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Former Climate Change Authority member reveals what went on before he quit and offers a withering assessment of the PM

Clive Hamilton has been at the pointy end of public discourse on climate change for more than 20 years.

Among lots of other things, he’s written challenging books on the science, founded a progressive thinktank and had a failed crack at being an MP for the Greens.

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The Climate Institute, Australia’s first NGO to focus solely on climate change, is to shut down at the end of June after 12 years.

It was born into an era when politicians and voters were finally waking up to the importance of climate policy. But now, its self-described “centrist, pragmatic advocacy” has run out of financial backing.

Early years

It’s easy to forget, given the political theatrics we’ve witnessed over the past decade, just how little attention was being paid to climate policy before the explosion of concern in late 2006. Life was bleak for environmental groups under the four Howard governments from 1996 to 2007, with the partial and controversial exception of WWF.

Climate change was simply not an issue that had traction with the federal government, and the business community had fought itself to a standstill on the topic of whether Australia should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which John Howard resisted to the end.

Bob Carr, the then premier of New South Wales, had been trying to get carbon trading onto state and federal agendas with limited success.

By 2004 attitudes were shifting, not least because of the ongoing Millennium Drought. In a 2015 interview Clive Hamilton, a climate policy academic and inaugural board chair of the Climate Institute, noted:

In the early 2000s when the environment groups started to get serious about climate change, they adopted their standard tactics, which had run out of steam. The problem for environmentalism in Australia, as well as internationally, is that they had this glorious period of the 1980s and ‘90s, and then they became institutionalised; their tactics became stale. It wasn’t their fault – it’s just the world changed.

Hamilton explained that in 2005, Mark Wootton, director of the Poola Foundation, approached him saying that he had A$5 million and wanted to spend it on something that would “cut through” the stagnant climate change debate. Hamilton thought about it and proposed the Climate Institute, which he put together over the ensuing months. After chairing the board for its first year Hamilton returned to his duties at the Australia Institute.

Launching a tour of rural Australia the following year, Wootton told journalists:

People have to see there is a solution, that there is a way out… It’s about people moving on and not feeling that sense of despair, which I’ve genuinely felt, and that’s why we set this up.

The institute opened its doors in October 2005 and was soon in the headlines. Howard attacked Carr, declaring himself “amazed a former Labor premier should advocate that we should sign up to something that would export the jobs of Australian workers”.

A month later, the Climate Institute returned fire with an attack on the Howard government’s Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, widely interpreted as a way for polluting nations to dodge Kyoto.

This pattern of well-timed reports and timely rebuttals has continued over the past 12 years. During this time the Climate Institute has challenged successive governments to do more, to create stronger policy and a more predictable investment environment – something that is sorely lacking to this day.

The institute’s critics will claim it never escaped the neoliberal paradigm – the idea that the market can and will deliver as long as the right policy levers are pulled at the right time. In fairness, though, it never pledged to transcend free-market economics anyway, although it also tried along the way to expand the argument to include moral (and religious) values.

Main achievements

In the reporting on the institute’s demise, its main claims to fame are listed as helping to expand the renewable energy target in 2008, saving the Climate Change Authority from Tony Abbott’s axe in 2014, and building bipartisan support for Australia to ratify the Paris climate agreement in 2016.

But there was much else that the Climate Institute worked on, which is in danger of being forgotten.

It toured rural Australia to listen to farmers’ concerns.

It tried to signal to politicians that voters cared. For example, before the “first climate change election” in November 2007, it commissioned a poll of 877 voters in nine key marginal electorates. It found that 73% of voters thought climate change would have either a strong or a very strong influence on their vote at the election, an increase from 62% in August.

It also played a part in stitching together what political scientists call “advocacy coalitions”. One notable example was its help in producing the Common belief: Australia’s faith communities on climate change report, released in December 2006 with input from 16 Australian communities including Aboriginal Australians, Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other denominations.

Why it died and what next?

The institute’s outgoing chief executive, John Connor, told Reneweconomy that the decision ultimately comes down to funding:

We haven’t been able to plug the [funding] gap. Centrist, pragmatic advocacy is not sexy for many people who want to fund the fighters or pour funds into new technology.

As such, the Climate Institute is another victim of the policy paralysis that has exasperated and bewildered commentators.

It is indeed hard to justify the funding of calm, measured policy advice when the mere mention of the most economically tame of notions – an emissions intensity scheme – causes panic and retreat in the federal government.

Climatologist and Climate Council member Will Steffen, interviewed on the ABC, suggested that over the past two or three years many organisations have begun to take climate change on board, and so the institute’s unique role was lessened.

But one piece of the furniture that urgently needs saving is the institute’s Climate of the Nation, the longest trend survey of the attitudes of Australians to climate change and its solutions. Hopefully another organisation (I’m looking at you, Australian Conservation Foundation) will pick this up.

The staff of the Climate Institute will hopefully find new roles within the now smaller ecosystem of environmental policy advice. With the impacts that the institute and others were warning about in 2005 arriving with depressing predictability, Australia desperately needs three things.

It needs community energy programs. It needs effective opposition to plans for yet more fossil fuel extraction. And most relevantly here, it needs a cacophony of well-informed and relentless voices advocating for the most useful policies to get the carbon out of our economy.

There’s a fourth thing, actually: luck. From here on we are going to need an enormous (and undeserved) amount of luck if the lost years of ignoring sensible climate policy advice are not to come back and haunt us.

Marc Hudson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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Scott Pruitt, the new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, gave an interview on CNBC on Thursday during which he denied carbon dioxide was a primary contributor to global warming. Pruitt also said that there is ‘tremendous disagreement’ over the extent to which human activity such as CO2 emissions are affecting the earth, despite widespread agreement in the scientific community

• EPA head Scott Pruitt denies that carbon dioxide causes global warming

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Certain traditional owners and conservation groups allied to stand against a planned gas hub in Western Australia's Kimberley region. AAP Image/Tim Gentles

In Australia and across the world, Indigenous people are resisting developments that threaten their lands. Wangan and Jagalingou people stand in opposition to the planned Carmichael coalmine in Queensland, while the Sioux people are holding firm in their struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock.

As these contests intensify, they reveal that Indigenous peoples often have limited say over what happens on their country. When pitted against powerful state and corporate actors, Indigenous people may seek assistance from others, such as environmentalists, to protect their interests and further their aspirations.

In Australia, these arrangements have sometimes been called “green-black alliances”. However, as we argue in our new book Unstable Relations, it is misleading to contend that Indigenous people and environmentalists necessarily share (or don’t share) the same ends and motives.

They are neither natural allies nor enemies. Instead, we suggest, close attention to the past and present of “green-black” meetings in Australia reveals that their relationships are surprisingly unstable, and are shaped by shifting legal and social contexts.

To understand how and why these collaborations occur, and how and why they can fall apart, we need a better comprehension of the particular processes and people involved, rather than treating them all as uniform.

Understanding land rights today

Since 1966, governments in Australia have progressively recognised different forms of Indigenous land rights. Perhaps the most well known is “native title”, which was first recognised in the High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision.

Native title applies only to Crown lands and pastoral leases, only authorises limited land use rights, and is proven through condescending tests of cultural “continuity”. Because of the history of colonial dispossession, some groups fail to meet these tests; others refuse to do so. These problems notwithstanding, multiple forms of Indigenous land rights together cover more than a third of the continent, much of it in remote Australia.

As we have recently seen, mining companies and others often greet changes to land rights regimes with dire warnings about economic impacts. The “Mabo madness” of the 1990s proved overblown. By and large, Australia’s various land rights regimes have been highly accommodating to miners and mineral extraction.

In violation of United Nations principles, Australia’s native title laws do not recognise Indigenous peoples’ rights to consent over what happens on their country. Rather, they simply allow a right to be consulted for six months. This gives rise to contractual agreements, such as Indigenous Land Use Agreements, which effectively grant mining companies and others a “social licence to operate” in exchange for a mixture of cash and in-kind benefits.

Indigenous academic Marcia Langton and others have argued that this era of “agreement-making” has the potential to lift Indigenous people in remote areas out of poverty. According to this argument, environmental groups that raise concerns about industrial activity do so at Indigenous peoples’ expense.

A simplified version of this story is often found in the mainstream media, casting environmentalists as out-of-touch urbanites and portraying Indigenous groups who work with them as dupes or somehow illegitimate.

Meanwhile, many Australians seem to accept that extractive developments are both inevitable and beneficial, despite complex evidence to the contrary.

The alternative view is the one depicted in this painting by Garawa artist Jacky Green, in which a road train covered with dollar signs represents “the wealth being taken away from us, from our country”.

Unstable relations

The anthropological and historical research presented in our book highlights that, far from being manipulated, Indigenous people who are opposed to a particular development often seek to enter into strategic partnerships with environmentalists. Crucially, these are not inevitable alliances but negotiated collaborations, which can run into problems if circumstances change.

The controversy that erupted in recent years over Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act was shaped by collaborative relationships established between the Australian Conservation Foundation, The Wilderness Society, and Cape York Land Council and its former chairman Noel Pearson decades earlier. Whereas these groups had formalised an alliance in the mid-1990s, which successfully lobbied for land rights and the return of country to traditional owners in Cape York, they split in the late 2000s over how to regulate planning on that country.

Nonetheless, while a public controversy raged, together these groups continued to privately negotiate further outcomes over jointly managed national parks.

Another quite different example is the campaign against a major liquid-gas processing plant and port at Walmadany (James Price Point) in Western Australia. The ethnographer Stephen Muecke has characterised the relationship between those Goolarabooloo people who sought to halt the project and their green supporters as the most successful such collaboration in Australia’s history.

This was based on long-term personal relationships between some of those involved and, crucially, the media and scientific resources that environmentalists were able to bring to the campaign. “Citizen scientists” took their cue from Goolarabooloo people’s firsthand knowledge of local environs, conducting highly successful surveys of turtle nests and bilbies.

In our book, we and other contributors point to many other productive but nonetheless unstable relationships in South Australia, the Northern Territory, Victoria and elsewhere.

The ‘green-black’ future

Environmentalists often seem oblivious to the contractual landscape in which they are acting. They mistake their relationships with particular Indigenous groups as a natural alliance, based on received ideas of Indigenous connection to country.

But as Yorta Yorta activist Monica Morgan has pointed out, Indigenous people have a holistic relationship with their country, which doesn’t always fit with the specific goals of environmentalists. When green groups assume that Indigenous peoples’ “traditional culture” is necessarily conservationist, this can lead them to denigrate Indigenous people who pursue economic opportunities.

Relationships between Indigenous people and environmental interests continue to change. Both are now landholders of significant conservation areas in remote Australia, while Indigenous people are increasingly employed as rangers through state-funded conservation projects.

Again, specific case studies show how these arrangements are far from simple. At the former pastoral property of Pungalina in Queensland’s Gulf Country, Garawa people return to “Emu Dreaming” places now managed by non-Indigenous conservationists. There they negotiate an ambiguous field of responses to their presence, ranging from interest and respect to anxiety.

In Arnhem Land, Kuninjku people express ambivalence about the problem of the environmentally destructive buffalo in an Indigenous Protected Area. The buffalo are simultaneously recognised as companions, an environmental problem, and a crucial source of meat in hungry times.

As long as Indigenous people have limited capacity to decide what happens on their country, and as long as environmentalists continue to oppose destructive developments, their interests will sometimes intersect. However, as these situations arise and alliances form, we should be careful to avoid essentialising or conflating those involved. “Green-black” alliances will certainly be productive at times, but they will always be unstable.

Timothy Neale receives funding from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre.

Eve Vincent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Trump adviser shocks scientists and environmental advocates with statement that negates EPA policy and ‘overwhelmingly clear’ evidence on climate change

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming.

Pruitt said on Thursday that he did not believe that the release of CO2, a heat-trapping gas, was pushing global temperatures upwards.

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