Scott Morrison's Climate Policy Is Just Another Culture War, Complete W. Wine-Sipping Green "Elites"
Last edited Thu Apr 29, 2021, 01:39 PM - Edit history (1)
“We will not,” Scott Morrison told us last week, “achieve net zero in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities.” Actually, he might – and that’s the problem. With his speech, the prime minister sought to package climate change as culture war, as prime ministers have done so more or constantly since at least the mid-1990s. You know the drill: the tedious presentation of environmentalists as effete weirdoes (cue the Bill Leak drawing of a gimp suit), who sip fine wines as they simper about their carbon footprints.
By contrast, Morrison would have us think he snaps his fingers at these Green sybarites and addresses himself only to the suburban working class. Yet, as Crikey’s Bernard Keane pointed out, the PM delivered his recent remarks decrying elitists in the grand ballroom of the Fullerton Hotel (“luxury and heritage in the heart of the city”), during a Business Council of Australia event the Australian described as “corporate Australia’s night of nights”.
You could not ask for a more perfect illustration of the actual relationship between environmental policy and inner city wine bars. Contrary to what the tabloids would have you believe, the real players in the climate change debate are not shaggy ecologists but bankers, mining executives and other besuited representatives of the traditional ruling class. In other words, the people determining the response to the rising temperatures are precisely those least likely be affected by them.
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In a recent piece for the Conversation, climate scientists James Dyke, Robert Watson and Wolfgang Knorr argue that, from the very beginning, policy debates about global warming have been dominated by an elite more concerned about financial returns than cooling the planet. Most arguments about net zero remain within that paradigm, they say, relying on technological innovations that most experts don’t consider possible. “Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C,” the scientists wrote, ‘“because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/27/climate-justice-wont-be-achieved-by-scott-morrison-clinking-glasses-with-bankers-and-bosses