Nothing will come of nothing

The story of Australia’s failed attempt to create an emissions trading scheme in 2009 has been contested ever since, but the dramatic split the situation caused in the environment movement is not often part of the re-telling. Here’s how I saw the events of that fateful year.

There’s a segment on Radio National’s Sunday Extra program called “The year that made me.” Listening to it always makes me think of 2009, the year that it all began to unravel for climate and energy politics in Australia.

In January of 2009, I was an active member of the direct action collection and climate change ginger group Rising Tide Newcastle and we were in the last days of organising a grassroots climate action summit, bringing together people from community groups around the country. The month before, Kevin Rudd had announced Australia’s 2020 greenhouse emissions reduction targets to the National Press Club. I was one of three women that December day who rose to speak out in protest against the 5–15% target he announced. We were dragged from the room by security, but the point was made: the targets were below range of emissions reductions necessary from rich countries to make to contribute our fair share of keeping global warming below two degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, so it was not good enough. Following the targets announcement, protests erupted around the country and the Australian environment movement was united in its condemnation of the weak ambition Rudd had set for Australia’s contribution to global action on climate change. There was momentum, energy and lots of activity.

The grassroots climate movement was earnest and aflame with the urgency of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report. Superlatives and absolutes were part of how people established their roles and place in the change that was underway. The position one took about how rapid the transition away from fossil fuels had to be was a moral one. It was fundamentalist in its teleology: we want climate change to not be happening, therefore, we advocate for policies and actions by Governments and economies that will arrest it in the shortest possible time. Someone else could figure out how to make it happen. The argument was dressed in the language of reality: scientific principles, observations and predictions indicate that x, y and z catastrophic effects will happen unless we dismantle the greenhouse emitting industries. Politics, society, culture, the human condition, all of these were deemed adaptable and malleable compared to the fundamental rock of “the science” and the “reality” of the challenge we were facing. Failure to publicly state your commitment to radical decarbonisation was met with flabbergasted disbelief. How could you not want this? Don’t you understand the scale of the problem?

Other parts of the environment movement spoke of different realities: political and economic realities. These seemed to the people that understood them no less immovable than physics. The difference in approach boiled down to perspectives on the nature of the problem we were trying to solve. Some were trying to understand and solve problems of physics: what concentration of greenhouse gases is “safe” to maintain a stable climate? How much less is that than what we’re currently producing? Deduct industry from society and present results. Others were trying to solve a social and political problem: we are currently running our society on stuff that is creating wealth and comfort now, but will cause us great harm in the future… how do we help our society change its mind and stop doing this before the harm becomes irreversible?

Suburban parents that had been turned on to climate change by An Inconvenient Truth had become overnight activists and then autodidacts on energy policy. The more they read about the threat of climate change, the more intense became their commitment to bracing targets: we need 100% renewable energy by 2020 and 50% emissions reductions in the same time frame. In environmental campaigning, as in all social contexts, outsiders can expose the absurdity of habits that seem quite normal to those that are immersed in it. Seen through the eyes of new climate activists, the sophisticated manoeuvres of political advocacy appeared hopelessly ineffectual and this contrast was consistently a source of tension in the grassroots climate movement.

The same dynamic rends the hearts of idealists that attend the UN climate negotiations as I did for the first time in the second half of 2009. The awful juxtaposition of Pacific island nations pleading for their future against the procedural bastardry of Saudi Arabia, or the dry and relentless resistance of the United States, China, Australia or any number of others is too much for the soft-hearted to bear. The whole apparatus seems absurd until you widen your vision and imagine trying to negotiate consensus among 192 countries that covers not just energy and industry but agriculture, land use, forestry, global shipping and aviation, adaptation, finance and even how to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions in the first place. Impose those discussions on a legacy of colonialism and conflict, inject some geopolitical jostling and you start to get an idea of why the UN climate negotiations are so excruciating.

Australia’s Climate Action Summit took place in the period between Rudd announcing the Government’s mediocre target and the May 2009 press conference that split the climate movement in Australia. It was perfect timing, coming just a month after Rudd’s weak target announcement.

The climate summit brought together grassroots activists from around the country to plan, share skills and information and create a national network. In addition to the summit, we organised a lobbying blitz, taking grassroots people to meet backbenchers and ministers in a full day of meetings, capped off with a big protest action. Unlike the UN, we leaped straight into content without sorting out process, and that was a big mistake. Consensus was abandoned and the summit began voting on questions, decisions and proposals. The problem with voting is that up to half of the people participating in the decision will walk away dissatisfied, which may be fine for a company board but it is no good in groups that want to maintain their coherence and connection with each other. It’s no use voting and overruling if everyone in the group needs to take part in implementation of the agreements you make. This is why the UN often uses consensus: because the “united” part is more important to most of its members than any of the decisions they might make day to day and year to year.

At the end of the summit, over 1,000 people encircled Australian Parliament House, wearing red and calling for emergency action on climate change. We had been told by police that we were not to approach the parliament and go ahead with the circle, but there were too many of us, and we pressed ahead anyway, holding hands all the way around it and displaying banners declaring a climate emergency. It was a display of unity that disguised the seeds of division. The summit had adopted by majority a position to “prevent the CPRS from becoming law” but many people in attendance, including myself, had argued that it was only the current form of the CPRS that should be prevented from becoming law: amendment was possible and desirable.

In the five months from December 2008 to May 2009, however, the professional environmental sector and the grassroots activists agitating about climate change we were mostly united and there was a huge amount of pressure being put on politicians across the country. After the summit, MPs were targeted in 30 protests around the country. In addition, 60 climate action groups from around the country took the shared policy positions that had been adopted at the summit and sent them in a letter to Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. This letter was released publicly in the week prior to the CPRS Exposure Draft legislation.

The fossil fuel industrial complex was also agitating. The Minerals Council’s Mitch Hooke told 4Corners in March 2009 that cutting emissions by just 5% by 2020 was “the equivalent, not that it’ll ever happen, of moving to a candles economy, riding horses. You’ve got to shut down your transport sector and your power generation. That’s, that’s the magnitude of the challenge.”[1]

Rising Tide was participating in a CPRS working group convened by Climate Action Network Australia (CANA). I was usually our delegate to the meetings and phone calls for this group and found it frustrating that we did not spend our time getting out into the open our points of divergence, and how they were likely to effect the campaign work we were all doing. All the groups were united in opposition to the CPRS, but the triggers that would transform this opposition into support were different. Some would never support it. Some wanted restrictions on international trading, or removal of the $40 per tonne cap on the price. The working group did not put these thresholds on the table, or was not a trusting circle where people would nominate such information. In addition to that circle, there were circles being convened to which we were not invited, where the CEOs of the professional environment groups discussed the scheme, though they too, did not, or could not, develop agreed priorities.

The Climate Institute and Australian Conservation Foundation had also been working in another circle. While a thousand people were blockading coal exports at climate camp in Newcastle in July 2008, ACF and TCI launched the Southern Cross Climate Coalition (SCCC), a collaboration with the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Australian Council of Social Services committed to effective action on climate change, in conjunction with a fair and orderly transition for Australian industry and society. The SCCC was founded on the belief that collaboration across all sectors of Australian society was critical to achieving an effective, fair and lasting response to climate change.

CANA held its annual conference in March 2009. The CPRS and emissions reduction targets were the subject of energetic and repetitive debate and discussion. I put the questions that Rising Tide had about red lines and thresholds directly to the Australian Conservation Foundation’s climate change campaign manager. What would it take to switch ACF to supporting the CPRS? Would a 25% emissions reduction target do it? He confirmed this was the case. Such frank conversations must have been rare, because so many people seemed surprised by what happened next.

Over the weekend of 2–3 May, the CEOs of the Southern Cross Climate Coalition were called to Canberra, unbeknownst to other environmental groups and people in their own organisations. On the morning of Monday 4 May, the Government held a press conference. In the weeks prior, the CPRS had been facing the blow-torch of big business push back as well as environmental protest. Australian business wanted to delay the start of the scheme. Emissions intensive exporters wanted more free permits. Australian coal exporters wanted to not have to pay for their fugitive emissions, even though they didn’t qualify for emissions-intensive support. At every stage of development of the CPRS, concessions were made by the Government that gave industry more generous assistance, or looser constraints. The changes announced on 4 May continued this pattern: the start date of the scheme was delayed to July 2011, emissions intensive industry assistance was fattened, as were promised hand-outs to the coal industry, which topped a billion dollars, (though the coal mining sector was still going to have to pay for its fugitive emissions).

Changes were also made in response to environmental criticism. Provision was made to allow Australia to contribute finance to international climate adaptation and mitigation efforts; the criticism that individual action would not by itself raise Australia’s overall mitigation effort was appeased with a commitment that increased voluntary actions would be listed among the considerations for setting the scheme’s emissions caps (the caps were to be set by an independent body, not a politician); the Productivity Commission would be tasked with reviewing the efficacy and necessity of industry assistance once a global agreement was in place, and the upper end of the range of potential emissions reduction targets was increased to 25% below 2000 levels by 2020. Immediately following Penny Wong at the Government’s press conference were the CEOs of the organisations in the Southern Cross Climate Coalition, welcoming the changes and throwing their support behind the CPRS.

There were many observers and participants in the CPRS’s emergence and demise, and each will have different stories to tell about how, why and what happened to it. Many observers focus on the events in parliament, but for the environment and climate movement that May press conference was the turning point.

This was the moment the wave that had been building since the release of the Fourth Assessment Report and An Inconvenient Truth broke and washed to shore. People were angry that all the agitating they had done had been traded in by the SCCC for modest results, coupled with more generous concessions to polluting industries. The CANA members had not understood how much more important their cooperation with the ACTU and ACOSS was to ACF and TCI than the views of other environmentalists. They deemed common ground between the business, labour, social welfare and environmental sectors to be crucial to enduring climate change action in Australia. Climate change is a whole of society problem requiring whole of society effort to address. Some wreckers, particularly the wealthy owners and lobbyists of fossil fuel industries, can and must be contained and overruled in the effort to address it, but pitting climate change action against the entirety of the business, farming and labour sectors makes climate change action impossible, and so, common ground must be forged. The split also divided those with different perspectives of scale. Those who wanted to see Australia decarbonise as quickly as possible were angry. Those who were primarily interested in an international agreement emerging supported the CPRS so that Australia would have legislation and targets locked in that could add momentum to that agreement emerging.

The weaknesses of the CPRS and the broken faith of our discussion circles gave us no space to be glad that all our campaign efforts had achieved an impressive victory. We had managed to force the Government to increase its top-end reduction target from 15% to 25% in just five months. That is the power of an energetic movement that spans the radical grassroots, the community-based mainstream and the policy negotiators. Opponents now made paradoxical objection to the 25% target on the grounds that the conditions Rudd set for moving up to it were “impossible.” These conditions centred on a global agreement being forged at that could limit atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse pollution to 450 parts per million, the level that would give us a 50:50 chance of keeping global average temperatures less than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. To object that this condition was impossible seemed to me an absurdity. If a global agreement that could deliver that result was impossible, what were we even talking about? It was a high bar, of course, but it was what everyone said they wanted out of the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, which was scheduled for the end of that year in Copenhagen. It made no sense to dismiss the very thing we wanted as an impossibility, while insisting Australia be as ambitious as possible and brushing aside the difficulties of reaching consensus.

I represented Rising Tide on an emergency phone link up convened by CANA three days later which gave vent to people’s anger. ACF and the Climate Institute participated in the call, along with Greenpeace, the Conservation Councils, some Climate Action Groups, GetUp and Oxfam. Though Rising Tide was still of the view that the CPRS was too generous to polluting industries, and intended to maintain our ginger group activity, I was not surprised the SCCC groups had changed their stance. There were differences of opinion about the substance of the scheme, yes, but this conflict arose from failed consensus and communication. Having contributed so much to the political momentum that made the Government put the 25% target on the table, the rest of us did have a stake in how that move was received and built upon and we had been left out. Emotions were high, but even in that moment, we did not have an honest conversation with each other and the CEOs about why they kept the news to themselves for 24 hours.

Here’s a clue. Just a year previously, the Climate Institute had given Greenpeace a confidential heads-up that they and WWF would be making a joint announcement with the Australian Coal Association and the CFMEU calling for a taskforce to be set up “charged with developing and implementing a nationally coordinated plan to oversee rapid demonstration and commercialisation of 10,000 GWh of carbon capture and storage (CCS) electricity per year by 2020.”[2] The CCS argument was continually defusing pressure against new coal fired power stations (“It’s okay, we can retrofit them to capture the carbon!”) and a taskforce with a plan and a mandate would cast some of the light of reality onto the CCS chimera: how much will it cost? Is it feasible? What will it do to electricity prices? How long will it take? How long could it last? Greenpeace’s reaction on getting this courtesy notice that the announcement was coming was to leak it to the media before it happened, and Fairfax duly reported that, “A leading environment group has aligned itself with the coal industry to push the case for carbon storage technology, in a move that has split the green movement.”[3] A protest was organised at the WWF office in Sydney. Angry emails and phone calls were directed to TCI and WWF.

Rising Tide’s position on CCS was the same as Greenpeace’s: we felt that supporting CCS gave succour to the coal industry and betrayed those of us that fought them. We did not support public funds being spent on CCS research and development, seeing it as a dangerous and wasteful distraction. But would we have betrayed the confidence had we been the recipients of the heads up? We might have prepared something in reaction or distraction perhaps, we would have lampooned and jeered, but breaking trust has far-reaching consequences, and is not to be done lightly, for tactical advantage, on a long-run issue like climate change.[4] When the CPRS compromise blew up, TCI did not refer back to this debacle. Greenpeace however, did draw comparisons to the notorious treachery that saw WWF support John Howard’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act behind the backs of a delegated team of environment group representatives working with agreed red lines and “die in the ditch” amendments the groups were seeking together. In this instance, however, there had been no agreement about what amendments were sought, and improvements had been made to the scheme to gain environmental support, just not enough for most.

When the amended CPRS went to the Senate in August 2009, the Liberal, National and Greens parties and the cross-bench Senators all voted against it. Should the Greens have voted for it, with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Conservation Councils and the local climate action groups all denouncing it? They would have been harshly judged for doing so.

Rising Tide was blessedly not in a position where our support or opposition to the CPRS had any influence on the course of history. If we had been, we probably would have split acrimoniously too. Perhaps the same is true of other players — the Greens, Malcolm Turnbull, Greenpeace, the floor-crossing Liberals Sue Boyce and Judith Troeth. Perhaps they took the stances they did because they thought they were not in a position to make or break the outcome. It’s impossible to say for sure. I assumed that the very strong emotions and hard lines of many in the environment movement had an impact on the actions of the Greens, who insisted the Government put a 40% by 2020 emissions reduction commitment on the table, thereby driving Rudd and Wong into negotiation with the Liberal Party, or so they maintain. There were valid arguments to make about the problems with the CPRS, but there was also majority public support for the instrument, and the reasons for some environmentalists deciding to campaign against it, and actually celebrate its defeat were obscure to most Australians, if they even knew that a split had occurred, which is doubtful.

A week before Copenhagen, Rising Tide and other grassroots activists organised a sit-in at Australian Parliament House. On 23 November 2009, 200 citizens arrived in convoy at the underground car park and silently filed up the stairs, sitting down in rows and blockading the public entrance. We were calling for Kevin Rudd and his Government to secure a global climate deal at Copenhagen (“Make Copenhagen Count!”). It was an amazing scene. Politicians came down to either show support or take the opportunity to hector or grandstand for the surrounding media. The protest was visited by Bill Heffernan, Steve Fielding, Bob Brown and Christine Milne. After occupying the area for several hours, the police started arresting people. One by one, those 200 people were removed by the police and taken downstairs to the parking lots under parliament and released. Many of them passively resisted, and had to be carried by police officers.

Shortly afterward, I flew to Copenhagen as part of my role as International Coordinator for Climate Action Network Australia. Not long after the split in May, I felt I had to leave the grassroots and I took a job as International Coordinator for CANA, attending the UNFCCC climate negotiations in the lead up to Copenhagen. My job was to facilitate participation in the conference for the 70-odd Australian non-government CANA members that travelled there for it, as well as meeting with Australian government delegates and participating in international advocacy meetings of Climate Action Network. It was a wild two weeks, distressing and exciting in equal parts. Its ostensible purpose was adopting the global agreement presaged by the Bali Action Plan in 2007, the agreement that Rudd had declared a pre-condition for Australia adopting its 25% emissions reduction target. The story of how and why that negotiation failed is more important than Australia’s story about the CPRS and its myopic “climate wars.” There are resonances, though. There were negotiators surprised by deals announced at press conferences. Some countries that wanted the most ambition and had much to lose were left out of discussions to hammer out the Copenhagen Accord. It was another failure of consensus, spectacularly played out in an abysmally-facilitated closing plenary, which saw the 192 countries of the UNFCCC literally bleed and cry and shout their way into bitter division and the nadir of our hopes for global cooperation to avert climate change disaster.

The real and perceived failure of Copenhagen triggered a spectacular rebound of climate denial forces and the climate movement in Australia moved into its darkest hour. In the first week of February 2010, Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong introduced the third CPRS Bill into parliament, but it was doomed to fail. In December, a week before the Copenhagen meeting began, the Liberal Party had changed leaders. Malcolm Turnbull lost the leadership to Tony Abbott by one vote and the party thereby lost its commitment to action on climate change and the amended CPRS that Turnbull had negotiated. With the demise of the bill, Kevin Rudd had a trigger for a double dissolution election on the importance of climate change, just weeks after signing the Copenhagen Accord. But he did not use it. In April, he announced that the government was shelving the emissions trading scheme until after the next election.

The messages of environmentalism hold within them a core of egotism that can be destructive: “we are saving the world,” “one person can make a difference,” “if I don’t act, terrible damage will be done.” These affirmations put the self at the centre of the effort, but that distorts a problem as huge as climate change. To say of the CPRS that it was “worse than nothing,” and work to unravel and prevent an imperfect climate change response, was a gamble with the future I did not feel I had a right to make. Who were any of us to make such a call, given how high the stakes have always been? When it comes to mitigation of climate change, nothing is worse than nothing. Had Turnbull supported the CPRS in August 2009, had the Greens supported it in December that year, or had Rudd gone to a double dissolution, Australia might have had an operating emissions reduction scheme for the last nine years. Emissions would have peaked in 2008, and be steadily coming down. Writing this story a decade on, worse than nothing is what we’ve reaped. The Great Barrier Reef has been subjected to repeated devastating coral bleaching, the heat keeps climbing and unthinkable bushfire catastrophes have come down on us. There’s still no orderly transition or social consensus that we should calmly meet these challenges with ambition and courage.

We can’t know how things might have been, or whether a united environment movement would have made any difference. And yet, we must critically evaluate our decisions and their consequences: what if there had been no environmental campaigners working on climate change at all? During the CPRS debate, at the UNFCCC, in the development of the 2011 carbon price and afterward? Would it have all been just the same? Or worse? Or better? Did we turn climate change into a culture war, an ideological battleground, and thereby defeat any chance Australia had of acting in an orderly and effective way to reduce our contribution to it? Was it solely the fossil fuel industry, sowing its doubts and deceptions over four or five decades, that poisoned the politics of climate change, or could the environment movement have been an antidote to that poison, if it had acted differently? When I listen to stories of people running for their children’s lives from storms and floods and fires, a cold feeling of dread comes over me at the possibility that the movement I was part of may have not merely failed, but actually entrenched the bitter failure of humanity more generally to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

The bitterness of 2009 keeps returning. Everyone can see clearly how others failed, but few speak publicly about what they themselves might have done differently. For myself, I wish I had been less naïve, less hyperbolic. I wish I had been aware of the decades stretching ahead, as clearly as I now see them trailing behind us. I wish I had indulged less in the general thrust of pushing things to a brink we subsequently tumbled over. What happened in Australia in 2009 was part of a much bigger disaster, as the world skidded across the ice to Copenhagen and people, organisations’ and nation states’ vastly different ideas of what is negotiable and what is an immoveable reality crashed spectacularly. When these histories get rehashed, people reasonably ask “why are we going over this again?” The rehashing is an indication that we still don’t have agreement about what our individual and collective actions mean in the history of climate change. Without that agreement, it is hard to see how we will change that sorry history.

[1] 4Corners “Heat on the Hill,” first broadcast 9 March 2009. Transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/s2511380.htm

[2] The Climate Institute. 16 April 2008. “Historic alliance calls for a national task force on carbon capture and storage” http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/articles/media-releases/historic-alliance-calls-for-a-national-task-force-on-carbon-capture-and-storage.html

[3] http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/green-groups-in-carbon-plan-rift/2008/04/14/1208025091641.html

[4] And in the end, who cares? https://theconversation.com/decades-on-the-promise-of-clean-coal-remains-elusive-46522