Following the great tradition of all recent PMs, comes SmoCo going up in flames over climate change, at the AFR: Nationals leader Michael McCormack said the Coalition should hold the line against further action on climate change after a leadership coup against him by Barnaby Joyce failed but reignited fierce internal debate in the Coalition
It’s hard to believe he could make it worse but SmoCo is trashing the east coast gas market, at the AFR: The federal government and NSW have reached a $2 billion energy deal which will require NSW to free up massive amounts of gas for domestic use in return for the construction of new interconnectors,
Eighty Australian Research Council (ARC) laureates have signed an open letter demanding strong action to make deep cuts to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions: Eighty of Australia’s top academics have written an open letter declaring an “urgent need for deep cuts” to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions following the current unprecedented bushfire crisis. The letter calls on
Via SmoCo this afternoon comes a notion six years too late: “We need to get the gas from under our feet. There is no credible energy transition plan for an economy like Australia, in particular, that does not involve the greater use of gas as an important transition fuel.” “There are plenty of other medium
Via the McCrann Sock Puppet today: If you are a “Climate Change” true and absolute believer – and even more emphatically so, if you’ve gone the full “Climate Emergency Greta” – the answer is nuclear. If you remain more rationally sceptical of the claimed evils of carbon dioxide and the associated demonisation of coal, or
At The Australian, the Doomsday Clock is about to strike midnight: The keepers of the Doomsday Clock have moved the symbolic countdown to global disaster to the closest point to midnight in its 73-year history, citing “existential danger” from nuclear war and climate change. Funnily enough, there was no mention that the Doomsday Clock also
Fresh from Reuters, it’s now 830 cases and 25 deaths in China. Accelerating transmission and the mortality rate has jumped to 3%. Alas, it’s on like Donkey Kong. Markets up.
The New South Wales government recently announced plans to double the capacity of the Sydney desalination plant to 500 million litres a day. A 15 million litre a day plant is also planned for the Hunter region, while one as large as the existing Sydney plant could be built in the Illawarra region if water
Via Deloitte: A new global report from Deloitte shows that 81 percent of Australia’s business leaders believe that climate change will have a negative impact on their business operations (compared with a global average of 48 percent). The report, The Fourth Industrial Revolution: At the intersection of readiness and responsibility, surveyed more than 2,000 C-suite
Which is rapidly evolving into some kind of feel good talisman, at Domain: Amid almost daily complaints from industry about skyrocketing electricity costs, out dropped an announcement recently so counter to the dominant news flow that it seemed beyond belief. Yet there it was in the business pages: Australian software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and iron
He’s an Albotross around Labor’s neck, via the AFR: Labor leader Anthony Albanese has admitted it was a “mistake” to take the 45 per cent emissions reduction target to last year’s federal election, indicating Labor would reduce the target. Mr Albanese said that while Labor wanted “ambitious” targets, the plan to cut emissions by 45
Via the FT: The German government has struck a deal with the country’s coal-producing regions to phase out the use of coal power by 2038 in return for compensation and benefits worth €40bn. Berlin will also set aside €4.35bn for utilities such as RWE, which will close some of their coal plants early. The deal removes one
With each passing day, ScoMo climate change ineptitude burns brighter. He will no doubt be reassuring colleagues that it is all in hand, as the closed loop of politics does its thing. He’s wrong. This is a catastrophic political moment. A tipping point has passed. ScoMo is on the wrong side of it. Indeed, he
Earlier this week, I published two articles (here and here) explaining why Australia’s mass immigration program – which adds around a Canberra-worth of population every year – will make it next to impossible to meet our Paris Agreement targets to reduce carbon emissions. The logic is simple: adding millions more people to Australia’s population means
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews says it would not be appropriate to discuss potential changes to the state’s carbon emissions reduction policy until the bushfire crisis is over. An independent advice panel chaired by former federal MP Greg Combet has recommended that the government adopt more aggressive targets, including reducing emissions by 40% on 2005 levels
Yesterday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was quizzed by the media on whether the government intended to meet Australia’s emissions targets as laid-out under the Paris Agreement, and promised to go even further: Australia has pledged to cut emissions by 26 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030, under the Paris Agreement. “It is my intention
I honestly don’t know how Millennials don’t burst spontaeously into flames of rage, via Domain: With properties hidden away off the grid in remote locations, popular travel startups based out of tiny houses are keeping a careful eye on bushfires. Startups including Unyoked and Shacky advertise themselves as enabling users to get “easy access to the
I guess because they are not quiet enough, ignored firies are rallying their own national fire crisis summit, via The Guardian: Former emergency leaders who have been pushing the Morrison government to take action on the climate say they will “go it alone” and convene their own summit on the bushfire crisis. The Emergency Leaders
Via your burning PM today: “I’m a Sydneysider and I know how unusual it is to see that haze across my city, and I know how distressing that has been, particularly for young people, who wouldn’t have seen that before.” “And I can understand that is deeply unsettling to a lot of Australians, particularly those
The new AEMO Integrated Energy Plan makes for facinating reading: The objective of an ISP is to minimise long-term total system costs, thereby maximising benefits in the interest of consumers, while meeting the NEM’s reliability, security and emissions expectations. We have set out in Part B our modelling approach to determine a least-regret development path
You wouldn’t be her for quids. She was far too young to know what she was getting into. On the one hand she’s up in lights: On the other hand, she’s now being blamed by the child abusive right for everything from polio to the death of god. My own view is that Greta is
Sydney has disappeared, at The Guardian: The New South Wales environment minister Matt Kean has split from his federal Coalition counterparts, arguing climate change is behind the bushfire crisis and calling for greater emissions reduction. Kean’s intervention piles pressure on Scott Morrison to do more on emissions reduction and disaster management after his predecessor Malcolm
Via Domain comes Economist Ross Garnaut: …Carryover credits refer to an accounting measure, where a country counts historical emissions reduction that exceeded old international goals against its current target. Australia will include its carryover credits from its over-achievement on the Kyoto Protocol in its efforts to meet the Paris target. Most countries don’t count their credits,
Welcome to the new frontier of LNG doom. Via FTAlphaville: This is a guest post by Rauli Partanen, an author, analyst and communicator on climate change, environment and energy systems. Partanen co-founded and leads Think Atom, a non-profit think tank advocating nuclear energy alternatives. In this post he argues Germany’s interests in natural gas are jeopardising the European Taxonomy for
Some more good news for the species, not, from the World Meteorological Organisation: The year 2019 concludes a decade of exceptional global heat, retreating ice and record sea levels driven by greenhouse gases from human activities. Average temperatures for the five-year (2015-2019) and ten-year (2010-2019) periods are almost certain to be the highest on record.
Via the Climate Council today: A long-term warming trend from the burning of coal, oil and gas is supercharging extreme weather events, putting Australian lives, our economy and our environment at risk. The Climate Council’s new report, ‘Dangerous Summer: Escalating Bushfire, Heat and Drought Risk‘, has found this summer is shaping up as a terrible trifecta
IPSOS via Domain: The environment has for the first time surpassed healthcare, cost of living and the economy to be the number one concern for Australians. The Ipsos Issues Monitor, which asks a representative sample of Australians to select the three top issues facing the nation, found 32.1 per cent rated the state of the
Slowly but surely, Europe is declring carbon war on Australia. Ealrier this year we saw the begiing of divestitures: Norway’s massive sovereign wealth fund may soon rip up to $3.7 billion out of Australian fossil fuel companies after the Norwegian Parliament passed a tightened set of ethical investment rules. The laws were adopted late on
Via FTAlphaville: We admire German economist Hans-Werner Sinn for taking it upon himself to warn us that driving an electric vehicle is a halfhearted fix to global warming. From The Guardian’s comment pages: Electric vehicles also emit substantial amounts of CO2, the only difference being that the exhaust is released at a remove — that is, at
The UN is warning that the globe is headed for a massive overshoot on carbon emissions and associated climate catastrophe: Global temperatures could rise sharply this century with “wide-ranging and destructive” consequences after greenhouse gas emissions hit record levels last year, international climate experts warned on Tuesday. The head of the World Meteorological Organization said
