The Rejection of Kyoto Protocol and the Framing of Energy Policy Debate under Howard Government

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  【Abstract】Issue framing – the defining of policy problems – is undoubtedly one of the most important policy instruments that politicians have at their disposal to legitimate their favored courses of action. In the context of controversal policy problems with considerable uncertainty and difficulty, such as the control of greenhouse emmision and the use of nuclear energy, it is usually the language used by politicians, instead of knowledge or scientific evidence, that helps to construct political meanings, guide actionss or justify solutions.
  
  【Key words】Issue framingPolicy discoursesDecision makingGoverning strategies
  
  【中图分类号】H313【文献标识码】A【文章编号】1006-9682(2010)02-0137-04
  
  1.Issue Framing and the Making of Policy Decisions
  
  In Australia in the realm of governance and public policy, as Bell noted, standard literature on governing capacity has tended to focus on rationalist forms of ‘evidence-based policy analysis’ whereas critics respond that in the face of bewildering complexity and multiple ways of seeing the ‘reality’, policy making or advancement in governing capacity are not necessarily about ‘getting down to the facts’ or imposing ‘expert solutions’(2004:23-4). “Politics is largely a word game”(Graber, 1981:195). As Wayne Parsons observes, a public policy “problem has to be defined, structured, located within certain boundaries and be given a name. How this process happens proves crucial in the way in which a policy is addressed to a given problem.”(1995:88)Therefore, issue framing, or the definition of a problem as it relates to other issue areas, is an unavoidable process of discussions of issues and policy areas. In this process certain facets of reality are highlighted to make specific issues more prominent, consequential, and memorable. By strategically framing an issue or event, actors have the ability to bring attention and interest to an issue, opening or closing a political window for action.
  Environmental issues such as climate change or global warming in particular, owing to its scientific uncertainty and hence difficulty in getting access to the relevant facts and expert knowledge, are highly impacted by their frames and can be perceived or constructed quite differently in different policy discourses. This paper is a case study of Australia’s climate change policy, particularly the Howard Government’s rejection of Kyoto Protocol and its decisions to revive the nuclear energy debate, which is a significantly risky policy to pursue because of Australia’s lengthy anti-nuclear history. The objective of this paper is to show the importance of idea framing in defining issues and making policy decisions. By examining the way how climate change problems are constructed and articulated by the Howard Government in preparation for different policy responses, I will try to make it clear that it is not ‘reality’ or even ‘science-based knowledge’ in any testable or observable sense that matters in shaping political consciousness and behavior, but rather the belief evoked by the language of politicians to construct problems and justify solutions.
  
  2.Rejection of Kyoto Protocol and Science-based Evidence
  
  In the policy realm of climate change, the first step toward the technological fix for global warming is often identified with implementing the Kyoto protocol(Crist, 2007:34), which was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 as the first binding agreement to establish principles aimed at bringing climate change under control. The embodied principle in the Kyoto Protocol(KP), which only sets binding greenhouse gas(GHG)emission targets for developed nations, is that because developed nations have contributed most of the anthropogenic GHG emissions to date and have the wealth to respond effectively, those nations should be the first to reduce GHG emissions. In the period leading up to the KP negotiations, Australia conducted a diplomatic campaign against uniform emission reduction targets, seeking special concessions for Australia if such targets were adopted(Reidy, 2005:207). However, when the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in 2005, the Howardgovernment had rejected any involvement in emissions trading, or of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol despite the most lenient GHG reduction target granted to Australia-an eight per cent increase in emissions between 1990 and 2010 in comparison to an average target among industrialized countries of a five per cent cut. Along with the United States, Australia was the only other developed nation not to sign the treaty, claiming it would be detrimental to the economy(Kerin 2006:28).
  The argument given by the Howard Government as justification is that due to its energy-intensive economy and its position as the world’s largest energy exporter, the ratification of the Protocol will put Australia at a competitive disadvantage against other countries who have not committed to GHG reductions, as well as suffering the effects of investment and emissions intensive industries moving offshore(Saddler et al, 2006:1). As is recorded on Hansard, Prime Minister John Howard said on 26 May 2004 that, “It [the Kyoto Protocol] will cost jobs…and it will do very great damage to the resource sector of Australia, which is not in the national interests of this country”, though he was not explicit about how and which industry will suffer what kind of loss most. A year later, in an interview published by The Australian on 12 September 2006 under the headline ‘Documentary films don’t guide my environment policy’, John Howard, the Prime Minister, once again rejected the Kyoto protocol as acting against the economic interests of the country and presented accusations of ‘alarmist’ views specifically regarding global warming, which ironically he employs as a backdrop for the ‘rational debate’ on nuclear energy(Higgins et. al, 2007:416).
  In view of the scientific uncertainties, climate change is undoubtedly amongst the most contested contemporary policy problems for all governments. Even the Prime Minister was making contradictory comments in relation to his position in the international effort to combat climate change. “I’m committed to seeing that the Kyoto emission control targets are met, and they will be met for Australia, but I’m not going to sign a treaty which would disadvantage Australian industries compared with countries such as China and Russia. I’m not going to do that, because that would cost jobs and be manifestly against the interests of Australia.”(Howard, 2003)If the Prime Minister is correct and current policies will enable Australia to meet its target, then how would ratification put Australian domestic industries at a disadvantage compared to their overseas competitors and result in job losses? May be one of the contributing factors for the Howard Government’s ambivalence in the navigation of a coherent long-term policy course has been the absence of “the most appropriate forms of knowledge and modes of expertise that might be used to help build policy or governing capacity”(Bell, 2004:22).
  Climate science differs from other applied research that serves policy interests(such as monitoring or measuring), in that the ultimate outputs typically cannot be appreciated from the results of a single project or experiment. In theory, the interaction between the worlds of environmental science and policy may seem straightforward with scientists providing relevant knowledge about nature upon which informed policy decisions could be based. However, in reality this linear model tends to be replaced by a much more complex relationship where the distinction between facts and values, knowledge and interests is less clear-cut(Lovbrand, 2007:39). Especially in the case of carbon cycle research related to KP some research program is carried out mainly to “close the ‘knowledge gap’ in relevant policy domains”(Bell, 2004:23). In order to be useful in the regulatory process, scientific experts are often asked to respond to questions they have not themselves chosen(Weinberg, 1972)and, under the political call for certainly and predictions, tend to “make oversimplifications and downplay, rather than reduce, uncertainties in their fields of knowledge”(Sundqvist, 2000:60)or engaged in the production of knowledge that is deemed useful in a very specific policy context(Lovbrand, 2007:44).
  As a result, due to the scientific difficulties to accurately measure and monitor greenhouse emission, the ‘expert’ knowledge or relevant ‘facts’ generated from their research are exposed to different interpretations and used to support different policy responses to climate change issues. One the other hand, the experience of climate change seems tenuous, uncertain and distant from the tangible realities of daily life for most people. This is why the public, instead of weighing and deliberating issues, tend to “rely heavily upon their social values to pick and choose among ideologically-friendly interpretations in news coverage, often making up their minds about a topic in the absence of knowledge”(Nisbet, 2008:5). Therefore, it is the government that comes with “their experts or consultants” to provide “most of the values and predispositions that shape the search for the relevant ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ to be used in policy analysis and in building governing strategies”(Bell, 2004:25).
  Bulkeley identifies two dominant climate change discourses in Australian environmental policy responses, the first of which is a resource-based discourse coalition that emphasizes: “…the need to act in the(economic)national interest, to ensure that developing countries participate in any international agreement, and, in the light of scientific uncertainty and the potential costs of action, to pursue measures which have a minimal economic impact”. The second is a greenhouse action discourse coalition whose members have diverse interests but who share a commitment to a precautionary response to climate change(Bulkeley, 2000b:739). Bulkeley’s identification of climate change discourses clearly shows that although energy use is the major source of Australia’s GHG emission, energy policy and greenhouse policy have often developed along separate paths, with different objectives. “The primary objective of energy policy in Australia over the last decade has been the introduction of competitive energy markets to improve economic efficiency and lower energy prices. Environmental objectives have not been central to energy policy”(Reidy, 2005:204). With the pragmatic attitude and neoliberal market economy ideology of Howard government, “preparing for uncertain future impacts is not a high priority when there are more pressing and immediate concerns with more immediate impacts”(Abramovitz, 2001:29).
  
  3.Greenhouse Emission and the Framing of Energy Policy
  
  When the Howard Government was first elected in 1996, it moved energy policy towards ever more explicit support for fossil fuel energy use and exports and for the development of energy-intensive manufacturing industries such as aluminium and magnesium smelting, while refusing to establish mandatory targets for emissions reduction or improvements in energy efficiency. This position is well demonstrated in the Government’s white paper (2004:4)on energy policy, Securing Australia’s Energy Future, which stated that fossil fuels will “meet the bulk of the nation’s energy needs”. Nuclear energy was tabled as a “reserve” energy technology-one where Australia has less of a strategic interest – behind Australia’s market leading and fast-following technologies such as coal, hot dry rocks, natural gas and wind. Even hydrogen – another reserve energy technology – was considered more likely than nuclear to potentially deliver low-emissions energy(2004:23).
  However, with the public’s escalating and widespread concern about the consequences of global warming(Global Views, 2006), the policy was updated in the same government paper in July 2006 and states, “There is significant potential for Australia to increase and add value to our uranium extraction and exports” and “[to invest] in leading-edge, clean energy technology while being pragmatic about what technologies help Australia achieve its economic, energy and environmental goals”(2006:5:1). In fact, early in February 2006 the Prime Minister had told Southern Cross Radio that “If the economics of energy lead us to embracing unclear power, then we should be willing to do so”(ABC News Online, 2006). Later, in the 19 May interview, he restated the governing economic considerations but extended the frame of the issue to include the “environmental advantages of nuclear power”(The Age, 2006).
  It is not difficult to sense the shift in government climate policy framing and hence infer from the use of the word “pragmatic” that unclear energy, while perhaps not the most popular choice for clean energy technology, is nonetheless, the most practical(Higgins et. Al, 2007:409). This pragmatic attitude is further enhanced by the Prime Minister in a press conference held on 17 October 2006 in Canberra, when he declared that people who oppose nuclear energy, but demand solutions to climate change are “unreal”. It is interesting to note that, despite the previous criticism of the global warming ‘alarmist’ view, the reframing of energy policy of the Howard government was very much operated against the same background of climate change. While the basic science messages did not change significantly since its rejection of KP, the framing of these messages in public communication did change. This is partly because it was evident that climate change would probably become an important election issue and the government has been criticized about its late acknowledgement of climate change and its refusal to seriously address the issue(Silkstone, 2006).
  As Edelman believes, the real power in policy making resides in the process whereby problems are constructed and articulated, since it is through language that we experience politics: “the language that interprets objects and actions also constitutes the subjects” (Edelman, 1988:9). By reframing nuclear energy as one with potential economic and environmental advantages, the Prime Minister would on the one hand win the trust of the public based on his great economic achievements over the past decade as a responsible and successful economic manager and at the same time cleverly incorporate a contentious issue such as nuclear power into the economic frame. In his address to the Committee for Economic development of Australia On 18 July 2006, the Prime Minister claimed that “a growing number of environmentalists now recognize that nuclear energy has significant environmental advantages” and Australia has “the makings of an energy superpower”, if it grasps the opportunities that globalization offers by exporting to an expanding energy market(Howard, 2006). To make his speech more powerful, he concluded with a warning in relation to the Australian anti-nuclear culture and said, “…if we sacrifice rational discussion on the altar of anti-nuclear theology and political opportunism, we will pay a price. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but in 10, 15 or 20 years Australia will surely pay a price”.
  The same language was used repeatedly on different occasions to help with the naming of a problematic terrain and suggest what courses of action are appropriate to it, priming the public of a possible shift in policy response to the issue of climate change. On 16 October 2006, in an address to the 15th Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference in Sydney, Ian MacFarlane stated that nuclear energy could be “a major part of the global strategy to curb greenhouse emissions” and “the issue of uranium and nuclear power is as much about lowering greenhouse gas emissions as it is about the supply of energy”(MacFarlane, 2006). On the same day, the Prime Minister John Howard asserted in a press conference, “I believe very strongly that nuclear power is part of the response to global warming, it is clean green”(Howard, 2006). Statements of belief such as this are difficult to counter because, by pointing to what the future will bring if the policies are implemented, they throw up ‘multiple and clashing political realities’-realities which simply cannot be tested against the real world(Graber, 1981:204).
  Edelman(1988:104)has argued at length that the ‘critical element in political maneuver for advantage is the creation of meaning’ and that a key political tactic must always be ‘the evocation of interpretations that legitimate favored courses of action’. Language can be used as a powerful instrument to construct political meanings that guide action especially when there remains considerable uncertainty and, as a result, difficulty, in translating the scientific climate changes research into practical policy directions and actions. Considering the many problems concerning nuclear waste disposal and reactor safety and a 30~50% increase of cost compared with energy generated from coal fueled power plants, it is still largely unknown whether nuclear power can be an effective means for Australia to reduce its reliance on coal-fired electricity production, and thus reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Nevertheless, the words and language employed by the Howard Government such as ‘lowering greenhouse emissions’ ‘clean green’ ‘practical options’ and the symbol of “energy superpower” undoubtedly help construct nuclear energy as a promising consideration with both economic and environmental advantages. The linking of nuclear energy as a solution to global warming has fostered a perception which makes it easier to introduce and embed the contentious issue “within a framework of the existing beliefs and values, thereby legitimizing and popularizing the issue”(Higgins et. al, 2007:410).
  
  4.Conclusion
  
  “Knowledge, and indeed, competing forms of knowledge, matter a great deal in terms of public policy and governance strategies”(Bell, 2004:22). In the context of climate change policies, scientists definitely contribute to the framing of issues and the agenda for climate change by defining what evidence they can produce and by making claims about its significance for policy-makers. However, given the complex and uncertain nature of global warming scientific research, policies are in many cases developed before scientific closure and interact with science in the context of continuing uncertainty and unresolved debates while the lay publics are often labeled as ignorant, or incapable of handling the scientific complexities which guide decisions. Hence, the ability of the government to frame issues – that is, to choose the language and define the way that policy controversies such as greenhouse emission and nuclear energy are presented to the public – is undoubtedly one of the most important policy instruments that political elites have at their disposal. Whether the policy will be successfully implemented is yet another story, but with the framing of policy discourse, policy makers could undoubtedly generate and maintain tight control over public beliefs about what the problems are, their seriousness and possible causes and most importantly the government’s capacity of coping with these problems and implementing the established goals.
  References
  1 ABC News Online. ‘Don’t Rule out Nuclear Future: PM’, 24 February, 2006 Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/2006
  0602/s1577452.htm
  2 Abramovitz, J.(2001)Unnatural Disasters in Worldwatch Paper 158, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C
  3 Australian Government, Securing Australia’s Energy Future, June, 2004
  4 Australian Government, Securing Australia’s Energy Future, July, 2006 Update
  5 Australian Government, Uranium Mining and Nuclear Energy – Opportunities for Australia, Report to the Prime Minister by the Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy Review Taskforce, December, 2006 Source: http://www.dpmc.gov.au/umpner/ docs/ nuclear-repot.pdf
  6 Bulkeley, H.(2000). ‘Discourse Coalitions and the Australian Climate Change Policy Network’, in Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, vol. 18, no.6, pp.727~748
  7 Crist, E.(2007).‘Beyond the Climate Crisis: a Critique of Climate
  Change Discourse’ in Telos, Winter 2007, pp.29~55, www.telospress.com
  8 Edelman, M.(1988). Constructing the Political Spectacle. University of Chicago Press
  9 Graber, D.(1981). ‘Political Language’. In Hnadbook of Political Communication, eds. D. Nimmo and K.R. Sanders. Sage.
  10 Higgins, G., Maggs, C., Mckenzie, M., Christian Meuter, E., Semon, E. & Birch, G.(2007). Framing the Debate: An Analysis of the Australian Government’s 2006 Nuclear Energy Campaign, Sydney University Press
  11 Howard, J. Address to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, Sydney Conventions & exhibition Center, 18 July 2006
  12 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II(IPCC WGII)(2007)Working Group III Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers.
  13 Kerin, P.(2006). ‘Sins of Emission’ in Business Review Weekly, August 3~9, 2006
  14 Lovbrand, Eva.(2007). ‘Pure Science or Policy Involvement? Ambiguous Boundary-work for Swedish Carbon Cycle Science’. In Environmental Science & Policy 10(2007): 39~47
  15 MacFarlane, I. Speech to the 15th Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference, 16 October 2006
  16 MAPW. 2005 Case Study ‘The Strategic Importance of Australia’s Uranium Resources’. 13/10/05Source: http://www.aph.gov.au/house/
  committee/isr/uranium/subs/sub30.pdf
  17 Nisbet, M.C.(2008). ‘Framing Science: a New Paradigm in Public Engagement’. In New Agendas in Science Communication, eds. LeeAnne Kahlor and Patricia Atout. Taylor & Francis Publishers.
  18 ‘Nuclear power inevitable, says PM’, The Age, 19 May 2006
  19 Parson, W.(1995). Public Policy. Edward Elgar
  20 Prime Minister John Howard, Hansard, 26 May 2004
  21 Prime Minister John Howard, John Laws Program, 4 June 2003
  22 Riedy, Christopher(2005). The Eye of the Storm: An Integral Perspective on Sustainable Development and Climate Change Response, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology, Sydney. http://hdl.handle.net/2100/250
  23 Saddler, H. et al(2006). Competitiveness and Carbon Pricing: Border Adjustments for Greenhouse Policies, Discussion Paper 86, The Australian Institute
  24 Silkstome D.(2006)‘Forget about left or tight, I’m just the weatherman’, The Age, 26 August 2006
  25 Sundqvist, G.(2000).‘The Environmental Experts: on Science’s Authority in Environmental Protection’. In Knowing and Doing: On Knowledge and Action in Environmental Protection, ed. L.J. Lundgren. Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Kristianstad, Sweden
  26 The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Global Views (2006)
  27 Transcript of the Prime Minister The Hon John Howard MP, press conference with The Hon Peter McGauran MP, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Parliament House, Canberra, 17 October 2006
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