Welcome
John Grimes, Chief Executive Smart Energy Council
WHEN IT COMES TO ENERGY AND CLIMATE POLICY, the Biden win in the US will have significant consequences for Australia. The US provided cover for our own outrageous climate denial and inaction. Suddenly Australia is exposed internationally. Europe is acting, the UK is acting, North Asia is acting, and now the US goes from international laggard to international leader.
Contrast that with Australia’s work to hold back the tide of anti-coal sentiment globally. With the UK 100 per cent out of coal by late 2024, and the US now committed to being out of coal by 2035, that battle is lost. Globally the conversation has shifted from shutting down coal, to imposing ‘carbon tariffs’ on imported goods. That means if your steel, glass, cement, chemicals and agricultural products are made with fossil fuels, they will be taxed on import at a higher rate than those with embedded clean energy. The problem is Australia’s leaders are not even prepared to admit there is a problem, and to the extent that they do, our targets and actions are woefully inadequate in response. That might be fine when the biggest consequence is quelling a climate denying rebellion on your own backbench. It is quite another when it threatens to bring down great swathes of the Australian economy. Right now, Australia is the deer in the headlights. We used to have a rhino standing between us and oncoming traffic. Now we are on our own.
TITANIUM PARTNERS
In my view THE US ELECTIONS don’t seem to have done much to clarify the climate picture: on the one hand, exit polls showed 70 per cent of Americans “favoured more government support for green and renewable energy,” but on the other hand the Senate they elected will block any big moves towards low-carbon infrastructure. A President Biden – which will happen if all the votes are counted – can get America back in the Paris climate accords, but he’ll lack the votes to ratchet up America’s ambition levels with sweeping infrastructure proposals – which means, I’d guess, that the pressure will be off other recalcitrant nations.
None of that is even close to ideal. Yes, we’re headed in the right direction: eventually, economics alone, without a shred of government policy, would get us to a clean energy economy. But ‘eventually’ is the problem: as we know by now, catching up with physics and chemistry requires that we move much with enormous speed. This will be the crucial decade, and it’s not beginning well. So activists will be searching hard for other levers to push. The most obvious is our financial system – it’s a necessary part of the fossil fuel empire, providing the ready cash that allows the industry to go on expanding climate be damned. Activists have gotten steadily better at understanding its intricacies and bending its practices. Full disclosure: I began 2020 getting arrested in the lobby of the JP Morgan Chase bank branch nearest the U.S. capitol at the start of the StopTheMoneyPipeline campaign – by October the financial giant, biggest fossil fuel lender on earth, had promised it would become ‘Paris-aligned’. It will take lots more pressure, but it’s pressure worth applying: unlike governments, financial institutions can move quickly, and their edicts are global. Australian activists have been at the forefront of this work, learning important lessons throughout the Adani campaign; now that knowledge is spreading. We don’t know if we can move fast enough to materially slow climate change; we know we have to try. Bill McKibben is founder of environmental group 350.org, a New Yorker columnist and author of ‘End Of Nature’. He is credited by US President-elect Joe Biden as a key thinker, influencer and advisor
2 SUMMER 2020
