(Image: Private Media/Mitchell Squire)

Nothing happens for decades, then decades happen in weeks, to quote Ilyich Lenin (or was it Ferris Bueller?). Or life comes at you fast, same-same.

At a global level, we seem to be heading full-tilt towards a capitalism of global renewables, funded by joint state-private enterprises and initiatives, fuelled by massive shifts in huge finance funds, themselves kept bubbling over by low interest rates on a global scale.

This transformation is happening at a dizzying pace, and there’s no reason to believe that such commitment of funds is simply greenwash — though that may well be part of it. But the combination of technical advance, government schemes, the changing composition of the capitalist elite over time, and the market for such, has all come together, no doubt with behind-the-scenes deals and arm-twisting, not so much at COP26 as around it, as the conference itself announces one inadequate measure after another. 

Scott Morrison kept the push on this moving along at today’s Victorian Chamber of Commerce breakfast — that is what it takes to be a capitalist: a willingness to have breakfast with people who think Judith Sloan is on the money — trying to create some sort of dichotomy between state and capital that the past decade has done a lot to abolish, in favour of capital. “Can-do capitalism” against “don’t do” government policy. 

Ha! Nothing like a bit of retro-Thatcherism from the PM to get the crowd going on the curdled eggs breakfast circuit.

But of course it means nothing. Having done everything to stand in the way of renewables investment — above all, by generating eight years of capricious policy on state funding and regulation — the Morrison government is yielding by stages to the need to create a stable framework for renewable investment, lest new capital swing against them in frustration. 

That hasn’t been enough to avoid the wooden spoon at COP26’s assessment of state responses to the climate emergency. We fulfilled our global role as, via the most streamlined settler colonialist nation standing, the standard-bearer of annihilatory modernity — an exterminatory and extractive history, clearing the land of its inhabitants, then consuming it as a mere production input.

Perhaps this is our new global role? Khrushchev once remarked that, once communism had won, they would need to leave Switzerland as it is, to know the price of everything. Do we have a future as a brown energy theme park, to remind the world what it was like once? We certainly seem to be working towards it. The Morrison government is trying a difficult two-way swing, with the sudden commitment to electric cars — previously held to be as much a threat to happy family life as your new bikie stepdad — while continuing to appease the Nationals and a dozen or so regional/rural electorates with one crackpot scheme or boondoggle after another.

It’s a measure of the change over the past half-decade or so that we have gone from the absolutely surreal solutions to the asset-stranding of brown power — such as Tony Abbott’s desire to send in the army to run a nationalised Liddell station, which would have had the added bonus, for Mr T, of the chance to stay in a barracks again — to that of carbon capture, which is a far more streamlined impractical non-solution than hitherto. 

But this leads to an interesting problem for governments still genuflecting to big brown. Any sector or period of capitalism is always a mix of profits from actual business, and from rents of various types (yes, yes, don’t @ me, Marx Reading Group people — it’s oversimplified), including state payments to willing clients. That has been hidden until now by the transitional stage of green and brown power, when green energy was getting, or deserved to get, more subsidy than brown energy to get it up the start of its development curve. The subsidies brown energy got were to hold up the sag of the curve as it came down the other side.

Now, as the commitment to green renewable energy becomes total — anyone noticed how the remnant denialists at new green News Corp, having been allowed a three-week dummy spit, are saying a lot less about matters green? Has the memo gone out? — subsidies to brown energy become visible, not as part of a state package, but as pure rent, dead payment, call it what you will. However many billions is thrown into the brown coal hole, it will at most plug a gap between its claims to long-term viability and its dismal performance. Really it will just mitigate losses. 

This is already being noticed in the cities, far more than it was five years ago. Give it another five years and the fury against it will be white hot. A yet more educated population, in a yet more high-tech/knowledge-dominated economy, will have no patience with this sort of stuff. They don’t now. I still reckon that the winning slogan in the coming election is “a vote for Scott Morrison is a vote for Barnaby Joyce”, and that the form in which Labor and the Greens are focusing on Morrison strikes some as having a frisson of anti-suburban snobbery about it. But by 2025 it’ll be as toxic as nuclear waste. Or, in fact, the nuclear industry. 

This is the global process going on, playing out in a particular local fashion. Depressingly, the Liberal command bunker appears to have grasped this faster and more forcefully than Labor, a process also occurring in the UK. Where Labor should have been making the case for modernity from the day after the 2019 election, prosecuting the government, it has hedged and hummed and built back innumerable electorate specific concessions.

That may still get it a win, but had it gone for the big claim on green power — in a systemic fashion, not as part of a factional deal — the Coalition would be either identified wholly with brown power, or kowtowing to Labor’s vision. Now it feels as if the Liberals at least may have closed the policy gap, sufficient to close the polling gap during the election. 

On the one hand, that is petty politics. On the other, it’s a world historical pivot. Paradoxically, we have the chance to really seal the end of the brown energy era. If we, the worst state in the world, suddenly turn around, then it’s over (perhaps with some reversals to come).

Supposing Labor doesn’t sell out, screw up, lose its nerve … and what odds of that, heh. As a great political leader once said: “We think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are.” Oh hang on. That’s The Breakfast Club.