The United Kingdom is set to become a world leader on clean energy and climate policy, after announcing an ambitious plan to halve carbon emissions by 2025.

Dan Cass writes: Another excellent report has been released by the Grattan Institute. Although its focus is on pollution markets, it indirectly provides us with a clear economic justification to be bullish about the prospects of renewable electricity baseload, on the back of higher than predicted energy efficiency gains. The report, Markets to Reduce Pollution: [...]

I’m walking down a dusty road on the outskirts of the old citadel in Damascus, Syria. Lugging my backpack and avoiding donkeys, taxis and potholes in the road, I suddenly come across a patch of green. It’s a garden – about as big as three suburban sized Aussie backyards put together – and it’s filled [...]

I confess to being a little taken aback by the swing back towards campaigning for immediate adoption of a cap-and-trade emissions scheme that appears to be gaining ground in sections of the environment movement. This, in my opinion, is a misguided strategy that risks stifling progress at a critical moment instead of opening the space [...]

Giles Parkinson of Climate Spectator writes:  Like Noah and his Ark, Julia Gillard has made an effort to have two of almost everything on the committee that will guide Australia’s near-term efforts on climate change, and prepare the economy for the carbon challenges of the future. The Prime Minister herself is chairing the committee, which [...]

The problem with performing a political backflip of such spectacularly high degrees of difficulty as Kevin Rudd shakily negotiated today is the haunting rhetoric which can come back to bite you in the ass. In dumping Labor’s commitment to introduce an emissions trading scheme (ETS) this term, various media reports have pinned Rudd to comments [...]

The Greens’ climate policies, from our proposed CPRS amendments to our Safe Climate Bill, have been widely lauded as being the most economically sensible and scientifically literate of all the parties’. But Mungo MacCallum wouldn’t let that reality get in the way of a good pro-ALP story. Perhaps the most egregious error in Monday’s diatribe [...]

Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation: They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an “Oh, shit” moment–an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. It’s especially alarming when people who, ahem, know their shit, speak about [...]

So, what is the goal of legislative climate action? Is it about trading emissions permits? Is it about technology policy? Surely it’s not about arguing over who can support polluters more! Is it even about reducing emissions, then? While you can mount arguments for all of these, fundamentally, in my opinion, the goal is none [...]

There’s a lot of burn-out in the climate movement right now. A lot of tired people, a lot of grumpy people. I know – I am one! I can completely understand why – we’ve had a year of not only hard campaigning, but also a particularly distressing one. Dashed hopes aren’t easy to bear, a [...]