Faith in facts? Climate change, spin and the Australian election
Election campaigns are strange rituals. This strangeness is most evident in promises about “the economy” – usually a code word for digging things out of the ground faster than your opponent, and shipping them to the nearest furnace or methane fridge.
In this heady rhythm of deeper, hotter, faster campaigning the wet blankets known as “fact-checking units” have been a striking feature of the 2013 campaign in Australia. These units, most notably those at the Conversation, the ABC and Politifact, claim that they “help restore faith in the political process”.
“Returning” to facts seems particularly glib when two-thirds of the country’s print media is owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose papers have depicted Rudd as a bungling Nazi commandant and have run a front page gloriously claiming “Australia needs [the conservative leader] Tony”. Furthermore, Conservative contempt for the very concept of factshas the ring of an American culture war, as doubt is cast on rising temperatures.
For my part, “fact-checking” borders on tautology, if understood as a demonstration that something is true because of incontrovertible data. Facts are agreed conventions between relevant parties (especially professions). Science studies has been at pains to argue that you can’t “check” facts in the same way you check the mail – as berks might have you believe. Facts are made in a context through institutions historically run by blokes – with all the discrimination that entails. In this sense, the rhetoric of “fact-checking” tells us more about the janus-faced institutional politics of measurement and numbers than it does about epistemological units.
Nowhere is the politics of measurement more fraught, and often mind-bendingly complicated, than around climate change mitigation policy, where Australia’s leading institution for measuring, monitoring and trading carbon emission permits is on the verge of being systematically dismantled.
Consider two points of departure for climate change mitigation policy: one centred on reducing emissions from the electricity sector and another around the bio-carbon (carbon locked up in soil, tree trunks and roots).
Consumer retail electricity prices are the political hot button issue, with sharp rises recently due to long postponed and heavily contested network upgrades responsible for the lion’s share of that increase. Carbon pricing has played a minimal role in pushing up retail prices, yetrecently published analysis suggests that it is working to reduce emissions from the stationary energy sector – Australia’s largest contribution to climate change under the Kyoto accounting framework. Importantly, other factors are at play in the downward pressure on emissions: notably the monumental uptake of solar PV by households, more intense competition within the fossil-fuelled electricity generation sector and the cruelling of the manufacturing sector by the high Australian dollar.
This all makes Abbott’s promise to “axe the toxic carbon tax” seem fiscally irresponsible given that, by their own estimates they’ll forgo $13.5bn in revenue to save $7.5bn.
Our measurement systems for electricity sector emissions are now taken for granted appendices to obscure but enormously consequential reports. Unlike the electricity sector, where calculations of watts structure economic life, the ephemeral character of bio-carbon has been much more difficult to subsume under a rationalist policy gaze.
In land-use accounting, facts are much fewer and further between. Instead, numbers have been marshalled in tenuous support of the economic agenda to dig things out of the ground as fast as possible. The intersections of science and policy around biocarbon have been characterised by what Paul Edwards usefully terms “data friction” – overlapping, conflicting sets of data that are intended to cover the same referents, such as native trees cleared by farmers’ bulldozers. Spats worth billions of dollars in liabilities under the Kyoto Protocol centred on Australia’s land-use carbon figures during the 1990s occurred whenstate and federal data sets told very different stories.
Fact-checking didn’t seem to make politicians more honest then and there’s no reason to believe the public will be any better served by fixating on facts where the Coalition’s soil carbon-centric approach is concerned. Rather, it’s the needs of extractive industries that are clearly structuring the policy here too.
As Ben Eltham notes in a scathing review of the policy here, according to a comprehensive scientific review of soil carbon technology by the CSIRO last year, “a general lack of research in this area is currently preventing a more quantitative assessment of the carbon sequestration potential of agricultural soils.” Worse still, the CSIRO’s soil carbon trials actually showed a decrease in the amount of carbon stored in the soil. Little wonder opposition spokesperson Greg Hunt “hasn’t been telling the full story.” It would make for a tortuous tome of measurement politics.
Meanwhile the basic arithmetic of climate change mitigation continues to be pushed further and further into the background. As George Wilkenfeld has incisively noted, “public concerns about the risks of global warming seem to peak at roughly decade intervals.” We’re just coming off the third decadal peak, and atmospheric concentrations are rising faster than ever. Little wonder many are looking beyond party politics for their mitigation solutions.
Fonte: theguardian.com
