Success endangers greens


"EARLIER this month, a congregation of 16 religions in Australia declared climate change a moral issue. Anglicans, Catholics, Muslims and Jews claimed there was a moral imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If only it were that simple.
Although there is undoubtedly a moral aspect to it, climate change defines the new order of environmental challenges that confront us. Their solutions involve understanding and resolving complex scientific, economic and geopolitical challenges, radical technological advances and multibillion-dollar shifts in investment and risk management.
Spawned by the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s, the modern environmental movement has flourished on a diet of alarm and alert, filling a provocative but generally valuable role as social gadfly with strong left-wing credentials, drawing its relevance from revealing environmental problems and then targeting governments and companies for their actions or inaction.
As such, the environment debate has traditionally been portrayed as a contest between good and evil, between right and wrong. Save the forests, no dams, no nukes. Their solutions have tended to be equally simple. Sign the Kyoto Protocol. Ban plastic bags. No old-growth logging. Save the whales.
A combination punch of prolonged drought, water restrictions and a series of increasingly confident and alarmed reports about the likelihood and impact of climate change has driven climate change mainstream and taken the environmental portfolio with it.
This shift has irrevocably brought the environmental issue from the fringes into the engine room of political debate in Australia. Most pundits are predicting the elevation of high-profile parliamentary secretary and former republican movement leader Malcolm Turnbull, to be p"