argue marketing is productive, in that it boosts consumption (even disregarding the inherent unsustainability of such a model of economic activity), then you simply must concede that government advertising, too, must be to some extent effective in influencing viewers’ actions and choices.

Which brings us to the fundamental flaw in the right’s championing of personal ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom of choice’ – it applies only to perceived threats from the state (although do-good NGOs and advocacy groups tend to figure pretty high on the list too). If there’s a public interest at stake, the Tories don’t want to know. If the threat to personal liberty comes from a pervasive marketing society good at exploiting social ills to turn a dollar for corporations, that’s suddenly OK.

It’s inconsistent, and it’s why I say to any conservative I hear moaning about perceived nanny statism and threats to personal liberties: bullshit.

Get your own house in order before you criticise.

It’s no secret that power generation is central to the sustainability challenge, here and elsewhere. Australia is committed to produce 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by the end of the decade and there is an array of policies in place aimed at meeting this target, revolving mainly around feed-in tariffs and other support for small-scale solar generation, as well as incremental national targets from total electricity sourced from renewable technologies.

Unlike transport, food and agriculture, and other human activities heavily dependent on liquid hydrocarbons, electricity generation probably won’t bear the brunt of the ‘oil crunch’ most reputable geologists believe is coming over the next few years. Australia still has access to reliable supplies of fuel for our brown and black coal-fired power plants, which should last for several more decades at least. At the same time, however, the sector is no exception to the rule that the daunting sustainability and environmental challenges we face over the coming years and decades – fossil fuel depletion, climate change, general environmental degradation and so on – tend to be heavily interrelated. Per unit of power generation, coal-fired electricity kills about 4000 times more people than nuclear power, with significant impacts in terms of air pollution, acid rain, and toxic wastes such as contaminated ash and mercury.

As is the case for reduced reliance on private transport, more energy efficient housing and urban design, and just about any facet of the sustainability imperative that you may care to mention, it wouldn’t be too difficult for truly independent and progressive-minded political leaders to convince people that transitioning away from fossil fuels is in their individual and collective interests. As I pointed out on this blog last week, the fact that the anti-wind lobby has the ear of conservative politicians in a way that sustainability advocates can only dream of, given the evidence for the nefarious health effects of fossil fuels and lack thereof when it comes to the supposed ill-effects of renewables, would be laughable if it wasn’t so worrying.

So how should it be done? As ever, it depends very much on who you ask. Key considerations include cost effectiveness, the effect on power bills, and sources for investment. Looking a little further afield, the effect on global efforts to tackle climate change of developing nations’ burgeoning middle classes remains as important as ever, as more energy-intensive lifestyles will provoke a spike in global electricity demand. Indeed, Australia has large developing countries such as China and India to thank for a large percentage of national export income, as we flog our mineral resources to power Asia’s rapid economic development.

Once again, I feel the best approach is to take a vision of where we want to be and to work backwards. That, after all, is the main aim of this Sustainability Series – to map out some basic ideas for what a sustainable society may look like in several decades’ time, and some of the practical steps we can take to get there.

From this perspective, there is one major debate which eclipses all others: decarbonisation of the current centralised grid versus decentralised development of renewable generation technologies. In other words, should we favour large-scale solar, geothermal, wind farms and other renewables, accompanied by major transition networks; or should we move towards localised, small-scale electricity through initiatives such as the City of Sydney’s innovative trigeneration project?

The answer probably lies somewhere in between. Both approaches have significant drawbacks and benefits, which are summarised neatly on this UK local government organisation’s website.

Continued expansion and retrofitting of the existing centralised network is likely to be least capital-intensive approach and entail the least disruptive transition strategy. Large power stations are currently the best bet for managing peak loads – very hot and very cold periods where demand for electricity reaches its maximum peak and could overwhelm a network without significant excess generation capacity on standby.

On the other hand, centralised generation networks are grossly inefficient. According to the City of Sydney’s figures (see link above), only about 30% of the energy produced by Hunter Valley coal- and gas-fired power stations actually arrive in the Sydney CBD. Much of it is lost as heat during transmission. Meanwhile, ongoing reliance on large-scale power plants institutionalises ongoing reliance on fossil fuels, as replacing existing plants with more expensive renewable energy alternatives is costly and requires significant upfront investment, which means that the pinch will be felt by end consumers through their power bills.

Decentralised energy means adding new capacity can be highly incremental, harnessing diverse sources of investment. For instance, Australian households have shown themselves very willing to snap up opportunities to dramatically cut energy bills by installing rooftop solar panels. Government subsidies and feed-in tariffs have even seen some households start to earn income from the various schemes.

Of course, feed-in tariffs raise the equity issue of those who cannot afford the upfront investment to install solar panels effectively subsidising (often more wealthy) beneficiaries of the scheme. Likewise, feeding large amounts of surplus electricity back into a grid designed to distribute power in precisely the opposite direction is not without its technical challenges. However, there is no reason while well-designed schemes cannot provide appropriate incentives for uptake of small-scale solar generation without unduly affecting the prices paid by other users – particularly low-income households. Limiting feed-in tariffs to compensate investment only and providing compensation to less well-off network users are both viable strategies.

Distributed generation has the potential to alleviate the need to construct new power plants, avoiding infrastructure costs which can instead be redirected to subsidising the addition of new capacity and the development of ‘smart grid’ technology to manage intermittent demand. Localised power would also be more resilient to blackouts; provide massive job creation opportunities in auditing, planning, installation and maintenance; and new capacity would be able to be brought online far quicker. It could theoretically encourage local-scale cottage industries and small business over corporate control of the electricity generation process, empowering communities and individuals to manage energy infrastructure as they see fit (although coordinated management of the network would, of course, remain important).

In terms of drawbacks, localised energy generation would be far more visible and (arguably) intrusive than the current system of large power plants – although given the adverse health effects of current generation methods as well as the aesthetic eyesore that is transmission poles and wires the latter point is highly contentious. Community consent to solar panels on rooftops need not be particularly problematic, however there are likely to be greater obstacles when it comes to more conspicuous systems such as wind turbines and trigeneration technology.

There is therefore a case for mixing investment in decarbonising the existing grid infrastructure with the rapid roll-out of small-scale distributed generation technology, however the weight of argument would appear slanted in favour of the latter as a solution to the problem of reducing carbon emissions, increasing network efficiency, managing energy costs borne by businesses and citizens, and in future-proofing this key sector of the economy against future fossil fuel shortages in an equitable manner.

Anti-wind lobby a wind-up, surely?

Firstly, how’s this for logical inconsistency.

On Tuesday, The Sydney Morning Herald ran a front-page story describing how a ‘astroturf’-style political campaign has sprung up in opposition to the expansion of wind farms in NSW, and the underhand influence that such groups are bringing to bear on decision-makers within the state government and parliament.

Given the conservative parties in Australia are racked by climate scepticism in a way largely unseen elsewhere in the world outside the US, I felt strongly enough about these developments to pen a letter to the editor, which was published the following day. It read:

So, let me get this straight.

Climate sceptic groups, which appear willing to dismiss a compelling body of scientific knowledge on anthropogenic climate change, are happy to oppose renewable wind power based on health concerns for which there is scant credible empirical evidence (”Wind farm opponents ‘aided and abetted’ by climate sceptic groups”, December 20)?

Given the links between many such groups and corporations at the heart of the unsustainable fossil fuel-based economy, it sounds to me like a case of not letting the facts get in the way of a self-interested ideological crusade.

The contradiction is not difficult to grasp. Cherry-picking evidence is a fairly universal trait in political commentary and activism in all its guises. I am becoming increasingly convinced that political beliefs, like religion, are generally formulated to satisfy individuals’ deep-seated yearning for certainty and consistency in their interpretation of the world and human society. The evidence doesn’t really bear out the assumption that people develop political and ideological values based on rational observation and reflection.

Nowhere is this tendency more starkly apparent than in the ranks of climate sceptics. The complexity of both climate science and climate change economics is undoubtedly bewildering, but the sheer weight of evidence underlying the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming is surely enough to sway anyone approaching the subject with a truly open mind into favouring precautionary policy solutions. As I have argued before, the inevitable points of contention and uncertainty within climate science that sceptics are so apt at exploiting in no way change the blindingly obvious: that evidence for man-made climate change significantly outweighs supposed evidence against. Once this fact, which is of course very difficult to dispute based on an open-minded examination of the evidence, is acknowledged, climate change policy becomes a simple matter of risk management – the costs of a relatively early transition away from an economy dependent on energy-intensive methods of production, distribution and consumption and fossil fuels would appear to be greatly inferior to those we risk facing in the event of runaway climate change. This is particularly true in the context of global peak oil (oil supply and price shocks, it can be argued, coincide too neatly with major world economic crises of recent times to be a coincidence).

How, then, do we explain this surprisingly widespread distrust of climate science and sustainability discourse within public policy?

Quite simply, most ardent climate sceptics I have met personally appear to have some unusual personality trait which, I would contend, predisposes them to such a dangerously contrarian view. Most are simply garden-variety conservative reactionaries, whose borderline pathological suspicion of and resistance to all manner of progressive morality clearly trumps their ability to logically examine the broader nature and implications of the sustainability challenge. Others, like my steadfastly climate-sceptic university lecturer, appear to have let their contrarian identity cloud their judgment, their distrust of all manner of scientific, political and academic authority allows their views to break free from the bounds of rationality. Put simply, they would rather ignore all the weight of scientific evidence than conform to a ‘mainstream’ position.

Of course, it is the contrarians of history who have enabled humanity to supersede any number of injustices, untruths and outright crimes against reason. But the fact remains that not all contrarians are on the right side of history – indeed, it could be argued that only a select few ever are. In the case of climate sceptics, the twin challenges of peak oil and global warming mean that their chances of being vindicated by history, unlike the great resistors of centuries past, appear very slim indeed.

Aside from the likely psychological underpinnings of some of the more fervent opponents of progressive action on sustainability, which no doubt play no small role in explaining the scale and scope of the political movements springing up in resistance to alternative energy, there is the elephant in the room: corporate vested interests. The main anti-wind farm group mentioned in the Herald report, who go by the name of the Landscape Guardians, are indicative of the opaque power relations between such advocacy groups and powerful interests with a stake in the ongoing profitability of various fossil fuel industries. Loosely based on a similar group in the UK, the Landscape Guardians are linked to the corporate mouthpiece Institute of Public Affairs and that organisation’s astroturf-style spinoff, the Australian Environment Foundation.

In addition, the Waubra Foundation, another national group mentioned in the article which opposes wind power expansion on the basis of adverse health effects purportedly attributable to wind turbines, has been shown to be another front for the ‘guardians’ with links to the Liberal Party – the corporate class’s main champion within parliamentary politics.

To be very clear, there is little medical or scientific evidence that low-frequency ultrasound emissions from wind turbines have any impact on human health. As reported in the Herald this morning, a string of peer-reviewed studies have failed to identify any link between wind turbines and ill health. Appropriate regulatory controls on noise pollution are already incorporated into planning decisions on wind farms.

Of course, the planning minister, Brad Hazzard, indulges in the obligatory misrepresentation of the facts. He is quoted in the same article as saying ‘the jury is still out on health issues [linked to wind turbines], very much so.’ As is the habit of climate sceptics, he is taking the possibility that some skerrick of evidence to support his anti-progressive disposition may emerge in the future and presenting it as casting doubt on the state of scientific knowledge. This is a disingenuous tactic which seeks to manipulate public opinion and appease the powerful vested interests his side of politics overwhelmingly represents (and not just his side, of course). 

However, even if significant evidence of damage to human health due to wind farms were to emerge, the proposed guidelines for NSW reported in the press this morning remain ridiculous. Any hypochondriac living with a two-kilometre radius of a wind turbine would have legal recourse to block the development and trigger submissions to be lodged with regulatory bodies relating to noise, visual impact, effect on land values and other issues. While there is nothing wrong with accountability in any of these areas, the proposed restrictions outweigh anything that applies to coal- or gas-fired power stations, coal mines or coal seam gas developments. Given that somewhere in the order 170 000 people worldwide are killed by particle pollution from coal-fired power plants every year, this is patently ridiculous.

So here we have it – yet another prime example of Australia’s crisis of governance in overcoming vested interests in dealing with the sustainability challenge. Wind power is rapidly becoming more commercially viable, with upfront government subsidies able to accomplish the rest in helping fundamentally shift Australia’s energy mix in favour of renewable technologies. The signs of our fundamentally compromised governance systems being capable of resolving the conundrum in an ethical and forward-thinking way are far from positive.

Asylum seekers: time for a rethink

Also in the news this week: asylum seekers. How unusual. In fact, the sickening media cacophony over this issue has largely prevented me from revisiting it in the 18 months or so since I last tackled it. This is despite significant evolution of my views during this time.

Robert Manne, a self-identified progressive and opponent of the Howard government’s ‘Pacific solution’ to irregular maritime arrivals, penned a thought-provoking article in the Fairfax press earlier this week. Entitled ‘How the left got it wrong’, Manne’s piece pretty neatly reflects the changes in my personal views on the subject in recent months.

Like Manne, I believe that many on the left opposed Howard-era policies on account of the thinly-veiled xenophobic dog whistle politics brought to the issue by the government of the day. I certainly count myself among those who fall into this category. And indeed, I maintain that opposition – after all, John Howard in 2001 didn’t invoke the tragedy of deaths at sea in justifying his hard-line stance; rather, his jingoistic slogan ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the manner in which they come’ offered political legitimacy to the worst in Australia’s national psyche – the latent racism that defined political discourse and policy action in eras past, from White Australia to One Nation.

But in our rush to (justifiably) condemn this heartlessness, Howard’s opponents buried our heads in the sand somewhat on some of the fundamental parameters of the issue. We flailing pointed to ‘push factors’ of overseas conflict and natural disaster to explain fluctuating numbers of boat arrivals in the face of all the evidence. We somewhat naïvely contended that Australia could revert to full onshore processing and dismantle mandatory detention without risking grave consequences for the desperate wretches who took to the boats.

The deaths of up to 200 asylum seekers off east Java earlier in the week has cemented my conversion to offshore processing. It is not a matter of futilely punishing the victims of the people smuggling trade, as I have contended in the past, but the only plausible means of preventing tragedies like we’ve seen this week from being revisited time and time again.

That said, not all proposed solutions are of equal value. Tony Abbott’s policy on the issue ignores the decreased deterrent value of processing in Australian-run centres in third-party nations (most asylum seekers end up in Australia anyway, as shown by the figures for Nauru detainees during the Howard years), as well as the deplorable intellectual dishonesty in claiming Labor’s Malaysia solution is unworkable based on humanitarian grounds while proposing the two boats back to Indonesia (a non-signatory of the UN Convention on Refugees like Malaysia) – with all the risk of sabotage and diplomatic furore that would entail.

The answer probably does lie in some kind of refugee swap, such as the policy proposed by Labor but opposed by the Coalition on spurious, base, and purely political grounds, whereby Australia increases its humanitarian intake program in exchange for returning boat arrivals to a third country. Very stringent checks and balances would be required in order to uphold the international principle of non-refoulement (not returning legitimate refugees to their place of persecution).

In any event, it is unconscionable for progressives within this debate to continue to support onshore processing, which likely sustains the situation where people are exposed to the risk of catastrophe on the high seas, merely out of reflexive opposition to some of the more distasteful viewpoints out there.

This simple observation makes the two main parties’ politicking over the issue particularly nauseating. Meanwhile, the Greens may also require a solid dose of introspection on the ethical implications of their policy.

Meanwhile, in Pyongyang

A little further afield, and this week also saw the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.

The passing of the Dear Leader instantly set of a torrent of moral posturing, frenzied speculation and outright fear-mongering throughout the Western media, Australia’s included. Take, for instance, the December 19 headline from the New York Times: ‘Kim’s death inspires worries and anxiety’.

Without even a whiff of evidence than any prospect of major destabilisation was afoot, the liberal press reinforced a series of irrational jitters within various pro-Western nations’ political classes through several days of anticipation of some kind of belligerence on the part of the ‘hermit state’.

Needless to say, nothing of the sort that actually warrants concern has transpired as of yet. Meanwhile, there is little doubt in my mind that the combination of dismissive satire and overblown fear about the country’s military and nuclear objectives merely reinforced North Korea’s diplomatic isolation, hence aggravating the problem.

Of course, the deeply corrupt system of state socialism espoused by North Korea deserves to be deplored the world over. The best evidence suggests that millions of impoverished people have perished there from starvation over recent decades, while the ruling military/communist class featherbed their own nests with tacit Chinese support.

But the fact remains that the North’s nuclear ambitions, which have incited so much angst in the West and in the country’s north-east Asian neighbours, really only appear to have ramped up when the war-mongering neo-con George W. Bush identified Kim’s regime as part of the three-pronged ‘axis of evil’ with Iraq and Iran. Given the historical precedent in Iraq, why wouldn’t North Korea – and indeed Iran for that matter – wish to acquire some form of nuclear deterrence?

[/rant] Merry Christmas, everybody.

As always, it kind of depends who you ask. Norman Borlaug, known as the “father of the Green Revolution” and credited with having saved as many as a billion people from starvation worldwide, is acerbic in his criticism of Western environmentalists who oppose the transformations he helped unleash:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. […] If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things".

The Green Revolution took place during the mid-twentieth century, and revolved around the development of high-yield varieties of several staple crops, the expansion of irrigation techniques and the use of synthetic herbicides and pesticides. It is widely credited with having overcome Malthusian notions of global famine due to overpopulation, allowing the world population to balloon from around one billion people in 1800 to around seven billion today. Its advocates claim that it greatly favoured development in poor countries, with India and the Philippines only two examples of famine-prone developing nations which miraculously achieved agricultural self-sufficiency in a matters of years.

These arguments need to be taken seriously, however so too do those advanced by critics of Borlaug and the advent of market-mediated industrial agriculture. These include:

• being responsible for the large-scale disruption of traditional subsistence farming, unleashing the global urbanisation phenomenon and all its attendant social, economic and environmental issues, all while enabling large US agrochemical and agribusiness firms (such as Monsanto) to reap multi-billion-dollar profits;
• contamination of organic crops by genetically-modified species;
• inducing over-reliance on just a few grain varieties due to large-scale monoculture;
• decreased biodiversity;
• exacerbation of inequalities due to an increased reliance on market-mediated access to food; and
• the negative environmental effects of widespread pesticide and herbicide use, particularly in developing countries with less stringent safety standards.

These are very real problems, however a cursory glance at the list would appear to suggest that incremental reform to current practices will be sufficient to ameliorate them. This in turn would imply that the current predominant development model, based on industrialised agriculture dominated by large corporations and reliant on inorganic farming techniques, is fundamentally sound.

Then there’s sustainability.

A basic tenet underlying this ongoing discussion of just that topic is, of course, that we must rethink vast swathes of our current methods of social, economic and political organisation in order to respond to a range of potentially catastrophic challenges – including climate change (including loss of biodiversity, desertification and soil degradation), resource shortages (from unsustainable exploitation of fossil fuels, water and so on), and the repeated crises of global capitalism.

How does industrialised, large-scale agriculture, which dominates the food production process in both developed countries along with the prevailing discourses in international development theory, fit into this imperative?

The key question be posed is, unsurprisingly, how sustainable is this current order? Putting aside for the moment the raging controversy between different points along the political spectrum outlined above, is it reasonable to assume that business as usual – perhaps with incremental reform – will be sufficient to overcome the sustainability challenges I have just outlined.

Greenhouse gas emissions

Agriculture is responsible for high levels of methane and nitrous oxide emissions – primarily from livestock and synthetic fertilisers respectively. In Australia, the sector accounts for a touch under 20% of total direct greenhouse gas emissions – or about 15% when expressed in carbon dioxide equivalent terms.

Nitrogen fertilisers contribute 3.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while reduced carbon sequestration from land clearing, deforestation and soil degradation are also of major concern.

Although the precise effects of climate change are difficult to predict, it is widely believed global warming will result in accelerated loss of agricultural land to desertification, more frequent and severe drought and other natural disasters, and altered regional climates.

Flow-on economic, social and environmental costs

The UK government estimates the direct social, environmental and economic cost of food transport at £9 billion per year – 34% of the total annual food and drinks market for that country.

Massive industrial farms directly serving stores in urban areas ensure fabulous economies of scale, but the social, health and environmental consequences of all the extra trucks on the road – for as Part 1 of this series demonstrates, this is how most goods are moved around – are untenable given the likely future impact of escalating greenhouse emissions and fossil fuel shortages.

The widely-quoted David Pimentel of Cornwell University has calculated that for every calorie of meat consumed in developed countries today, there will have been over eight calories of fossil fuel input – from natural gas for fertiliser, oil for agricultural machines and transportation, and the energy requirements of refrigeration, etc.

Effect on global population

It is certainly true that the vastly improved yields associated with the Green Revolution have greatly increased the world’s capacity to feed its rapidly expanding population. This is indisputably a good thing, as it would be unconscionable to advocate leaving billions mired in poverty, vulnerable to disease and famine. This is the essence of the charge levelled at certain environmentalists in the West by Norman Borlaug, quoted above.

However, die-hard advocates of large-style industrialised agriculture (the status quo, by and large), ignore a very important flip-side to that same coin. Dramatically increasing the planet’s ability to feed itself has helped underpin the ever-accelerating explosion in global population – since the start of the Green Revolution, roughly three billion extra people have been born, overwhelmingly adding to ranks of the global poor, who have the highest fertility rates.

Today, there are up to three billion people worldwide who are malnourished in some form or another, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Even despite the establishment’s faith in technological breakthroughs along the lines of the Green Revolution to sustain up to nine billion people by century’s end (usually by placing much hope in controversial GM techniques), it is a fact that cereal grain availability per person has been steadily decreasing globally over the past 20 years. This does not augur well.

Agro-ecology: A possible solution

I suggested in Part 1 of this series that our best bet in coping with the impending sustainability challenge is in fundamentally rethinking our way of life with the notion of self-reliant, resilient communities firmly in mind.

In terms of food, this will mean an emphasis on resilient, organic and localised agriculture where possible.

Urban areas are where the bulk of demand is concentrated and it makes sense to seek to alleviate what has become a dangerous level of reliance on national and international markets. Localising food production systems will enable greenhouse gas emissions to be cut while reducing demand for fossil fuels through avoiding the need to transport goods from source to store. It will also mean less reliance on synthetic fertilisers and unnatural preservatives, as food will be consumed far fresher than is currently the case. Provided sufficient attention is given to allotting the necessary spaces in planning decisions, yields could be much higher than some detractors may presume – studies indicate that composting outperforms synthetic fertilisers by about 30%.

Just as importantly, promoting local self-sufficiency in food supplies will encourage healthier eating while ensuring communities are resilient in the event of future oil price shocks, natural disasters and changed local climates.

The massive waste associated with industrialised agriculture extends well beyond excess greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel use. There is massive waste of grain through feedlots for cattle and other farm animals. According to David Pimentel again, the US could feed 800 million humans with the grain it uses to feed livestock. Furthermore, rates of soil loss on agricultural land outstrips soil renewal by a factor of between 10 and 40, making many regions’ grip on food security tenuous at best.

So what practical form could localised agriculture take? There are, thankfully, a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Two case studies in particular stand out: 1990s Cuba and Argentina between 1999-2002.

In Cuba, the former Soviet Union cut off oil supplies, forcing a radical rethink of agricultural practice on an island largely isolated from global food markets. The possibilities offered by localised, organic farming had already been investigated by Cuban authorities, but it took a crisis to see abstract theory put into practice. The command nature of the national economy no doubt helped.

The same cannot be said of Argentina in 1999, it too in the grip of crisis. There, the trend towards localised agriculture emerged out of the chaos of economic meltdown in the form of a radical, grassroots social movement operating quite outside the constraints of official government policy. In both cases, idle urban spaces were systematically employed to boost the supply of local, organic food.

Interestingly, there a similar stories to be told about Americans and Britons during the second world war, where deprivation once again forced a rethink of market-based agriculture and food supplies.

Dr Robert Biel of the University College London, quoted on the earthtimes.org blog, says that

”the huge urban population is not producing food and this puts an intolerable pressure on the rural side of society which has to produce most of the food.”

Localised and organic food production systems have the capacity to greatly enhance to resilience of communities, improve health, help mitigate and respond to climate change, reduce fossil fuel use and partially solve a great number of environmental problems associated with industrialised agriculture, such as pesticide use, strains on water supplies and soil erosion.

The scope for localising both food production and energy generation is large. One good idea in this field is the Dream Farm 2 project, which involves an anaerobic digester to harness methane from livestock and other organic wastes for combined heat and power generation. Such methods can result in up to a 70% increase in energy efficiency (as once again it doesn’t have to be transported long distance with resultant losses) and to cut both greenhouse gas emissions and net energy consumption in half.

Concurrently, we can focus on improving the uptake of eco-friendly techniques on existing large-scale farming operations – principles such as using green manure and no-till farming are major examples.

Conclusions and the way forward

For most serious students of sustainability in developed societies, it is clear that the way forward will inevitably involve eschewing inequitable, unsustainable and inefficient large-scale markets in favour of a hybrid system built at least in part around the principles of local self-sufficiency and community resilience. Despite mainstream political discourse remaining trapped in the growth-obsessed, corporate-dominated, top-down models of market economics, there really is no other credible alternative.

At a global level, the industrialised agricultural techniques of the Green Revolution have doubtlessly saved many millions from starvation. Paradoxically, however, these apparent advances have also helped sustain runaway population growth among the world’s poorest people and a historically unprecedented trend towards urbanisation. These developments have unleashed a variety of grave ecological issues while pushing many out of subsidence-based (and hence more resilient) lifestyles, decimating small-scale agriculture in both rich and poor nations, and extending the logic of markets to the extend where whole countries depend on them for their very survival. This has spawned a host of other problems, notably a complete lack of readiness among communities to deal with the likely effects of peak oil and climate change, and price spikes in basic grain commodities – threatening the very survival of millions – due in no small part to unconscionable speculation by large Western multinationals as well as more expensive fuel inputs.

As ever, how to move from abstract theory to practical applications is not altogether clear. No doubt some elements of our parliamentary political systems – notably The Greens – would have considerable sympathy to the thesis laid out here (which is by no means original), however it is depressingly clear that liberal democracies everywhere are trapped in the logic of corporation-dominated market economics with its inherent fatal flaw of externalising environmental and social cost in the context of the profit motive.

It is likely that the dislocation of economic crisis across Europe and the US will clear the way for the emergence of self-organising, organic civic movements with a duel brief of combatting unjustifiable social inequity and responding to impending ecological crises. The Occupy movement provides great hope as a potential vector for the kind of progressive transformations are required.

It remains uncertain, however, whether even with the favourable circumstances provided by the current crisis of global capitalism liberal democratic societies will be able to muster the public energy and will necessary to spark the change we all need. The crushing weight of cynicism and disengagement, stoked by decades of callous individualistic social doctrines, free-market fundamentalism and objectifying consumer capitalism, may yet prove too great.

In any event, stay tuned for a future instalment in this Sustainability Series dedicated to governance and democracy, which will seek to bring my critique of the status quo together into a relatively precise blueprint for how the society of tomorrow may look.

In all seriousness, the struggle against unsustainable economics (and the politics which underpins it) is likely to become as important in our time as the 20th-century struggles against tyranny in all its guises – Nazism and Stalinism first and foremost. The stakes are, of course, quite different, yet just as high if not higher.

The 20th century saw some degree of liberty of conscience and action triumph over overt forms of oppression, and no-one should deny the fundamental role played by Western-led and inspired consumer capitalism in these achievements. Likewise, we should acknowledge that leftist beliefs in privileging the collective over the individual continue to this day to be tarnished by one of the great mass delusions of the past: that Soviet-style authoritarian communism was a viable and morally acceptable path to prosperity. The point, I think, is illustrated well by a disconcerting moment during my to-date only brush with one of the Australian incarnations of the global Occupy movement in Melbourne last month.

The few-hundred protesters marching through the streets were, to be fair, a pretty diverse bunch. No doubt there were advocates of new ways of rethinking prosperity in the context of greater equality, cooperation and ecological sustainability among them. The crowd seemed to be dominated, however, by old-school statist socialists. Here’s a selection of what I read on some banners and placards amidst the demonstrators (see photo above):

CAPITALISM EQUALS CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!

LET THE RULING CLASSES TREMBLE; WE HAVE A WORLD TO WIN!

REVOLUTION IS THE SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE

Perhaps these guys haven’t ever had the chance to take a close look at the history of the last century. The collapse of the Soviet Union clearly had as much to do with the statist repression it came to embody as with the lure of the materialist consumption-based lifestyles of the West and its ethos of wealth accumulation.

More likely they’re just opposed to – quite understandably – the increasingly untenable excesses of globalised consumer capitalism but lack a clear, credible alternative for the 21st century.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the world is straining at its ecological limits. Global population is projected to stabilise at somewhere around 9 billion people by century’s end. With heavily populated nations such as India, China and Brazil developing at a breakneck pace, hundreds of millions of people are likely to join the ranks of the global middle class over the coming decades.

Unfortunately, the wealthy, consumption-based lifestyles to which many inhabitants of developing countries aspire are unsustainable. If even conservative scientific projections about anthropogenic global warming turn out to be accurate, it will rapidly become clear that even current levels of consumption – about 80% of which accrues to the richest 20% of humanity – have been utterly unsustainable. The swelling numbers attaining high-consumption lifestyles as the Asian economic powerhouses develop can only exacerbate the problem – accelerating the depletion of finite fossil fuels, the growth in climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions, and putting strains on global food supplies.

Catastrophe of a similar kind has only been averted in the past by sweeping technological advancement; the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century being the most notable example. Those technologies – centring primarily on mechanised agriculture and the development of new pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and grain species – nonetheless appear highly susceptible to depleted fossil fuel reserves and associated price spikes. If large-scale industrial agriculture is again going to put paid to Malthusian concerns about widespread famine as global population balloons, new techniques are going to have to be developed and implemented on an extremely rapid scale.

In any event, any objective appraisal of the situation inevitably leads to the conclusion that corporation-dominated global financial, economic and political systems – and notably the sectors most key to human survival such as agriculture and water – are ill-suited to the impending challenges. The contention that technological innovation within these global structures can overcome the converging threats of climate change, resource shortages and free-market capitalism’s evermore frequent systemic crises (which only serve to exacerbate already gaping inequalities) appears optimistic at best.

Defenders of the status quo – essentially the entire mainstream political and cultural establishment – like to point to the ‘false alarms’ of recent human history (civilisation collapse through nuclear war, Malthusian notions of global famine and so on) as justifying scepticism about the claimed implications about our current array of potential civilisational crises. The following, quoted from the Future Scenarios climate change and peak oil reflections blog, neatly summarised the implications of this tendency:

[T]here is a long tradition of millennialism in Judeo-Christian culture which periodically leads to predictions of the “end of the world as we know it” based on the idea that our current world is fundamentally flawed in some way. The simplicity and mostly incorrect nature of these past predictions suggest caution when considering current predictions of doom. The fable of the “boy who cried wolf” is sometimes cited to suggest current concerns are also false alarms. But this history also has the effect of inoculating society against considering the evidence. Exposure to a small dose of millennialism leads to resistance to the effects of larger doses. Ironically, the point of the fable is that the threat of the wolf is real but that no one takes any notice because of past false alarms.

What most mainstream analysis of the evolutionary trajectory of our global order lacks is an understanding of a simple insight: our era of rapid economic development and globalisation based on massive consumption of finite fossil fuels is, to the best of our scientific and anthropogenic knowledge, historically exceptional.

We are, when we step back and take a broad, nuanced view of history, very much venturing forth into the unknown if we maintain our current model of development. Merely observing humanity’s tendency to exaggerate past threats is a useful rhetorical tool for those opposing systemic change in our societies, yet offers little to debate about the sustainability of the current global economic and political order other than sounding a (necessary) note of caution against excessive hubris.

The sheer range and scale of the challenges awaiting us – indeed which are in many cases already upon us –, as well as the undeniable unprecedented nature of our historical era, make the issue of sustainability the new key variable in any political or economic debate. Fundamentally rethinking the way we live – in terms of food, water, clothes, shelter, work, transport and other sectors – is surely soon to become a basic necessity. Not only to avoid the potential future catastrophes so ill-suited to our current political order, but also to adapt to the inevitable shifts that will likely come to redefine the very assumptions underlying our current way of life.

An interesting practical manifestation of just how sustainability may work in the real world comes through the notion of community resilience. Put succinctly, resilience is a multi-faceted narrative aimed at fostering maximum self-reliance in national, regional and local communities. Rather than being mediated by mass markets with their attendant anti-democratic power structures and tendency to favour profitability over both sustainability and equitably fulfilling basic human needs and desires, individuals and communities would regain direct control over things such as organic food and basic services. An ethos of cooperation, rather than profit, could come to complement the forms of markets we really can’t avoid (consumer goods in particular) by restoring management of public services – from insurance to healthcare to finance.

Whatever the precise form the resilient, sustainable communities of tomorrow may ultimately take, it is widely acknowledged that a reinvigorated prioritisation of some form of political and economic localism will have to be a major part of the solution. This series will seek to map out some key ideas about just how the society of tomorrow – one which will be capable of resolving many of the intertwined issues of environmental degradation, inequality and social injustice, fossil fuel resource shortages, climate change and the democratic deficit at the heart of liberal-capitalist democracies. It will also attempt to look at some of the strategies we could implement – including a fundamental rethinking of our modes of governance and the assumptions on which our economic model is based – in order to realise this vision and perpetuate something akin to our unprecedented levels of current prosperity well into the future.

Areas on which policymakers will need to focus as a matter of urgency include transport, food and agriculture, consumption levels, planning and housing, governance, industry, and energy production and use.

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This article will kick things off with a look at transport.

Moving stuff around – people as well as goods – is central to all current economic activity in developed nations such as our own. Indeed, it is difficult to seriously envisage any form of dynamic, modern society without this distribution of human and physical capital.

At present, however, transport is not generally done in a sustainable way. The sector represents about a quarter of Australia’s primary energy consumption, and around 15% of our greenhouse gas emissions. Like our GHG portfolio in general, our per capita emissions from transport are well above both the world and OECD averages. Current trends are likewise not particularly encouraging. Growth in emissions from transport represent the majority of anticipated future emissions under a baseline, ‘business-as-usual’ policy scenario.

Transport is an integral component of a society’s economic life and therefore of a future resilient community. Personal mobility and the transport of goods will need to be maintained in ways that are far less carbon-intensive and far less reliant on largely imported fossil fuels. These two key considerations will from the basis for much of the analysis in this article.

Private transport

Australia, much like the United States, is very much a land of the automobile. The convenience of the personal mobility they afford us is key to modern lifestyles and economic activity. Cars have, however, a series of deleterious effects on society, including:

• being far less energy efficient and greenhouse gas emissions-intensive than mass transit;
• encouraging unnecessary trips (which could be accomplished using alternative transport modes) and undue reliance;
• the social, health and economic cost of accidents, particle pollution and congestion;
• facilitating unsustainable urban planning, benefiting low-density urban sprawl over vibrant medium- and high-density urban communities;
• creating a ‘personal bubble’ which reinforces the individualistic narcissism of modern consumer-capitalist society – something which must be overcome in order to foster reengagement in political and civic life (restoring people to engaged citizens rather than the passive consumers they are rapidly becoming).

The truth is that, as convenient as our cars may be, and as much as they may be an integral part of modern life in Australia, we would actually be collectively better off without them – or at least with far less reliance on them. Of course, the fact that the automotive industry is vast and sprawling raises the possibility of genuine economic disruption as society shifts towards other forms of transport, and also poses significant barriers to change in the form of political resistance.

Frustratingly, emissions from cars would appear to be one of the easier aspects of unsustainability in society to fix. Consider that the average modern car is responsible for only 5% of the total emissions of one manufactured in the 1960s. Although these advances are largely cancelled out by an explosion in the prevalence of private motor vehicles – over 12 million on Australian roads according to the ABS versus about 769 000 in 1950 –, it remains clear that the industry is capable of vastly reducing its ecological footprint given appropriate incentives to do so. Depressingly, however, the fact that we still allow outer-suburbanites to purchase petrol-guzzling 4x4s with no practical purpose within the urban environment in which they are driven is testament to the sheer inability of our current governance structures to adequately respond to the sustainability challenge.

For perspective, it is worth noting that even low-emissions vehicles built today are high in C0₂ output when extraction of resources, manufacturing, fuel and so on are taken into account. Even the forms of personal transport widely fêted as the solution for a sustainable future fall victim to this basic flaw – for instance, electric cars remain emissions-intensive (due to charging) while the electricity generation network has not been fully decarbonised, while the manufacture of hydrogen fuel cells is similarly energy intensive.

The solution, of course, is a balanced approach. The UK’s Stern Review has correctly identified inaction of reducing transport sector emissions and reliance on fossil fuels as a ‘false economy’, meaning that although it’s cheaper and easier in the immediate term, it will end up costing us big time.

There are some very simple measures which governments could be taking to increase the sustainability of private transport in Australia, focusing on reducing the energy intensiveness of our current fleet and overcoming reliance on private motor vehicles for personal mobility (particularly in urban areas). These include:

• congestion taxes. These are political hard-sell because they impact on our overly car-reliant lifestyle, riling conservatives, but they are being implemented in major cities across the world;
• a ‘bonus-malus’ system on new car purchases. This involves applying a bonus or a direct charge to all new vehicle purchased depending on carbon emissions – smaller, more efficient vehicles would in effect be subsidised by taxing emissions-intensive cars, utes and four-wheel-drives. Theoretically, the system could be budget neutral if managed carefully, while a range of dispensations and exemptions, for instance for people reliant on larger vehicles for work, could be contemplated;
• outright bans on high-emissions vehicles (the Hummer comes to mind, but there is no reason why anyone should need to drive a large four-wheel-drive living in the city);
• industry subsidies for low-emissions vehicles. It says a lot about Australia that local car manufacturers have continued to churn out large family cars with inefficient engines for many years (often with direct government support), only to see sales collapse and plants threatened with closure when petrol prices began to spike. Local car manufacturing is a good strategic asset, and governments should offer the industry adequate incentives to switch to fuel-efficient models and to invest in low-emissions R&D;
• mandated efficiency standards for new passenger and commercial vehicles sold in Australia (or a reinforcement of current standards where possible; including a phased-in start-up date);
• end tax breaks for company car fleets and other schemes which unduly encourage personal vehicle use;
• significantly ramp up investment in alternative modes of transport – including mass transit, car-sharing schemes and so on (more on this below).

Freight

For bulk freight, rail transport is up to 10 times less emissions intensive than road transport. Furthermore, privileging trains over trucks for hauling freight would result in reduced congestion, less road accidents, using less fuel for equivalent payloads, less damage to roads and associated repair costs, and improved aesthetics (particularly in dense urban environments in proximity to industrial areas).

Hidden subsidies and other misguided policy decisions have subtly tipped the balance in favour of road freight, resulting in increasing concern in many communities about the health, safety and social impacts of monster trucks such B-double behemoths in the Blue Mountains.

In monetary terms, road congestion costs the NSW economy almost five billion dollars a year, a figure which is projected to double by 2020 without a dramatic shift in policy.

Some what can be done to redress the balance? Here are some ideas:

• strategic investment, funding, planning and construction relating to rail infrastructure and services, based on the notion of a “hub-and-spokes” network (increasing efficiency – currently, the rise of road over rail freight owes largely to the inflexibility of the latter);
• obliging manufacturers and retailers to clearly label “carbon kilometres” on all products
• a progressive levy favouring locally or regionally produced goods;
• increasing capacity through improved signalling and traffic management;
• intermodal freight connections – these encourage long-distance freight to be shifted to rail, with road (heavy or light vehicles) restricted to shorter-range movements;
• increased federal investment in the publicly owned Australian Rail Track Corporation to improve rail freight infrastructure; and
• ending the subsidisation of B Double trucks, which has distorted road-rail competition.

Public transport

One of the key characteristics of living in NSW – and Australia generally, for the most part – is the derisory quality of public transport. Our cities and towns tend to be low density and sprawling, owing no doubt in small part to our material prosperity and wide open spaces. Needless to say, relying on cars for even short-range trips and work commutes is not a sustainable way to live. Dramatically improving Australia’s public transport infrastructure through targeted investment is the biggest single factor in weening ourselves off fossil fuel-guzzling, congestion-causing cars.

Currently, investment in road over public transport is ludicrously slanted in favour of the former. The disparity reaches a disturbing 5:1 at the federal level. Owing to a powerful automotive lobby, however, far too much money continues to be poured into building evermore freeways, highways and overpasses at the expense of clean, safe and sustainable public transit.

Sadly, much of this investment in roads is in vain. Adding capacity to the road network in order to ease congestion is often futile, as the enhanced infrastructure only serves to funnel more cars into already-congested bottlenecks. Motorways in suburban Sydney often resemble parking lots during peak hour.

Increasing road capacity without corresponding investment in public transport usually only exacerbates the problem in the medium to long term. Worse still, overspending on roads encourages greenfield land releases without adequate accompanying planning and investment in public transport.

This latter issue plugs into the unseemly influence of developers in state politics, no matter which major party is in office. Many of our stupendous urban planning failures in Sydney and elsewhere owe largely to developer lobbying. There is a urgent need for coordination and rigorous independence in our planning governance. Illustrating the scale of the problem, the Coalition and Labor in NSW have received well over $20 million from developers alone over the past 20 years. This is institutionalised corruption.

The funding imbalance outlined above is resulting in congestion, air pollution, massive carbon emissions, lost productivity, stress, and a host of other nasties.

So what to do from a policy point of view?

• Ramp up support for regional rail services (currently being neglected or even closed);
• increase infrastructure investment: straighten, maintain and expand rail lines;
• invest in comparatively cheap light rail in built-up urban areas, while encouraging centralisation in development and discouraging sprawl and associated reliance on private motor vehicles (more is needed than eternal feasibility studies!);
• revenue from carbon taxation or auctioning CO₂ pollution permits, plus taxation of fossil fuel profits are valuable avenues for raising the necessary revenue;
• plan and build an eastern-seaboard high speed rail network – Sydney to Melbourne is the world’s fourth-busiest air corridor, suggesting that if this fast rail network can’t be profitable, what can?
• encourage active transport for local journeys – this comes down to planning, infrastructure investment (dedicated cycle lanes, walking paths, etc.), bike rental schemes in CBDs and major suburban areas, etc.).

Put simply, there is a lot we can do as a society to make our economically crucial transport sector more sustainable. The benefits can be reaped in terms of health, economic productivity, visual and aural aesthetics and reduced pollution.

None of what I have suggested here is particularly ground-breaking stuff (I’m saving that for later in the series, I’m promise!) There is a significant part of the community which realises the importance to our future prosperity of the transition to a sustainable future, particularly in terms of transport. Public support for increased public transport investment is consistently very high. More and more people are becoming aware of the scope of the challenge, and what needs to be done.

As always, a variety of vested interests will stand in the way of bold policy aimed at the broader public good. Reform will have to reach far beyond the transport sector before any of the above vision can be realised. More on this in a future article in this Sustainability Series.

There is, however, a fair degree of hubris on all sides about just what the implications of pricing carbon will be. While conservative fear-mongering about a crushing blow to struggling industry and spikes in the cost of living are hardly credible, neither are the glowing assessments of some others – notably on the centre and the left of the political spectrum – about the level of innovation a modest carbon price is capable of achieving.

The ALP, only agreeing to legislate after having its arm twisted by the Greens and the independents, is among the worst offenders. Pricing carbon, we are told by the Federal Government, will unleash a historic wave of innovation and investment in clean energy technology, setting Australia on the path to a low-emissions economy by mid-century (as part of the deal struck with the crossbenchers, the greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for 2050 was revised upwards to an 80% cut on 2000 levels). In the same breath, federal Labor happily reassures everyone that the price will be so modest so as to have minimal effect on the economy, and that in any event nearly everyone will be compensated.

Faced with the obvious logical inconsistency of federal Labor’s sales pitch, many in the community are understandably confused. How can the carbon price have these wonderful, transformative effects when the pricing signal itself (this is, after all, the point of the exercise – to influence behaviour by making carbon-intensive goods, services and manufacturing processes comparatively more expensive) is claimed to be so modest as to involve next to no pain for anyone?

I recently submitted a 2500-word university assignment on the environmental effectiveness of carbon pricing, which formed part of a more holistic 11,000-word group critique of climate change policy in Australia as a whole. Here’s a run-down of what I learnt, and an answer to the above conundrum.

In February 2011, Julia Gillard said:

‘Putting a price on carbon [is] a fundamental structural reform as significant in our own time as the reforms of the Hawke-Keating government a generation ago. […] A carbon price will drive another sweeping technological revolution like Information Technology did in the 1980s and 90s.’

To say the very least, Ms Gillard appears to place a high degree of faith in the ability of carbon pricing to achieve the 80% emissions cut envisaged for 2050. In order to achieve such a large-scale decarbonisation of the economy, fundamental changes to energy production, distribution, storage and conversion must occur. In addition to fundamentally altering society’s energy mix in favour of renewable technologies, the macroeconomic and institutional structure of society will have to be reorganised in order to reduce the carbon intensity of a broad range of human activities.

Put another way, we can’t live the way we do now if our greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels are going to be reduced to the extent federal Labor claims it is aiming for. In all likelihood, the changes will be far-reaching – “structural” in the academic lingo – and touch all areas of economic activity. Houses will be smaller and far more energy efficient. There will have been a large-scale shift to public transport, with private vehicles running on some form of low-carbon technology (probably electric engines, hydrogen fuel cells, or some mix of both). A vast variety of services and activities will have become localised, particularly agriculture (community farms, vertical gardens, etc.) and other food production. Work patterns will also have fundamentally shifted – many will work from home using IT interfaces and ultra-fast internet, while many aspects of the services sector will have shifted to functioning on a cooperative rather than market-reliant basis, in order to compensate for the shift away from unsustainable consumerism as a model for economic activity and employment.

Much of this is, of course, necessarily speculative, even excluding the unfortunately very real possibility of a far less rosy, indeed dystopian, “broken society” that would result from a failure to adapt early to looming resource shortages (notably oil). However, there is little doubt that the broad economic structure of society must evolve along a different path to that on which we are currently set.

Can pricing carbon alone do this? It’s highly unlikely. More on this later.

But what, then, is the value of pricing carbon, and all the attendant economic disruption, political upheaval and strident opposition from big business and conservative politicians?

Well, a carbon price – whether functioning as a direct carbon tax, emissions trading, or some hybrid of the two – is the most efficient, cost-effective way to achieve what is known in policy circles as “low-cost abatement opportunities”. Nicknamed “long-hanging fruit”, the term simply refers to the cheapest and easiest ways to quickly cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“Low-hanging fruit” currently centres on fuel switching, consumer behaviour and “stop-gap” technology (already available and commercially viable – or close to it). On its comprehensive website dedicated to the recently-legislated carbon tax, the Federal Government lists the following as examples of what carbon pricing can achieve:

• converting coal-fired boilers to gas-fired boilers in manufacturing plants, commercial buildings and hospitals
• encouraging chemical plants to install scrubbers to reduce nitrous oxide emissions
• encouraging the installation of more efficient motors in industry
• encouraging the capture and use or flaring of emissions from mining and gas extraction.

Hardly ground-breaking stuff. The theory is, of course, that by the time all possible improvements in energy efficiency and conservation have been exhausted, and all commercially viable “stop-gap” measures have been taken by industry, more heavy-hitting changes such as large-scale uptake of renewable energy in electricity production will become comparatively cheap enough to attract adequate private investment.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple (and I suspect many Australians who oppose the carbon tax have some sense of the excessive rosiness of this long-term scenario). There is a problem which theorists have referred to as a “dynamic inconsistency” inherent in relying on market signals alone to spark the transition to a low-emissions economy. The notion is a relatively complex one, but to break it down, one can simply say this: in order for highly expensive structural changes to make financial sense for the private sector, the carbon price would have to be jacked up to an economically unfeasible level.

So what’s the solution. Basically, the state will need to step in and underwrite the many elements of the transition which cannot attract private sector investment. This includes providing start-up capital in initiatives pertaining to low-carbon research and development (R&D) – the kind of investments with high risk and long paybacks which no reasonable private investor would touch.

Matthew Warren, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, has pointed out the following:

‘Many of the biggest technological ‘leaps’ forward and infrastructure projects in modern history have been underwritten by government. Typically these are large-scale investments with either big risks or long paybacks – or both.’

Mainly thanks to the influence of the Greens, the carbon pricing package that has now passed into law takes some positive steps in this critical area of climate change policy.

Revenue from the carbon tax (or from auctioning pollution permits when the scheme shifts to an ETS around 2015) will partially fund public investment in low-emissions R&D through the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the $3.2 billion Australian Renewable Energy Agency, and the $200 million Clean Technology Innovation Program. These investments will complement clean energy support programs such as the Renewable Energy Target.

The Australian’s Paul Kelly summarised this development well in an opinion piece published in July:

‘The key to grasping Julia Gillard’s climate change package is to realise that pricing carbon is not enough – this package both prices carbon across much of the economy and simultaneously offers incentives to generate a $100 billion renewable sector by 2050.’

Carbon pricing – being useful as it is in providing a market signal in favour of clean energy – must be the preferred policy instrument for raising funds for this very necessary investment. It is not, however, sufficient in and of itself.

It is this simple reality which has made some of Labor’s other policy decisions relating to climate change so bone-headed. A whole raft of complementary policy measures have been ditched, sacrificed on the altar of balanced budgets, on the spurious grounds that they would “no longer be necessary” once there was a carbon price in place.

Michael Schellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute (a sustainability think tank in the US), uses a neat analogy to express this:

‘We didn’t tax typewriters to get the computer. We didn’t tax telegraphs to get telephones. ‘When you look at the history of technological innovation, you find that state investment is everywhere’.

The Federal Government has tended to present carbon pricing as a panacea in making the Australian economy less emissions intensive. However, despite the ability of carbon pricing to encourage industry to seize low-cost abatement opportunities as an initial step towards a low-emissions economy, it is clear that history suggests that manipulating market signals alone will be insufficient in effecting structural change in the economy itself.

Responding to the political infeasibility of implementing market-based emissions reduction policies in the US due to opposition from political conservatives, the New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt has noted that:

‘The Defense Department created the Internet, as part of a project to build a communications system safe from nuclear attack. The military helped make possible radar, microchips and modern aviation, too. The National Institutes of Health spawned the biotechnology industry. All those investments have turned into engines of job creation, even without any new tax on the technologies they replaced.’

Strategies to be considered in ramping up public investment in energy research and innovation include the use of military procurement, rethinking deployment incentives (grants and subsidies, etc.), and the creation of public-private hubs aimed at fostering breakthroughs in technologies capable of assisting in the transition to a low-emissions economy.

Furthermore, areas of investment conducive to the emergence of a new economy based on a uniform strategic vision for a low-carbon future need to be prioritised for government investment. For instance, the promotion of roof-top solar panels to reduce dwellings’ reliance on coal-fired base-load electricity, such as through feed-in tariffs, should continue. Other areas for consideration include enhanced, mandatory energy efficiency standards for new buildings; increasing investment in public transport, and prioritising energy efficiency and sustainability in urban planning strategies.

All the above considerations should form part of a national strategic plan for the transition to a low-carbon economy.

One can’t help but wonder whether The Australian was out to whip up more fear of the transition ahead with its front-page story yesterday, entitled “JULIA GILLARD SEALS CARBON TAX BUT GREENS WANT MORE”.

The irony, of course, is that, from a policy perspective at least, the so-called “extreme fringe” of Australian politics is the only one with a firm grasp on reality.

For many advocates of a globalised world economy based on free trade, corporate capitalism and the liberal-democratic global political order, the scale and tenacity of the protest movement must have come as a grinding shock. Since the advent of Thatcherism and the Reaganites following the economic dislocation caused by oil price shocks in the mid-1970s, followed within a decade by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the onward march of Anglo-Saxon-style neoliberalism had appeared unstoppable. Political and economic “freedom”, it was widely supposed, would result in ever-rising levels of peace and prosperity across the globe.

Indeed, this post-Cold War “Washington Consensus” of Anglo-American ideological hegemony had met with considerable success. Economic policies of liberalisation, deregulation and opening up to the global economy had lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty across southern and eastern Asia in particular. The emergence of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine in international diplomacy sparked renewed faith in the ability of the international community to protect vulnerable peoples against the ravages of conflict, poverty and repressive regimes. Deaths from war and conflict dropped worldwide and Westerners – Americans first and foremost – brimmed with a collective optimism that the liberal political and economic creed would ultimately prevail as humanity’s way of the future.

The past decade has put paid to much of that wishful thinking. The rise of organised anti-globalisation activism was a mere precursor to the events and ideas that have come to fundamentally shake the very underpinnings of the American-led global political and economic order. 9/11 saw a religious fundamentalist backlash against Western cultural imperialism and the spread of materialist and exploitative economic and political ideas, which had been brewing throughout the latter part of the 20th century, burst spectacularly into mainstream conscience. The disastrous war in Iraq saw liberal evangelism – and the cold power of US military might which underpins it – further delegitimised. Finally, free-market fundamentalism descended into a self-imposed spiral of destruction with the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, further bolstering the case of those who opposed the prevailing global order.

The result is a more fractured and uncertain world, with future developments more difficult to chart than ever before. Much literature is enthusiastically taking on that daunting task all the same. However, most analyses are doomed from the beginning, predicated as they are on fundamental misunderstandings about the nature and implications of the liberal democratic capitalism, globalisation and American military and economic hegemony that reigned supreme from the collapse of communism until – according to most accounts – the onset of the GFC (although theorists at times differ considerably as to the precise event or events which signalled the end of the inexorable rise of American-led global liberal capitalism).

One such analysis has been provided by the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs writer, Gideon Rachman, in his book Zero-Sum World (subtitled Politics, Power and Prosperity after the Crash). Rachman’s work is an impressive tome, surveying the rise of what he terms the liberal-democratic “Age of Optimism” out of neoliberal economics and the end of the Cold War and documenting in forensic detail the formidable array of global problems – climate change, resource shortages, poverty, overpopulation, financial crisis, failed states, terrorism and nuclear proliferation to name only some of the most pressing – which threaten global peace and prosperity.

Where Rachman’s thesis falls down, however, is in his excessively bright assessment of the advancement of human well-being worldwide even during the heady boom years of the “Age of Optimism”. It is true – and to some extent reassuring – that Rachman seeks to draw some of the lessons of the impasse in which global capitalism now finds itself, and in doing so he makes a clear attempt to steer clear of the dangerously over-optimistic hubristic idealism of neoliberalism and globalisation’s more passionate advocates of recent decades. However, Rachman nonetheless falls very much within the prevailing wisdom of mainstream political science. He has forged a career writing for leading media advocates for the American brand of corporation-driven globalisation, as he himself concedes in his book. His former and current employers, The Economist magazine and The Financial Times, he notes in the epilogue to Zero Sum World, have been “energetic chroniclers and promoters of globalisation and of the spread of free-market and democratic ideas”. He describes the crash of 2008 as a “disorienting experience” for commentators of his ideological persuasion. While all this makes him a soundly neutral observer in the eyes of current mainstream beliefs, it certainly detracts from his ability to critical analyse world events of past decades in any truly nuanced manner.

To begin with, Rachman describes the age of American-liberal hegemony as a “world where things were steadily improving”. Such a claim reflects the prevailing orthodoxy in political and economic theory – that the spread of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy was, in Rachman’s words once more, “a win-win” dynamic. Certainly this argument has merit when consideration is given to the dramatic economic development in the developing world over recent decades, most notably in India and China. It is undeniably true that liberalised global trade has unleashed powerful forces of growth which are improving the material standing of hundreds of millions who would otherwise likely have been destined for lives of grinding poverty.

Adopting a more critical perspective, however, problems soon begin to arise with the conception of the neoliberal age as the high point of global prosperity – particularly once we factor in the caveat that development must by definition be economically and ecologically sustainable.

One major problem that Rachman overlooks is that developed world growth through the “Age of Optimism” was largely based on the “smoke and mirrors” expansion of a complex financial services industry. Much accumulation of wealth in the US, Europe and Western “outposts” such as Australia over recent decades can be attributed to speculative investment in finance and real estate. As the present-day global economic crisis demonstrates, much as did the 1999 Asian Financial Crisis and the burst of the dot-com bubble around the turn of the millennium*, such growth was never likely to be sustainable on a scale of decades.

Furthermore, and perhaps more pertinently in terms of debating the merits of free-market capitalism as the path to global prosperity, much developing world growth over the same period has depended on unsustainable Western consumption habits. I saw on French television news only this morning that the EU and US together account for 37% of Chinese exports. While China and India have been able to sustain growth through the GFC despite a collapse in demand from the US in particular, it is clear that these countries’ ongoing rapid development is threatened by a set of global economic imbalances and would suffer greatly from a protracted period of depressed demand from developed economies.

Even more broadly, the entire globalised economy relies on the availability of relatively cheap fossil fuels for transport, agriculture and the manufacturing of a stunningly diverse range of goods. Crude Impact is an excellent and provocative documentary which examines the extent of global dependence on fossil fuels, and the dangers this dependence presents in an age of concern about global warming and peak oil. Rachman cautiously dispels fears of oil shortages by pointing out that concerns about diminishing supply were overcome after the oil shocks of the 1970s, primarily through new finds and technological progress. He also notes that alternative sources of fossil fuels are emerging, such as unconventional gas (shale and coal seam – hardly a prospect likely to warm the hearts of environmentalists) and hydrocarbons from burning coal. Such an analysis blithely ignores the dangers potentially posed by climate change through the release of greenhouse gases – and the extent to which Rachman fails to grasp the disconnect between the energy and growth imperatives of market economies and the ecological constraints imposed by global warming is one of the more disconcerting aspects of Zero Sum World. However, the list of serious global challenges posed by ongoing reliance on fossil fuels transcends concerns about climate change and resource shortages. Budgetary problems in Europe and the US mean that the military might that has facilitated a ready supply of oil and gas for the global markets will become evermore financially unsustainable over the medium term. Meanwhile, the West’s reliance on foreign oil has been a major source of conflict over the course of the 20th century – particularly in places such as Africa, Latin America and the Middle East – and dwindling conventional reserves can only exacerbate this predicament.

Many of the same problems afflict the global supply of food. Again, the exact extent of the issues and the likely ramifications of future variables are extremely hard to accurately map out. Global warming risks sparking large-scale desertification of crucial agricultural lands, overpopulation means demand is outstripping supply in many cases, spikes in the price of oil threaten the very technological basis of large-scale, mechanised agriculture. Foods riots in 2008 may well be a sign of what is in store, and unconscionable speculation by Western financiers in basic foodstuffs has been demonstrated to have made things even worse. There are also serious concerns about securing supplies of water needed for an ever-expanding global population.

Of additional concern, and largely airbrushed in Rachman’s account of recent history, is the rampant inequality that has accompanied free-market fundamentalism wherever it has spread. On an international scale, the fruits of globalisation have not been reaped by regions where abject poverty exists, most notably sub-Saharan Africa. Increased wealth has disproportionately accrued to the wealthy – both within and between countries. Given the scale of the ecological constraints on development rapidly becoming apparent, it would appear that the solution lies not in an ever-expanding market economy but in privileging localised economies based on small-scale self-dependency initiatives, complemented by broader markets for necessary consumer goods and services. More participatory and inclusive modes of governance will have to be part of the equation.

More and more evidence suggests that beyond a certain point, it is equality, not average income, which most accurately predicts the well-being of a society on almost any given measure. TED currently has a video up of a talk which neatly encapsulates this most threatening of home truths. While growth is undeniably necessary in developing countries for its citizens to have a decent standard of living, most people in the West have long passed the point at which increases in material wealth have any appreciable impact on well-being. And, as is becoming increasingly clear, the “tragedy of the commons” – what economists refer to as the externalities of Western consumption – environmental degradation, resource depletion, conflict and inequality – often largely outweigh the satisfaction of obtaining evermore income and consumer goods.

While trying to avoid the insulting hubris of many political and economic leaders in their appraisal of current forms of capitalism, Rachman repeatedly succumbs to the arrogant and presumptuous terminology of the dominant order’s most diehard supporters. For instance, he repeatedly brandishes the word “free” as if Western-style consumer capitalism and liberal democracy are the best of all possible worlds in terms of personal and collective liberty. Establishing such a patently false dichotomy between “free” Western societies and the rest of the world erroneously assumes a correlation between personal and political liberty and “economic freedom” as it is conceived under corporation-dominated global capitalism. There is an abject failure within this discourse to account for structural constraints on liberty of conscience and action inherent in liberal democratic societies (when viewed from a Chomskyan perspective, for instance). Furthermore, we can perceive an assumption that the West’s materialist and individualistic ideology constitutes the optimal form of the human condition, and therefore an endpoint of social, political and economic evolution.

Unfortunately for this conception of freedom, globalisation, characterised as it is by large corporations as the dominant power structure (in terms of control of the mass media, influence on electoral politics, ideological legitimacy and their status as bastions of consumption-based lifestyles), is resulting in an ever-widening gulf between governance and ordinary citizens. Perhaps the most apparent manifestation of this tendency is the widely-acknowledged democratic deficit at the heart of the European Union – in many ways an institution at the heart of neoliberal globalisation. The idea that all citizens of the world yearn for economic and political “freedom” based on this model is one of the most arrogant and galling aspects of the mainstream liberal mindset.

As an example of these culturally chauvinistic undertones which run throughout the book, Rachman dismisses Iranian theocracy as a system which manifestly inhibits freedom. I would contend, however, that the Iranian political system is merely an alternative all-encompassing ideological superstructure (the so-called “rules of the game” in which nearly all debate takes place). In other words, it constitutes some form of democracy (Iran does, for instance, hold presidential elections with multiple candidates, even if the dominant power structure – the country’s ayatollahs and their minions in the Revolutionary Guard – undeniably rig this process on a consistent basis). However, this democracy operates only within the loose limits of the prevailing ideological framework, much in the same fashion as parliamentary politics function within liberal democracies. If this sounds revolutionary and outrageous, consider the following: what is the status of those within free-market capitalist societies who advocate alternative economic and political superstructures – be they old-school Marxists or something a little more modern? In Australia, not even the “extreme” Greens come even close to fulfilling such a role within electoral politics. The US suffers from an even deeper dearth of original thought within its democratic structure. Only in more social-democratic Europe and Latin America can we find true radical alternatives to the power structures of consumer, corporate capitalism.

Of course, it would be intellectually disingenuous to suggest that the Iranian theocracy is as “free” or tolerant as modern liberal democracies. However, the broader point about political debate and mainstream belief operating firmly within an overarching ideological framework holds equally true of both forms of society. There are heretics in both systems, which differ only in the manner in which those dissidents are persecuted and ostracised. Tellingly, Rachman does not linger in his book on the state of liberty in whole-scale participants in the Western-led global capitalist system, such as Saudi Arabia, where human rights are in an exponentially worse state than subjects of consistent Western demonisation, such as Iran.

It is these simple observations of contradictions at the heart of the liberal democratic narrative that render Rachman’s triumphalism about the “spread of democratic ideas” through the “Age of Optimism” particularly wrong-headed and at times even distasteful.

Zero Sum World can be further identified as a thesis sitting firmly within the bounded rationality of the prevailing orthodoxy when considering Rachman’s perspective of both the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the sub-primes crisis of 2008. Rachman characterises both these events as mere “irrational exhuberance” – taking ideas such as free-market economics and liberal democracy which are supposedly fundamentally correct to a logical and damaging conclusion. This almost amounts, it would seem, to considering both these catastrophes as the simple result of “too much of a good thing”. This is wrong, as the tenets of neo-conservatism, neoliberal economics and violently imposing democracy on non-compliant countries, represented not an aberration within a fundamentally just and righteous process, but a seismic shift in the evolution of human society towards true democracy, prosperity and well-being. It can certainly be argued that post-1980s neoliberalism has set most human societies on the wrong trajectory entirely, particular when consideration is given to factor ranging beyond mere material wealth – for instance social justice, emotional and spiritual well-being, social peace and cohesion, and environmental sustainability.

Bewilderingly, Rachman also seems to identify the GFC of 2008 an event which saw the sudden emergence of a suite of dangerous global problems, such as climate change, extremist ideologies and resource shortages. Yet it is clear that these problems were always the inevitable outcome of a blind faith in consumption-based, corporation-dominated, inequitable, excessively homogenous and ecologically unsustainable global capitalist order.

Despite Rachman’s admirable intellectual gravitas, the unfortunate conclusion drawn from his analysis of these global issues is that ongoing US dominance of the international system is the best recipe for success in moulding a peaceful and prosperous world of tomorrow. He fails to perceive that the US – and the broader developed world – is hopelessly mired in hubristic fantasies about the righteousness of its own ideologies. Furthermore, it is unlikely to emerge from its delusions vis-à-vis its fundamentally undemocratic dominant power structures, its suboptimal economic order (in terms of human well-being) and its lack of concern for equity and sustainability within the global order which it, more than any other civilisation, has contributed to shaping.

Unfortunately, the varying forms of statist and kleptocratic authoritarianism embodied by the rising powers of Russia and China offer little solace as a credible alternative. Likewise, the 20th century’s battle of ideas between totalitarian socialism and laissez-faire capitalism is one that has alright been fought and won. In fact, contrary to Rachman’s distinctively unimaginative solution, the best hope lies in a rethinking of global economic and political power structures which will draw on the best of Western culture and the globalisation it has fawned while addressing the fundamental contradictions which seem sure to spell the demise of global capitalism in its current form at some point in the future.

Depressingly, however, given the current balance of power relations both between and within the world’s largest powers, the future is less in our hands than we may like to think.

* Greyed-out section added as a result of online feedback.

Dean is an occasional columnist for the Fairfax press, which describes him as a “freelance writer and advertising creative director”. He purports to be a staunch defender of freedom – freedom, that is, of the corporate sector on whose back he makes his living to make money without any attempts by society, through the state, to impose controls in the interests of the wider good.

If that sounds familiar, it probably has something to do with the resources sector’s shameful bleating about the Rudd government’s proposed mining tax, which resulted in a highly untoward back-down from federal Labor on the issue. Only recently, with ongoing revelations about the meagre returns the Australian community can expect from the record profitability of mining and resource exports and the far-from-transparent negotiations through which three large corporations secured a revised tax skewed in their favour after Julia Gillard’s arrival as PM, has the broader community begun to realise just how raw a deal this country is getting from its mineral wealth.

Or maybe it’s more to do with the gambling industry and their audacious claim that, should the state seek to curb the profits they draw from problem gamblers (up to 40% of total gambling revenue, apparently), the community will nonetheless suffer due to “lost jobs” and reduced investment in local communities by clubs. In other words, we’ll continue to exploit you for our profit, and in return we’ll continue to employ the staff we need to make said profit and even throw in a few thousand dollars here and there for kids’ sporting teams. Spare me.

Even in the illustrious company of the gambling and mining industries, there aren’t many sectors I find more distasteful than advertising and marketing. Ads frequently seek to undermine our capacity for rational choice through combinations of deceit, misrepresentation, spin and appealing to our baser instincts. The insidious spread of the marketing society at times almost seems to amount to totalitarian thought control, making a mockery of the oft-repeated claim that liberal democracies are the only true “free” societies. Today, I can’t sit in my living room without being exposed to a barrage of crass, manipulative marketing messages blaring from a television tuned to a commercial network. I can’t open a newspaper without being assaulted by full-page advertisements for products responsible for all manner of social problems – alcohol chief among them. Walking down the street, entering shops, sitting in others’ cars or on public transport, browsing the internet: all everyday tasks which have become impossible to accomplish without being exalted by unsolicited messages – many seemingly aimed at an audience with an average mental age of eight – to consume, consume, consume. The indoctrination effect is near total. The worldview whereby corporate propaganda’s ubiquitousness is normalised within a discourse centring on the power of individuality rationality and consumer choice. Suddenly, we find ourselves constrained in our power to reason, and hence to challenge this form of cultural hegemony, in a way that we generally only consider possible under totalitarian regimes.

Rowan Dean’s latest opinion piece opens by criticising the “faux sincerity” of industry self-regulation, such as the alcohol industry’s DrinkWise or the fast food industry’s Australian Quick Service Industry Initiative for Responsible Advertising to Children. I almost caught myself believing that this diehard advocate for an unfettered marketing society was willing to criticise corporate power and the way it uses marketing to promote or sustain social ills – in this case alcohol abuse and obesity – from which big capital profits handsomely.

Of course, it wasn’t to be. Dean’s gripe with this self-serving trend to self-regulation was that it may “encourage ever more intrusive regulation” of advertising, by legitimising the assumption that restricting marketing activities can curb excessive consumption. The true culprits, Dean claims, are “individual parental responsibility, lack of self-discipline and freedom of choice”. This is the well-rehearsed faux libertarian argument about “choice” and “personal responsibility” corporate types so like to trot out in order to downplay the negative social consequences of their business practices.

To suggest that restricting advertising is useless in solving social and health problems flies in the face of evidence about the effectiveness of anti-smoking strategies, where a blanket ban of advertising tobacco products helped culturally delegitimise a damaging practice. Likewise, it is false to assert that there is no reliable evidence that restricting advertising of junk food, especially that aimed at children, could improve public health.

Dean, reliant as he is on marketing socially damaging products to make a living (he admits to having marketed not only junk food but tobacco in his time), characterises legitimate state action in regulating advertising as “more government interference in the marketing of legal products”. This is another familiar line fed to the public by corporates seeking to protect their business models, and it too appeals to most people’s innate sense of individuality and the attachment to liberty and freedom of choice that comes with it. Unfortunately, just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.

Dean seeks to associate supporters of more regulation of marketing as “bureaucrats” whose “hunger for rules won’t ever be satiated”. A funny characterisation of medical professionals, academics and public health advocates, to say the least.

These faux libertarian arguments should be recognised for what they are: disingenuous strategies to undermine the case for state regulation of markets which seeks to protect corporate profitability – of the advertising sector first and foremost – at the expense of the broader public good.

One need only cast one’s memory back to the major industrial disputes of decades past to perceive just how things have come full circle.

In 1998,  for instance, the Liberal-led coalition under John Howard was strident in its support for Patrick Corporation in its massive industrial dispute with the Maritime Union of Australia. In what was rationalised as a push for increased productivity (through reduced conditions and forced casualisation of waterfront employment), the Coalition saw no impediment to changes which would ultimately see a near-halving of the company’s permanent workforce through voluntary redundancies.

None of this is particularly surprising. Conservatives traditionally side with business and the corporate class in pitch battles with workers and unions over industrial relations and workplace reform. One of the better known international examples is the 1984-85 UK miners’ strike, where Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government successfully implemented neo-liberal industrial relations reforms in the face of bitter and protracted union and worker opposition. As a result, numerous mining operations closed down in the face of international competition (through cheap imports) coupled with growing reliance on oil and gas for power production.

Through all these examples, the ideological divide remains clear and consistent. Liberals’ and conservatives’ belief in free-market reform as a path towards greater productivity is opposed by a unionised working class which fears (and rightly so) bearing the brunt of such policies through lost employment, income and reduced working conditions.

Which brings us to today, and the Greens’ and Labor’s attempts to push through carbon pricing reform in the face of union reticence, popular suspicion, and staunch liberal/conservative opposition.

It’s not hard to see how we’ve come full circle. We suddenly find the liberal/conservative Coalition, traditional proponents of free market, neo-liberal “economic rationalism” including attacks on union power and support for globalised production, standing up for jobs in industry.

The irony is galling to those with even an elementary grasp of political and economic history. In 1990, the Port Kembla steelworks employed about 30 000 workers. In the face of technological advancement, liberalisation of the labour market and production processes, and organisational restructuring, that figure had fallen to 21 000 by 1996, and today stands at barely 5000. In just 20 years, that’s about a 85% decrease in the number of local workers employed in the region’s largest industrial operation.

Direct and indirect employment sustained by BlueScope Steel’s Port Kembla operations apparently now totals about 12 000 people, which is of course nothing to be sniffed at in a regional economy of a couple of hundred thousand workers, but this number remains vastly inferior to even the direct employment figure from barely two decades ago.

The point being? Well, globalisation and pursuit of neo-liberal policies which bolster corporate profits while decimating industry are apparently a legitimate reason to shed 85% of steel-making jobs in 20 years, in the eyes of liberal-conservatives. Yet a to-date relatively minor impost aimed at fostering innovation in green technologies, promoting energy efficiency in industrial operations, and slanting investment conditions in favour of less emissions intensive production early to avoid pain later, evidently is not. Never mind that initial compensation levels leave corporate bosses with little justification to immediately shed jobs.

In truth, Tony Abbott’s motives in so vehemently opposing a carbon price in Australia are doubtlessly far from pure. Even leaving aside his well-documented political opportunism which seemingly knows no bounds, Abbott adheres to a political ideology that has in the past seen no barrier to turning a blind eye to 85% cuts in industry employment in order to bolsters profits and improve “productivity”. In other words, jobs are important, but only when it suits him.

There is every chance resources and manufacturing executives will seize the confusion over carbon pricing to shift yet more production offshore, thus reducing costs and boosting profits. There is little doubt that in the case of job losses which, given initial compensation levels and the ongoing profitability of resources and raw materials exports to China and other boom economies will be unjustified, Abbott will blame the eco-tax and not the profit-hungry execs. This is true to conservative form.

Ultimately, the prerogative of conservatives under Anglo-Saxon-style über-liberalism is to champion almost anything that favours private gain (endless tax cuts, liberalisation, curtailing union power) while opposing almost anything that seeks to promote the public good beyond the much-venerated “profit motive” (regulation, ending inefficient subsidies, eco-taxation).

Anyone who thinks Tony Abbott and his liberal-conservative opposition are champions at heart of employment in primary industry should think again. The increasingly bitter attacks on the Greens as being anti-jobs is hypocrisy in the extreme.

This discussion would probably not be complete without looking at the actual effects of all this conservative-supported job-cutting in the Illawarra over recent years (in the interests of balance, yes, the Labor Party is now just as beholden to corporate over popular interests, as exemplified under the corrupt state ALP administration for the past 15 years).

It is a fact that, while the regional economy has been able to absorb much of the lost jobs through employment growth in services and other sectors, unemployment in the Illawarra has consistently remained above the national average – somewhere in the region of 7-8% compared to about 5% nationally. Youth unemployment is of particular concern. The reliance on industry at Port Kembla is real, therefore the initial compensation arrangements to trade-exposed manufacturing to shield these businesses from international competitors facing no carbon price are important. The Greens are wrong to deride as “rent-seeking” the very real argument that, in the immediate to medium term, every tonne of carbon emissions cut in Australia will simply be produced offshore in less emissions-efficient operations.

It is vital to remember that the initial aim of carbon pricing revolves not around shutting down emissions-intensive industries (with the resulting job losses), but providing “incentivisation” (I love that non-word) to existing industry to invest in energy efficiency, while ensuring new investment will be increasingly channelled to comparatively more profitable “green” industries like renewable energy.

It is this aim – effectively subsidising less profitable investment in more sustainable economic activity without immediately threatening the overall profitability of emissions-intensive operations – which has not been clearly articulated by the Gillard government. The result is the impression among voters that the tax is immediately going to try and de-carbonise the economy while somehow protecting jobs reliant on those very same carbon emissions – a logical impossibility.

As I have long argued, it makes sense to take this earlier, smoother approach to the de-carbonisation challenge by imposing a modest price on carbon now. The competitive advantage it will ultimately give Australia will be felt in the years and decades to come, as international investment in clean energy and related industries ramps up (this is already happening in places both with – such as Europe and California – and without – e.g. China – formal carbon pricing mechanisms). Without some serious policy to fund investment in renewables, Australia risks falling badly behind the curve in this crucial industry of the future.

In a carbon-intensive economy such as Australia’s, the incentive to act earlier is all the more strong. Massive public opposition to the carbon tax is testament to the lack of political and economic vision of our “lucky (but dumb) country”, and to the dearth of progressive convictions along with the sheer incompetence of Labor.

You don’t have to look far to see the boundless economic opportunities. Apart from Australia’s massive natural advantages in solar, wind and wave power, investment in emissions abatement in existing industry has been delayed for too long. The proposed cogeneration plant at Port Kembla, which could cut the steelworks’ emissions by 9%, is a perfect example:

Putting a price on carbon could be the trigger that finally causes BlueScope to invest in its stalled cogeneration plant at the Port Kembla steelworks…

Basically, this investment could stimulate employment and help the profitability of BlueScope’s steel-making operations in the Illawarra by enhancing energy efficiency.

The apparent contradiction between traditional progressive and conservative values outlined above may, in the light of this evidence, be pure illusion. Although it’s clear that the Liberal party is rejecting liberal values in trying to argue in favour of direct government regulation to achieve emissions reduction targets, they may in fact be adhering to their traditional support for easy corporate profit over progressive investment in employment, albeit in an underhand way.

Or, more likely than not, Tony Abbott is just an intellectually disingenuous opportunist fanning understandable popular confusion and fear for his own electoral advantage.

It will be at the expense of moving towards the Australian economy of the future.

A pretty bold statement, most people will find. But consider the evidence:

• liberal democracies are invariably built on a relatively free-market economic structures in which corporations and industry wield immense political and economic clout. The tendency has accelerated in recent decades with the advent of neo-liberalism and the subsequent dismantling of the “mixed economy” that sustained both consistent growth and social equity through the post-war boom years. Emissions abatement threatens to impose costs on corporations, threatening profits. With comparatively weak popular engagement and power within the political and economic super-structure, the difficulty of reforming the economy to respond to climate change is immense.
• responding to climate change threatens the traditional cosy relations between mainstream political bodies – conservative, liberal and “social democratic” alike – and the afore-mentioned corporate-dominated power structures.
• inducing changes to people’s lifestyles in order to render them more ecologically sustainable threatens well-honed notions of personal and economic liberty – “who are you to tell me to drive a more efficient car, own a smaller home, use public transport, buy energy efficient appliances…?”
• climate science and the economics of climate change are so overwhelmingly complex that they are simply beyond the full comprehension of non-experts – in other words, almost the entire voting public.
• the massive growth of the financial sector and share ownership has seen many people’s incomes, pension funds or insurance schemes tied up in the profitability of what are likely to be highly emissions-intensive companies.
• The far-reaching implications of the climate crisis have created excellent fodder for a whole raft of conspiracy theorists, anti-establishment figures, merchants of controversy (think of Christopher Monkton) and an impressive variety of nut-job attention-seekers to mount a very profitable industry based on disinformation, fear-mongering and generally being unhelpful.

I could go on…

But with the anti-carbon tax lobby whipping itself into a veritable frenzy since the recent announcement of the federal government’s plans to price carbon, now would probably be a good time to take a step back, take a deep breath, and try and rationally examine the implications of the scheme that has been announced.

Here is a list of reasons why pricing carbon – right now and in a form broadly resembling the scheme proposed by Labor, the Greens and the cross-benchers:

• Climate change seems to be real. Sounds kind of obvious to those of us who approach the question with an open mind, but even studying for a semester under a die-hard climate skeptic has failed to change my view on the accuracy of climate science. This is a risk management issue – there is extremely strong evidence of anthropogenic climate change that has been building through peer-reviewed scientific debate for decades now. The time for politicians to respond has long passed. We are paying catch up.
• Australia has a highly emissions-intensive economy by global standards. Put simply, this means we have further to go in order to set our economy on an environmentally sustainable footing in terms of reform and emissions reductions.
• A little pain now will avoid a lot of pain later. The proposed carbon pricing scheme is, contrary to the Rudd-era ETS, relatively scalable. It largely locks in a paltry 5% cut in emissions on 1990 levels by the year 2020, but can be rapidly scaled up in the event of progress in global climate negotiations. Similarly, sparking early investment in renewable energy and related industry immediately will allow a smoother, less painful transition to a low-emissions economy, while avoiding massive job losses in the profitable resources and energy sectors upfront (due to massive levels of compensation).
• It won’t simply “send emissions offshore”. This is a furphy propagated by those who profit handsomely from emitting lots of greenhouse gases and their political cheerleaders. A booming China will ensure resources, mining and raw material manufacturing will remain highly profitable despite this modest impost.
• It will make Australia a global leader in tackling carbon emissions. It says a lot for people’s view of our place in the world when they treat this as a bad thing. The importance of establishing effective, functioning carbon pricing mechanisms in facilitating a binding global treaty shouldn’t be underestimated.
• It’s the cheapest way to reduce emissions. Any serious student of climate change economics knows that Tony Abbott’s proposed “direct action” scheme is an inefficient, ineffective excuse for a climate change policy designed to delay necessary reform and pander to the numerous climate skeptics in the Coalition ranks. Previous bipartisan support of carbon pricing demonstrates this.

Again, I could go on, but those are probably the main points.

Of course, there are very real problems raised by opponents and supporters of the scheme alike, many of a technical nature. Here are some of the main issues surrounding the carbon tax:

• The Labor government is hopeless at communicating. Why, oh why can’t the ALP properly prosecute Abbott’s naked political opportunism in the climate change area? Why can’t they clearly articulate the above reasons why carbon pricing is a good idea in order to sell the policy and counter the bewildering and angry fear-mongering from industry and rabid political conservatives?
• The Labor government has a serious (and largely deserved) credibility problem. “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.” I personally detest Julia Gillard more for her risible climate change policies leading into the 2010 election than actually correcting those policies after the fact. But either way, it resembles a cynical, brazen lie.
• Australians think they’re under financial pressure when in fact we’ve never been collectively so prosperous in a material sense. Yes, the working class is struggling in an increasingly unequal society, but that should not be redressed on delaying sensible reform to reduce emissions, but through other policy areas.
• Emissions trading is vulnerable to cheating and fraud. Even the nascent carbon markets in the EU, certain US states and New-Zealand have demonstrated this. Tight government regulation of methods of obtaining emissions permits will be required once the scheme switches to an ETS in a few years’ time.

Ultimately, carbon pricing is good, progressive policy which is better tackled earlier rather than later. The list of reasons why it’s a good idea is long. Unfortunately, that of the barriers to its implementation is too.

For all those a bit lost in the technical detail, who are confused and don’t really know what to think or who to believe, I have a simple piece of advice. Think of the motives of the various participants in the current carbon tax debate. Where does the self-interest lie? The answer: overwhelmingly on the side of the corporate sector and emissions-intensive industry, their conservative political lackeys and the media personalities who do very well by peddling fear and misinformation on this crucial challenge our society must face.

I know who I would believe.