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Let’s start with the unjustly obscure English punk/folk singer TV Smith. Don’t worry, we will quickly get to Australia’s climate wars and the long con of carbon credits.
Smith has been around since, well, punk began in the mid-1970s. I’ve described him – fairly I think – as “Chomsky meets Leonard Cohen, but punk.” The man can do things you don’t often associate with punks. Like, properly sing. And write – the man is an insightful compassionate poet and keen observer of, well everything. (1)
He can write about nature, technology, about the sense of futility but endurance in resistance. And he can about the ways that elites seek to discourage challenge. Which is where this story begins.
In his song “More Than This” on his album Misinformation Overload, Smith sets the scene
So the bankers take their seats
With the party elite
In a billionaire’s retreat
Safely out of reach.
And they blame the workers, blame the unions
Blame the slump and blame the boom
And the consumer, blame the system
Blame the losers, blame the victims
And then, the second verse…
So the policies are planned
That we won’t understand
Then the members all shake hands
And the meeting disbands
And they blame the downturn, blame the climate
Even though they’re the ones behind it
Blame the third world, blame the markets
Blame the decoys, blame the targets
And when I watch or read the brilliant coverage of the carbon credits scam (more on those pieces in a minute) my mind is drawn back to those lines
“So the policies are planned
That we won’t understand”
That is to say, I want to make the basic point that a dense and incomprehensible policy, well that is a FEATURE not a bug. Making it eye-wateringly, brain-shreddingly complex means that the conversation can stay at the level of soundbites, that most people give up trying to understand it and those who do persist seem weird to their friends and are disheartened and CRUCIALLY – you need a lot longer to unpack bullshit than to throw it, and if you’re having to explain it in detail, you are irritating/frustrating potential supporters. It becomes a “well, we should just leave it to the people who study this all day long.”
This tactic, when used by creationists to try to cast doubt on evolution by natural selection, is called a Gish Gallop, after its main proponent, Duane Gish. Basically, someone gallops through a whole load of nonsense, and their opponent is then left to either let a load of lies/half-truths go unchallenged (and strengthened) or else take up five or ten more times trying to unpick it all, and probably strengthen it into the bargain. It’s a no-lose situation for the bullshitters.
Which brings us to the carbon credits saga, the latest in the long line of astonishingly successful tactics used by Australian fossil-fuel interests over the last thirty five years.
They toyed with (but mostly abandoned/subcontraced it out deniably) outright denial. Then they put out the “too expensive” argument, and enlisted various other groups (looking at you CFMEU) to resist both a carbon tax and then an ETS. They talked with a straightface about technofixes, and got the taxpayer to dig deep. They have now morphed into using a policies-are-planned/Gish Gallop approach, alongside being the fox in the henhouse and benefitting from the fact that lots of potential critics never survived – at an organizational level – the drop in radical-end-of-resistance funding after the Global Financial Crisis. The big groups that might call bullshit are mostly – not all, but mostly – cowed or captured.
The “complexity” takes us back to the days of the tax versus ETS debates (which go back further than 2009, and further than Shergold in 2006/7, but I digress). An ETS is supposed to be more “efficient” (though that is asserted rather than supported with evidence). But the key benefit, I suspect, beyond being able to make banks and consultancies rich via various wheezes that are politely called “regulatory arbitrage” and the like (academics don’t like to use words like “thievery” or “rorting” – it’s too close to the truth) was this – ETS is complicated compared to a tax, which would be easy to understand, easy to “sell,” if sold right.
And so when the Greens, in early 2010, tried to save something from the wreckage Rudd had caused (see that cartoon by the brilliant @davpope), one of the points was that it would remove the eye-watering complexity.
And they were, ignored.
Look, a con man wants to distract you, to make you think you are seeing one thing when you are actually seeing another. There are various ways to do that. Flattery is one, but so is its opposite. They want you to believe them, not your “lying eyes” and they want you to doubt your sense-making ability. So they complicate, they “complexify”, they gish gallop, they bullshit.
Finally, here are three things I’ve read/watched of late that I think are just brilliant at explaining the carbon credits scam. Doubtless there are others.
Crikey piece by Maeve McGregor
The reason Labor is gaslighting the nation about its climate policy and the Greens
The Juice Media video
Nick Feik in the Monthly
The Great Stock’n’Coal Swindle
References
(1) I’ve met him on a number of occasions, and as best I can tell, he’s just a top bloke too.