Christopher Pearson: Hotheads warned, cool it

JOHN Howard's new position on greenhouse gas emissions is a bitter disappointment to many of his supporters, but it comes as no surprise. The writing was on the wall in March last year, when a Lowy Institute opinion poll found 70per cent of Australians were worried about global warming. Perhaps no prime minister seeking another term in office these days can hope to withstand that tide of public opinion, irrespective of the merits of the case. Changing tack and leaving the Labor Party looking economically subliterate over its commitment to a collapsing Kyoto model is plainly the right way to get re-elected.
Even so, there is something terribly galling about the federal Government deciding to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on controlling emissions of what will turn out to be, in all probability, a perfectly harmless gas. I hope Howard is still enough of a conservative at heart to be haunted by that thought for the rest of his career.
Business Council of Australia president Michael Chaney summed up the pragmatist case. "The public generally accepts global warming as an inevitability. That is likely to drive any political response. I am of the school that thinks of this issue in the same way that I think of home insurance. I doubt if my house will burn down but I'm prepared to pay a premium just in case."
This is a variation on the Roman line vox populi, vox dei, which concedes divine authority to popular opinion. Yet we know that strong leadership can change public opinion through time. I think the Prime Minister could and should have taken a bolder stand right from the start of the debate. He should have sacked ministers, especially in the environment portfolio, who falsely asserted an incontrovertible link between global warming and carbon dioxide. He ought to have promoted more of the informed debate we have seen in the pages of The Australian from the likes of Bjorn Lomborg and Bob Carter. No doubt we are a more credulous people than our grandparents were, but he might have tried appealing to the scepticism that was once such a prominent feature of the national character.
Instead the English-speaking world has had to rely on Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's most notable chancellor of the exchequer, for intellectual and moral leadership on these matters. On November 1 he gave a speech on the economics and politics of climate change to the Centre for Policy Studies in London that anyone whose mind is made up on the question of carbon dioxide could benefit from reading. His first target is the Stern report, which he dismisses as scaremongering.
"If scaremongering seems a trifle harsh, I should point out that, as a good civil servant, he was simply doing his masters' bidding. As (Tony) Blair's guru, Lord Giddens (the inventor of the so-called third way), laid down in this context, in a speech last year, 'in order to manage risk, you must scare people'."
Certainly ABC television and the more impressionable electronic media, led by Radio National, were keen to pass on the message: "It's official; be afraid, be very afraid."
Lawson says: "The voluminous Stern report adds disappointingly little to what was already the conventional wisdom, apart from a battery of essentially spurious statistics based on theoretical models and conjectural worst cases. This is clearly no basis for policy decisions, which could have the most profound adverse effect on people's lives, and at a cost (that) Stern almost certainly underestimates." Reinforcing the charge of disinformation from the Blair Government, he says: "It is, in a very real sense, the story of the Iraq war, writ large."
Lawson cites various authorities to conclude that a "modest, if somewhat intermittent, degree of global warming seems to have occurred. Why has this happened and what does it portend for the future? The only honest answer is that we don't know." He then goes on to administer a richly deserved rebuke to Blair's scientific claque: "It is simply not true to say that the science is settled, and the recent attempt of the Royal Society, of all bodies, to prevent the funding of climate scientists who do not share its alarmist view of the matter is truly shocking."
The next leg of Lawson's argument relies on two irreducible truths. "First, there is no way the growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be arrested without a very substantial rise in the cost of carbon, presumably via the imposition of a swingeing carbon tax, which would require, at least in the short to medium term, a radical change of lifestyle in the developed world. Are we seriously prepared to do this? (A tax would at least be preferable to the capricious and corrupt rationing system (that) half-heartedly exists today under Kyoto)."
Without settled science to warrant it, how many people will stand still for any length of time for a vast blow-out in the price of energy? As he points out elsewhere, "the trebling of oil prices since Kyoto was agreed in 1997 has done little to reduce carbon emissions". When the millennial panic about saving the planet has died down, as we can be reasonably confident it will, how politically sustainable are artificially inflated energy costs likely to prove?
Lawson's other unavoidable fact is that, even if the developed world were prepared to forgo its accustomed reliance on fossil fuels: "It would still be useless unless the major developing nations, notably China, India and Brazil, were prepared to do the same, which they are manifestly and understandably not." No amount of jaw-boning by Howard and Peter Costello is going to persuade the two Asian giants to curb their energy consumption and the economic activity that is delivering, often for the first time, a measure of prosperity to their people. It is utterly hubristic of them to imagine otherwise.
Instead, Lawson argues, "We are driven back to the need to adapt to a warmer world and the moral obligation of the richer countries to help the poorer countries to do so." The Dutch have been maintaining dykes to keep the sea at bay for 500 years and can manage higher sea levels if and when they materialise. The Bangladeshis, on the other hand, may already need substantial aid.
Lawson is commendably clear and insistent about the level of uncertainty surrounding the science of climate change. But as he says: "Uncertainty cuts both ways. While it may well be the case that, on a business as usual basis, the Earth is highly unlikely to get as warm as the climate alarmists tell us it will over the next 100 years, we cannot be sure: it might." He then goes on to develop an argument about "the precautionary principle", which is a model of lucidity, and to consider the likelihood of various extreme weather events and the prospect of global cooling. For people who believe everything they read or see on television, he also has some consoling things to say about glaciers and the melting of the polar ice.
Summing up, Lawson detects two main dangers in "the new religion of eco-fundamentalism", apart from the needless havoc it may wreak on some developed nations' economies. The first is that "the global salvationist movement is profoundly hostile to capitalism and the market economy ... Given the fact that the only way in which the world's poor will ever be able to escape from their poverty is by embracing capitalism and the global market economy, this is not good news."
The second is even more disturbing. "It could not be a worse time to abandon our own traditions of reason and tolerance, and to embrace instead the irrationality and intolerance of eco-fundamentalism, where reasoned questioning of its mantras is regarded as a form of blasphemy. There is no greater threat to the people of this planet than the retreat from reason we see all around us today."