The climate wars are over, new Opposition leader Sussan Ley said last week. Queensland senator Matt Canavan begs to differ, pledging to do whatever it takes to keep them going. It’s not hard to sow discord after electoral defeat, and if events last week are any indication he may yet succeed.
The first post-election skirmish in the war that’s supposed to have ended was the election of the National Party’s leadership team. It was Canavan’s first tilt at leadership in a political career that began 15 years ago with his appointment as chief of staff to then-senator Barnaby Joyce.
Intelligent, articulate and well-educated, and with plenty of political years ahead of him at age 44, the Rockhampton-based senator was not disheartened by losing to leader David Littleproud. To the contrary, the “humbling” experience of getting thousands of supportive emails, he told Paul Murray on Sky News, “put the fire back in my belly to… fight for a better future for our country.”
His platform, he said, was to “get rid of all these ridiculous green schemes that are costing a fortune – by the government’s own research, net zero will cost nine trillion dollars to get to by 2050… I may have lost the battle today, but the war against this net zero madness is not over.”
He took heart from Littleproud’s statement that he’s open to reviewing the net zero policy. “I will not serve in a ministry that supports a policy of net zero emissions,” he said. “There’s never been a plan to achieve it… You should never set a binding target like this with no flexibility when you don’t really know how you’re going to get there.”
Canavan has a point. Net zero emissions by 2050 (or 70 per cent lower net emissions by 2035) are vexing targets, full of unknowns and pitfalls. Pathways to get there are vaguely defined. We don’t yet have a solid grasp of what will make up the “net” that’s supposed to neutralise actual carbon emissions, or how this will happen.
There are also big unanswered questions around energy demand. Military conflict and artificial intelligence between them are drastically lifting demand for energy – in the case of AI requiring exponentially increasing power at the level of whole cities every year. And fossil energy is cashing in.
After years of complete denial about human-induced warming, these days Canavan, whose tertiary education is in economics, is more strategic in his approach. He allows that carbon emissions cause warming but denies any connection between that and extreme events like floods and droughts.
He’s also strategic in the authorities he relies on. Interviewed on the ABC last week he let slip that while he’s read IPCC reports, “the best person I’ve read on this is Dr Roger Pielke Jr… a scientist at the University of Colorado”. He left out an important qualifier: Pielke is a political scientist.
In that interview Canavan talked about emissions rising despite Australia’s efforts (true) but not about consequences if this trend continues: living conditions for humans becoming intolerable this century, and eventually unviable. Despite all the questions and backsliding about emissions targets, Australia has no choice but to continue replacing fossil energy with solar and wind.
There’s a driven intensity in Matt Canavan’s politics that brings to mind Tony Abbott, who became prime minister on the back of a long, single-minded campaign to end the Gillard government’s carbon tax – in the same 2013 election that put Canavan into the Senate.
Like Abbott, he’s adept at sloganeering. Sitting in his home office for television interviews he has a monitor behind him with a short message for voters about climate and energy, currently calling for more coal-fired power stations. He enjoys controversy, once posting on Twitter (now X) a photo of a ute carrying the slogan “black coal matters” – a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s tempting to think his contrarian attitude is falling out of favour with the success of climate-conscious independents in federal elections – the first of whom, Zali Steggall, saw off Tony Abbott in 2019.
But Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency has reignited wars both cultural and climatic in many countries around the world. No-one should count on Trump’s present unpopularity lasting beyond another tariff backflip or a rebounding stock market.
A public nervously watching new energy infrastructure – transmission lines, solar arrays and wind farms – rolling out across the land might turn out to be easy prey to a well-targeted fear campaign. And Matt Canavan, never one to shy away from an argument, isn’t going anywhere.