[ExI] Oz Big Dry

[Damien Broderick]

May 4, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist, nytimes.com
The Aussie ‘Big Dry’
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
SYDNEY, Australia

Almost everywhere you travel these days, people 
are talking about their weather ­ and how it has 
changed. Nowhere have I found this more true, 
though, than in Australia, where “the big dry,” a 
six-year record drought, has parched the Aussie 
breadbasket so severely that on April 19, Prime 
Minister John Howard actually asked the whole 
country to pray for rain. “I told people you have 
to pray for rain,” Mr. Howard remarked to me, 
adding, “I said it without a hint of irony.”

And here’s what’s really funny: It actually 
started to rain! But not enough, which is one 
reason Australia is about to have its first 
election in which climate change will be a top 
issue. In just 12 months, climate change has gone 
from being a nonissue here to being one that could tip the vote.

In the process, Prime Minister John Howard, a 
conservative now in his 11th year in office, has 
moved from being a climate skeptic to what he 
calls a “climate realist,” who knows that he must 
offer programs to reduce global-warming 
greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, but wants 
to do it without economic pain or imposed 
targets, like Kyoto’s. He is proposing emissions trading and nuclear power.

The Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, proposes a 
hard target ­ a 60 percent reduction in 
Australian CO2 emissions from 2000 levels by 2050 
­ and subsidies for Aussies to retrofit their 
homes with energy-saving systems. The whole issue 
has come from the bottom up, and it has come on 
so quickly that neither party can be sure it has 
its finger on the public’s pulse.

“What was considered left a year ago is now 
center, and in six months it will be conservative 
­ that is how quickly the debate about climate 
change is moving here,” said Michael Roux, 
chairman of RI Capital, a Melbourne investment 
firm. “It is being led by young people around the 
dinner table with their parents, and the C.E.O.’s 
and politicians are all playing catch-up.”

I asked Mr. Howard how it had happened. “It was a 
perfect storm,” he said. First came a warning 
from Nicholas Stern of Britain, who said climate 
change was not only real but could be 
economically devastating for Australia. Then the 
prolonged drought forced Mr. Howard to declare 
last month that “if it doesn’t rain in sufficient 
volume over the next six to eight weeks, there 
will be no water allocations for irrigation 
purposes” until May 2008 for crops and cattle in 
the Murray-Darling river basin, which accounts 
for 41 percent of Australian agriculture.

It was as if the pharaoh had banned irrigation 
from the Nile. Australians were shocked. Then the 
traditional Australian bush fires, which usually 
come in January, started in October because 
everything was so dry. Finally, in the middle of 
all this, Al Gore came to Australia and showed 
his film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“The coincidence of all those things ... shifted 
the whole debate,” Mr. Howard said. While he 
tends to focus on the economic costs of acting 
too aggressively on climate change, his 
challenger, Mr. Rudd, has been focusing on the 
costs of not acting. Today, Mr. Rudd said, 
Australian businesses are demanding that the 
politicians “get a regulatory environment 
settled” on carbon emissions trading so companies 
know what framework they will have to operate in 
­ because they know change is coming.

When you look at the climate debate around the 
world, remarked Peter Garrett, the former lead 
singer for the Australian band Midnight Oil, who 
now heads the Labor Party’s climate efforts, 
there are two kinds of conservatives. The ones 
like George Bush and John Howard, he said, deep 
down remain very skeptical about environmentalism 
and climate change “because they have been 
someone else’s agenda for so long,” but they also 
know they must now offer policies to at least defuse this issue politically.

And then there are conservatives like Arnold 
Schwarzenegger and David Cameron, the Tory Party 
leader in London, who understand that climate is 
becoming a huge defining issue and actually want 
to take it away from liberals by being more forward-leaning than they are.

In short, climate change is the first issue in a 
long time that could really scramble Western 
politics. Traditional conservatives can now build 
bridges to green liberals; traditional liberals 
can make common cause with green businesses; 
young climate voters are newly up for grabs. And 
while coal-mining unions oppose global warming 
restrictions, service unions, which serve coastal 
tourist hotels, need to embrace them. You can see 
all of this and more in Australia today.

Politics gets interesting when it stops raining.

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