From Europe, a carbon game-changer?

Survey after survey reports that most Australians want our governments to tackle climate change. But when push comes to shove, as we know from experience, many of us are susceptible to scary stories about the household costs of such action.

Levelling the playing field: European Commission
 president Ursula von der Leyen in London last month. 

The Liberal and National parties also have a big problem with climate science, as we’ve been reminded this week. A small but noisy section of their membership demands that no quarter be given in what they see as an ideological battle. In the latest instalment of the saga, an eruption among a minority of National MPs, themselves a small minority of government MPs, has propelled the government even further from reality. It would take a prime minister with a very large dollop of internal authority to drag his or her party towards a rational long-term approach — but Scott Morrison, in 2020, is not one of those.

And if Labor wins the next election, it will again be reliant on the Greens to pass legislation in the Senate (or, if it’s unlucky, the Greens plus others, as the Rudd government faced), and the minor party, especially under fire-breathing leader Adam Bandt, will drive a hard bargain. Labor, in any event, has gone cold on climate action since the sad events of last May.

Read the story from Inside Story by Peter Brent - “From Europe, a carbon game-changer?”