Can anyone recall the last time an environmentalist applauded a Coalition policy on climate change? Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull managed it twice at the weekend after unveiling the Liberals' ''Green Carbon'' initiative at a speech to the Young Liberals convention in Canberra on Saturday. The Climate Institute's John Connor welcomed the series of initiatives, saying they indicated the party was moving away from ''denial and delay'', while Greens Senator Christine Milne suggested that not only had Turnbull sidelined climate sceptics within his party (a considerable achievement) but that the policy was an improvement on the Rudd Government's obsession with a simplistic emissions trading scheme.
Under the leadership of John Howard, the Liberal and National parties were mostly staunch, even proud, climate-change deniers, happy to ignore the increasingly urgent warnings by the International Panel on Climate Change and sit on their hands while governments elsewhere in the OECD (with the notable exception of the US) began to take active steps to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The Coalition's excuses (that the link between global warming and human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide had not been satisfactorily established, that Australia's share of greenhouse gas emissions was small in any event and that efforts to rein in these emissions were pointless unless all large polluters, including those in the developing world, agreed to undertake remedial action) perfectly matched its conservative ideology and its fear that action would cost jobs. But this stance became increasingly untenable towards the latter part of its term in office.
In shifting the Coalition's stance to one that that is more proactive and sympathetic to the popular view that Australia has a duty to act in the global common interest Turnbull is starting from a low base. That his weekend policy release earned a tick from two groups usually dismissive of anything the Coalition has to say on the environment suggests he is off to a good start in re-establishing his party's credentials. Conversely, it also points to a general dissatisfaction with federal Labor's own efforts to reduce Australia's emissions the central features of which are an emissions trading scheme to be introduced next year and a promised 5 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
That target (which Labor has promised to lift to 15 per cent if other major polluters agree to similar cuts) is not stringent. Naturally, Turnbull claims the Coalition's efforts will easily outstrip Labor's target, and result in a reduction of 150 million tonnes a year by 2020 all without a carbon trading scheme.
Instead, Turnbull is arguing that the savings can be achieved through biosequestration, by making buildings more energy-efficient and by building two new coal-fired power stations with carbon-capture technology.
Better yet, these initiatives will not require any behavioural change on the part of consumers, will impose no direct costs on business or homes, and will not cause any job losses.
It all sounds a bit too good to be true. Certainly, a practical means of capturing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired power stations is still some way perhaps another decade off, which means Turnbull's target may be fanciful. Nevertheless, his emphasis on biosequestration, which many scientists (Tim Flannery among them) believe can mitigate the effects of global warming easily, cheaply and effectively, is welcome. It has the added advantage (especially for Australia's thin top soils) of improving soil texture and ecology, and improving the retention of fertilisers and nutrients. Turnbull's enthusiasm for bio-char is shared by many, though the science about how much carbon will be drawn down from the atmosphere as a result is inexact.
To be truly effective and beneficial, it's likely that sources of material other than crop waste will be required. What these might be, Turnbull is not saying. Nor did he reveal exactly what solar and other renewable energy sources the Coalition will invest in if it wins government.
But then, he doesn't really have to. Turnbull's policy is about drawing points of difference with Labor and reaffirming his own environmental credentials within the electorate without alarming unduly those in the Coalition party room who remain sceptical about the necessity for mitigation and are dismissive about the level of public support for measures that are more than symbolic and might actually affect their hip-pocket nerves.
Turnbull has turned the Coalition's lack of an emissions trading scheme of its own into a plus, arguing that an emissions trading scheme is ''no solution at all without new energy sources and new low-emission technologies''. This is disingenuous, of course, but politically astute.
Labor no longer has the environmental policy field to itself, which is a good thing given the timidity it has so far evinced on global warming.
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