Green strategic analyst talks politics & history of climate change policy

Beyond Zero Emissions' Matthew Wright talks to Dan Cass, a Green strategic analyst from Dan Cass & Co, about current political events and the history and politics of climate change in Australia and internationally.

Further reading:

http://dancass.com/

Beyond Zero interviews Dan Cass from Dan Cass & Co

download

Transcript

Matthew Wright:    Hello and welcome to another edition of the Beyond Zero show, broadcast from 3CR radio in Melbourne and syndicated live on the Community Radio Network satellite across Australia.  On this week’s show we’re talking to Dan Cass, of Dan Cass & Company.  Dan Cass is a green strategy analyst, and he’s an expert in government and regulatory affairs, and he’s going to be telling us a bit about what’s been happening in the politics of climate change and climate change solutions, of course.  And that’s a very pertinent subject at the moment given that there’s an imminent Federal election, and we thought we’d get Dan in as our special guest, given the timing and given the change of political leader in Australia and how mining resources and how climate change had related to that.  So, a very warm welcome today, on the Beyond Zero show to Dan.  Dan, how you going Dan?

Dan Cass:        Good, thanks Matt.  Thanks for having me.
   
Matthew Wright:    Now I just wanted to open by asking you a bit about your history and how you got involved in the environmental field, and in particular solutions to climate change, and what you’ve got out of that?

Dan Cass:        Well, the first thing is coming in here today to see the studio, which has not changed in quite a while.  It reminded of going off as 3CR’s correspondent to the Earth Summit.  So that was in Rio in 1992, and that was the conference that decided on the Framework Convention on Climate Change, within which the Kyoto Protocol falls, and I was a very ‘green’ - in both senses of the word - young youth activist.  The Earth Summit was a huge disappointment, I think for a lot of us, because the science then was saying that there had to be 60% cuts in emissions.  That was what the IPCC had been saying, and the political deal was we couldn’t plan a transition immediately - so all of the climate policy at the international and then the national level cascaded down from this assumption that instead you would set a target to reach cuts of 50, 60, 70% in 50 years or 70 years or whatever, against that baseline of 1990.  I think that was the first betrayal in a sense.  I think governments should have said we have to do this straight away, but we can’t, and we will try.  We will try to make this transition, rather than just planning something against a hypothetical timeline that kept being fungible over the years.

Matthew Wright:    And do you think that part of the problem was the lack of tangibility - that the public couldn’t really... there wasn’t that push and pull because nobody could grab a target?

Dan Cass:        Well I think a lot of people were confused by the science.  But I think in some ways, they were clearer than then in subsequent years after the nihilist lobby had muddied the waters so much.  There was a huge concern in the late 80’s – climate change, but also the ozone depletion, which is not the same problem but for the public it was a pretty clear link to make, that we had to change how we do things, and that that was a lesson that is valid.

Matthew Wright:    And bringing that forward to today, we had, if we go back to the beginning of the Howard era (because that’s what defines the Australian climate change politics really) we had Senator Hill leading our climate negotiations?  I hope I’ve got the right citizen there…

Dan Cass:        I’m not sure when you’re talking about, but the Howard era set the default switch to nihilism about the science, and obstructionism at the UNFCCC.  So the Australian delegation is, I think, known as a not always good faith participant.  I mean that’s even a euphemism - it’s really known as a pretty rough spoiler, like we play pretty rough and tough.  And Howard said repeatedly he was ‘not yet sure about the science’, and part of that was the, part of his agenda, as well as confusing the science, was to confuse the technology.  And so we had him and the mining industry saying that renewables couldn’t do the base load, ever - that the technologies were all unproven and so on.  So that you had this confusion about the problem, and then also this absolute confusion about the solution.  And I think that’s what we need to cut through and that’s what hopefully we can cut through now with the report BZE has done.

Matthew Wright:    We’ve been speaking to Dan Cass, from Dan Cass & Co.  He’s a green strategic analyst and an expert in government and regulatory affairs.  And the ramping up of that rhetoric - they really got going.  The story goes that Hugh Morgan gave John Howard a call and said ‘this is not on, we can’t do this, we can’t go anywhere down this Kyoto track, there’s got to be a full reversal’, and at the same time you’d assume that behind the scenes all the lobbyists and the PR people were gearing up to really guide the public away from any action and to guide policy makers, and to guide all the regulation.  When did that peak?  How quickly do you think they ramped and has that got us to where we are now?

Dan Cass:        Look, I don’t know really (and I think Guy Pierce is probably the expert on this) but I sense that there were a couple of waves and one was the resource lobby and the coal lobby in particular on the climate denialism.  But then another wave was the nuclear renaissance, which was about 2006 when Howard went to Canada and said famously that we had to have this debate - as if society had not debated nuclear power, as if it was some secret, elite discussion, when in fact it had been a huge robust debate for decades.  I think that also was profoundly important because it was then yet again another industry lobby attacking the ability of renewables to ever be the solution, and so it was masked as climate concern.  It was a time when the liberal ministers and Howard suddenly started evincing some kind of concern for the future and they suddenly started saying climate change was real and it was a problem and that was the reason why we had to have nuclear power, because as we all know renewables are nothing.  That’s just some hippy technology - a dream that could never be realized.  So I think that was also pretty damaging for the clean energy movement.  But I think that it’s worth remembering, Matt, particularly at election time that the Labour party during those years it was in opposition had a great opportunity which it lost and squandered.  And that opportunity was to really think about what it would do in government.  And instead, I think a lot of the senior insiders in New South Wales, and Victoria, and in the Federal Labour party saw climate change purely as a vote issue.  They didn’t actually think about the basis of their policy for industry and for the economy and they saw the Kyoto Protocol as really just a token issue, or perhaps something more important – a symbol, that was an important symbol, like the apology perhaps, and that if you just were part of the protocol and part of the inside of the tent that that was enough.  I remember one very senior Labour advisor saying, off the record of course, ‘all we need to do is talk about Kyoto and that achieves a product differentiation’.  And you can’t come back at that - I had nothing to say in response.

Matthew Wright:    It’s product differentiation politics, but it’s not about doing anything.

Dan Cass:        Right.  We’re not choosing breakfast cereal, we’re working out whether a party is legitimate as a government and whether they’ve actually understood the bigger threat that humanity now faces.

Matthew Wright:    We’ve been speaking to Dan Cass, from Dan Cass & Co.  He’s a green strategic analyst and he’s an expert in government and regulatory affairs.  Now there was some interesting politics at place.  So Howard was still in power federally but the states were run by Labour governments and through COAG they started a process of setting up an emissions trading scheme which morphed into what was just thrown out, which was the CPRS.  But it started as a state initiative.  I guess a way to undermine Howard’s - the fact that there’s a big divide in his support base; people who wanted action on climate change and people who didn’t - so to drive a truck through that wedge.  So he had this COAG derived thing but from the day they started, they started talking about emissions trading schemes, there were a few hints they were doing modeling on zero percent, so no change in emissions by 2020, or a 5% reduction, or an extreme case - they were talking 15% as their extreme case.  They used the word extreme.  Then they decided not to let any of the news about the targets they were modeling get out.  Why do you think they choose to talk about emissions trading schemes and all these abstract things, and what did that do for them, but also do to lose the public as well?

Dan Cass:        Well, look it’s a really good question.  I think probably in each state there’s a slightly different micro-politics to this but I think the template in New South Wales is quite a good one.  I was working for the Greens for a few years there in the New South Wales parliament and would see the Carr government re-announce its emissions trading commitments and its framework for targets, constantly.  And that’s a bit of a joke about contemporary politics, that most of it is just done by press release.  You don’t have to do anything; you just have to say you’ll do it.  And the news outlets all know they’re being manipulated but the journalists have to report it because a government announcement is news, by definition.  So this was constantly being re-announced and re-announced and I think that the movement as well takes a little bit of the blame for allowing the government to hide behind the mechanism that kept us one step away from the transformation, which is to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, and energy saving on a timeline fast enough to stop a climate catastrophe.  And they put that in the too hard basket.  I want that to be really clear.  So state Labour governments under the Howard Federal government all really assumed that they could keep the same industries, they could keep the same trade unions happy, digging up the same coal and mining the same oil and gas, and that somehow a market mechanism that allowed people to trade in the small, easy steps, - the light bulb, and the energy efficiency changes to residential apartments and industry, and perhaps some bigger industrial processes - that that would be enough.  I think secondly, they also thought that climate could be solved by emissions trading on a global scale and that that was really a sin of the forefathers back at Rio I think, that they set up a treaty that allowed that kind of voluntary mechanism, a low cost mechanism.  But I think the third thing is they just didn’t grapple with the technology and that’s the opportunity lost.  I think the Labour party spent many years in opposition where they could have been learning about renewable energy, and energy efficiency, and learning how to build an industrial economy for the 21st century and instead they hid behind emissions trading and so on.  And the final fig leaf of course – clean coal, which for a few years in the 90’s…

Matthew Wright:    Well, they didn’t stop talking about it.

Dan Cass:        Right, it became a bit of an obsession.  So, thanks to buying in emissions reductions from developing companies, clean coal and then some domestic price mechanisms, we could essentially keep digging up the coal; keep using the oil and the gas.  Well that’s not a transformation in the energy economy.

Matthew Wright:    You’re listening to Beyond Zero, and we’re speaking with Dan Cass.  Dan Cass is a green strategic analyst and he’s an expert in government and regulatory affairs.  It’s great to have Dan on the show today and be able to talk in terms of an imminent election that’s on its way and how we’ve sort of got to no climate action, which is Australia’s thing right now, it’s no climate action. It’s not like Europe where things are happening. They’re transforming their economy by going to very fast trains and renewable energies.  They’ve got massive wind power targets, they do buy  obviously a bit cloudier up there in many parts of Europe, and solar thermal and solar, certainly in Germany and in Spain.  Now Dan, we were just talking about COAG and governments and where they went but all through the environment movement themselves, I mean there are different parts of the environment movement, but where did they position themselves?  How did they think they were going to win this, and where perhaps did they go wrong given that we’re still in virtually the same place we have been for the last ten years?

Dan Cass:        Well I think that’s a really good question, and I think it’s one that the movement has tried to ask but perhaps needs to keep reflecting on.  I think globally, the main fault really, the main mistake was backing down from a very simple ecological argument – there’s a planet, we live on it, we can’t wreck it.  And instead people got obsessed with buying some kind of mainstream credibility, or so they thought, by adopting the free market mechanisms that are carbon trading.  And the movement here followed that agenda.  I think that was a global trend.  Maybe it was a bit more prevalent in the U.S. but the Europeans, the Australian environment groups, all embraced this idea that as long as we got the abstract target for the road map way down into the future right and we then had some trading scheme; we would eventually get to deep cuts in emissions.  I think that was profoundly wrong for a number of reasons.  I think firstly its just too confusing for the public.  You can’t build a mass movement around a claim that people don’t understand.  People in the movement were often confused about who was asking for what when and how it would work.  These mechanisms were resulting in legislative proposals that were hundreds of pages long, that were essentially all about economics and trading and finance and regulation, with barely a line about the planet because they were really financial policies not environmental policies.  I think the second problem was that it moved the debate away from clear climate science and into a realm that only a very small number of people really have a stake in.  And I also think that it’s not particularly ethical.  I think that the environmental movement is a very legitimate expression of a simple ethical position, based on the science – we have one planet, we’re wrecking in, we need to stop doing that.  And I think that emissions trading is inherently really ambiguous, ethically, and I think the climate movement now realizes that and its claims are much more simple, which is not to say simplistic, but they’re more direct and more robustly connected to some kind of ethical basis that people can really understand.

Matthew Wright:    And the translation of that, I remember countless forums, and seminars, and even public talks that used to say look, we’ll just get this in, we’ll get started, and then it would ‘unlock innovation’.  Now what did ‘unlocking innovation’ mean, because no-one seemed to know what it means?

Dan Cass:        Well look, innovation I think is incredibly fascinating.  I don’t really understand - I haven’t worked in R&D.  I’m really interested in what I read now about innovation in technology and design.  I think it’s actually quite a hard thing to foster as a nation and I think Australia suffers from that, often.  I think that we have great innovation in the lab but it doesn’t often get to the production line and into the market.  And that I think is another, that’s a side of the failure that Labour could turn around if they want to.  I think that they could be a nation building party, they could be a party of industry policy, and creating a new kind of economy that is climate friendly in Australia and I think that’s something that they just gave up over those years.  I think they just hid behind clean coal and emissions trading and they didn’t really embrace what this means - to invent an economy that is climate neutral.

Matthew Wright:    When the rhetoric actually mentioned the innovation, were they talking about innovation just as an excuse for they actually didn’t know what to do?  They couldn’t predict, so they said ‘innovation’.  Get this emissions trading scheme in, and innovation will sort it out?

Dan Cass:        Right, it could be.  And that’s the whole point about the market mechanism.  That instead of getting their hands dirty and taking apart the fossil fuel economy and building a new one, they said let’s just get this abstract price right and then the market will do the rest.  And I think the environment groups really have to abandon that.  It’s an elitist strategy; it’s completely failed in terms of technical politics.  It’s just not working with the public.  It’s not galvanizing anyone and these trading systems are inherently unstable.

Matthew Wright:    But the esteem that economists have been given, these “Boffins”, who talk in very abstract language and use lots of numbers and charts to confuse people, they’ve actually managed to gain serious esteem and be trusted in public.  So I guess the environment movement just thought we can’t fight that and were trying to jump on the back of it.  But fighting confusion with confusion is possibly not a good strategy.  It’s a fact that people do say, they fall back on what’s the economics of this, and what’s the economics of that… how can that be undone?  Or are we stuck in an economics frame?  Are we just going to be completely stuck there, where the “Boffins” get to rule and the public just can’t dismantle it and can’t work out what’s going on and will just expert referral back to those boffins who own this space?

Dan Cass:        Well I think there’s a, in the short term, the problem with Australia’s economic debate on resources is that it has been captured by the resource lobby and that’s a very sectorial interest.  And I think that a lot of the economically rational arguments that happen in the media aren’t particularly rational.  I think a lot of the positions that the Australian puts forward and the mining lobby put forward are based on a kind of ‘a mate’s deal’ economy and not actually a particularly free market economy.  It’s not unique to Australia.  We saw this week with the G20 meeting, that the OECD is still saying that globally the government subsidy of the fossil fuel industry is in the realm of a hundred billion dollars a year and the G20 have now back flipped on their promise to remove those fossil fuel subsidies.  Well that’s an economically irrational thing to do.  They’re leaving in place a government handout, so a corporate welfare, of one hundred billion dollars a year to one sector which they’ve picked as a winner.  So, even if we had a level playing field it would be better for the environment.  I think then the next argument is to go beyond that and some kind of ecological economics is obviously the future but that’s still quite a nascent field.  But I think the environment movement could benefit a lot from just clearing up the economically rational arguments and clearing out the subsidies and all the pork barreling that goes to an industry that really has been held up by the corporate welfare state for decades.

Matthew Wright:    And they certainly whinge and whinge and whinge, so that Kevin Rudd, maybe you’ve got some insights into how it might have happened, but Kevin Rudd pretty much got done-in by the mining industry over the super profits tax.  Now somewhere the decision was made to put the CPRS to bed and we know from an environmental perspective the obvious reason to do that was because the CPRS wasn’t actually about doing anything but protecting polluters and not addressing climate change, taking us back to some sort of protectionism for big dirty Australian polluting companies.  But it was put to bed I guess for different reasons.  And suddenly left of field comes the mining super profits tax, maybe to try and redefine Kevin as someone with some guts, someone who actually is a strong man and not a weak man and then he has subsequently been deposed.  Can you give us your analysis on how this all came about and what the context is?

Dan Cass:        Look I found the last days of the Rudd government really confusing.  I think that came from the fact that the kitchen cabinet had pulled in all the decisions from all the agencies and the other ministers in a little box and Rudd’s office was trying to make every decision that was of any importance come through his desk and his team of advisors, and in the end I think they really lost their way.  I think there’s not even a particularly coherent internal logic to their own decision making.  They picked the RSPT fight seemingly out of the blue, and clearly there was a plan behind it, but it just doesn’t fit with the way that they had dealt with the climate debate or with any of their negotiations with other industries.  It really came out of left-of-field.  And I think the disappointing thing is that imagine if they’d fought so hard for a sensible carbon tax which the public understood and wanted, and which was absolutely justifiable economically and ecologically.  And instead they went to war over an economic reform which was beneficial, but I’m not that clear that it was the best way to restructure taxation in the country.  We didn’t get the government’s clear response on the rest of the Henry review, and the Henry review discluded the GST.  So I can’t explain it Matt, it came across as another chaotic and not logical step in a program that was really falling apart.

Matthew Wright:    Because they’d spent years building up to what became the CPRS and it was just way, way too long, it was just ridiculous, and the super profits tax needed to be resolved in a few weeks.  And it was a big reform.  We’re talking almost similar sort of impost to the economy and it needed a decision within weeks, which perhaps that sort of time frame for climate change would be good, or maybe just a little bit longer, but not years - the juxtaposition between the two is just bizarre.

Dan Cass:        It was bizarre, and I think everyone sees that.  This morning on Radio National Michelle Gratton was commenting that the mining industry had extraordinary access that we’ve never seen before.  An industry having the doors of government thrown open to them.  And it made me think – perhaps the young climate activist, maybe the youth climate movement should just take this as an invitation.  Maybe they can get the doors of government thrown open to them for a few days, or a few weeks, to talk about their lives, to point out the absurdity of this, you know, one sector which does not hold up the sky, or the economy, having the whole government in a complete tailspin when future generations have no say in climate decisions that go against their interests every day.

Matthew Wright:    Well I’m waiting for the moment when I’ve got Julia Gillard’s personal mobile number in my phone and I can call her any time of day because it seems that if you’re a mining exec that’s the expectation of what you can get out of government.

Dan Cass:        Yeah, and I think the difficulty here is that people can’t yet imagine a clean energy economy.  And that’s the most important thing we have to do.  That has to be an argument not about climate change, not about taxation, but about how to make a better economy that will employ more people, employ them in better jobs, and employ them in such a way that we can repair the planet and not kill it. 

Matthew Wright:    And how can we get that - just to finish up now because we’ve only got a couple of minutes left - how can we get that into the media, and into the minds of Australian people?

Dan Cass:        Well, look, I think there are a number of things that have to be done.  I think a scenario that explains the technology is important.  But I also think that the technologies themselves and workers from countries that have thriving industries need to be brought here and their stories need to be told.  I think it seems simplistic but it has to be very tangible.  I think a lot of people in the Labour caucus, a lot of the members, even the ministers, don’t really get that renewables are doing base load and that they’re employing millions of people around the world.  And I think anything that makes that very clear in Canberra can start to shatter the latent ideology from the Howard era that the Rudd government has just lost in, which is that renewables can’t do base load, markets are the key solution, and that ultimately climate change can be this kind of abstract win, where we don’t have to make a transition out of dirty fossil fuels.

Matthew Wright:    That’s great, we have to leave it there.  Thank you.  We have been speaking to Dan Cass, from Dan Cass & Company.  He is a green strategic analyst and he’s an expert in government and regulatory affairs. You have been listening to Beyond Zero Radio produced by the campaign group, Beyond Zero Emissions. You can check our website at www.beyondzeroemissions. org. If you would like to call us from Melbourne, Monday to Thursday 03 8383-2232   Thank you.