Despite everything that’s happened over summer – and is yet to happen, with Fires Near Me apps still pinging around the country – Prime Minister Scott Morrison is clearly not going to do anything substantial on climate of his own accord. That’s even clearer after his confounding, defensive and at times nonsensical appearance at the National Press Club yesterday. So he and Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor and the rest of the coal-huggers will have to be dragged to it by the crossbench and backbench, state and territory governments, business and civil society and even quiet Australians. And underlying the PM’s verbiage is a logical fallacy: it makes no sense to invest in adaptation to warming while simultaneously pursuing policies that accelerate warming. How do you adapt to an ever-worsening climate? Far from being an investment, as the prime minister would have us believe, doing both adaptation and exacerbation at once is completely unsustainable – a fool’s path to both environmental and economic ruin.
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| Prime Minister Scott Morrison. |
As public concern and anger over climate change hit peak levels earlier this month, and after stumbling from one fireground to another amid the disaster, the prime minister talked about how the government’s emissions-reduction policies might evolve. As The Monthly’s editor, Nick Feik, wrote, that bright idea lasted a matter of hours. All it took was for one cabinet minister to speak off the record to The Australian, warning [$] that a change in policy would “blow the place up”, and the PM snapped back into line. Soon enough, Morrison was telling Sky News Australia host Peta Credlin that hazard reduction was as important, if not more important, than emissions reduction.
Read the story from The Monthly by Paddy Manning - “Emissions elisions - The PM has no plan for real action on climate change.”
