The UK-based Alliance for Responsible Citizenship seeks a world in which “empowered citizens take responsibility and work together”. Rejecting “the inevitability of decline”, it seeks solutions drawing on “humanity’s highest virtues and extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.”
What’s not to like about that? Our own deputy premier, Guy Barnett, liked it enough to fly at his own expense to the ARC gathering in London last week.
He was in interesting company. Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott shared the hall with self-described “sceptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg, current US House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who with fellow-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has been tasked by President Donald Trump with slashing “waste” in US government. Ramaswamy had a friendly chat on stage with none other than our own former federal treasurer, Peter Costello.
The fog of war, the din of political turmoil and Trump’s assault on institutional norms make a perfect smokescreen for a concerted global push to abandon half a century’s worth of painstaking climate science and pretend it’s been conjured up simply to make us all miserable.
And I get it. There’s not much fun to be had in global warming.
Barnett’s London odyssey happened amid reports that the world’s commitment to cutting carbon emissions may be losing momentum, with a global slowdown in the transition to clean energy and an uptick in the use of fossil fuels.
The BBC World Service reported that Trump’s “national energy emergency” pushing a revival of fossil fuels in the US was influencing Argentina, Indonesia, South Africa and some other countries to walk back from their transition to renewable energy.
Oil, coal and gas industries everywhere including here, often in league with extreme-Right political interests, are putting billions into media campaigns to take advantage of nostalgia for a simpler life, hoodwinking the public into thinking they’re bona fide good guys when they’re patently not.
“Greenwashing” is what you get when political leaders and commercial entities make claims that products, services or other activities don’t damage climate or environment when they do. It’s happening on a vast scale, from global to local, and it’s leading us down some dangerous paths.
The ARC gathering is a case in point. Its mantra of empowering citizens to take responsibility is a sugar-coating on its underlying agenda – to ensure that public policy is not affected by science’s conclusion that human activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels, is causing global heating.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader who helped get Britain out of the EU, told an interviewer at the conference that it was “absolutely nuts” to cast CO2 as a pollutant, and repeated the discredited line that sunspots and volcanoes have more climate impact. Yet in the same interview he admitted that “I’m not a scientist; I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading warming or not.”
Here’s the thing: Farage and the general run of people supporting the political Right, while themselves often coming from a privileged background, all have a problem with “elites” determining public policy. They’ve used this loaded word to target genuinely valuable experts with real, hard-won knowledge, like US infectious diseases guru Tony Fauci and climate scientist Michael Mann.
We’ve always known that advertising, a time-honoured part of daily life, sometimes bends the truth to nail a deal. We like to think that regulators will apply national laws to prevent truth from being bent beyond recognition (lying). But that rarely happens.
Greenwashing corrupts the public space and the body politic. In continuing to push an alternative, false narrative about our wellbeing it is putting countless lives and futures at risk, and delivering yet another blow to our ability to defang the climate demon.
Another meeting last week, here in Tasmania, brought together people concerned about the impact of greenwashing on public policy. It explored accidental or deliberate misuse of language in forming climate policy, and was organised by David Hamilton, a member of Climate Tasmania with expertise in fossil fuel emissions.
Unlike ARC, this meeting involved no expensive travel. I attended via Zoom, at no cost to me and minimal cost to the organisers. I have studied this topic now for the best part of two decades, but I learned much from Hamilton’s insights and the discussion that ensued.
I’ve attended dozens of climate conferences and seminars during Guy Barnett’s 10 years as a State MP and holder of several climate-related portfolios, but I haven’t seen him at a single one. He could save money and air miles and reach out to people here, with real expertise and no hidden agendas, but he doesn’t seem to want to.