Not incidentally, the legacy of this measure continues, with controversy, in the Paris Agreement. When European delegates realized the implications of this last-minute change the next day, they were horrified, according to a senior Australian bureaucrat in the negotiating team. (Iceland and Norway were the others.) In the final negotiating hours, Australia managed to extract a further concession: Land clearing would be included in the target accounting system. In the wrangling over emissions targets, however, Australia pulled off a devastating coup: It would be one of only three OECD countries permitted to increase emissions through 2012. The Australian government took some relatively innovative proposals to price carbon and target an increase in renewable power to the Kyoto talks. It was before the days of orchestrated opposition to climate science, although an intensely anti-environmentalist mining and industrial businessman, Hugh Morgan, was already beginning to agitate against climate action via think tanks-including one co-founded by the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s father, Keith Murdoch. In the lead-up to the Kyoto Protocol adoption in late 1997, the Australian government of the day, led by John Howard, was old-school conservative. The book shows how the country at times played an outsize role in international climate negotiations, and it demonstrates that this role was predominantly negative. (The title is Wilkinson’s name for a cabal of people who reject mainstream climate science, businesspeople, and politicians who relentlessly lobbied against any emissions cuts.) It’s not an exaggeration to say that emissions policies were key to all of the six changes of prime minister in that period-sometimes brutally so, as both the two major parties have ousted their own leaders while in government. Yet climate change has been the most persistently contentious issue in Australian domestic politics for the past 15 years, as Marian Wilkinson documents in her book The Carbon Club. The Carbon Club: How a Network of Influential Climate Sceptics, Politicians and Business Leaders Fought to Control Australia’s Climate Policy, Marian Wilkinson, Allen & Unwin, 456 pp., AU$32.99, September 2020. Polling has shown so for many years even questions such as whether Australia should be a leader in climate solutions score highly. Most Australians care deeply about the environment. Australia’s largely coastal population, agriculture and tourism industries, and delicate ecological systems are all highly vulnerable to changes in an already harsh climate. While it is the world’s second-biggest exporter of thermal coal and has much to lose in a world that moves in line with scientific recommendations, it loses more, of course, if that doesn’t happen. The country’s resolute lack of action is paradoxical from some angles. Only weeks before the United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, it was one of the few OECD nations that had not improved its emissions reduction target, or set out a net-zero aspiration, or increased funding for developing countries to deal with climate change. Even in a fiercely partisan landscape, there’s no longer much argument in Australia that the country is anything other than a climate laggard. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described Australia as “leading the way” on climate in September, Australian media was startled.
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