Category: Climate

In her ‘gotcha’ style of questioning Leigh Sales on ABC challenged Bill Shorten about the cost of his climate change policies. People with any real knowledge of the subject know there is no simple answer. What is clear is that we face an existential threat to our planet.David Pope in the Canberra Times pointed to the nonsense of  questioning by Leigh Sales and the Murdoch media on irrelevant detail – all in the name of so called ‘balance’.The main steam media is failing us dismally on climate change.(John Menadue) (more…)

No one is coming to save us. Mass civil disobedience is essential to force a political response. (more…)

This article is part of a series examining the Coalition government’s record on key issues while in power and what Labor is promising if it wins the 2019 federal election.

It might feel like the past decade of climate policy wars has led us into uncharted political waters. But the truth is, we’ve been sailing around in circles for much longer than that. (more…)

This week, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who must surely go down in history as one of the great champions for global health, addressed the British Parliament. (more…)

Humanity survived the cold war because no one pushed the button. On climate change, the button has been pushed again and again. (more…)

Labor’s attempt to find the middle ground in its climate policy pays lip service to the warnings that credible scientists are making on the need for drastic cuts to fossil fuel emissions by 2030. The party’s position, outlined by the federal member for Isaacs, Mark Dreyfus, in a letter to his constituents , misses the opportunity to make a case for a 1.5 degree target as a reasonable and urgent policy goal. (more…)

The first duty of a government is to “protect the people”, their safety and well-being. Nowhere is this duty more important than in addressing climate change, which now constitutes a near-term existential threat to human civilisation. It is an open, and pressing, question whether the Australian Public Service (APS), and particularly the intelligence services, currently have the capacity to properly consider and assess the climate threat to the people of Australia, and to offer sound advice on action to minimise that threat. (more…)

The 75^th anniversary of the establishment of Kosciuszko State Park falls on Good Friday,  19 April 2019. The Park was famously established by Premier William McKell to protect the nationally important mountain water catchments, to restore soil erosion caused by burning off and over-grazing by stock and to provide opportunities for visitor use and enjoyment. Kosciuszko is one of the Australia’s greatest national parks; it is a National Heritage Property protecting priceless Australian heritage and receives more than 1 million visits a year. The Park enjoyed 74 years of bipartisan support for conservation until regressive 2018 legislation was passed to retain thousands of feral horses within the Park.  (more…)

The Morrison Government has for months argued Australia is on track to meet its international greenhouse gas emissions abatement targets “in a canter”. (more…)

Concerned former fire and emergency chiefs have warned of increasingly catastrophic extreme weather events and demanded action on climate change.

The group of 23 ex-top brass fired a salvo against Prime Minister Scott Morrison as well as state and territory governments in a signed joint letter issued in Melbourne on Wednesday. (more…)

Environmental news is rarely good. But even by those low standards, 2018 was especially bad. That is the main conclusion from Australia’s Environment in 2018, the latest in an annual series of environmental condition reports, released today.

Every year, we analyse vast amounts of measurements from satellites and on-ground stations using algorithms and prediction models on a supercomputer. These volumes of data are turned into regional summary accounts that can be explored on our Australian Environment Explorer website. We interpret these data, along with other information from national and international reports, to assess how our environment is tracking. (more…)

According to the UNHCR, since 2008 an estimated 22.5 million people have been displaced by climate or weather-related events. According to researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the University of Wisconsin global warming is already responsible for some 150,000 deaths each year around the world. In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that climate change would lead to about 250,000 additional deaths each year between 2030 and 2050, from factors such as malnutrition, heat stress and malaria.

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In the lead-up to the federal election, the ALP has made climate change a focus of its campaign and has provided significant opportunities to strengthen climate action in Australia. However, if elected, the ALP would need to rapidly ratchet up these policies to ensure the scale and speed of transition that is required. (more…)

The federal Coalition government has delivered its last budget before the May poll, and pretty much finished the way it started in government nearly six years ago: Long term climate and clean energy policies and technologies are ignored, and the focus is on trinkets and handouts. (more…)

A bad model with transparent assumptions is better than arbitrary analysis based on wishful thinking, writes Warwick McKibbin.Published in AFR on 26 March 2019 (more…)

Australia can learn lessons from other countries who take very seriously the importance of addressing now the various complex challenges of climate change impacts on environmental assets and the lifestyles and livelihoods of citizens. We have no national plan to mitigate the threats and impacts of natural disasters and extreme weather events under emerging conditions of the new climate era. Two recent initiatives from the UK and Canada provide directions a future federal government could follow building on current work especially by some state governments. (more…)

As the debacle of Australian climate and energy policy unfolded over the last three decades, the continuing bleat from peak industry bodies, such as the BCA, MCA and APPEA, has been the need for policy certainty and consistency. Notwithstanding the fact that those same organisations too often have wilfully undermined achievement of those objectives. (more…)

Australia can learn lessons from other countries who take very seriously the importance of addressing now the various complex challenges of climate change impacts on environmental assets and the lifestyles and livelihoods of citizens. We have no national plan to mitigate the threats and impacts of natural disasters and extreme weather events under emerging conditions of the new climate era. Two recent initiatives from the UK and Canada provide directions a future federal government could follow building on current work especially by some state governments. (more…)