A spectre is haunting Australia. The spectre of direct government investment in renewable energy.
Well it should be anyway.
As Tony Abbott gallops around the parliament shouting “I’m the king of the castle team Australia”, tearing up the carbon tax (aka the carbon price), demolishing what remains of the welfare state, demonising refugees and muslims and making a mockery of himself of the world stage, a new debate has quietly emerged amongst progressives and climate activists about whether we should ‘change tack’ when it comes to climate campaigns.
The Greens federally seem happy enough to rally people around a revival of emissions trading. As has been covered in Green Left, here, here, here, here andhere, we reckon it’s a fairly open and shut case that carbon trading is rubbish. So what is the alternative?
The title of this article is a hint. From the outset, it is important to note that counterposing direct state investment in renewables to carbon trading as ‘our only choice’ is a false dichotomy. Regulating coal fired power stations, coal mines and unconventional gas out of existence is another action the state can take. Expanding the mandatory renewable energy target is another option. Nationalising and phasing out mines and power stations is another tool at the states disposal – if the political will existed.
Outside of what the state is doing there is the realm of direct action: activism in the streets; climate camps, pickets like at Bentley and Leard forest; walks against warming, climate emergency rallies, trade union climate campaigns, town hall meetings; the establishment of co-operatives such as the earthworker co-op, and renewable energy co-ops. Rebecca Pearse harks to the crucial role of the grassroots here.
There is a whole world of stuff outside of what the Government does and says that is super important to creating genuine, deep going, lasting political change. But State and Federal policy remains an important area and is something the aforementioned grassroots movements can and should seek to influence in a strategic manner as part of their campaigns.
Now back to carbon trading. Apart from being ineffective, even if it did work *exactly* as intended carbon trading is also painfully slow. Slow as in it doesn’t have much effect over the course of a three or four or six or even nine year term of government.
So you can implement some sort of whiz-bang carbon trading scheme that will (In theory at least) decarbonise the economy in thirty or forty years, but if it gets dismantled after the first three or six or even nine years then it won’t have done much good.
Direct government investment in renewables by contrast is something that can be done quickly. We know wind farms in particular are quick to approve and build.
The question of how to fund such a project (other than by simply adding to government debt) of course rears its head. Such a project could be paired with a double digit rise in both the corporate tax rate and the personal income tax rate on those earning over $180,000 per year. Sound unrealistic? Maybe so in the current political climate, but of you think that you can neatly avoid this issue by drinking a few tall glasses of carbon-trade-kool-aid, its high time you reassess the relationship between class and climate. Taxing (or expropriating from) the rich and stopping dangerous climate change are intrinsically linked. Singing thegreenhouse mafia an ETS lullaby and hoping it will quietly cease to exist is delusional.
Now, if we are to assume that the asbestos lobby and the horse drawn cart industry group are not as politically influential as they once were due to the fact that they no longer have much of an economic base, could we then also conclude that actually getting renewables built is what will diminish the power base of those who would seek to overturn and unravel climate policies, be they strong or weak?
Put simply: if a progressive government builds a hundred billion dollars worth of publicly owned wind farms in six years – which we know will knock out a heap of coal fired plant due to the merit order effect – what is a right of centre government going to do if it gets elected? Pull down the wind farms? Not likely. But more to the point, the fact that those wind farms are operating will have significantly diminished the actual power, the actual revenue base of the fossil fuel lobby.
Now those who follow climate and renewable politics will know that Abbott is on the wrong side of history and zero-fuel-cost renewables will inevitably dethrone coal as the dominant source of electricity. But those who follow the waxing and waning of the polar ice caps would also know that the pace at which renewables are displacing coal – even given its impressive momentum – is nowhere near fast enough to prevent a very high risk of runaway warming, a world six degrees hotter with decimated food production and rising sea levels.
And here enlies the problem with the ‘market will save us with cheap renewables’ approach espoused by reneweconomy and co (whose work I respect and enjoy, don’t get me wrong).
Are ‘green capitalists’ concerned primarily with trench warfare against the old guard (the fossil fuel mafia) to slowly capture market share? Or do they want to decarbonise the global economy quickly enough to stop runaway warming? Because the two are not necessarily the same.
Moreover, would ‘green capitalists’ be content to let the Australian government invest in publicly owned renewables (and thus capture a big slab of precisely the new market they are aiming to control) if it meant that the inevitable demise of the fossil fuel mafia in Australia happened a decade or more earlier than if market forces alone drove the shift?
Who cares what green capitalists want, I can hear a bunch of socialists say. Fair question. Not me, they can go jump. But I reckon the Greens do. Because the Greens stand at a crossroads. They could feasibly be the parliamentary representatives of this new emergent group of capitalists. Thats certainly how Greens leader Christine Milne pitches some of her rhetoric, couching renewables policy in terms of competition. Clever wedge politics, or the actual game plan of the Greens? It would be naive to think the Greens don’t seek the opinion of Australia’s fledgling renewable capitalists when developing policy.
What if next time the Greens control the balance of power in the senate, they made it a condition of forming government that there was a major project of public investment in renewables. An ‘NBN of renewables’. The longer this government stays in, the closer it takes us to 100% renewables via direct investment in renewables. On one hand the ‘green capitalists’ would miss out on some market share – perhaps even a lot of market share – and the politically dangerous example of what direct government investment in renewables can achieve will be like a genie released from a bottle. The idea might take root elsewhere, heaven forbid. But on the other hand, from the perspective of ‘green capital’ a future government might just privatise the wind and solar parks, and at least one strategically important corner of the ‘evil empire’ of global fossil capital – Australia – will have had a giant hole ripped out of its power base.
How much time do we spend going ‘one step forward and two steps back’? Will we have an alternating cycle of gently pro-renewables government followed by a term of fossil mafia dominated government that undoes the previous government’s market mechanisms, all the while green capitalists holding off on investment because of all the darn uncertainty, and at some point around the year 2035 the balance finally shifts decisively in the favour of just keeping the latest useless ETS in place?
Why not cut to the chase and smash out a big renewable public works project starting in 2016?
Direct public investment is where all our coal fired plants came from and its where the Snowy Hydro scheme came from. These were not built by revolutionary socialist governments (but could have been; concrete and steel don’t discriminate).
I look forward to seeing a considered response from at least one or two Greens regarding this. You do some good work Greens, I work alongside your activist members, I work with them, and I respect them. But by golly you have got precious little to say about direct investment in renewables. Why? Are you that scared of rocking the boat of neoliberal ‘the market knows best’ ideology? You rock the boat in other ways, why not in this realm?
Its one thing to not want to be seen as being too radical or revolutionary or anti-capitalist. But you could at least do a proper job of being left social democrats when it comes to your renewables policies.
Source: Zane for Newcastle. Reproduced with permission.
