Comprehensive vs Piecemeal - a critical issue in climate policy

The severity of the climate crisis requires powerful corrective action and comprehensive policy solutions to be successful. Unfortunately the complex politics of climate lead to piecemeal solutions being chosen. This is a problem. 

The difficulties and complexities of climate politics, especially during the last decade of the climate wars have naturally made it hard to develop any climate policy let alone good ones.

Governments have chosen short-to medium-term climate and energy policies and tended to avoid the long-term solution offered by a price on carbon. They also favoured smaller piecemeal policies over a comprehensive economy-wide carbon price. And they have consistently favoured policies that support energy over climate. 

Labor chose to pursue a piecemeal approach prior to the election as an understandable protection from further political attack. They undertook to adopt a pragmatic sector-by-sector approach, making policies for each of the 8 carbon-emitting sectors of the economy. This may have been good politics at the time but it's almost certainly not good climate policy. It leaves us vulnerable to many years of partial progress when the climate crisis needs comprehensive policies to address the root cause of the crisis - continuing growth of fossil fuel consumption supported by continuously growing subsidies.

A comprehensive policy such as an economy-wide carbon price will be more effective than a number of smaller, sector based policies. It is also easier to predict the rate of reduction it is likely to achieve. And it lessens the number of gaps between policies that emissions may be able to leak through. Or, gaps that vested interests can work around and lessen their contribution to reducing emissions. 

Piecemeal is definitely in the interests of those who want to delay decarbonisation and maintain business ‘almost’ as usual. It also adds many degrees of complexity which will also work against the climate.  It would appear they have succeeded in convincing Labor to adopt a piecemeal approach. 

Australia needs to actively and deliberately restore carbon pricing as a viable policy option and recognise its value as a comprehensive policy that can underpin a steady and orderly decarbonisation, almost by itself. We cannot allow its past value as a political weapon in brutal retail politics to cut us off from such a powerful policy instrument. The alternative is continuing piecemeal policies that will struggle to meet Labor's targets and will certainly be too little to keep us on track for 1.5 degrees of warming.