ANNA ROSE
Melbourne University Press, 2012, 357 pages, $19.99 (pb)
Anna Rose, a climate change youth activist and leader, was
warned by her many colleagues in the environment movement of the risks of
agreeing to do a television documentary, screened earlier this year by the ABC,
pitting her against the former Liberal
Party senator, science minister and climate change denialist, Nick Minchin.
The “whole show will play into the denialists’ strategy of framing the science as disputed when it actually isn’t”, she was told, and it would serve merely to give the infinitesimally tiny bunch of cranks and denialists prime time exposure to market their shonky product, ‘doubt’.
Rose had heard that the respected scientist, Tim Flannery,
and the ABC’s science journalist, Robyn Williams, had declined to ‘balance’ the
scales on an issue for which the time for weighing up the science is long past. Nevertheless, the documentary was going
ahead, so Rose decided it may as well be her and pinned her hopes on exposing the
weaknesses of the denialists’ case to sway the undecided viewer. Madlands
is her account of the experience.
Her first meeting, with Minchin’s hand-picked right wing
libertarian bloggers, “a mum and dad team from Perth” who “had discovered that
thousands of climate scientists and all the world’s main scientific academies
were wrong”, set the tone for incredulity which was not dispelled by subsequent
denialists.
Meanwhile, a stubborn Minchin proved impervious to the
patient persuasion of Rose’s chosen climate scientists. Pillow-punching frustration at Minchin’s smug
(‘I remain to be convinced’) irresponsibility is punctuated by Rose’s dawning
realisation that his intransigent denialism is not really about the science at
all but the implications of the
science for the future of, and for the massive profits from, a fossil-fuel-based
economy.
Minchin’s claim to be an ‘open-minded sceptic’ is hollow,
says Rose, showing how Minchin relentlessly denies scientific fact because of his
core conservative political and economic values, especially his opposition to
environmentalism as ‘the new religion’ of the ‘extreme left’ and his dread of government
interference and regulation of the free market - except, of course, for
favoured causes such as government subsidies ($9 billion annually in Australia)
that make fossil fuels so much cheaper in relation to assistance-starved renewable
energy.
By book’s end, Rose, having despaired of changing Minchin’s
politically-shuttered mind but determined to find “common ground” with
denialists, joins hands with Minchin in celebrating “competitive economic
advantage” through energy efficiency, a solitary policy plank which sidesteps
the central issue of replacing carbon-dirty energy with clean renewables.
This not only concedes scientific ground to ratbag
denialists but Rose’s concluding plea that the climate change movement needs “people
who understand markets”, like Minchin and other free market ideologues (“harmonising
the market with the environment” is “what this whole project has been about”,
she concludes), is a crippling political concession given the carbon tax and emissions trading scheme failures
of the capitalist market to solve a world-threatening crisis of its own making.
