The Mid-Week Essay (1): Australian PM's perverted views on climate emergency

Published by MAC on 2020-02-05
Source: Renew Economy (Australia)

Big coal man fiddles while country burns

Morrison’s refusal to move on climate, and the “prosperity doctrine”

by Giles Parkinson and Michael Mazengarb

Renew Economy (Australia)

3 February 2020

It’s become, quite literally, the burning question of the Australian
summer. How do you explain a prime minister who says he accepts the
science of climate change, acknowledges the link between climate change
and the devastating bushfires, who bears witness to the suffering and
losses, and then chooses to do nothing about it?

Prime minister Scott Morrison likes to say he is a “do-er”. In fact, says
so ad infinitum. But when it comes to climate policies, the appeals to Do
Something beyond Australia’s glaringly inadequate current policies, and to
show some leadership, have been ignored.

Morrison insists that Australia is doing more than most, which is patently
not true; that emissions are falling, which are the result only of
accounting tricks; and says he will not increase Australia’s emissions
targets, or urge other countries to do so, even when it is clear that
current policies will take average global warming to more than 3°C, and
more devastation for Australia and Australians.

The most commonly cited causes for Morrison’s inaction are the influence
of the radical MPs and senators within Liberal and National Party ranks
who completely reject the science of climate change, and who seem to have
a vice-like hold over Coalition numbers, and their leaders.

And then there is the power and influence of the fossil fuel lobby that
not only appears to have a financial grip on the Coalition, but also a
mortgage over some of Morrison’s key advisory positions. And let’s not
forget, of course, the Murdoch media.

There is another influence, however, that is worth noting now as citizens
and investors struggles to comprehend Morrison’s tin-eared response to
victims and fire-fighters at the height of the crisis, his lack of
empathy, his refusal to adjust his climate policies in any meaningful
manner since, and his focus on “resilience” and adaptation.

And that influence – we should be reminded – is Morrison’s Christian
faith, and in particular the “prosperity doctrine” or “prosperity gospel”
to which his church subscribes. This belief holds that the world’s
resources are there to be exploited, that Christians have a duty to do so,
and that only Jesus can have an influence over climate.

Morrison is openly and proudly a member of the Horizon church in the shire
of Sutherland, which is itself a member of the Australian Christian
Churches organisation, formally known as the Assembly of God church group
and which until recently counted Hillsong Church as a member.

What exactly is this “prosperity doctrine”? The key point, as explained by
Bishop George Browning in “The Anglican” in late 2018, is to remove any
impediment to personal gain and prosperity. On the issue of climate
change, it is what helps deliver “traditional conservatives”, if that is
who Morrison claims he is, into the embrace of the radical right.

“The goal of government is therefore not to regulate for the common good,
but for the prosperity of the individual, even to the detriment of common
good,” Bishop Browning writes. “The attitude of the conservatives in the
present government on environmental issues is evidence enough of this
stance.”

That could explain why Morrison is so keen to promote the coal sector, why
he brought a lump of coal into parliament and declared “don’t be afraid”,
why he mocks new technologies like batteries and EVs, and why his only
tangible response to the bushfires has been to try to force the states to
open up Australia’s gas reserves – a polluting fossil fuel, of course –
for more exploitation.

Morrison justifies this pursuit of more gas as a necessary “transition
fuel”. But as we wrote last week, and was echoed by Simon Holmes à Court
in the Guardian, the idea of gas as a transition fuel has long been
discarded – unless, of course, you intend to slow down the replacement of
coal with the much cheaper wind and solar.

For some reason, the exploitation of wind and solar resonates less well
with the Pentecostal evangelists than the exploitation of coal, gas and
oil. Perhaps this is partly explained by the “neo-Liberal Jesusing” (as a
Guardian headline writer put it so beautifully last year).

Mairead Shanahan, a Macquarie PHD student, wrote in 2017 that several
Australian neo-Pentecostal leaders have links to mining companies, energy
providers, and property developers.

Lucas Jacometti, Pastor of the C3 Church in Hobart, says in a sermon on
climate change scepticism: “Only Jesus has the power to shift the
climate.”

She notes that in 2016, the Tasmanian newspaper The Mercury reported that
Jacometti, in partnership with oil prospector Malcolm Bendall, wanted to
develop the Tasmanian central highlands into an oil reserve. Jacometti
lobbied state and federal members of parliament, government departments,
and public servants to get oil exploration on the Tasmanian state agenda.

Morrison wants NSW to exploit its gas reserves. In return, he offered
support for infrastructure deemed to be “green”, but which had largely
already been announced or planned – upgrades to the NSW-Queensland
transmission link and the HumeLink interconnector designed to support the
government’s pet project, the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group that publishes the
‘Doomsday Clock’, which they recently moved to just 100 seconds to
midnight, also does a good breakdown of the historical evangelical
approach to climate change.

“Some evangelicals cite religious reasons for avoiding climate solutions.
They subscribe to the belief that “God will take care of everything” or
even that climate change is a sign of their coming salvation after the
“end times,” they write.

Go back further, and you will find in a 2010 Pew Research Center survey
that 58 percent of white evangelical Christians said Jesus Christ would
return to earth by 2050, by far the highest percentage in any religious
group.

And regardless of whether the Second Coming is associated with the
destruction of the earthly world or its transformation into a paradise for
the righteous (both of these beliefs have persisted within various strains
of evangelical Christianity), there is no point in protecting a planet
that is soon coming to an end (Zaleha and Szasz, 2015).

“Although most evangelicals would agree that the Bible commands them to
care for the poor, prominent right-wing evangelists such as E. Calvin
Beisner argue that fossil fuels are beneficial and essential to lifting
people out of poverty, and that the proposed solutions to climate change
are not only fruitless but harmful to the poor.”

This is basically Morrison’s line from the National Press Club speech last
week. Apart from the patently untrue claim that “there is no credible …..
energy transition plan for an economy like Australia in particular, that
does not involve the greater use of gas as an important transition fuel”,
Morrison declared he would not do anything that would threaten Australian
jobs.

“I’m not going to sell out Australians based on the calls from some to put
higher taxes on them or to push up their electricity prices or to abandon
their jobs and their industries and tell them that they’re just collateral
damage of a global movement (by which he means the science and the call to
respect and act on it). I’m not going to do that.”

That, of course, is just a line of convenience. It was quickly dispensed
with just a few days later when Morrison announced a ban on all visitors
from mainland China because of the threat of the Coronavirus, with obvious
implications for the tourism industry and tertiary education.

But there is no such waver for climate change, even when the plummeting
cost of wind, solar and storage are making the transition to a zero carbon
economy affordable and most likely profitable because of the opportunities
they present. Instead, the government is back to embracing the “Lomborg
doctrine”, which deliberately ignores existing renewable and storage
technologies and lays all hope in more R&D.

Another relevant analysis comes from this article: Why conservative
Christians don’t believe in climate change, which was also published in
the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

“White evangelical protestants are by far the least concerned about
climate change,” it notes.

“An analysis of resolutions and campaigns by evangelicals over the past 40
years shows that anti-environmentalism within conservative Christianity
stems from fears that stewardship of God’s creation is drifting toward
neo-pagan nature worship, and from apocalyptic beliefs about ‘end times’
that make it pointless to worry about global warming.”

Sound familiar?

“I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their
future, and I think it is important we give them that confidence that they
will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live
in, that they will also have an economy to live in as well,” Morrison told
reporters last year. “I don’t want our children to have anxieties about
these issues.”

As Shanahan noted in her analysis:

“It is evident that neo-Pentecostal churches are content to leave global
ecological issues up to God. They believe that God loves humans and,
ultimately, humans can do what they like with natural resources, because
God will take care of the global climate.”