“Australia is the poster-child for irresponsibility on climate change” laments Christiana Figueres, former head of The UN Framework Convention On Climate Change. A key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, Dr Figueres is currently in Australia on a speaking tour. She deplores our PM’s latest “technology target” stunt.
Figueres dismisses Scotty from marketing, our coal lobbyists’ puppet PM and his weasel-worded “technology not taxes” evasion of responsibility; a dereliction of his duty to at least reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. But she may as well be talking about our bizarre determination to pursue the fiction of Kyoto carry-over credits.
Or the Coalition’s recent crazy decision to finance a four million dollar feasibility study into a coal-fired power station at Collinsville in North Queensland, a project that is destined to become a white elephant. Demand is flat and there is no shortage of electricity in supply in the area.
Tropical North QLD also has an abundance of renewables, wind, solar and hydro.
Morrison is concocting a fake substitute. Details remain top secret even to his own cabinet but he’s calling it a technology goal, so as not to upset the coal warriors who run his coalition. All will be revealed at the 2020 UN Climate Change Conference, to be held 9-19 November, in Glasgow.
Working on it now, doubtless, is Gus Taylor, the government’s undisputed computational champion following his sensational calculation that Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore’s annual travel amounted to an astonishing $15 million a year, a figure which was leaked to News Corp’s Daily Telegraph, in an apparently doctored report, by Taylor’s office, an action calculated to damage Moore’s reputation.
Happily, NSW Police were able to hand-ball the investigation of the forgery to the AFP which hadn’t “bothered” to look for the information required. As Clover Moore, herself observes,
“The people might pay the [AFP] salary but they work for the government who appoints them.”
Similarly, Figueres is not fooled by Morrison’s proposal of an alternative, Clayton’s commitment of his own. “I frankly think every industrialised country has to take on an economy-wide target,” she declares.
According to The Australian, (the Liberal Party’s Pravda), Morrison’s conflicted Coalition will oppose any proposal to adopt a long-term emissions goal, such as Labor’s net zero emissions target by 2050, which the Opposition announced this week. Already, crackpot Craig Kelly is calling it “an economic suicide note” on Sky.
It it’s suicide, then also committing economic self-slaughter are Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Cape Verde, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of Congo, Denmark, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Ethiopia, European Union, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Grenada, Guyana, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Kiribati, Lao PDR, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Maldives, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Namibia, Nauru Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niue, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Portugal, Republic of Marshall Islands, Samoa, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Spain, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Vanuatu. Add in all Australian state governments including Liberal.
But don’t expect Morrison’s mob to be shamed into accepting their fair share of decarbonisation. Amy Remeikis notes in Monday’s The Guardian Australia the paucity of the Coalition’s latest threadbare case as it airs the Kiwis’ cow, sheep-fart and Fergie tractor exhaust exemption.
The government’s killer argument against Labor’s zero emissions by 2050 policy, is that the Kiwis have quarantined New Zealand’s agriculture industry from Aotearoa’s target.
“So suddenly, after years and years of rhetoric over how we don’t need to look to other countries for our policies, including NZ, in the wake of its offers to take additional refugees from Nauru, New Zealand is the gold standard of policy.”
But no-one expects, logic, consistency or sanity from Morrison. Most of the time now we are surprised, if not somewhat dismayed, that he remembers to show up for work.
Trying hard to be wily, Scotty recycles tactics Howard used to dodge emissions targets in the Kyoto Protocol negotiated in the 1990s. “Investment targets or goals” for technologies will help the Coalition continue to abdicate all responsibility for being the planet’s highest per-capita greenhouse gas polluter, amongst advanced countries.
The dirty trick of focussing on investment is a legacy of climate contrarians such as Bjorn Lomborg, the world’s most active luke-warmer. Lomborg doesn’t deny the physics of the greenhouse effect, but instead cherry-picks information to deny that the risks of climate change are large enough to justify strong and urgent action.
Morrison’s technology hoax contains the specious case that governments should develop new technologies to drive down costs, before actually deploying the new technology. It is simply another criminally irresponsible, flawed, stalling tactic. Labor’s climate change spokesperson, Mark Butler calls out Scotty’s latest, futile, subterfuge.
Morrison’s ” … latest thought bubble of a “technology target” is just a throwback to the Howard era when he and George W Bush rejected emissions reduction targets in the Kyoto Protocol in favour of a so-called “technology approach” which boosted nuclear power and so-called ‘clean coal,’” Butler says.
Serial ministerial failure, Greg Hunt, Abbott’s environment minister patsy, who gave the nation “soil magic” or direct action is a huge Lomborg fan. Greg tried to stump up $4 million in taxpayer funds to pay for Lomborg’s appointment to an Australian university. Hunt’s opposition to the carbon tax cited Lomborg’s nonsense.
Scotty’s mob denies that we live in a climate emergency. Refuses to even say “climate change“, let alone admit that it is a result of anthropogenic global heating or link this to our recent catastrophic megafires. And worse. Kelly’s all for distributing climate change lies in schools so that children can make up their mind based on falsehoods.
Kelly’s a fan of Advance Australia – which bills itself as a right-wing version of progressive lobby group GetUp. Advance Australia plans to develop materials on climate change targeted at children. Their fossil-fuel propaganda would include a “Smart Scientist’s Kit”, a misinformative e-book of “10 climate facts to expose the climate change hoax”, as well as an “educational video and speaking tour” by a “renowned climate scientist”. Nine Newspapers reports.
Liz Storer, the former, silver-tongued, Liberal adviser behind the development of the kiddies’ kit of lies is a model of halcyon objectivity and tolerance as is evident in her views on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. (CEFC)
“We (recently) saw our PM give $1 billion more, taxpayer dollars, to the CEFC. For what? These guys started back in 2012 as a Labor-created, snot wad of a useless body,” she sneers. Useless snot-wad? Perhaps she should talk to CEO Ian Learmonth who notes in CEFC’s latest Annual Report,
We are proud to report that, since inception, CEFC investments have helped drive more than $24 billion in additional private sector (clean energy) investment commitments Australia-wide. Yet her PM is no better.
Scotty resurrects all his favourite flawed arguments as he Gish-Gallops away reducing greenhouse emissions.
“Currently no one can tell me that going down that path won’t cost jobs, won’t put up your electricity prices, and won’t impact negatively on jobs in the economies of rural and regional Australia. And my Government is absolutely committed to the jobs of rural and regional Australians,” he spins his hurdy-gurdy of vacuous, dishonest garrulity.
Scotty is totally surprised to get a bit of a hand from bush-lawyer Barnaby Joyce who can’t resist his own garbled Gish-Gallop, either, as he vents in a parliament’s hallway, shouting over the top of Joel Fitzgibbons’ Monday morning conference. Joyce is right on cue. It’s almost as if his outburst is scripted by the PM’s office.
“What a load of rubbish. What a load of pig manure. He’s going to reach out to you. He’s going to reach out to the coal mines. Don’t worry, fellas, we’re reaching out to you. We’re reaching out and saying you’re going to lose your job. Reaching out, that’s how you’re going to do it. You’re going to make the equation work by putting trees back on people’s properties whether they like it or not. We’re going to let the shrubs grow back on the country.”
You can’t beat parliament’s hallways for a bit of sober, civilised, rational discourse. Putting trees back? Oh, the horror of wanton reforestation.
No-one asks Morrison of the negative impact of doing nothing – especially when that means continuing the $42 billion a year subsidy which fossil fuel industries enjoy in the absence of carbon pricing. That would be cabinet in confidence and/or commercial in confidence and above all a matter of national security.
No-one can tell Scotty anything – unless, it’s former coal lobbyist John Kunkel or one of other nine former mining industry suits whom he’s recruited on staff. Or the claque of former News Corp hacks, who join them.
Australia would prosper – if only it had a government responsible enough to take real action on climate change, according to a range of experts. These include CSIRO calculations that we would spend 58-64% less on electricity under a shift to 100 per cent renewables.
Above all, it exposes the Coalition’s reversion to the hype of $100 lamb roasts, as cynical, disinformation. In fact, renewables bring huge economic benefits.
The CSIRO’s Australian National Outlook report finds bold action on the uptake of renewables could lead to GDP growth of 2.76% to 2.8% annually, a 90% increase in real wages and net zero emissions by 2050.
Monday, Pravda is full of Morrison’s drop that Cabinet ministers, the National Farmers’ Federation and freight lobbyists are all calling for Anthony Albanese to cost his economy-wide target of net-zero emissions by 2050, despite all states in nation having already made their own independent commitment. It’s the same wedge tactics we heard from Tony Carbon-tax Abbott with his $100 lamb roast and Whyalla off the map hype.
Oddly, The Oz fails to include the relative cost of inaction — which the Climate Council estimates at over $2 trillion by 2050 for Australia’s agriculture, property and productivity sectors.
But ScoMo knows that when you’re a government in an abusive relationship with the electorate, you gaslight the nation, you insist repeatedly that renewables are so costly they will wreck the economy. Or you make cryptic references to developing technologies – only to be blown out of the rapidly heating water in one of the best good news stories of the week.
“The technologies are here,” software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes says as he announces a $12 million plan to fund solar and battery off-grid system to provide clean and reliable power to communities hit by bushfires and other disasters.
In delivering the first two of what could be one hundred off-grid solar and storage systems – using rapid solar deployed by Australia’s 5B, and Tesla batteries , Cannon Brookes is struck by how surprised people are that such technology is available now. They tell him they thought such technologies were a decade away.
Such misconception is rife in the general community as it is amongst our ruling class. Yet disinformation about energy and denigration of renewables is the mainstay of much of mainstream media – the Murdoch papers, Sky News and toxic talk-back radio’s investment in recycling ignorance, prejudice and superstition. Even our ABC is not immune. Who can forget or forgive Chris Uhlmann’s mis-reporting that the SA grid had collapsed not because of freak weather but because of over-reliance on renewables.
This Sunday, David Speers on ABC Insiders, whose objectivity is imperilled by its increasingly framing discussion by reiterating federal government policy, twits Albo eight times about a carbon price in the desperate search for a gotcha headline that is neither in the nation’s interest nor in the interest of informative, objective journalism.
At the arse-end of last week’s government by announceables and cheering ourselves on until we are hoarse over such big wins as an Aussie Coronavirus cure; a billion dollar spend for Tindal air base, near Katharine, to upgrade it to re-fuel US long-range bombers, a bit of maintenance on the US Alliance we must pay for ourselves, dynamic duo, Dan Tehan and Greg Hunt shuffle on stage right, Saturday to pin the tail on the donkey of the body politic, a Liberal party game of upbeat stuff and nonsense where self-congratulatory bullshit masquerades as fact.
This week’s show’s subtext is abuzz with feel-good fantasies. Good old Aussie know-how and “working around the clock” will produce an anti-Covid-19 Coronavirus vaccine any day soon, whereas, other scientists in other countries are also researching and any vaccine is years away from licence and use in the community.
Professor Warwick McKibbin, director of the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, argues that government money would be best spent on advertising public hygiene, given that simple hand-washing is the single, best preventative against the virus.
The Covid-19 Coronavirus has been contained in Australia, claims Hunt, a fair stretch, given that the Morrison government is again putting the interests of trade and investment ahead of any woke city latte-sippers’ concern for public health.
Worse. The much-vaunted China travel ban was relaxed last week when a series of its cargo ships were allowed to dock regardless of the compulsory 14 day exclusion period. Shocking as this may be it’s hardly a surprise.
If the travel rorts have taught us anything, it is that Morrison’s government is flexible in applying regulations. Yet Health Minister Hunt’s quite happy to take a punt on helping turn Covid-19 into a global pandemic, if there’s a quid in it. It’s our government keeping us safe. Tarric Brooker in Independent Australia, notes,
By choosing to partially lift the China travel ban, the Morrison Government has chosen to bet the wellbeing of the Australian public on coronavirus statistics coming from the Chinese Government. The same government that lied about the impact of SARS and, even as late as January, was persecuting whistle-blowers who were trying to warn the world about coronavirus.
Yet Morrison’s government – can now add a brand new slogan. We’re the only party that didn’t stop the boats. New Zealand, on the other hand, has extended its ban on arrivals from mainland China into a fourth week, Kiwi PM Jacinda Ardern announces Monday 24 February. The ban would be reviewed after that, she says.
Of course, it’s difficult to get a fix on the facts amidst background noise from other competing narratives; the cheering on of UQ researchers who are “just days away” from testing a COVID-19 vaccine on animals while dapper Dan’s on hand to spruik up getting “normality” back into the international student market.
Nothing is remotely normal about the international student market which Liberal con-artists such as Immigration Minister David Coleman claim is worth a whopping $35 billion in export revenue. Luckily, Dave was addressing Gerald Henderson’s Sydney Institute last August and no-one was paying much attention.
Coleman is wrong. It’s not export revenue, as Leith Van Onselen points out. International students studying in Australia are legally allowed to work 20 hours per week. Many also work illegally. Because the income earned is used to pay for either tuition fees or living expenses, it is not a true export but merely economic activity.
International students working and supporting themselves are no more an export than domestic students living away from home. It pays to take boasts about total numbers of international education exports with a grain of salt, however much Dan Tehan loves to blow his own trumpet. We just don’t know the facts.
Tehan dynasty scion, Dan, an Education Minister, who knows the price of everything we can charge a fee for and the value of nothing that accrues from study let alone learning, struggles a bit to get his message out.
The guts of it is that he’s going to take China’s reassurances at face value because we’ve got to get those Year 11 and Year 12 fee-paying students back into the country or all hope of any sacred surplus materialising is buggered.
In fact, given “political tensions” and diplomatic ineptitude, the result of our government’s US sycophancy, numbers of students from China are declining while those from India and Nepal are on the rise.
Leith Van Onselen worries given the ABC’s Four Corners expose of plagiarism, academic misconduct, and students from India failing their courses, that standards may be lowered in order that the government can pump up numbers.
Or, in other words, that we continue to prostitute our tertiary institutions to boost our “export” earnings, however, dodgy or “Gussied” up they may prove. Yet there’s no way to “Gussie up” or put lipstick on the pig of Morrison government’s energy debacle.
Our corrupt, coal-fired climate science denying Coalition is crippling investment in renewable energy, according to COAG’s Energy Security Board (ESB) which released its annual Health of the National Electricity Market report on Friday. It confirms recent reports that investment in renewable energy in Australia has slumped 40% in 2019.
Yet as Giles Parkinson writes in Renew Economy The only thing that is getting in the way of a zero emissions target is a government refusing to acknowledge it is possible. And that’s because it doesn’t set a plan that federal regulators and rule-makes can follow, and which can provide a signal to business and investors.
The ESB pulls no punches. It’s time we called sabotage for what it is. The Morrison government is sabotaging the uptake of renewables in order to build a case for the fossil fuel industries which are among its principal backers and donors.
In its report, the Energy Security Board observes
The lack of a strategic direction has led to stakeholders deferring investment in the maintenance and construction of new generation, especially in flexible dispatchable generation. This has increased reliability risks, undermined affordability and slowed progress on emissions reduction. It has also raised barriers to entry and constrained competition in the market. With political uncertainty investment planning becomes very difficult and this has impacts well beyond the electricity industry.
The undermining of affordability of renewables is exactly what those who drive the coal-powered Morrison puppet government desire. It is part of their game plan. With every delay and cynical evasion, the Morrison government reveals itself to be hopelessly, irretrievably corrupted; captives of a fossil fuel industry which is interested only in the profit that comes from expansion even if this means destroying the planet.
At a time when all around it, is the evidence of irreversible global heating, drought, catastrophic megafire, rather than take action to pledge to limit greenhouse gas emissions the Morrison government prefers to play politics; weaponise climate change; rather than act in the best interests of the people it is elected to represent.
Labor’s pledge of net zero emissions by 2050 is neither controversial nor radical. Experts argue we should do much more. This week, it is abundantly clear, however, that the Morrison government, hopelessly in thrall to the coal and gas barons would rather wedge Labor than pursue an emissions policy which could help save the planet.
Its hoax of a technology target or goal is a ploy to get away with doing nothing when every indication from every expert is that we should do all we can and more.
Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor reduces our responsibility as global citizens to a despicable semantic quibble today. Australia has committed to a net zero emissions target by 2050 under the 2015 Paris Agreement?
“That’s incorrect,” said Taylor. “We signed up to the Paris Agreement, which involves the world achieving net zero in the second half of the next century.” We are not part of that world? Only a fool could be happy living in such a fool’s paradise.
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