BY JIM GREEN
The federal government is attempting to weaken support for measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ahead of a United Nations climate change conference at the Hague in November.
The conference is supposed to conclude negotiations on a range of issues such as allowable measures for greenhouse gas reduction (including the expanded use of carbon "sinks"), monitoring and compliance and the establishment of an international carbon trading market.
A vehicle for the government to push its agenda in recent weeks has been the federal parliament's treaties committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the Kyoto Protocol and its implications for Australia.
Following a meeting of the committee in Canberra on September 27, committee chairperson Liberal MP Andrew Thomson expressed concern about proposals to establish an international monitoring body.
Speaking on ABC radio on September 28, Thomson questioned the "strange notion of inspections like having Richard Butler go into Iraq. They're talking about people wandering around the Latrobe Valley or the coast of Queensland inspecting us. This doesn't sound the sort of treaty that would attract a lot of public support, I can tell you that."
During the public hearings of the treaties committee, Thomson wondered aloud whether Australia would find itself at the mercy of international inspection committees dominated by "hostile" developing countries.
The concern about ceding national sovereignty sits uncomfortably with the federal government's stated position that it will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol unless and until the United States does.
According to Thomson, climate change is a bureaucratic conspiracy driven by "those people in the bureaucracy who are very eager to secure budget funding and authority and policy importance".
Corporate front group
Where did Thomson get these paranoid ideas from? The answer is the Lavoisier Group, an industry-funded "think tank" led by Peter Walsh, a former finance minister in Bob Hawke's federal Labor government.
In its submission to the Treaties committee, the Lavoisier Group argued that the Kyoto Protocol poses "the most serious challenge to our sovereignty since the Japanese Fleet entered the Coral Sea on 3 May, 1942". The submission claimed the architects of the Kyoto Protocol "are determined to ensure, as best they can, that it will be impossible for those nations who commit to it, to ever change their minds. In order to ensure that the sovereign rights of withdrawal (which are written into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol), can in practice never be exercised, a new imperial order will have to be created.
"Under this new global structure, decisions with the most profound and intimate effect on Australian economic and social life will be made by the Kyoto (UNFCCC) Secretariat based in Bonn and Australia will only be able to escape from entrapment in this new imperialism through immense political upheaval of the kind experienced by George Washington and his colleagues when they rebelled against the authority of the British Crown and established the United States."
According to the Lavoisier Group, proponents of reducing greenhouse emissions will argue for the amendment or reinterpretation of World Trade Organisation rules to allow trade sanctions to be used to enforce the Kyoto Protocol. Thus the "sovereign rights" of WTO signatories will be destroyed and the WTO will either be abandoned by its members or it will become an "instrument of imperial authority".
"The logic of Kyoto is inexorable. Carbon withdrawal requires major economic dislocation, particularly for Australia, dependent as it is for much of its international trade on cheap coal-based energy. Democracies will not support policies which impose such dislocation except in times of national emergency such as the immediate threat of invasion", the submission rants.
Thankfully, the Lavoisier Group notes, Kyoto protagonists are not prepared "at this point" to urge the use of military power against "recalcitrants" who refuse to reduce greenhouse emissions.
Political cover
The Australian government cannot openly subscribe to the Lavoisier Group's crudest formulations, but the conspiracy theorists have already provided it with important political cover and support. The Lavoisier Group talks openly about "military invasion" while Thomson evokes frightening images of Richard Butler clones and people from "hostile" developing countries carrying out inspections in Australia. It's the Hanson/Howard routine all over again.
At a UN climate change conference in France in September, the Australian delegates argued that countries should monitor their own progress on greenhouse gas emissions rather than establishing an international monitoring body. An Australian delegate objected to a proposal to establish a consultative process to ensure continuity of information exchange, to facilitate international cooperation and to contribute to the assessment of demonstrable progress.
If such a body was established, Australian delegates argued, it should be prohibited from responding to questions about a country's performance except for questions posed by the country in question.
An Australian delegate also opposed proposals for financial penalties, or any binding consequences whatsoever, for countries failing to meet their targets.
Is that a black helicopter in the sky? No, just soot from another coal-fired power station.
[Visit Jim Green's nuclear and environmental research web page at <http://www.geocities.com/jimgreen3>.]