"Heat on Abbott as US pushes G20 climate change action"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 12/11/2014
Reporter: Tony Jones
Former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, discusses what the climate deal between China and the US means for Australia's role in international negotiations on carbon emissions and the announcement will impact on the G20's economic agenda.
Transcript
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: We're joined in the studio by the former Prime Minister Paul Keating, the key architect of the APEC Summit.
Thanks for being here.
PAUL KEATING, FORMER PRIME MINISTER: Thank you, Tony.
TONY JONES: What do you make of this secretly-negotiated climate deal between the US and China?
PAUL KEATING: Well I personally knew there was discussions running for six or seven months on this issue and I think it is - firstly, it's driven by the international imperative, I think. In China's case, its atmosphere. In the case of the US, the overwhelming sort of body of the science. And I think it's also something of a non-military, non-geostrategic thing the US is able to do with China. Remember, it's locked China out of the TPP, the trade pact. It's jammed China on the - it's proposed international investment bank. So this is one of the things it's able to do, which it put into the good category. But is this dispelling strategic tensions between China and the US? No.
TONY JONES: Well Obama seemed to be suggesting it was a major milestone that could have impact on US-China relations more broadly. You don't think it could signal any kind of thaw in the security tensions that have been growing up for quite a period of time?
PAUL KEATING: I think it's highly desirable that we see an emerging, evolving agenda where China joins great states like the US in these global issues, whether it's nuclear non-proliferation, the global commons, the sea, the atmosphere. This is unambiguously a good thing, Tony, unambiguously a good thing. And I think also now with these tensions on - particularly coming out of the Middle East, threats to the carriage of oil through the Persian Gulf, it may be that there's more common cause between the US and China in the protection of those cargos in the future. So, there may be an evolving non-military, if you like, no-strategic set of arrangements between China and the US and that is good for the world and good for the rest of us. But I don't think it's dealing with the underlying tension, and that is, that the US seeks to maintain strategic primacy in Asia when there has developed over the last 20 years an economy as large as its own.
TONY JONES: Well, I mean, you've expressed this concern before that the US and Japan and its allies are effectively ringfencing China or trying to contain China and that that is creating tensions. Does it appear to you though at least this move today signals there may be some lessening of tension?
PAUL KEATING: Yes, because I think actually doing a significant thing is a positive thing, but - is a positive factor, but is it changing the underlying deteriorating position between these two states? In other words, are they facing up to the - are both states facing up to the fundamental issue, and that is, how does, as Xi Jinping put it, the rising state meet the established state? How does the rising state meet the established state without moving to the dismal history of - we saw at the end of the 19th Century with Germany? How do we beat that? And I think we'd have to say in the last 12 months the game's got a lot nastier than it was even a year ago.
TONY JONES: And what do you put that down to, because, I mean, you see even in The New York Times today there are warnings about the rise of President Xi as being a very powerful leader as opposed to a weakened US President?
PAUL KEATING: Well, I think, look, the Nixon-Mao deal which set up the strategic situation in Asia after 1972 and provided all those years of peace and security, that template is becoming now irrelevant. The central relevance of it in the first instance was the Soviet Union. That's why they both did it. The Soviet Union disappeared in 1989. So from 1989 onwards, the basic rationale of Nixon-Mao arrangement started to decline. It is now fanciful to believe that the strategic construction of arrangements in Asia can be as they were off the template of 1972, off the Nixon-Mao arrangement. Yet the US, I think, you know, fails to understand that things can't remain the way they are and China has yet to give us a strategic view itself of how it sees the region, including a place for Japan, right. So you've got China wanting to assert its place as a peer of the US, yet not tell the world how it sees the region and you have the US in denial about its true strategic circumstances.
TONY JONES: Did we get, however, the first inkling that APEC may be changing its remit, effectively, today? This announcement, negotiated secretly, the last act of APEC is two presidents getting together having had behind-the-scenes talks to make these huge announcements.
PAUL KEATING: Well, Tony, when I first put the APEC Leaders' meeting idea to President George Herbert Bush at Kirribilli in New Year's Day, 1992, it was to develop for the first time a piece of pan-Pacific architecture where US policy in the region was run by the President and not the US Navy. And I particularly wanted the meetings to be not scripted, to be actually run by the leaders and by the host of the particular meeting. And I always saw the body being a geostrategic body, not a trade body. But the deal I finally cut with Bill Clinton - because he'd been attacking George Bush over Iraq, he didn't feel he could enter a strategic dialogue and a strategic body. We set it up more or less as an economic co-operation trade body. But it was always intended to be a geopolitical body and this is what you're now seeing it become. And this is most obvious. You had Xi Jinping meeting Prime Minister Abe to discuss strategic issues, you had Barack Obama meeting Xi Jinping, other leaders meeting their counterparts and Tony Abbott, indeed, meeting Vladimir Putin. These are not trade matters, they're strategic matters and they are done not in the plenary session of the meeting, but in the side meetings, as I always hoped and intended they might be. So, APEC is a gift of Australian foreign policy to the region and now is it reasserting itself as the primary piece of political architecture.
TONY JONES: So, it begs the question as to what will happen, whether this'll have a flow-on effect, as Bill Shorten is suggesting it should, with the G20 meeting this weekend. Do you think the climate issue will be shifted up the agenda - or should it be shifted up the agenda?
PAUL KEATING: It kind of has to be, doesn't it? I mean, when the two largest economies in the world and who are the ones that have the greatest impact on climate conditions generally come to this sort of - and they're very ambitious targets. I mean, here we are, 25 to 28 per cent by 2020 reductions for the US - like, we're talking about five in Australia, five, and they're talking about 25 to 28. And the Chinese have got an even bigger target, that is, that their emissions peak by 2030, you know. It shows what a complete nonsense policy the Government has, you know. This idea that, you know, we get rid of the carbon tax. The carbon tax was there to price - price pollution. When you stop pricing pollution, you start gifting money to polluters, you know, you're on the wrong tram.
TONY JONES: Well, I mean, back in 2011, you told this program you actually considered carbon pricing to be a huge reform up there with some of the ...
PAUL KEATING: Yeah.
TONY JONES: ... reforms of the Hawke-Keating Government. It's been scrapped now. Isn't it time for all sides of politics to actually support the only policy available in this country, Direct Action?
PAUL KEATING: Well, when you have a policy - when you have a government bereft of ideas on climate and their only idea is to buy climate remissions off the budget, what else can the rest of the community do, as you suggest? But, how much better to have the carbon sensibly and properly priced to meet the kind of objectives which have been established today by these two important people, President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping.
TONY JONES: If Tony Abbott was here now he'd probably say to you, "Well, President Obama, who's trying to seek these great cuts to emissions, is actually going to do it with direct action policies himself, so why shouldn't we do the same sort of thing here in Australia?"
PAUL KEATING: Well, the thing is, you won't get - some of these things, it may facilitate reductions in carbon, carbon pollution, will of themselves have some direct action, could be some direct action-type measure. But in the end, it'll be the market that delivers these very large changes in carbon. You know, you won't get 25 to 28 per cent in the US, simply by a direct action policy.
TONY JONES: How does such a huge issue as this, as two major - the two biggest countries in the world have sort of acknowledged, get so caught up in politics? We know the Republicans in Congress are going to oppose these direct action measures. They've already rejected the emission-cutting targets that Barack Obama has brought down today. They say - and it obviously begs the question if they get into government: will they reverse the whole process 'cause it's a long-term thing?
PAUL KEATING: Well, great states can make mistakes, Tony. And the US has this great schism at its core between the Republicans and the Democrats and this is really costing them their - it's costing them their leadership in the world, direction, credibility, so, we can only lament this condition.
TONY JONES: Now, one of your most passionate commitments has been to Australia finding security in the place where it lives in Asia. The Abbott Government is concentrating its efforts on creating two very large free trade agreements with India and with China and to do it very quickly. Is that part of establishing security? Are they getting that right at least, from your point of view?
PAUL KEATING: I think they are getting that right. But, you know, as you know, this has been a very long-term, a long-term policy which has even stretched through the Gillard and Rudd governments. Trade agreements just take a long time to do. No, this is all, I think, good in terms of our engagement with the region, our ability to trade in the region, but the psychological point that - where do we find our security? Do we find our security in Asia or from Asia? I've always been in the in Asia camp - you find your security in Asia, not from Asia. And that fundamentally means having an Australian foreign policy which adapts to the realities of the region. And the realities of this region are we have a number of great powers - China, India, Indonesia, Japan and we have a group of nations in the ASEAN bloc and a country like Australia has to run a pragmatic policy of finding its interests and its security from those interests rather than some sort of nostalgia for the Anglosphere, believing this is all a kind of aberrant development and our real credentials and our real linkages are still in the Northern Hemisphere.
TONY JONES: But you'll give some credit to the current government, the Abbott Government, for moving quickly in this direction. Narendra Modi, the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Australia in many, many years and he's going to address the House of Parliament here.
PAUL KEATING: A good development. It's good to see the Indians coming here. We've got a lot in common with India. Tony, I'm only interested in outcomes. I don't really care who does them. I didn't care who did them in the government I led and the one I was with Bob Hawke. I didn't care who did them as long as we did them, right? What I'm after is policies, but not nonsense. Policies actually get us somewhere rather than vapid ideology.
TONY JONES: Let's go to one of those policies. As you know, China's asked Australia to be a founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank. You mentioned that at the beginning of the interview. Under pressure from the US, the security cabinet has decided to reject that offer. Is that a mistake or a prudent judgment?
PAUL KEATING: It was a shockingly bad decision. The worst decision this government has taken, I believe, was to - in international terms, was to refuse China's invitation for us to be a founding member and shareholder in this development bank, fundamentally, investment bank. You know, there's - you hear this word, these phrases like "responsible stakeholders". You know, you had the US saying, "We don't want China to go it alone. We don't want it to pick off individual states." So when the Chinese actually say, "OK, well we'll multilateralise ourselves. We'll invite the rest of you in at the founding so you can shape the mores of this institution and the capital structure," we say, "Oh, no, we're not doing that because we don't want to see the US believe this is only going to make China more powerful in the region."
TONY JONES: That is the fear. The US fear and the Japanese fear is that this bank will be used to somehow leverage Chinese power. It'll be used in a way to kind of advertise power and to - and Australia would be part of that if it signed up to it.
PAUL KEATING: Tony, you know, I'm the chairman of the advisory board of China Development Bank. China Development Bank's balance sheet is three times the World Bank now - three times the World Bank. China can do all this development work itself from its own institution. It's putting the handcuffs on and is multilateralising itself to do something good in international terms and to bring countries like us into it. This is our greatest trading partner, our greatest trading relationship. They propose a body which has not - a non-strategic body which is basically looking to cater to the infrastructure needs of developing Asia - China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, all of South-East Asia, to go beyond what the World Bank does, which is basically, of its essence an anti-poverty institution. And we say no.
TONY JONES: Were you surprised that decision was taken by the security cabinet and not the Treasurer and the Finance Minister and so on?
PAUL KEATING: Well that tells you something, doesn't it? It wasn't taken in the full cabinet. I mean, ultimately adopted by the full cabinet, but not taken in the broad economic trade and security context, but of all places, in the security committee of cabinet. So, you know - you remember years ago Bob Zoellick said, "We want China to be a responsible stakeholder." So China says, "OK, I'll be a responsible stakeholder. What about this? We will capitalise a new development institution, focused on infrastructure. We invite the rest of you as founding members to put in the capital." We say, "Too good for us, no. Too good, too good for us, no."
TONY JONES: I'm going to move on because we've got a little time left ...
PAUL KEATING: It is a bad decision of the worst kind.
TONY JONES: Let's move on. After the tensions between Australia and Russia, Channel Seven's reporting tonight, quote, "Tony Abbott's threat to shirtfront Vladimir Putin is escalating dramatically with a fleet of Russian warships streaming - steaming towards Australia in a defiant show of force." What do you make of this news?
PAUL KEATING: Not much. A friend of mine reminded me recently that there was a flotilla of Russian vessels off the coast of South Australia in 1890 and the band master on one of the ships was Rimsky-Korsakov, the great Russian composer. But then he was the band master of one of the ships and we invited them into Adelaide and apparently he conducted a concert in Adelaide as a result. So maybe ...
TONY JONES: I don't think this fleet's going to be invited into Brisbane, by the way.
PAUL KEATING: It may not be, but maybe be there's a sort of young Shostakovich lurking aboard. We might get a good concert out of him.
TONY JONES: (Laughs) But on a serious front, you do have concerns and similar concerns in a way to the concerns you have about the way China is being ringfenced and contained, but this is also happening to Russia, with NATO moving right up to its eastern borders, to the western borders, if you like, of Russia, putting them under pressure.
PAUL KEATING: We had a chance at the end of the Cold War to settle the status of Russia. It took us two world wars to settle the status of Germany. We had a chance in 1989-'90 to settle the status of Russia and basically the US blew it. And what did it do? It extended NATO into the boundary of Russia to the west - Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic States. And instead of seeing these as bridges between Russia and the West, they made them outposts, Western outposts. And of course, this inflamed Russian nationalism. In a very large measure, the US created Putin.
TONY JONES: I was going to ask you: do you think the rise of a demagogue in Russia like Putin was inevitable when you mount that kind of pressure on their border?
PAUL KEATING: Well it certainly didn't help. And the other thing is, you see, the Northern European Plain runs from the north of France to St Petersburg. Bonaparte went across is, Hitler went across it and the Russians came back across it to Berlin. It's fundamentally indefensible. Yet, we had Barack Obama up in Estonia recently making a speech about protecting the Baltic states, 300 miles wide, 200 miles deep. They're fundamentally not capable of defence against Russian infantry and artillery. So, we've made these - we've bitten off pieces of the pie crust when the Russians were weak instead of taking the longer view: this is a piece of elasticity, a bridge where we had to deal with: Russia is a great state. Whatever we think about, Russia is a great state and it has one particular characteristic: it has - alone in the world, it has the capacity to obliterate the US. So, if for that reason alone, if no other, you would have a policy towards it. You would have a policy which would be about integrating Russia into Europe. That should have been the ambition of the Clinton administration. It wasn't. It was the Clinton administration who decided to extend NATO and the Bush administration extended it further.
TONY JONES: So, a final question. We're virtually out of time. But you're not suggesting that you have any sympathy, are you, for Putin's methods of arming ethnic Russians inside some of those border states, some of those hinterland states?
PAUL KEATING: No, no, Putin's a shocker, but the thing is: one bad act begets another. The West made a shocking strategic error in extending NATO at the end of the Cold War and what we're seeing now is part of the - is part of the debris from that decision.
TONY JONES: Paul Keating, fascinating as always to talk to you. Thanks for joining us.
U.S., China Reach Historic Climate Change Agreement
By: Dr. Jeff Masters , 4:44 PM GMT on November 13, 2014
Stunning and welcome climate change news came out of China on Tuesday, when President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a historic joint climate commitment. The U.S. pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26 - 28% by 2025, compared with 2005 levels. In turn, China agreed to peak its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030--and sooner if possible--and to get 20% of its energy from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030. In order to achieve its part of the bargain, the U.S. will need to double the pace of carbon pollution reduction from 1.2% per year from 2005-2020 to 2.3 - 2.8% per year between 2020 - 2025. In order to achieve its part of the deal, China must deploy an additional 800 - 1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero emission generation capacity by 2030--more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today, and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.
Figure 1. U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping after a joint press conference at the Great Hall of People to announce a historic climate change deal on November 12, 2014 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)
A step in the right direction, but a long ways to go Humanity has a budget to keep. In order to keep global warming below the agreed-upon definition for the threshold of dangerous climate change, 2°C above pre-industrial levels, cumulative human CO2 emissions since 1870 must remain below about 2900 GtCO2. About two-thirds of that budget--1900 GtCO--had already been emitted by 2011, according to the November 2, 2014 IPCC Synthesis Report .. http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2849. The International Energy Agency .. http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/English.pdf .. warned in 2012 that "almost four-fifths of the CO2 emissions allowable by 2035 are already locked-in by existing power plants, factories, buildings, etc. If action to reduce CO2 emissions is not taken before 2017, all the allowable CO2 emissions would be locked-in by energy infrastructure existing at that time." If China and the U.S. follow their new commitments, humanity will exceed its carbon budget by 2042, just five years later than if they continue to follow their current "business as usual" course, according to analysis by Frank Melum, Senior Point Carbon Analyst at Thomson Reuters .. http://tinyurl.com/l33fpwn. “We do not expect these new targets to significantly alter the world’s trajectory for emissions growth, but the joint announcement will probably alter the pace of negotiations, and could in time could lead to improved ambition levels,” said Melum.
Figure 2. Of the proven fossil fuel reserves still in the ground (equivalent to emitting 2795 Gt of CO2, dark grey oval with a black oval of the maximum we can burn embedded in it), between 66% - 86% must stay in the ground if we are to have at least a two-in-three chance of keeping warming below 2°C, according to three groups who have done carbon budget analyses, the IPCC, the International Energy Agency .. http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/English.pdf, and the Carbon Tracker Initiative .. http://www.carbontracker.org/report/wasted-capital-and-stranded-assets/. Reserves are those quantities able to be recovered under existing economic and operating conditions (split as 63% coal, 22% oil, and 15% gas, according to the International Energy Agency .. http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/English.pdf.) These reserves were valued at $27 trillion (nearly 40% of the global yearly GDP), according to The Capital Institute .. http://capitalinstitute.org/blog/big-choice-0/. The IPCC, quoting Rogner et al., 2012, Global Energy Assessment–Toward a Sustainable Future (Chapter 7: Energy Resources and Potentials .. http://www.globalenergyassessment.org/), says that these reserves are a factor of 4 - 7 more than what can burned. Fossil fuel resources are those where economic extraction is potentially feasible, and could become reserves in the future (e.g., methane hydrate deposits under the ocean floor.) The IPCC estimated these resources were an additional factor of 31 - 50 higher than the maximum we can burn. If only a small fraction of the these resources are developed and burned, Earth would have a hot-house climate like occurred during the age of the dinosaurs.
Commentary: A game-changing agreement While the new deal is not binding and doesn't go far enough on its own to stop dangerous climate change, it is a huge political step forward in the fight against climate change. One of the key arguments being made in the U.S. against taking climate change action--that China was doing nothing to limit their emissions--has now been nullified. And over the next fifteen years, China is planning on installing enough renewable energy from sources like solar and wind to power the entire United States--guaranteeing continued explosive growth and price drops in green energy that will make it able to out-compete fossil fuels even with the massive subsidies they enjoy. When you add in last month's European Union (EU) pledge .. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/10/24/3584121/european-union-deal-40-percent/ .. to cut total emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, we now have countries representing more than half of all global emissions making serious commitments to reduce carbon pollution. This gives real hope that a significant binding treaty to limit greenhouse gases can be successfully negotiated in Paris in December 2015 at the critical ?United Nations Climate Change Conference .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference?.
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