what is reality?

which comes first?

the orthodoxies and rigors of the usual doctrinal bullshite, dogma,
theology and ideology, or the over-riding necessity of rational
compromise, pragmatism and adaptation to environment

if ya don't think ya know, then take a guess

well, here's another of them thar journalistic opinions

copyrighted by the ny times 2007

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 4, 2007
SYDNEY, Australia

Almost everywhere you travel these days, people are talking about
their weather - and how it has changed. Nowhere have I found this more
true, though, than in Australia, where "the big dry," a six-year
record drought, has parched the Aussie breadbasket so severely that on
April 19, Prime Minister John Howard actually asked the whole country
to pray for rain. "I told people you have to pray for rain," Mr.
Howard remarked to me, adding, "I said it without a hint of irony."

And here's what's really funny: It actually started to rain! But not
enough, which is one reason Australia is about to have its first
election in which climate change will be a top issue. In just 12
months, climate change has gone from being a nonissue here to being
one that could tip the vote.

In the process, Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative now in his
11th year in office, has moved from being a climate skeptic to what he
calls a "climate realist," who knows that he must offer programs to
reduce global-warming greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, but wants
to do it without economic pain or imposed targets, like Kyoto's. He is
proposing emissions trading and nuclear power.

The Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, proposes a hard target - a 60
percent reduction in Australian CO2 emissions from 2000 levels by 2050
- and subsidies for Aussies to retrofit their homes with energy-saving
systems. The whole issue has come from the bottom up, and it has come
on so quickly that neither party can be sure it has its finger on the
public's pulse.

"What was considered left a year ago is now center, and in six months
it will be conservative - that is how quickly the debate about climate
change is moving here," said Michael Roux, chairman of RI Capital, a
Melbourne investment firm. "It is being led by young people around the
dinner table with their parents, and the C.E.O.'s and politicians are
all playing catch-up."

I asked Mr. Howard how it had happened. "It was a perfect storm," he
said. First came a warning from Nicholas Stern of Britain, who said
climate change was not only real but could be economically devastating
for Australia. Then the prolonged drought forced Mr. Howard to declare
last month that "if it doesn't rain in sufficient volume over the next
six to eight weeks, there will be no water allocations for irrigation
purposes" until May 2008 for crops and cattle in the Murray-Darling
river basin, which accounts for 41 percent of Australian agriculture.

It was as if the pharaoh had banned irrigation from the Nile.
Australians were shocked. Then the traditional Australian bush fires,
which usually come in January, started in October because everything
was so dry. Finally, in the middle of all this, Al Gore came to
Australia and showed his film, "An Inconvenient Truth."

"The coincidence of all those things ... shifted the whole debate,"
Mr. Howard said. While he tends to focus on the economic costs of
acting too aggressively on climate change, his challenger, Mr. Rudd,
has been focusing on the costs of not acting. Today, Mr. Rudd said,
Australian businesses are demanding that the politicians "get a
regulatory environment settled" on carbon emissions trading so
companies know what framework they will have to operate in - because
they know change is coming.

When you look at the climate debate around the world, remarked Peter
Garrett, the former lead singer for the Australian band Midnight Oil,
who now heads the Labor Party's climate efforts, there are two kinds
of conservatives. The ones like George Bush and John Howard, he said,
deep down remain very skeptical about environmentalism and climate
change "because they have been someone else's agenda for so long," but
they also know they must now offer policies to at least defuse this
issue politically.

And then there are conservatives like Arnold Schwarzenegger and David
Cameron, the Tory Party leader in London, who understand that climate
is becoming a huge defining issue and actually want to take it away
from liberals by being more forward-leaning than they are.

In short, climate change is the first issue in a long time that could
really scramble Western politics. Traditional conservatives can now
build bridges to green liberals; traditional liberals can make common
cause with green businesses; young climate voters are newly up for
grabs. And while coal-mining unions oppose global warming
restrictions, service unions, which serve coastal tourist hotels, need
to embrace them. You can see all of this and more in Australia today.

Politics gets interesting when it stops raining.

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

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Past Coverage
World Briefing | Australia: Standing With U.S. On Warming Accord (June
6, 2002)
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