Nourishing the environmental debate

Category Archives: Greens

What would real climate action look like? The Greens’ Safe Climate Bill!

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 of these.
Fundamentally, [...]

Where to now on the CPRS?

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 [...]

Wong refuses Senate request to model 40% target

The Senate today passed a Greens motion demanding that the Government require Treasury to model the 40% cuts below 1990 levels that we know are necessary.
But, within an hour, Minister Wong had thumbed her nose at the Senate and the planet, telling CE Daily that the Government “had already undertaken the largest economic modelling exercise [...]

Is some kind of agreement at Copenhagen all that matters?

In recent weeks, there has been a welcome shift in focus in the Australian climate politics debate onto the global stage. It goes without saying that, unless the world moves decisively as a community of nations, we have not a snowball’s chance in hell of avoiding climate catastrophe.
But the mainstream Australian discussion of the Copenhagen [...]

Garnaut excised from Wong’s vocabulary?

After he embarrassed her government last week by saying the CPRS may be so bad that it should be taken out the back and shot (well, not quite),it seems that Minister Wong has excised Professor Garnaut entirely from her vocabulary.
In a speech to the Lowy Institute today (not yet on her website, but will be [...]

Negative emissions needed for a safe climate: World Watch Institute

The latest State of the World report from the globally respected World Watch Institute is one of the highest-profile and credible calls for emergency action on climate change yet released.
The report concludes that the old scientific and environmental target of constraining warming to 2C is now well out of date and that we must do [...]

Joyce, the Nationals and climate change

Nationals Senate leader, Barnaby Joyce, let fly in today’s press and radio with an attack not just on emissions trading but on climate change science, effectively calling it “just a load of rubbish”.
According to Godwin’s Law, Joyce immediately lost his argument by invoking Nazism, referring to “environmental goose-steppers” and coining a new term: “eco-totalitarianism”. He [...]

Is this Kevin Rudd or John Howard?

It’s hard to find the words to express quite how atrocious today’s decision announcement has been.
Here’s a video that expresses what a lot of us are starting to think – that all those who voted for Kevin Rudd thinking he’d be better than John Howard on climate change were sold a lump of coal.
If you’re [...]

No help for renewables, but bending over backwards for coal.

Yesterday the Rudd Government demonstrated very clearly where its climate and energy priorities lie – not with the proven renewable energy solutions, but with the geosequestration pipe-dream that Al Gore has recently called “too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate”.
Fresh from burying Christine Milne’s feed-in tariff [...]

Violence and extinction in Tasmania’s forests

The last three days have been quite a revelation of exactly what’s going on in Tasmania’s forests. Regardless of the rhetoric of sensitive management of the forests, the real story is one of wantonly sending species towards extinction and viciously attacking those brave souls who stand up for protection.

On Monday, Bob Brown launched a new [...]