If You Think Climate Politics in the U.S. Are Crazy, Wait Till You See What Just Happened in Australia

Hold on to your hats!  Australia’s already-bizarre carbon price adventures veered into the utterly surreal overnight.

Picture this:  An eccentric billionaire mining baron, most famous outside Australia for commissioning a replica of the Titanic, appearing alongside the world’s most recognizable climate campaigner and former U.S. vice president, Al Gore, to announce Australia’s relatively new carbon tax will be scrapped, and a new emissions trading scheme proposed, effectively screwing over the sitting conservative prime minister, Tony Abbott, who is hell-bent on getting rid of carbon legislation altogether.

It’s a big blow to a prime minister who said recently in Canada that he has “always been against” an emissions trading scheme, and believes fighting climate change will “clobber the economy.”

For watchers of Aussie politics, it was a visual feast of weirdness.  For U.S. readers, imagine — I don’t know — industrialist Charles Koch jumping on stage with writer and activist Bill McKibben and you’re getting close.

Al Gore has shared a press conference podium, and political common ground, with many influential leaders in his time, but Clive Palmer must be among the most unexpected.  The mining magnate’s upstart political group, the populist center-right Palmer United Party, was elevated to the Australian political heavyweight class during last year’s national elections, and is now on the verge of holding the balance of power in the Australian Senate, or upper house – a position that possesses outsized power to wheel and deal with a government intent on getting laws passed.

That has meant all eyes are on Clive, who owns a nickel refinery and large swathes of land laced with coal and iron ore, along with several jets and resorts:  not the climate’s most likely hero.

If You Think Climate Politics in the U.S. Are Crazy, Wait Till You See What Just Happened in Australia