In my recent article I concluded with:
Confronted with the fact that no one wants to invest in coal, what do you do? One is you set up an inquiry, stack it with lovers of the clean black stuff, and call it the ”King review.”
The idea is to grab some cash from the $2 billion Climate Solutions Fund, as well as Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC).
In their findings you have the inquiry recommend that the funds be opened up to provide funding to heavy emitters and fossil fuel projects.
Not a bad plan. After all, it wasn’t the intention to use the funds in this way.
They are not just environmental vandals but straight out corrupt con merchants. Angus Taylor makes a good crook, it would seem. Or at least he knows how to get away with things.
I wanted to expand a little on the subject of this con job. You see there was a time when Australians didn’t like being conned.
“Don’t listen to him, he’s a con artist,” my folks would say.
I can vividly remember that phrase. As a teenager we seemed to apply it to everything. We sort of instantly knew when someone was bullshitting.
Now it seems we have lost that instinct and are now a gullible lot ready to believe whomever and whatever we are told.
If you didn’t read pertinent articles in The Guardian, The Age (paywall) or News24 you wouldn’t have a clue as to what the Coalition is doing. You might if you watch Sky After Dark and wanted a warped version of the truth.
After committing the worst possible domestic violence on our part of the planet, the Coalition decided to have a review of their existing madness, with men who in part created the environmental vandalism and go back to the past and use discredited technology.
Having spent a decade proving their incompetence these same idiot politicians now speak of the virtues of gas as being some sort of gentle nurse to the raped victim.
As Katherine Murphy wrote in The Guardian:
“Politicians and their advisers used to talk up the virtues of gas as a transitional fuel, and they used to talk about carbon capture and storage (CCS) as technology that governments needed to invest in to drive the transition to low-emissions economies.
The great botch-up is now well past infancy, and Australia’s record on climate and energy is a disaster so profound it’s still traumatising backstage protagonists years after the stadium rock wreckers have left” the crime scene.”
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We all incur a cost for the upkeep of our health. Why then should we not be liable for the cost of a healthy planet.
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Allow me to bring you up to date. The Coalition is proposing that after appointing a committee headed by former Fortescue boss Nev Power and others of the same persuasion, who in turn have probably been instructed on what to conclude; propose to spend heaps of your money on a gas-fired revival of manufacturing.
Conning the Australian people is really that simple. They do it all the time and people don’t care or don’t know. Paddy Manning in The Monthly reported that:
“Environment groups reacted with alarm, and independent Warringah MP Zali Steggall has called on the federal government to bring industry groups together to canvass their views on stimulus measures, arguing that the COVID-19 commission’s decision-making processes lacked transparency
Manning reported that:
Shadow climate and energy minister Mark Butler welcomed the roadmap’s step away from coal, but described the document as the Coalition’s 19th energy policy – and one that was light on details. “Minister Taylor has pulled a hamstring making sure that his anti-renewable colleagues know that expensive new coal is still in the mix, while also tipping his hat to expensive and dangerous nuclear power,” said Butler.
“… shadow resources minister Joel Fitzgibbon told Sky News, the roadmap appears to imply that CCS could keep the ever-contentious Liddell power station operating in his Hunter Valley electorate. “It’s just ludicrous to suggest that you can retrofit any carbon capture and storage system to a more-than-50-year-old coal-fired generator,” Fitzgibbon said.”
Once again a political donations-focused government seems determined to do nothing about climate change.
Absent is a price on carbon and nothing about a new regulatory strategy and there isn’t any room for a sizeable public investment.
And God help us! Talk about going back to the past. It even talks about big role for carbon capture and storage. You know, that technology that was going to change the future and give us clean coal.
Goodness knows how many millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on this obscenely expensive yet failed technology over the past 10 years.
The Prime Minister made a proper clown of himself in his handling of the summer fires, and the punters told him so.
During the coronavirus pandemic he made up a lot of ground. However, with climate change he finds himself, on the one hand, between his job, party donations, the backbench, the cabinet, and a squillion-dollar fossil-fuel industry that has he and his government by the short and curlies, and on the other hand what is best for the planet and its people.
It is not as though the government is without options. If it had the intestinal fortitude it could use a COVID-19 recovery that would drive full-time sustainable jobs and growth on the back of a low-emissions transition that would last 50 years or more.
The other option is to use the recovery to continue with fossil fuels and pretend (lie your way through it) that in a time of great uncertainty you had a moment of gas led fossil fuel enlightenment. Jobs versus the environment.
History tells me they will take option two.
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My thought for the day.
In terms of the environment I wonder what price the people of tomorrow will pay for the stupidity of today.
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Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!
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