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August 18, 2011
I have to agree with Giles Parkinson's judgement in Climate Spectator that the conservative's political strategy in Australia is one of opposing a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade scheme, undermining a clean energy policy, and attacking piece by piece, state-based incentives for to encourage the emergence of a renewable energy industry .
This strategy is expressed very clearly around solar energy. Though Australia has more sun than any other country there is a deep seated opposition to solar power. There is also a determination to scale back any support for renewable energy (including wind energy) in WA, NSW and Victoria. The impression that is given is that the conservative's energy policy is that electricity is, and should be, produced from coal fired power stations.
That is Australia's future. So the renewable energy industry has to be strangled at birth by creating a variety of log jams despite all the talk about the transition from coal to gas to ensure that Australia achieve its 2020 targets. In WA, where mass deception about global warming is widespread in the media, that rhetoric looks more like talking up the North-West Shelf gas as Australia's next big thing.
The economic justification for conservative's conception of Australia's future is the neo-liberalism antagonism to strong environmental mitigation targets because it is defined as a big constraint on economic and political autonomy of corporations and a broad regulation of the market. This antagonism results in a deep-seated anti-ecological and anti-social bias because it favours the profits of the corporations now, not the long term public interest. The result is a degradation of the physical and biological environment.
Thus the flow of pollutants into the underground water tables or aquifers created by the 'fracking' process of extraction for coal seam gas (CSG) is held to be a cost that, with the right discount rate applied, is almost negligible alongside the immense benefit of the energy we extract from CSG. If the tactic is to keep economics and ecology separate, the result is that governments are no longer trusted on the issue.
As Jeff Sparrow highlights that: what makes neoliberalism distinctive is its virulent hostility to any authority or values other than the market... In neoliberal theory, the laws of supply and demand regulate morality and aesthetics just as surely as they regulate everything else. What sells is, by definition, good, and vice versa.
That means neo-liberalism is hostile to neo-conservatism and the latter's emphasis on religion, tradition, nuclear family, and culture and it trashes everything the neo-conservatives hold dear. So the hostility to the left (renewable energy is used to hold the free marketeer's and neocon's alliance together.
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The coal seam gas issue pits two conservative constituencies — farming and mining — directly against each other. So it will be difficult for Tony Abbott to be all things to all people.
Given the long history of special treatment for mining extended by Australian governments of all persuasions, the states and Commonwealth. The miners will win in spite of the environmental issues around coal seam gas.
We should remember that the mining industry is one of the Liberal Party’s biggest donors.