March 14, 2009 – 10:38 pm
Last week, the Senate established two Inquiries into greenhouse issues. One, to be conducted by the Senate’s Economics Committee, will look at the exposure drafts of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation. It is due to report by 14 April when the Senate is out of session. The other inquiry will be conducted by [...]
There was an interesting feature article in the glossy magazine section of the latest Weekend Australian (not online), detailing the recollections of some of the people of Marysville in Victoria in the hours leading up to the horrendous bushfire which all but wiped out the town.
The story reconstructs the last 24 hours of Marysville’s life [...]
February 2, 2009 – 7:25 am
Anna Rose has written a piece on the Rooted blog about the climate action summit that’s was held in Canberra over the weekend, leading up to a major protest on Tuesday outside Parliament House when MPs all gather for the first time this year.
There was one paragraph in her report that I found particularly interesting:
In the [...]
January 15, 2009 – 4:57 pm
In this era of wide awareness about the need to reduce greenhouse emissions and debates about using pricing and market mechanisms to help achieve this, the state of Queensland maintains an absurd, expensive program of subsidising petrol by about eight cents a litre.
Of course it is politically very difficult for any government to abolish, because [...]
December 15, 2008 – 1:30 pm
There is no other single issue affecting the future of each one us as much as the risk of climate change. The federal government’s newly released carbon trading White Paper is about the only story today that really matters long-term. The emissions reduction target of just 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020 is [...]
December 6, 2008 – 5:50 pm
Not too long ago, it would have been common to see alarm from environmentalists about of the destruction of forests to create farming land. But this week, the Senate saw the Greens vote with the Nationals because of a measure which is causing “alarm over the destruction of farming land to create forests”.
November 18, 2008 – 12:03 am
Melbourne based blogger Andrew Norton was the first person I saw use the term ‘the real greenhouse denialists’ to describe people who accept the scientific arguments about climate change, but still aren’t prepared to try to make the major changes to their own lifestyles that would be necessary to meet the required emission levels.
I think this [...]
November 3, 2008 – 10:22 am
The Australia Institute has released a timely report (pdf) on the possibilities for including agriculture in an emissions trading scheme as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions. As the debate continues over the Treasury modelling of the costs of an ETS, we need to make sure we don’t lose sight of the where agriculture [...]
October 28, 2008 – 7:29 pm
I’ve tried not to get caught up in taking shots at the way The Australian newspaper interprets Newspoll findings. There are enough other people willing to make comment any time they believe there are flaws or distortions, and there are plenty of other issues for me to focus on.
But today’s effort was just too awful [...]
October 2, 2008 – 12:10 am
In May 2007, Steve Posselt engaged in a marathon kayak trip to help draw attention to the plight of the Murray-Darling basin, travelling over 3000 kilometres from Brisbane along the length of the Darling River and then to the mouth of the Murray. It took him four months and I have little doubt he would be [...]
