[Dialogue] THE BIG DRY

Fri May 4 08:22:00 EDT 2007

THE BIG DRY
Thomas Friedman, May 4, NYTIMES

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. 

Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
_http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla_ 
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