Net zero reality and the extinction of politics-as-usual

On words without meaning, meaning without worlds

The sheer inanity, the ecocidal banality of our current political discourse was encapsulated perfectly this morning on the floor of the House of Representatives, as reported thus in The Guardian's live blog:

Labor MP Dan Repacholi ... rejects claims that net zero would see the closure of coalmines, calling that allegation “rubbish”

This is where we find ourselves, following the National Party's decision over the weekend to formally scrap what has rather hilariously been referred to as their "net zero commitment".

With the Coalition sinking to historically epic disapproval ratings, tearing itself apart over whether to pretend to care about the climate crisis or to drop the figleaf altogether, the Labor government is presented with an opportunity to actually lead, to work with a progressive cross-bench, and to take real, significant action.

What they choose to do instead (and yes, it's a clear choice, none of this is accidental) is to put forward the Member for Hunter to indignantly declare that of course we can solve the crisis by continuing to do the main thing that causes the crisis.

Our entire political discourse has departed from reality.

[And, to be clear, there's nothing actually new about that. This has been the state of the climate discourse for well over a decade. It's just been brought to our attention again today.]

"Net zero" is a signifier with no actual meaning.

And that, of course, is why it is so beloved of the major parties and the press gallery. They can sound serious and committed without actually promising to do anything. Net zero commitment indeed. They can talk about an issue without having to address policy detail. They can point to offsets and markets and say "it's complex, but trust us" and hope that it goes away.

Politics stripped of meaning, where words can mean whatever the speaker or listener wants them to mean, and there is no shared grounds of reality, is very dangerous indeed. Here's our obligatory Hannah Arendt reference (from Between Past And Future, Viking Press, 1961, p136):

"it is as though we were caught in a maze of abstractions, metaphors, and figures of speech in which everything can be taken and mistaken for something else, because we have no reality, either in history or in everyday experience, to which we can unanimously appeal."

Some shared reality is crucial for any form of democracy to exist, as Arendt argues in this essay and throughout The Origins of Totalitarianism. In its absence, appeals to the authority of science or history or common-sense disintegrate, processes of thinking together and working together collapse, and resort to sheer domination becomes the only means available for those in power to retain it.

Consequently, Australia arrests more climate protesters than any other country in the world.

And, again, when the Coalition has chosen to make itself irrelevant and Labor has a big buffer of seats in the House of Representatives and a simple Greens Senate cross-bench, when there is a clear pathway to genuinely reform Australia's regulatory approvals processes to protect the environment, has Labor decided to sit down and negotiate with the Greens?

Ah, no. They have chosen instead to launch a marginal seats campaign, barely half a year into a three year term, to attack the Greens and try to wedge them into supporting their legislation as it is.

Ironically, Labor has learned precisely the wrong lesson from the way Greens and environment groups have used marginal seat campaigning over the last 20 years or so. Instead of recognising that there is real appetite in the community for action to protect the planetary life-support system if they're willing to mobilise around it, they've realised that they can use the same tactic to buttress their meaningless policies just enough to let them keep burning fossil fuels while pretending to care about the climate.

So, just as words have been stripped of their meaning, campaigning has been stripped of its meaning.

Meanwhile, grassroots community groups organising to meet their local members to lobby them on climate and environment are coming face-to-face with Labor MPs who are absolutely convinced that their government's policies are exactly what's needed. These MPs, many of them declared "climate champions" by the Labor Environment Action Network, so genuinely believe in their inherent identity as "champions" that cognitive dissonance blocks them from any capacity to actually push internally for more.

So, just as words and campaigning have been stripped of their meaning, representation has become meaningless.

We have to face up to this reality. We have to recognise that we are in that chasm between the no longer and the not yet (as I've explored a bit here and here so far) and start working on what comes next.

Because politics-as-usual is the politics of extinction. We have to make it extinct before it does it to us.

PS: If there's one thing you can do today to help that along, register to join me and a few thousand friends at the Rising Tide People's Blockade of the World's Largest Coal Port in Newcastle at the end of the month!

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