The big question for Scott Morrison and his colleagues is whether they want to be a backward-looking or forward-looking government.
Do they want to enshrine Australia as the last giant of the disappearing world of fossil fuels, and pay the price of declining relevance to the changing needs of our trading partners, with all the loss of jobs and growth that would entail?
Or do they have the courage to seize this opportunity to transform Australia into a giant in the production and export of renewable energy and energy-intensive manufactures, with all the new jobs and growth that would bring?
In recent weeks, the main customers for our energy exports – China, Japan and South Korea – have done something we’ve so far refused to do: set a date for their achievement of "carbon neutrality". Zero net emissions of greenhouse gases.
Faced with this, and the free advice from fellow conservative Boris Johnson that he should get with the program, Morrison has defiantly declared that Australia would make its own "sovereign decisions".
This is infantile behaviour from someone wanting to be a leader, like the wilful child who shouts, "You’re not the boss of me!"
It goes without saying that Australia will make its own decisions in its own interests. No other country has the ability or desire to force its will on us. But nor can we force our will on them. They will go the way they consider to be in their best interests, and it's clear most are deciding to get out of using fossil fuels.
We remain free to change our export offering to meet our trading partners’ changing needs, or to tell them all to get stuffed because producing coal and gas is what we’ve always done and intend to keep on doing. Our sovereignty is not under threat. No one can stop us making ourselves poorer.
A report issued on Monday by Pradeep Philip, head of Deloitte Access Economics, called A New Choice attempts to put figures on the choices we face in responding – or failing to respond – to global warming. I’m not a great believer in modelling results, but the report does much to illuminate our possible futures.
In last year’s election, Morrison made much of Bill Shorten’s failure to produce modelling of the cost to the economy of his plan to reduce emissions in 2030 by much more than the Coalition promised to do in the Paris Agreement.
Had he been sufficiently dishonest, Shorten could easily have paid some economic consultancy to fudge up modelling purporting to show the cost would be minor, but for some reason he didn’t. However, Morrison didn’t resist the temptation to quote the results of someone who, over decades of modelling the cost of taking action to reduce emissions, had never failed to find they would be huge.
It’s true that the decline of our fossil fuel industries will involve much expensive disruption to those businesses and the lives of their workers, as they seek out new industries in which to invest their capital and find employment.
But what’s a lot more obvious today than it was even last year is that this cost will be incurred whether it happens as a result of government policy, or because the decline in other countries’ demand for our fossil fuel exports leaves us with what financiers call "stranded assets" – mines and other facilities that used to turn a profit, but now don’t.
Last year it was possible for the cynical and selfish to ask why we should get serious about climate change when no one else was. Today the question is reversed: how can we fail to act when everyone else is?
One of Morrison’s great skills as a politician is his ability to draw our attention away from some elephant he doesn’t want us to notice. In the election he got us to focus on the cost of acting to reduce our emissions. The bigger question we should have been asking is, what’s the cost to the economy if we and the others don’t act to stop future global warming?
Whatever number some modeller puts on that cost, our "black summer" should have left us needing little convincing that climate change is already happening and already imposing great destruction, pain and cost on us. Nor is it hard to believe the costs won’t be limited to drought, heatwaves and bushfires, and will get a lot worse unless we stop adding to the greenhouse gas already in the atmosphere.
On a more positive note, Deloitte adds its support to those experts – including Professor Ross Garnaut and the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood – finding that "in a global economy where emissions-intensive energy is replaced by energy from renewables, Australia can be a global source of secure and reliable renewable power. Countries such as Japan, South Korea and Germany have already come to Australia asking for us to export renewable hydrogen for their own domestic energy consumption."
We have a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to simultaneously boost economic growth, create sustainable jobs [and] build more resilient and cleaner energy systems".
