Climate
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DAVID SPRATT. Senate report recognises climate change as existential risk, but fails to draw the obvious conclusions.
Climate change is “a current and existential national security risk”, according to an Australian Senate report released on Thursday 17 May. It says an existential risk is “one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development”. These are strong words. Continue reading »
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PETER DAWSON. Review of Sunburnt Country.
Peter Dawson reviews Sunburnt Country’ – Dr Joelle Gergis’ new book on Climate Change Climate Scientist, Dr.Joelle Gergis’s book pulls together from wide-ranging sources the story of the Australian climate since white settlement, but also reaches back 1000 years and more. She seeks to convince us that the climate change challenge we face is, by Continue reading »
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MANDY FREUND, BEN HENLEY, KATHRYN ALLEN, PATRICK BAKER. Recent Australian droughts may be the worst in 800 years.
Australia is a continent defined by extremes, and recent decades have seen some extraordinary climate events. But droughts, floods, heatwaves, and fires have battered Australia for millennia. Are recent extreme events really worse than those in the past? In a recent paper, we reconstructed 800 years of seasonal rainfall patterns across the Australian continent. Our Continue reading »
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Methane, coal seam gas and the demise of the planetary life support system
The extraction and transfer from the earth crust to the atmosphere of every economically available molecule of carbon, including coal, oil, tar sand oil, shale oil, methane gas, coal seam gas and other forms of hydrocarbon, constitutes the most significant shift in composition of the atmosphere since the PETM hyperthermal event about 56 million years Continue reading »
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Rescuing the Reef … again.
There must be a federal election coming as the government has announced a rescue package for the Great Barrier Reef. Like a damsel (fish) in distress, the Reef has experienced many rescue packages. As early as the mid-1990’s, the federal government introduced the Sugar Coast Environment Rescue Package which aimed to preserve important lowland habitats along Continue reading »
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PETER SAINSBURY. Macron tests his entente cordiale with Turnbull on climate change.
France’s President Macron is taking the opportunity while briefly in Australia to bully, embarrass, shame, blackmail, whatever, Prime Minister Turnbull into taking meaningful action on climate change and become the real leader the Australian people and Macron himself are looking for. He’s got a hard task ahead of him but we need whatever help we Continue reading »
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Media Watch. How News Corp and The Australian mislead us on climate change.
Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching The Australian and Cairns Post highlight a dissenting view on whether global warming is the cause of mass coral bleaching. Continue reading »
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JULIE P SMITH. Live sheep exports are not worth the moral cost.
Growing up near Midland on the outskirts of Perth during the 1960s and 1970s, I endured the weekly stench from the local abattoir. It was the price we paid to get meat to population centres. My first job was in the local meat processing plant, working with people described as “salt of the earth, working Continue reading »
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IAN DUNLOP. Climate Change: The fiduciary responsibility of politicians & bureaucrats. Part 2 of 2.
“Fiduciary: a person to whom power is entrusted for the benefit of another” “Power is reposed in members of Parliament by the public for exercise in the interests of the public and not primarily for the interests of members or the parties to which they belong. The cry ‘whatever it takes’ is not consistent with Continue reading »
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IAN DUNLOP. Climate Change: The fiduciary responsibility of politicians & bureaucrats. Part 1.
“Fiduciary: a person to whom power is entrusted for the benefit of another” “Power is reposed in members of Parliament by the public for exercise in the interests of the public and not primarily for the interests of members or the parties to which they belong. The cry ‘whatever it takes’ is not consistent with Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. The banking royal commission confirms our worst fears about many business executives and crony capitalism
There was a revealing heading in an article a while back by Ross Gittins, the economics editor of the SMH, ‘Faster growth demands better chief executives’. He concluded his article by pointing to the need for business leadership to seize the economic opportunities -‘ Our overpaid and underperforming chief executive officers are getting (it) wrong’. Continue reading »
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EMMA CARMODY. Lack of transparency in irrigation efficiency programs
An article by Kerry Brewster in the Guardian this week reports on a significant fraud investigation by Queensland’s Major and Organised Crime Squad (Rural) into subsidies granted to a landholder under the Healthy Headwaters Water Use Efficiency Program. Continue reading »
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DAVID BLOWERS. Australia’s slow march towards a National Energy Guarantee is gathering pace.
The finer policy details of the of the proposed National Energy Guarantee (NEG) have begun to leak onto newspaper front pages and websites, ahead of Friday’s crucial meeting of federal and state energy ministers. The good news is that the leaked information suggests solid progress has been made over the past couple of months on Continue reading »
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IMOGEN ZETHOVEN. Trashing our Global Ocean Leadership.
Australia was once a global leader in marine protection. Today, we have fallen spectacularly from grace. The Commonwealth marine park plans tabled recently in federal Parliament represent a triumph for the oil, gas and fishing industries and a massive backward step for our threatened oceans. Continue reading »
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CAROLYN PETTIGREW. Tourism and NSW National Parks – looking to the future. Part 2 of 2
The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is facing a future crisis that perhaps is not fully recognised by supporters of nature conservation. Visitation is skyrocketing http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/research/NSWparkspopularity.htm which on the face of it is wonderful. More and more people are beginning, potentially at least, to value our national parks and enjoy the experience of Continue reading »
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FRANK JOTZO. China’s emissions trading takes steps towards big ambitions.
China’s new emissions trading scheme will start small, but comes with big potential, Frank Jotzo writes. China recently announced that it will begin to introduce a national emissions trading scheme for carbon dioxide this year. The promise for more market-oriented climate policy in the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitting country is enormous. But it will Continue reading »
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CAROLYN PETTIGREW. What has gone wrong with the management of NSW National Parks? Part 1 of 2
In 2014 the NSW government hosted the IUCN World Parks Congress. The government touted securing the conference as a victory for their major events calendar. The key outcome of the congress was the Promise of Sydney – the Vision was excellent. The commitments, however, from the NSW Government were almost laughable, given the importance of Continue reading »
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ANDREW BLAKERS, MATTHEW STOCKS. Solar PV and wind are on track to replace all coal, oil and gas within two decades.
Solar photovoltaic and wind power are rapidly getting cheaper and more abundant – so much so that they are on track to entirely supplant fossil fuels worldwide within two decades, with the time frame depending mostly on politics. The protestation from some politicians that we need to build new coal stations sounds rather quaint. The Continue reading »
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ANDREW GLIKSON. Daniel Ellsberg and the global nuclear suicide machine
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save human way of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.” Albert Einstein 1946 Daniel Ellsberg, former presidential advisor, who had released the famous top-secret Pentagon Papers related to the Viet Nam war, also possessed a cache of top secret documents related to America’s nuclear Continue reading »
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MICHAEL LAMBERT. An Update on the National Electricity Market and the National Energy Guarantee.
The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Energy Council meets in the second half of April to consider a report from the Energy Security Board on the proposed initial design of the National Energy Guarantee which seeks to address both emissions reductions and improved reliability in the National Electricity Market. Continue reading »
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MATTHEW FISHER. Malcolm Turnbull in denial on climate change: The Uses and Abuses of Complex Causation.
It is commonplace for political and corporate leaders to obfuscate public debate on issues they want to avoid by applying simplistic, linear concepts of cause and effect to events that have multiple causes. In the case of climate change, one wonders how long the media and the public are going to let leaders like Malcolm Continue reading »
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TRISTAN EDIS. How renewables trumped brown coal and gas over Australia’s summer.
In reading some of the panic-stricken media commentary about the impending blackouts we were supposed to have this summer, you might have been led to believe that renewable energy doesn’t contribute much at all to ensuring the lights stayed on. Continue reading »
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JULIAN CRIBB. When ‘oil’ spells murder.
A worldwide spate of legal actions against governments and fossil fuel companies is changing the political context of the climate debate more profoundly than anything yet. Yet it may still not be enough to rescue humanity from the other nine existential threats that confront us. Five new groups dedicated to human survival illustrate a new Continue reading »
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South Australia’s renewable energy future hangs by a thread
It’s an election that is impossible to call. And too important to ignore. Continue reading »
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LAURIE PATTON. It’s not about the size of the population, it’s about where we’re all going to live
This week the ABC’s Four Corners and Q and A programs are focussing attention on an important issue facing 21st Century Australia – the size of the population. As is commonly the case with this subject, the debate is creating a fair amount of heat, but regrettably not all that much light. Continue reading »
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PETER SAINSBURY. US Republicans advocate (smoke and black holes) plan on climate change.
Eight prominent US Republicans are advocating that the Republican Party should lead action on climate change by introducing a carbon tax, with distribution of the revenue raised to all Americans (a Carbon Dividend). While this may move the debate forward in the USA, the plan is parochial, blind to the range of environmental issues threatening Continue reading »
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SAMANTHA HEPBURN. Why aren’t Australia’s environment laws preventing widespread land clearing?
Australia has national environment laws – the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act). Yet given the staggering rates of land clearing taking place, resulting in the extinction and endangerment of plants and animals in Australia, these laws are clearly not working. Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE The impotent and the pure!
In the Batman bi election the Greens have correctly directed criticism at the cruel policies of the ALP and the Coalition on refugees in Manus and Nauru.But the Greens do not have clean hands either. Continue reading »
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HYLDA ROLFE. Summer of our disconnect .
Hurrah-words don’t disguise the reality of the steady creep of business into our National Parks. When a world-status Park is involved, all sorts of phoney justifications for commercial incursions are trotted out. The pity of it is that so many of them emanate from within the Gamekeepers’ compound. But repetition does not generate conviction, and Continue reading »
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MICHAEL LAMBERT. Revisiting the South Australian Electricity Market.
In the context of the current South Australian election campaign, it is opportune to revisit the state of play with the South Australian electricity market which in 2016 and 2017 was used at the national level as an ill-informed or, perhaps more accurately, a misinformed argument about renewable energy and climate change policy. Continue reading »