What's the deal with Australian climate politics?

In this episode, activist Miriam Lyons gives an overview of Australian climate policy past, present, and future.

Text transcript:

David Roberts

G’day mates! As you all know, I’m in Australia at the moment, on a whirlwind speaking/listening tour regarding this country’s response to the Inflation Reduction Act.

I’ve been learning a ton about Australia’s history with climate policy, its clean-energy resources, and its current politics. It’s all much more complex and interesting than I appreciated before coming, so I thought it would be cool to record a podcast “in the field,” while I’m here, with someone who could provide an overview of all that stuff.

To my great delight, I was joined — live! in studio! — by Miriam Lyons. Lyons’ resume is … daunting. She founded a progressive think tank called the Centre for Policy Development and led it for seven years; she led the climate justice campaign at GetUp, the Australian equivalent of Moveon.org; she has written or co-written two books on economics and the clean-energy transition; and currently, she is director of the Australian Economic Transformation program at the Sunrise Project, which works to scale social movements and accelerate the transition.

Needless to say, she is quite familiar with the ins and outs of Australian climate politics! We had a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. Enjoy.

So, Miriam Lyons. Welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.

Miriam Lyons

Thank you so much. Very excited to be on the pod.

David Roberts

This is excellent. Oh, also, Volts listeners might be excited to know that this is the first Volts that I've ever recorded in person in the same room with my guests. That's exciting too. I know usually I'm a hermit at home, so this is cool. I would like to do more of it. Okay, so let's start then with a little bit of capsule history. I think the Volts audience is aware of the agita of climate politics in the US. From sort of Waxman-Markey era of 2009, 2010, all the way through the turbulence, et cetera, through IRA.

So let's talk a bit, a little bit about what's been happening in Australia during that same time period. Give us a sort of summary of the history.

Miriam Lyons

I've been thinking about how to sum up all of Australian climate politics really briefly. Okay, so in a galaxy far, far away. A colonized country was sitting on one of the world's biggest carbon bombs, and what happened next is an epic tale of triumph and betrayal. I think the TL;DR version is that we are one of the world's biggest exporters of climate pollution. We are also the sunniest continent on Earth and one of the windiest. So we have this enormous potential to be a massive exporter of climate solutions. And we're currently hitting our crossroads, which is that moment where we decide whether we want to be a Kodak country that is so attached to its old technology that it's failing to notice —

David Roberts

Oh, that Kodak. For the minute. I had the bear in my head. I was like, wait, what's the bear analogy? Oh, and the photograph analogy.

Miriam Lyons

Yeah, that one. It's just like, oh, there's all this sun and wind. What could we possibly do instead of killing the world with our coal and gas exports? So that informs a whole lot of the history of our climate politics, of course. And our fossil fuel lobby have been experts in using their enormous profits to win friends and influence policy and more importantly, to bully politicians when they don't get their way. And that playbook has worked really well for them for quite a long time, but it is now running out of oomph. And I think, you know, a big question now is whether our major parties will notice that the gun that the industry is holding to their heads doesn't have quite so many bullets in it anymore, but to kind of go back in time:

John Howard was our second longest-serving Prime Minister and a climate denier. He was unseated by Kevin Rudd in 2007 for two main reasons. So one was a massive backlash against his attacks on workers' rights, but the other reason was his failure to act on climate change. I saw the polls at the time. Those were the consistent two main reasons that voters switched from him to Kevin Rudd. So Kevin Rudd came in, he signed the Kyoto Protocol and he introduced a very modest emissions trading bill. So it was going to cut emissions by about 5% and any stronger emissions cuts were going to be conditional on what other countries did.

David Roberts

Let's discuss the political parties here. I forgot, we have different political parties at play. So the Conservative Party here is called the Liberal Party.

Miriam Lyons

Yes. So this is down under everything's topsy turvy. The Liberals are the conservatives.

David Roberts

Exactly, southern hemisphere thing. And the liberal party or the center-left party is the Labor Party.

Miriam Lyons

The Labor Party.

David Roberts

So Rudd was of the Labor Party.

Miriam Lyons

Rudd was of the Labor Party and the Labor Party was born from the workers' rights movement. And the Greens Party is also very relevant, which was born from the environmental movement.

David Roberts

So Rudd comes in, does some mild emissions cutting.

Miriam Lyons

Yeah, he plans for a very modest emissions trading scheme. And that bill did not pass the senate for reasons that you should not ask Australian climate campaigners about, unless you want us to break our own personal version of Godwin's law. Then the Copenhagen COP flopped, which took a bit of paint off Rudd because he had really been pinning his kind of domestic story to the idea that we would be acting in a pack. Then Malcolm Turnbull, the moderate leader of the conservative Liberal Party, who Kevin Rudd had been negotiating with, was overturned by his own party in favor of Tony Abbott because he was considering actually negotiating on a climate bill.

And so Tony Abbott was a Trump style climate denier. So suddenly Rudd had lost his prospect of having somebody reasonable on the opposition to negotiate the bill with. He then decided to shelve that bill, which turned out to be a very unpopular decision because immediately afterwards, his polling started to plummet, which resulted in his own party losing faith in him and overturning him in favor of Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

David Roberts

All these names are ringing very, very faint bells.

Miriam Lyons

And there's more. So she then narrowly won an election and was only able to form government with the help of a couple of progressive rural independents who were very clear on what climate change was going to do in terms of damage to the farmers in their electorates. And so they demanded strong climate action as part of their deal to allow the Labor Party to form government. Which meant that between them, they put together another climate package, which included an emissions trading scheme again, but a