Anti-politics and Global Climate Inaction: The Case of the Australian Carbon Tax

Abstract

<jats:p> Action on climate change has enjoyed popular support in most Western countries. Despite this, successive governments have struggled to implement policy to tackle this issue. Using the case of opposition to the Clean Energy Act, passed in Australia to establish an emissions trading scheme, this paper argues that a growing and broad sentiment of distrust in political elites, described as ‘anti-politics’, can explain some of this contradiction. Particular forms of climate policy, in particular emissions trading schemes, have been successfully framed as policies that appeal to the interests of a new class of liberal elites while hurting ordinary working people. This frame was used successfully in Australia by conservative forces to oppose the Clean Energy Act. While used cynically by political leaders in this case, the paper argues that anti-political sentiment reflects genuine concerns about the detachment between the state and voting population. This detachment is reflected in neoliberal climate policies. Through briefly examining the cases of the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Gilets Jaunes protest movement, the paper argues that while formulating climate policy we must consider anti-political sentiment, developing responses to the climate crisis from a bottom-up rather than top-down approach. </jats:p>

Capturing a soil carbon economy

“…To run concurrently with this ETS, the carbon farming initiative (CFI) was adopted to provide offsets that could be used within, and promote emissions reduction within, the agricultural sector [72,73,75]. The CFI was supported by the Australian Carbon Pricing Scheme and issued carbon credit units for each tonne of CO 2 e abated or sequestered [73,[76][77][78][79]. The CFI was the first nationwide example of carbon credit creation and trade by the agriculture and forestry sectors to a wider market [77,80].…”

“…However, in late 2014, the CPM (that underpinned offset ETS trading of CFI credits) was repealed [73,80,81]. The repeal and subsequent withdrawal of the CPM was politically motivated by a change in government that negatively framed the CPM as a 'carbon tax' to secure votes [79,87]. Following the withdrawal, Australia's GHG emissions rebounded to exceed 2014 emissions levels (and have done so subsequently each year) [84,88].…”

The Wickedness of Rittel and Webber’s Dilemmas

“…These demonstrations not only spilled over to other European countries; they can also be seen as symbolic of protests against other policy decisions and expert-based knowledge claims, which are considered to be elitist, by at least some of the protestors. This may bring to mind notions such as climate skepticism (Copland, 2019), as well as antivaccination activism (Chiou & Tucker, 2018). Added to that are many conspiracy theories that are spread over the internet contesting dominant accounts of events.…”

Things are Getting Worse on Our Way to Catastrophe: Neoliberal Environmentalism, Repressive Desublimation, and the Autonomous Ecoconsumer

“…Within this framework, environmental problems are "caused by a failure to 'value' the environment and a lack of properly defined property rights"; that is, "a failure of the market to attach a price to environmental goods and services" (Beder, 2001: 132). However, this ideological dimension often remains obscured under the aegis of "market neutrality," which effectively brackets normative concerns that deviate from market-based principles and, in turn, functions to depoliticize environmental politics (Beder, 2001;Copland, 2019;Flynn and Hacking, 2019).…”