Whatever happened to climate change in Australia?

From what you might have been reading or hearing about in Australia, climate change might as well have stopped, as it was barely mentioned during the election campaign. Far from being the great moral challenge of our generation it seems no longer to exist at all...

This is very curious because it was climate change and how Australia should best address it that has been the churning engine of the country's insane politics over the last 6 years.

First it was Kevin Rudd who first opened the game with his pulse-raising claim, then let everybody down when he couldn't actually follow through and implement an emissions trading scheme (ETS). To further compound the irony, the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, faced rebellion within his party when he supported an ETS and eventually lost the leadership to Tony Abott, with the rivalry pivoting around this issue. The madness continued when Rudd's public backflip on the policy helped contribute to his image of unreliability when in turn led to the leadership spill and his loss of prime ministership to Julia Gillard.

But all that constitutes only half of the craziness. The Labor party was heavily damaged by the backstabbing of Rudd by Gillard, and barely squeaked into power in the next election by negotiating with independents. Gillard had promised never to introduce a carbon tax in her government, but then found herself in a hung parliament in which her party could only retain power by allying itself with the Greens, who demanded a carbon tax leading to an ETS as their price for support. This unfortunate situation helped cement her image as untrustworthy, a supposed character flaw which the oppostion, led by Abott, harped on relentlessly. The Greens exacted their price and the Clean Energy Bill did eventually became law in November 2011, but has been controversial the whole time.

Gillard's declining popularity and the looming disaster of the upcoming election led to a comeback by Kevin Rudd, but that seemed to have done almost no good at all in reversing Labor's fortunes, and Tony Abbott is now prime minister. It's no secret he is a climate change skeptic and one of his policy stands is a repeal of the Clean Energy Bill. He plans to replace it with a $2.5 billion 'direct action' policy which nobody (let alone Tony Abbott) seriously believes will achieve anything.

All of this raises the question of why the Australia electorate has lost interest in climate change. Well, that's a question for another day.

The last and greatest irony of this whole debacle is that ETS schemes and carbon taxes are almost completely ineffective at mitigating climate change. This entire drama has been unnecessary.

Only nuclear power can both massively reduce emissions and keep global living standards rising.

There's no getting around that fact.