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| Australians are among the biggest greenhouse polluters
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|---|
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Graphic credit Shrink That Footprint; the full size image can be seen on that page.
| |
Another page on this site deals with the
Liberal Party and their war against climate
change action previous to the election of the Abbott Government.
The graphic on the right shows that Australians, per capita, produce more
greenhouse emissions from their electricity consumption than any other
nationals other than the Saudis and the people of the USA.
The picture for overall emissions, from all sources, is very similar.
Plainly Australia and Australians have an
ethical responsibility to lift their game.
We cannot say that we should wait until there is a global consensus for
action, we should be doing our best to clean up our filthy nest before
expecting others to reduce their emissions.
| |
|
This section written 2015/01/06
|
|
The carbon tax worked
|
|
| | From DoE Quarterly Update
| |
With his approval rate around 30% PM Abbott didn't need more news showing
that he is on entirely the wrong track, but in early 2015 it was comming in
thick and fast.
The Department of the Environment released its
Quarterly Update of Australia's National
Greenhouse Gas Inventory: June 2014.
It included the graph on the right which shows clearly that the carbon tax
that the PM removed was working to lower emissions.
The Earth is continuing to get hotter
| |
| | From BoM annual climate statement 2014
| |
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology
reported
that 2014 was the third hottest
on record for Australia (following 2013 which was the hottest ever).
Note that the map shows that in a substantial part of Australia 2014 was the
hottest year on record.
2014 was, globally, the hottest year ever.
This was reported in January 2015 by the
Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA),
NASA and NOAA.
NASA and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) are both
USA based.
JMA, NASA and NOAA are three of the world's four main agencies that report
on global weather, the forth is the Hadley Centre (UK).
It is expected that the Hadley Centre will release a similar finding
within the next few weeks (written 2015/01/17).
Nine of the ten hottest years have occurred since 2000, the remaining one
was 1998.
Pope Francis calls for climate change action
Meanwhile,
Pope Francis called for serious action on
climate change.
So there is more urgency than ever before, and more calls to reduce emissions.
Will PM Abbott do the right thing?
It seems unlikely.
| |
This section added
2021/10/15
|
|
The Abbott Government tried to not miss any chance to throw mud at the renewable energy industry. It provided five million dollars of taxpayers' money to fund a Flinders University
study looking into whether wind farm noise might impact the sleep of people who live nearby.
After five years a report was released. In an article posted on the Flinders University Web site by 'newsdesk' the below was written:
“Of all residents living within 10km of a wind farm who responded to the survey, only 0.3 percent attributed sleep disturbance to wind farm noise, which was no higher than the rate of sleep disturbance attributed to road traffic or other noise sources (2.2%) and less than sleep disturbance attributed to any other cause (16.1%), such as insomnia.”
This was perhaps a curious choice of words by Ms Rawson, 0.3% (3 per thousand) is actually about 1/7 of 2.2%.
Anyway, it would seem that there are very, very few people who believe that they are disturbed by wind turbine noise.
I wonder, did PM Abbott hope that the study would find damning evidence against wind turbines or was he just 'throwing mud in the hope that some would stick'?
Was he honestly expecting to find evidence against wind power or was it just an attempt to smear wind power?
| |
| | Appreciation Franciscus Antheunis
|
|
The Abbott government keeps on telling the Australian people and the world
that it is pro-renewables and is trying to reduce Australia's (shamefully
high) greenhouse gas production rates.
At the same time it has caused investment in large-scale renewables in
Australia to fall by 88% from the levels during the Rudd-Gillard governments.
Giles Parkinson
listed ten of the Abbott government's
biggest lies about renewable energy in March 2015.
April 2015; Bloomberg New Energy Finance published a graph showing that
in the year to the end of March investment in large-scale renewables in
Australia had been $192m.
It the previous twelve months it had been $1 887m.
This is a drop of 90%.
In a
survey conducted by the Australia Institute for Solar Citizens it was
found that "64% of self-identified Liberal voters support an increased
renewable energy target, while 43% of Liberal voters would support an
ambitious target of 50% or more renewables by 2030."
Plainly, the Abbott Government is quite out of step with what even Liberal
voters want.
The Abbott Government is working for the coal industry and big business, not
for the Australian people nor even for their voters.
In the Australian community generally, the survey found that 83% want more
"solar energy plants", 74% wand more wind turbines and 85% want more
rooftop solar.
| |
| | The sad part is that to the Abbott Government this is
simply a fact of life.
|
|
|
|
|
|
The ABC has
reported
that Christopher Pyne, Education Minister, sees the Australian National
University's decision to divest of unethical investmens as bizarre.
A spokesman for the university said the decision was based on environmental
impact, social issues and governance.
We should not be surprised that My Pyne was unable to understand a decision
based on ethical principles.
|
|
There can be no doubt that
climate change and
ocean acidification are two of the greatest threats now facing our planet.
Given the Liberal's
record to the present it seems that the Abbott
Government will be doing very little to reduce Australia's greenhouse
gas production; which, per capita, is among the highest in the world.
It is interesting, and must say something about the relationship between
religion and morality, that
Tony Abbott is probably
the most conspicuously religious Australian Prime Minister in living memory
and at the same time the most unethical.
The previous Australian Labor governments did much too little about reducing
Australia's climate impact.
If the Abbott Government does even less they will be committing one of the
greatest crimes against the planet that any nation has ever been guilty of.
Australia alone?
Politicians of both major Australian parties have said that there is little
point in Australia acting alone in reducing its greenhouse emissions.
If
Australia was to take significant action it would not be alone,
it would perhaps be catching up.
Many European nations are well ahead of us.
At the end of 2012 China had 75GW of wind power installed compared to
Australia's 2.6GW.
On 2013/10/25 Grenatec reported that China has plans to built up to 20
high-capacity, high-voltage power lines across its territory in order to
connect its western sun, wind and hydro energy sources with its eastern
and southern energy-hungry coastal cities.
No medium of long-distance power transmission line has ever been built in
Australia to connect a region rich in renewable power with the electricity
grid.
First, the science:
- About 99% of
papers published in peer-reviewed
climate journals accept the fact of ACC;
- The vast majority of
climate scientists accept the reality
of ACC;
- So far as I know, every scientific organisation that has any interest in
climate, anywhere in the world, accepts the reality of ACC.
In addition:
A more complete and up-to-date version of this argument is
elsewhere on this site.
Direct Action?
| |
| Sydney Morning Herald poll result
|
|---|
| |
Very few people believe that PM Abbott's 'Direct Action' plan will
achieve anything other than wasting a lot of taxpayer's money.
|
|
PM Abbott surrounding himself with climate science deniers
Maurice Newman, head of the PM's
Business Advisory Council,
Dick Warburton head of the PM's RET review
group and
David Murray, head of the PM's financial system inquiry, are all
climate science deniers.
Is this a coincidence, or does he go out of his way to pick climate science
deniers?
2013: A year that PM Abbott would like to ignore
The Conversation reported some points
made in the World Meteorological Organization's statement on the 'status of
the global climate of 2013'.
- Globally, 2013 was the sixth-hottest year since records began in 1850;
- The top 15 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998.
- Australia had its hottest year since records began;
- Persistent heat characterised the year, with long periods of above
average temperatures and a lack of cold weather.
In this one year, Australia also experienced its hottest day, week, month
and season on record.
|
|
The Abbott Government has consistently downplayed the importance of climate
change and dishonestly criticised the
carbon tax and blamed it for all sorts of financial
costs.
They have also consistently pushed their
"
Direct Action Plan", which no
independent economist is willing to support as a practical or economically
effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Bernard William "Bernie" Fraser is a prominent Australian economist and was
Governor of the Reserve Bank from September 1989 to September 1996
(Wikipedia).
On 2014/03/13, Mr Fraser, in his current position as chair of the Climate
Change Authority, gave a scathing speech to the National Press Club.
Lisa Cox wrote about the
speech in the Sydney Morning Herald
(SMH).
Mr Fraser said that "the Abbott government is working in the short term
interests of business and not the long term interests of the community in
its policies on climate change."
In the same SMH article, Ms Cox reported that
"On Wednesday, former treasury secretary Ken Henry backed comments by
economist Ross Garnaut that the Abbott government's direct action policy
would cost closer to $4 or $5 billion, rather than the $1.5 billion the
government has predicted."
I believe that the Government has promised to limit its spending on
climate change action to $1.5b,
so it seems very likely that little will be achieved by the Direct Action
Policy, but perhaps that is the aim?
| |
| Why Abbott's Liberals support coal
|
|---|
| | Image credit Dr Mike Kelly
| |
In an
article
in The Age, 2014/11/20, written by Paolo Totaro, PM Abbott's stance on
climate change was severely criticised:
The attitude of Prime Minister Tony Abbott to the global challenges of
climate change is "eccentric", "baffling" and "flat earther", according to a
group of senior British Conservatives.
The group, including Prime Minister David Cameron's Minister for Energy and
a former Thatcher Minister and chairman of the Conservative Party, says Mr
Abbot's position on climate change represents a betrayal of the fundamental
ideals of Conservatism and those of his political heroine, Margaret Thatcher.
In a series of wide-ranging, separate interviews on UK climate change policy
with The Age, they warn that Australia is taking enormous risks investing in
coal and will come under increasing market and political pressure to play
its part in the global battle against climate change.
Elsewhere on this site I've listed many
reasons to believe that the coal industry is in serious and probably
terminal decline.
letter published in the prestigious journal Nature 2015/01/07 stated that
a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and 80% of coal reserves must
remain in the ground if we are to have a reasonable chance of keeping
global warming to no more than 2°C.
Graham Readfearn
reported
in The Guardian, 2014/12/09, that:
Australia has been named the worst-performing industrial country in the world
on climate change in a report released at international negotiations in Peru.
The climate change performance index ranked Denmark as the best-performing
country in the world, followed by Sweden and Britain.
Among the world's top 10 emitters, Germany was ranked the highest at 22.
Australia was second bottom overall, above Saudi Arabia – which was
not classified as industrial.
The report states: "The new conservative Australian government has
apparently made good on last year's announcement and reversed the climate
policies previously in effect.
As a result, the country lost a further 21 positions in the policy evaluation
compared to last year, thus replacing Canada as the worst-performing
industrial country."
The article went on:
Jan Burck, report author at Germanwatch, told the Guardian: "It is
interesting that the bottom six countries in the ranking – Russia,
Iran, Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia and Saudi Arabia – all have a lot
of fossil fuel resources. It is a curse.
|
|
| Big jump in emissions when carbon tax abolished
|
|---|
| | Annual changes in NEM emissions based on AEMO's Carbon
Dioxide Equivalent Intensity Index data.
For FY2014-15 data are projected using the changes recorded in the first
100 days since the repeal of the carbon tax, compared to equivalent periods
in the previous years.
Data from AEMO, Image by Mike Sandiford.
| |
PM Tony Abbott abolished the previous government's carbon tax.
What was the result?
On 2014/11/04 Professor Mike Sandiford, Director of the Melbourne Energy
Institute, had an
article published in The Conversation.
The article included the graph on the right.
Professor Sandiford wrote:
"Across the National Electricity Market (NEM) we are tracking towards an
extra 14 million tonnes CO2 for FY2014-15 compared to FY2013-14.
If we get lower than average rain, electricity sector emissions might grow
by a few more million tonnes and exceed 10% over the year."
This shows that, despite the Abbott government's claims that the carbon tax
was not working, it was in fact working very well, and with the abolition of
the carbon tax emissions have shot up.
The bottom line: If you want your kids and grandkids to inherit a world
greatly damaged by climate change, vote Liberal.
Following the mid November release of the agreement between China and USA on
carbon emissions PM Abbott was quoted in The Australian as saying:
"We'll cut emissions now, not years in the future".
Anyone looking at Professor Sandiford's graph (above) can see that he will
have to
very quickly reverse his approach if he is going to keep that promise.
By far the most polluting power stations in Australia are those that burn
brown coal.
With the combination of decreasing electricity consumption and a carbon tax
it would have been the brown coal power stations that would have shut down.
Without the carbon tax at least one less polluting black coal power station
in NSW has closed down instead.
In January 2014 Energy Australia removed one half of the Wallerawang Power
Station from service and in March it placed the other half on 'three month
recall'; that is, it was not used but could be brought back into service at
three month's notice.
See Energy Australia's
Net site for more information.
This is again showing that PM Abbott's promise of "cutting emissions now,
not years in the future" is
empty.
The Abbott Government's Direct Action Plan involves taxing the general
population to raise money to then pay to the polluters to encourage them
to pollute less – the idea that Wilcox illustrates so well in his
cartoon on the right.
That this can be better and more effective than simply
taxing the polluters I find frankly ridiculous.
Bernard William "Bernie" Fraser is a prominent Australian economist and was
Governor of the Reserve Bank from September 1989 to September 1996
(Wikipedia).
On 2014/03/13, Mr Fraser, in his current position as chair of the Climate
Change Authority, gave a scathing speech to the National Press Club.
Lisa Cox wrote about the
speech in the Sydney Morning Herald
(SMH).
Mr Fraser said that "the Abbott government is working in the short term
interests of business and not the long term interests of the community in
its policies on climate change."
In the same SMH article, Ms Cox reported that
"On Wednesday, former treasury secretary Ken Henry backed comments by
economist Ross Garnaut that the Abbott government's direct action policy
would cost closer to $4 or $5 billion, rather than the $1.5 billion the
government has predicted."
I believe that the Government has promised to limit its spending on
climate change action to $1.5b,
so it seems very likely that little will be achieved by the Direct Action
Policy, but perhaps that is the aim?
After removing the
carbon tax (decreasing government income) and
bringing in the
direct action plan (increasing government expenditure) we
find that in November 2014 the Abbott Government had to decrease salaries in
the Australian Defense Forces because there isn't enough money in the
budget.
Should we be surprised?
|
|
|
A WWF survey
found that 89% of Australians want the RET to be increased or stay the same.
The same survey, conducted 2014/11/26 and involving 5,036 voters, found that
84% of people want the Federal Government to invest more in renewables.
(Download the pdf file of the survey results.)
|
|
In late October 2014 the Abbott government continued with its campaign to
support the declining coal industry and minimise development of renewables.
They proposed reducing the Renewable Energy Target from 41 TWh per year
down to 26; according to Lane Crocket, CEO of Pacific Hydro, this would
reduce the amount of new renewables to be built between 2014 and 2020 by
70%.
For more see a Sydney Morning Herald
article by Peter Hannam.
Earlier in the same week PM Abbott had notoriously said "Coal is good for
humanity".
By backing the coal industry, which is plainly in a state of serious and
continuious
decline,
Mr Abbott is not only betraying future generations,
but he is damaging Australia's economic future.
The man is completely out of touch with reality.
It apears likely that, whatever the government does, coal will continue
to decline and renewables continue to thrive.
While PM Abbott is in charge Australia will foolishly
stick loyally to the centuries old fossil fuel industry and neglect the
exponentially growing renewables sector.
| |
Update: UniWA baulks, but Pyne determined to 'educate' Australians
The Guardian
published a piece on 2015/05/08 discussing UniWA's decision to regect
Lomborg's 'Consensus centre'.
Staff, students and the general public had reacted strongly against the
proposal.
Education Minister Christopher Pyne is determined to set Lomborg up somewhere
else.
Lomborg's is the type of thinking that the Abbott Government believes
Australia needs more of.
It seems that UWA have used Lomborg's book 'The Skeptical Environmentalist'
as an example of bad science.
|
|
April 2015; In a cash-strapped economy PM Abbott has managed to find
$4m funding for Bjørn Lomborg
to set up a 'consensus centre' at the University of WA.
It seems that Mr Lomborg has been having a hard time getting his message
funded in Europe.
No doubt he has much more in common with the Abbott government than with
more environmentally progressive European governments.
A Facebook friend of mine, Byron Smith, who I have found to be highly
reliable, wrote the following about Bjørn Lomborg:
Lomborg has spent years receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry
(through the usual network of industry front groups) and in 2003 was
formally found to have published a scientifically dishonest book by the
Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (a government body), though he
himself was acquitted of intentional or gross negligence due to lack of
relevant scientific expertise.
The book in question ("The Skeptical Environmentalist") is riddled with
shoddy work, dodgy footnotes and misleading or outright false claims.
The title is based on a claim by Lomborg to have previously been a member of
Greenpeace.
Greenpeace say they have no record of his ever being involved.
Lomborg has published a single peer-reviewed paper in an unrelated field
(almost twenty years ago).
Since then, Lomborg has built a name for himself as a "lukewarmist", who
claims to accept the basics of climate science, but insists that the harms
will be minimal and are best tackled through economic growth and research
and development.
His work has been heavily criticised by a wide variety of relevant
scientific and economic experts.
The Abbott Government abolished the Climate Commission in 2013 on the basis
that their $1.5 million annual operating costs were too expensive.
The people of the Climate Commission relaunched as the Climate Council after
thousands of Australians chipped in to the nation's biggest crowd-funding
campaign.
Quoting from Tim Flannery of the Climate Commission:
It seems extraordinary that the Climate Commission, which was composed of
Australia's best climate scientists, economists and energy experts, was
abolished on the basis of a lack of funding and yet here we are three years
later and the money has become available to import a politically-motivated
think tank to work in the same space.
This
poll, published in late August 2014, shows that the Abbott Government,
hell bent on supporting the
declining coal industry and cutting back on
renewables, is totally out of touch with what the Australian people want.
|
The poll:
What do you think of Australia's current investment in renewable energy?
| Enough | 10%
| | Not enough | 87%
| | About right | 2%
| | Don't know | 1%
| | Total votes | 3,639
|
|---|
Should the federal Government subsidise the use of renewable energy?
| Yes | 87%
| | No | 13%
| | Total votes | 3,524
|
|---|
Do you approve of the extraction of coal seam gas via hydraulic fracturing
(fracking)?
| Yes | 13%
| | No | 87%
| | Total votes | 3,374
|
|---|
Would you be willing to pay more for your energy if you knew it was from a
renewable source?
| No | 17%
| | A little more | 57%
| | A lot more | 26%
| | Total votes | 3,397
|
|---|
What plans do you have for using renewable energy in the future?
| Use more | 85%
| | Use less | 7%
| | No change | 9%
| | Total votes | 3,264
|
|---|
Do you think the government should consider paying coal fired power stations
to shut down?
| Yes | 66%
| | No | 34%
| | Total votes | 3,250
|
|---|
Which power sources do you think will grow the most over the next few years?
| Solar | 69%
| | Wind | 14%
| | Hydropower | 1%
| | Ocean power | 3%
| | Biodiesel | 1%
| | Geothermal | 3%
| | Ethanol | 1%
| | Nuclear | 8%
| | Total votes | 3,059
|
|---|
Do you think Australia should adopt nuclear power as an alternative to
fossil fuels?
| Yes | 22%
| | No | 78%
| | Total votes | 2,953
|
|---|
What do you think is the Australian power industry's most important
challenge in the next decade?
| Extract more fossil fuels | 4%
| | Find sustainable options | 29%
| | Improve renewable storage | 38%
| | Manage rising price costs | 7%
| | Ensure cheaper renewables | 22%
| | Total votes | 2,885
|
|---|
At home, do you use renewable energy as part of your supply?
| No | 26%
| | Yes, a little | 32%
| | Yes, a lot | 36%
| | Don't know | 5%
| | Total votes | 2,837
|
|---|
|
| |
| PMs Abbott and Harper: brothers in the tar pits of history
|
|---|
| PM Abbott finds a friend
(PM Abbott called Canada Canadia; I don't think PM Harper really called
Australia Austria.)
Image credit: David Pope and Canberra Times
| |
In June 2014 Tony Abbott visited like minded PM Stephen Harper in Canada.
The Abbott Government in Australia and the Harper Government in Canada are
among the very few in the world that hold short-term profits for their
supporters to be more important than the future of the planetary environment.
PM Abbott has proposed an 'alliance of like-minded nations' in an effort to
keep the obscenely profitable fossil fuel industry alive and to slow the
accelerating rise in clean renewable energy such as wind and solar.
In Australia much of the financial support for Abbott's Liberal
Party comes from the coal industry while in Canada PM Harper's support comes
from the highly polluting tar-sands and oil-shale mining businesses.
Both Abbott and Harper are strongly opposed to taking serious action on
climate change because they see it as not good for the quest for ever more
short-term profits.
| |
| PM Abbott doesn't understand science
|
|---|
| Mr Abbott really should have a science minister, he needs
someone to explain science to him.
Infographic from
Where Is My
Ostrich
| |
PM Abbott continues to deny that climate change is a major factor in
the changing weather and increasing fire danger in Australia.
From news.com.au,
"Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change, said the NSW bushfires were proof that the world "is
already paying the price of carbon", and also criticised the government's
direct action policy."
PM Abbott said that she was "talking through her hat"!
He might as well have repeated his infamous statement, "Climate change
is crap".
Mr Abbott is known for his Christian beliefs.
I would remind him of Matthew 7:5:
"You hypocrite!
Remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to
remove the speck from your brother's eye."
I don't believe that this man can be as stupid as he pretends to be, but
still, it is a huge embarrassment to have a man seeming to be this stupid
as Prime Minister of Australia.
| |
| Damage from Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines
|
|---|
| | PM Abbott would rather sell more coal than worry about
typhoons
| |
ABC news reported "maximum sustained winds of about 315 kilometres
an hour" in the Philippines (2013/11/09).
There were reports that this may be the biggest and most powerful
huricane/typhoon on record.
How long will it be before Tony Abbott tells us that it has absolutely
nothing to do with climate change?
The Philippines delegate to the United Nations Climate Summit seems to see
a connection (as would any honest and well informed person).
Philippine Climate Change Commissioner and lead climate negotiator Naderev
"Yeb" Sano delivered some potent remarks during the opening session of
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, saying:
"With an apparent cruel twist of fate, my country is being tested by this
hellstorm called Super Typhoon Haiyan".
"It was so strong that if there was a Category 6, it would have fallen
squarely in that box ...
To anyone outside who continues to deny the reality
that is climate change, I dare them, I dare them to get off their ivory
towers and away from the comfort of their armchairs.
I dare them to go to the islands of the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Indian
ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions
of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods,
to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling sea ice caps,
to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Nile where
lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that
confronts similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannahs of Africa where
climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and
water become scarce."
The above was extracted from an article in RenewEconomy.
From the Sydney Morning Herald, 2013/11/13:
"[Judge Finnane] is on the island with Sydney judge John O'Meally, who
served on the bench for 27 years.
The two met the island's President, Anote Tong.
Judge Finnane said: "If [Mr Abbott] came here and saw the things over here
that I have seen, I think he would have a different view.
If he looked at them and didn't walk around with shut eyes he would see
there is something very significant happening here.
"When you talk to people like President Tong and all his advisers you
realise that they have very strong views and they base their views on the
science of it.
And they are affected, they definitely are affected, in a way that makes it
an urgent matter and that something must be done."
Judge Finnane said the Prime Minister's plan to abolish the Climate Change
Authority and the axing of CSIRO jobs came as no surprise because he had
said it was part of his policy.
"I think it is taking a position without any regard to the evidence, which
I think is very sad, and in time he may come to regret that," he said.
After announcing his cabinet, PM Abbott was asked about the absence of a
science portfolio: "Ah, um...science? As in CSIRO? That's part of industry".
This must have been insulting to all the scientists in the country.
(News, December 2014: PM Abbott adds Science to Industry Minister Macfarlane's
Industry portfolio title. Lip-service to reduce the criticism?)
If there is no Science Minister, does Mr Abbott think that he can more
easily ignore climate science?
Maurice Newman has been employed as Chair
of PM Tony Abbott's Business Advisory Council.
He is already on record as stating
nine fallacies on wind power in one
sentence, recently he was quoted as saying:
"The CSIRO, for example, has 27 scientists dedicated to climate change.
It and the weather bureau continue to propagate the myth of anthropological
climate change and are likely to be background critics of the Coalition's
Direct Action policies."
RenewEconomy, 2013/09/17.
The article went on:
"Newman said money spent on pursuing the myths of climate change and global
action was wasted"
This strongly suggests that he does not believe that anthropogenic climate
change is a fact.
Is it likely that Mr Abbott would put Mr Newman in as Chair of his Business
Advisory Council, knowing him to be a climate skeptic, if Mr Abbott himself
takes climate change seriously?
| |
What about a study into coal and health problems?
There is a huge amount of evidence that
coal is killing people yet the Abbott government
keeps on trying to link wind turbines with ill-health.
Why not a study into how many Australians are dying due to air pollution
from the burning of coal?
|
|
A quote from PM Tony Abbott on 2014/05/28:
"It's particularly important that we do not demonise the coal industry and
if there was one fundamental problem, above all else, with the carbon tax
was that it said to our people, it said to the wider world, that a commodity
which in many years is our biggest single export, somehow should be left in
the ground and not sold.
Well really and truly, I can think of few things more damaging to our future."
The
World Health
Organisation (WHO) released a report very recently
indicating
that air pollution kills around seven million people each year.
The pollution from the burning of coal a very large part of that.
It can conservatively be calculated that Australia's
coal exports are
responsible for more than a hundred thousand deaths each year.
Yet Mr Abbott says we should not demonise coal!
There's money in it!
One of PM Abbott's more infamous statements has been
"Coal is good for humanity".
| |
February 2014 – NHMRC release new study
The National Health and Medical Research Council released a new
draft report in February
2014 stating that "There is no reliable or consistent evidence that wind
farms directly cause adverse health effects in humans."
The NHRMC released another
report in February 2015
with the same conclusion.
|
|
In a piece published in
RenewEconomy
2014/01/13, Simon Chapman wrote:
"On January 10 Prime Minister Tony Abbott signaled that it might be timely
for the National Health and Medical Research Council to review the evidence
on wind farms and health saying 'it is some years since the NHMRC last
looked at this issue: why not do it again?'
He appears to be poorly informed.
The NHMRC reviewed the evidence in 2010, and has been re-reviewing it again
since 2012, with the release of a public discussion document imminent."
This shows that, in his rush to oppose anything renewable, PM Abbott is
willing to spend tax-payer's money on more investigation of a point that
has been settled for years.
There is no sound evidence at all that
wind turbines cause illness and much evidence
that
they save lives by displacing coal-fired
power.
There have been at least
20 reviews of the research literature that
have concluded that there is no reason to believe that wind turbines have
any adverse health impacts.
On the other hand
coal's health impacts are well known, but
while
studies of the impact of
coal on people's health in places like the Hunter Valley are desperately
needed, there is no indication that the Abbott Government will fund any.
The Abbott Government placed a food health rating system on a Net site and
then removed it a day later.
(See the story in detail on the
ABC Net site.)
It seems that the government were more interested in looking after the
interests of the big companies that are selling Australians unhealthy food
than in informing us about how unhealthy those foods are.
At the end of April 2014 the Abbott Government is talking about having an
unacceptable budget deficit.
In order to reduce the deficit the PM is considering
bringing in a new tax (thus breaking a promise to not do so).
So far it at least makes sense, but then comes the stupid part.
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| Sydney Morning Herald poll result
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- At the same time he is still determined (or so he says) to abolish the
carbon tax (increasing the deficit);
- And he wants to bring in his Direct Action Plan, which no one believes
will work and will cost $1.55b or more (increasing the deficit);
- And he has announced that he will buy 58 more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters,
that we don't need, there being no apparent threat to Australia, at a cost
of $12 billion (increasing the deficit).
Where is the logic in all this?
Especially when independent authorities tell us that the carbon tax is
serving its purpose and reducing emissions, while only marginally increasing
energy prices; and no economist will support Direct Action?
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Other environmental cuts
The Abbott Government also cut funding for the Environmental Defenders
Office's in the states.
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Most of the list below was extracted from an article written by Luke
Menzies and published on
The Conversation 'the first 90 days':
- Abolition of the Climate Commission;
- Stripping back the previous Department of Climate Change;
- Cut the budget of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency;
- Started proceeding to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation;
- Announced a review of the Renewable Energy Target;
- Stripped $349m from the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagship program;
- Stripped $42m from the National Low Emissions Coal Initiative;
- Suspended the National CO2 Infrastructure Plan;
- Announced intention of abolishing the Climate Change Authority;
- Downgraded representation at the annual UN climate change talks in
Warsaw.
Very quickly once in power PM Abbott abolished the Climate Commission
and has started work on scrapping the Climate Change Authority.
But while he has attempted to shut down the Clean Energy Finance Corporation
it turns out that this cannot be done without an act of Parliament.
In mid December 2014 PM Abbott was dishonestly blaming renewables for the
high price of electricity.
This is nothing new for the
Liberals.
Immediately before the Abbott government was elected Tony Abbott promised
that he would not reduce the funding of the ABC.
In November 2014, about a year after the election, the Abbott Government
substantially cut the ABC's budget.
Following this, Abbott's Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, said that
planned cuts to programming by the ABC were some sort of ABC plot and not
the fault of the government.
Liberals call on Orwell for help
2014/11/21; In a remarkable piece of Orwellian double-think Finance Minister
Mathias Corman claimed that the $254 million to be taken from the ABC's
budget over the next five years was not a budget cut but rather an efficiency
dividend!
This being so, PM Abbott had not really broken his promise at all.
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull also got himself in a twist while
trying vainly to support his boss.
He argued that Abbott had promised not to cut the ABC budget in one interview
the night before the
election but he, Turnbull, and Joe Hockey had a number of times made clear
the broadcasters couldn't be exempt from general budgetary cuts.
So, again, according to the Orwellian logic of Mr Turnbull, we are not
really to believe that this was a broken promise.
Mr Turnbull went on:
"I've defended the Prime Minister on this today...
I think you've got to take his comments, which – look, I mean, what he
said, he said, and, you know, it's there, it's on the record.
But you've got to take that in the context.
And I can only assume that what Mr Abbott was referring to or was thinking
about, anyway, was the proposition that there would be cuts in – with
the intent of reducing ABC services and we've ruled that out."
(Thanks to Michelle Grattan and The Conversation.)
It must be very difficult for Mr Turnbull to try to justify PM Abbott's
support for the coal industry and refusal to take climate change seriously.
Turnbull himself, when leading the Liberals, wanted to take climate change
action.
It seems that everyone in the federal parliamentary Liberal Party has to
ignore his ethical principles for the sake of loyalty to the Party.
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| A small part of the Tomlin's hydro scheme
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| | Photo credit ABC Landline
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Run-of-the-river hydro systems are about as environmentally friendly as
any hydro-power scheme can be.
They usually involve only a very small weir where the water is taken from
a stream, a pipeline and a power station at a lower level on the same stream.
The water is taken from the stream, generates power, and goes back into
the same stream.
Nigel Tomlin his and son, Josh, who are farmers in southern Tasmania, are
working on a visionary
2 GWh/year hydro scheme.
They have already built a
100 MWh/year run-of-the-river hydro
scheme on the Jones River near Ellendale, they know what they are doing.
Like so many Australian farmers, they have found that they have to work
outside their farm to get a viable living.
Nigel supplemented the farm's income by working 25 years in the hydro-electric
industry.
They are now about 30 months into the bigger scheme, which is
on the Humboldt River near the small town of Maydena, 60km WNW of Hobart, on
the Gordon River road.
Josh tells me that they expect to have it completed by June – in time
to take full advantage of the winter's run-off to generate clean-green power.
Josh says that it will generate power about eleven months of each year and
will be on full power about six months.
The scheme will maintain an environmental flow all the time and there will be
periodic shut-downs "during high flow events to ensure flooding influences on
habitat are maintained".
The Labor Federal Government gave a $700 000 clean energy grant for
the Tomlin's project.
The Abbott
Liberal government has cut
the clean energy grant scheme, so there probably will not be any more schemes
like the Humboldt River one while the present government is in power.
Unfortunately the wholesale price of electricity has fallen from around
$60/MWh to closer to $40 during the planning and construction period and the
price of the Large Scale Renewable Energy
Certificates that the scheme will generate is also low.
The Tomlins mortgaged their farm to build the project.
When completed the electricity generated by the Tomlin's hydro scheme could
displace an equal amount of power currently generated by coal in Victoria
and save up to two thousand tonnes of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from
going into the atmosphere each year.
Our government should be giving all the support possible to such innovative
schemes.
The ABC's
Landline produced a story on the Tomlin's
visionary project.
Also see RiverPower, Josh
Tomlin's Net site.
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This section added 2013/09/24
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One of the earliest acts of the Abbott Government was to decide to reduce
the amount of information being given to Australians about refugee boat
arrivals (apparently because they don't want Australians to know about how
many boats are arriving after they promised to 'stop the boats').
In response, some of the people of Christmas Island, where most refugee
boats go, said that they would take it upon themselves to announce boat
arrivals.
As mentioned above, the Abbott Government abolished the Climate Commission
(apparently because they didn't want Australians to know the facts about
climate change).
On 2013/09/23 it was announced that an independent non-profit organisation
would take over the work of the Climate Commission and be named the
Climate Council.
The members of the old Climate Commission will volunteer their time while
the Climate Council gets up and running.
These are promising developments.
PM Abbott is trying to hide the truth from Australians and Australian
citizens are volunteering to keep the information flowing.
The Abbott Government is making Australia an international object of disgust
with its support of fossil fuels at the cost of climate change.
Climate Progress
reported on 2013/11/21 that Shell Oil "includes a high price for carbon
dioxide when evaluating new projects.
The $40 a metric ton price that Shell uses would &8211; if widely adopted
– reshape domestic and international energy consumption and
investment trends."
So while the Abbott Government is doing its best to ignore climate change and
protect the polluting fossil fuel industries Shell Oil has recognised the
need to reduce carbon emissions.
From Shell:
"Without clear measures to promote investment in more efficient and
low-carbon technologies, [the world] risks setting itself on a course to
potentially catastrophic climate change.
At Shell we advocate publicly and to governments that a strong and stable
price on CO2 emissions will help drive the right investments in low-carbon
technologies.
But we are not waiting for government policy to develop.
We consider the potential cost of a project's CO2 emissions, which we set at
$40 a tonne, in all our major investment decisions."
This means that Shell will, in future, avoid investments in fossil fuels and
move toward environmental sustainability instead; a more forward thinking
stratigy than that of the Abbott Government.
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| Leunig on Abbott's climate change stance
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On 2013/11/08
The Conversation
published the following:
"This week, the Australian Government announced that it would not send a
minister to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
negotiations in Poland for the first time since 1997."
Yet another indication that the Abbott Government is supporting the fossil
fuel industry and ignoring climate change for the sake of quick profits at
the expense of the long-term needs of the planet.
As I write this section, in November 2013, the Abbott Government
is doing its best to dismantle the structures, modest though they were,
that the previous Labor governments put in place to achieve some action
to slow climate change.
I ask the reader to think, when next he or she sees a bird, what choices
does that bird have in whether something is done to slow the climate change
that will severely affect that bird's habitat?
Is it to the bird's advantage that Australia continues making lots of money
by mining and selling coal?
Or would the bird's prospects be more advantaged by Australia reducing its
greenhouse emissions?
And then think that the same question could be asked in relation to all of
the creatures on this planet.
What right do we humans have to damage the habitats of all the animals on
the planet simply for our own short-term advantage?
We can carry that question even further.
Is it really to the advantage of most Australian's that we take no, or very
little, action on climate change, or is it just to the short-term advantage
of a few wealthy people and the politicians who pander to them?
How stupid is this policy?
Indonesia is a nation of islands; according to Wikipedia there are some
18 307 island in the Indonesian archipelago.
In 2012 there were a quarter of a billion people in Indonesia.
With more than 18 000 islands and a quarter of a billion people how
many boats would there be in Indonesia that might be used by desperate
people to get to Australia?
If PM Abbott tried to buy them all the greatest effects he would have would
be to cost the Australian taxpayers a fortune in buying hundreds or
thousands of boats, to produce the problem of disposing of these at
Australia's expense, and
to cause a boom in the boat-building industry in Indonesia.
While PM Abbott is heavily relying on Indonesia's President Yudhoyono's
cooperation in his efforts to stop refugees coming to Australia he has
shown a remarkable degree of ineptitude in his efforts, if indeed he is
making efforts, to keep President Yudhoyono on side.
Then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer,
cheated the
East Timorese out of their fair share of the oil and gas resources of
the Timor Sea back in 2002.
Now it turns out that our government set up spying equipment while
'generously' doing some building work for the new East Timorese Government
a little earlier.
It seems that they then used that equipment to good advantage when the
sharing of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea was being decided.
It also seems that the huge petroleum company Woodside was a major winner
out of the agreement that Australia managed.
Alexander Downer later left politics and got himself a lucrative job as
advisor to Woodside; draw whatever conclusion you like from that.
Most recently, Australia's spy agency ASIO has raided the home of a key
witness about the spying allegations.
The Attorney General under the Abbott Government, George Brandis, said that
this was justified on the "grounds of national security"!
Is he implying that tiny East Timor, one of the poorest countries in the
world, is a security threat to Australia?
Surely this is a case of ASIO being used to undermine East Timor's attempt
to finally get justice over the resources in the Timor Sea.
For more information see
The Guardian.
PM Abbott and the COALition has turned its back on renewables – the
way of the future – and is doing all it can to support the dying
coal industry.
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Tribal Wisdom
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to
generation, says that:
"When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to
dismount."
The Abbott Government has more advanced strategies, such as:
- Buying a stronger whip.
- Changing riders.
- Appointing a committee to study the horse.
- Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead
horses.
- Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
- Reclassifying the dead horse as living impaired.
- Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
- Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead
horse's performance.
- Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the
dead horse's performance.
- Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less
costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially
more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
- Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
And, of course ...
- Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
From The Guardian: The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians
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For the first time ever, in 2011 investment in renewables for power
generation world-wide exceeded that in fossil fuel generation.
The trend continued in 2012 and there is every reason to think that the
relative decline if fossil fuel power generation will be permanent.
The Abbott Government is committing Australia to an attempt to prop up the
failing and polluting technology of the past and actively downgrading
support for the renewables that are the way of the future; while the rest of
the world moves on.
In mid May 2015 the Abbott government announced that it would set up a fund
of
$5b of taxpayer's money to support
unviable coal projects!
Quoting from Lisa Cox writing in the Sydney Morning Herald:
"Coal projects in the Galilee Basin and on the door step of the Great
Barrier Reef could receive government financing under a $5 billion loan
scheme in the federal budget.
But companies would have to demonstrate their projects would not be
commercially viable without government funding to be eligible, the Abbott
government has said."
All Australians should be asking, if these projects are not financially
viable, when we know that they are environmentally disastrous, why is
taxpayer's money being thrown away on them?
Jeremy Grantham – coal a stranded asset
Billionaire Jeremy Grantham wrote a GMO
Quarterly
Letter, February 2014, in which he said:
"... I have felt for some time that new investments today in coal and tar
sands are highly likely to become stranded assets, and everything I have
seen, in the last year particularly, increases my confidence."
He noted that the Chinese had just increased their solar power target for 2015
by 60%.
Yet our Liberal Government is betting God knows how much of Australian
taxpayers' money that coal is still going to be a winner!
The Disaffected Lib
reported on 2014/02/25 that:
"Smog in China has become so severe that it's interfering with photosynthesis.
Chinese scientists report that China's smog-clogged atmosphere has taken on
aspects of 'nuclear winter' and could wreak havoc on the country's already
stressed food supply."
and
"Early this month the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences claimed in a
report that Beijing's pollution made the city almost 'uninhabitable for
human beings'."
Plainly pressure is growing in China to reduce the pollution from burning
coal (and other fossil fuels).
While Australia's Abbott Government is increasing its support for coal in
hopes of exporting more and more, the
rest of the world is seeing that the end of coal burning is inevitable if
we are not to destroy our environment.
China backs renewables
While the Abbott government is backing the nineteenth century fossil fuels
industry China is going flat-out into twenty-first century renewables.
For example, RenewEconomy reported on 2014/02/27 that when you look at
the combined capacity of solar water heating and photovoltaics China has
about 20GW more installed capacity than the rest of the world combined.
This sort of story is becoming more and more common.
Der Spiegel, 2014/02/28, reported that
RWE (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk: rough translation
Rhenish-Westphalian Electricity Plant), which is predominantly involved in
coal and gas and generates 150 million MWh of electricity in Germany alone
each year, made a loss of 2.8 billion euros in 2013.
The loss has been ascribed to oversupply of electricity and competition from
renewables.
Greg Hunt is Environment Minister in the Abbott Government; a bit like being
Minister for Peace in Gengis Khan's government I would think.
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Obvious bias
The RET Review Panel has appointed ACIL Allen as chief advisor and modeller.
Giles Parkinson says that ACIL Allen is "a consultancy seen as close to the
fossil fuel industry, and whose highly contested research formed the basis
of the coal industry's attempts to dismantle the RET in 2012."
See RenewEconomy, 2014/04/24.
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On 2014/01/08 The Guardian printed an article written by Lenore Taylor which
included the following:
"The environment minister, Greg Hunt, has canvassed compromise options with
industry including changing the existing target that 20% of energy come from
renewable sources by 2020, to one requiring 25% from renewable sources by
2025."
No surprise here, I have been suggesting that this would be a likely move
from the Abbott Government for a year or so.
By putting back the date the Government will be able to ensure that there
is as little action on climate change as possible in the current term of
government; they will 'plan' to make most of the action in the last five
years or so of the period.
It seems that Greg Hunt is getting well into the feel of the job; he's
appointed a new adviser, Patrick Gibbons.
Gibbons has a long history with efforts to discourage and dismantle policies
supportive of renewable energy, energy-efficiency and carbon pollution
reduction more generally.
See Business Spectator, 2013/12/05.
Quoting from Business Spectator...
"Gibbons had been the Victorian premier's energy adviser over a period in
which the Victorian government undertook a range of counterproductive
measures for emissions reductions.
Top of mind for the renewables sector will be the imposition of onerous 2km
setback conditions on wind farms.
But he was also involved in a concerted campaign of misinformation
surrounding the pricing of carbon pollution to scare the electorate –
a campaign that reached ridiculous proportions."
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| | Graphic credit: The Berkeley Blog
This graph shows, in direct contradiction of Mr Warburton's claim, that the
vast majority of climate and earth scientists accept that global warming is
largely caused by Mankind.
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What else would you expect from the Abbott Government?
"The Australian government has nailed its colours to the mast on the issue
of renewable energy by choosing manufacturing chief and climate change
denier Dick Warburton to head its review into the renewable energy target."
See
RenewEconomy, 2014/02/17.
Mr Warburton was on ABC radio on 2014/02/18.
He claimed he was not a climate change denier; said that he doesn't deny that
the climate is changing, but he is skeptical about whether the main cause is
due to the gasses that humanity is puting into the atmosphere.
In this, of course, he is at odds with the vast majority of the world's
climate scientists, so he probably would more accurately be called a
climate science denier rather than a climate change denier.
He was on ABC radio again on 2014/02/23.
He claimed that the question of whether carbon dioxide levels were or were
not the main driver for the present climate change was scientifically
unsettled.
In this he is markedly at odds with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) and the great majority of climate scientists.
For more of Mr Warburton's misleading propaganda, this time denigrating
renewable energy as not a viable alternative to coal and gas, see
RenewEconomy, 2014/04/09.
The Abbott Government and the Liberal politicians of the 2013 Parliament
must be the most scientifically ignorant of any First World nation, if not
of any nation at all.
In the Senate debate on the repeal of the Carbon Tax, 2013/12/09, Senator
Ian Macdonald has compared climate change with Y2K.
Quoting from an article in the
Daily Telegraph:
Liberal senator Ian Macdonald has railed against the carbon tax and the
stated threats of climate change, comparing it with the dire Y2K warnings
before 2000.
"I'm sure in years to come people will look back on history and say, yep,
remember global warming ... we're still going," he told the chamber on
Monday.
This is ignorance and denialism on a par with that of South Africa's
President Thabo Mbeki who denied that AIDS was caused by the HIV virus and
consequentially may well have been responsible for 300 000 deaths.
In addition to this, and as mentioned elsewhere on this page, we have Tony
Abbott denying any link between
increasing bushfire risk and climate change and accusing Chritiana
Figueres of "talking through her hat" when she mentioned that there was a
link.
The Conversation on the Abbott Government's firs 90 days
Luke Menzies wrote a
page for The Conversation titled
'Climate and science policy: the Coalition's first 90 days'.
It shows how the Abbott Government is continuing to war against any actions
on climate change.
Up until a few years ago financial planners in Australia, in general, had a
very poor reputation.
They worked to generate as much income for themselves as they could, rather
than maximising the income of the clients who paid for their services.
In effect, the clients paid twice; they paid the fees charged by the
planners, and they lost potential income by indirectly paying for the
kickbacks and commissions that the financial planners received from the
complicit investment organisations.
The previous Labor government brought in legislation that outlawed kickbacks
and commissions to financial planners and made the planners "place clients
interests ahead of their own".
(See an article
by Peter Martin written at the time.)
The Abbott Government intended to change this (March 2014), but the
Senate would not allow them to do it (November 2014).
In a statement Christopher Pyne (Mr Abbott's Minister for Education and Leader
of the House) directly implied that he could not conceive
of any reason other than the abolition of the carbon tax that could make
anyone vote for the Liberals.
He said that "Nobody could doubt that the 2013 election was a referendum on
the Carbon Tax".
This plainly shows that, in his opinion, the election was a one-issue
election and, again in his opinion, the only reason people voted for the
Liberals would have been to get rid of the carbon tax.
While I don't accept his view as correct, I find it interesting and
revealing that he may believe it.
On 2014/01/22 it was reported that refugees who had been forced to return
to Indonesia alleged that they had been beaten and burned by Australian
sailors.
The burns and other injuries were confirmed by Indonesian police.
Was there improper action from Australian sailors or not?
The official word is that there was not; but they would say that wouldn't
they?
So long as the Government insists on secrecy the Australian people will not
know the truth.
Louise Newman wrote a
piece for The Conversation
on 2015/06/09.
I quote Ms Newman:
"From July, doctors will no longer be able to fulfil their ethical and
professional obligations to report mistreatment of detainees.
Under new legislation, passed last month with the support of both major
parties, health professionals may be sentenced to two years in jail for the
unauthorised disclosure of information about conditions in detention centres."
"Doctors have long held concerns about the capacity of the immigration system
to provide adequate health care – and about the health impact of
prolonged detention itself.
So health workers find themselves questioning the morality of a policy that
in many ways can be seen as directly causing the health problems they are
asked to treat."
Why do both the big political parties collude in the unethical and secret
mistreatment of refugees?
A quote from PM Tony Abbott on 2014/05/28:
"It's particularly important that we do not demonise the coal industry and
if there was one fundamental problem, above all else, with the carbon tax
was that it said to our people, it said to the wider world, that a commodity
which in many years is our biggest single export, somehow should be left in
the ground and not sold.
Well really and truly, I can think of few things more damaging to our future."
Perhaps climate change and ocean acidification will be more damaging to our
future Mr Abbott?
Perhaps the future of the planet is more important than your precious coal
industry?
The World Health Organisation (WHO) released a report very recently
indicating
that air pollution kills around seven million people each year.
The pollution from the burning of coal a very large part of that.
It can conservatively be calculated that Australia's
coal exports are
responsible for more than a hundred thousand deaths each year.
In Australia alone, 27 519 healthy years of life are lost every year
from exposure to air pollution of which burning coal is one of the main
sources (Environment Justice Australia;
Cleaning the Air report).
How can a man who claims to be a
Christian, with Christian values, support
this terribly destructive industry when its only strong point is the money
in it?
In late November 2014
Green Tech Media
gave our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, this distinction.
The following is quoted from Green Tech Media:
Since taking office, Australia Prime Minister Tony Abbott has worked to
dismantle every policy designed to confront climate change in his country.
Alarmed by the government's actions to kill a carbon tax, water down
renewable energy targets and boost subsidies to coal, fellow conservatives
have called Abbott's actions "baffling" and labeled him a "flat-earther."
"The future for coal is bright, and it is the responsibility [of] government
to try to ensure that we are there making it easier for everyone wanting to
have a go," said Abbott recently, explaining his desire to subsidize coal
export projects and boost the industry.
According to the International Energy Agency, two-thirds of fossil fuel
reserves need to stay in the ground in order to avoid catastrophic climate
change.
Abbott has blamed renewable energy targets and the country's former carbon
tax on high power prices in the country.
However, the government has admitted that renewables only make up 5 percent
of consumers' bills and the repealed carbon tax only made up 9 percent
– while 51 percent goes to network charges due to an overbuild of
electricity infrastructure.
Note that this doesn't even include PM Abbott's statement:
"
Coal is good for humanity".
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Benign wind power or killer coal?
We know that the mining and burning of coal
kills millions of people each year by the
air pollution it creates, we know it is one of the main causes of
climate change, we know it is one of the
main causes of
ocean acidification,
but our PM says that "coal is good for humanity", does his best to
minimise the development of renewable energy in Australia and throws
billions of dollars of taxpayer's money at the
dying coal industry.
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In a June 2015 interview with radio shock-jock Alan Jones (a long-time wind
power opponent) reported by Lenore Taylor in
The Guardian,
PM Abbott called wind turbines "visually awful" and said that they have
"potential
health impacts".
He went on to say:
"What we did recently in the Senate was to reduce, Alan, capital R-E-D-U-C-E,
the number of these things that we are going to get in the future ...
I frankly would have liked to have reduced the number a lot more but we got
the best deal we could out of the Senate and if we hadn't had a deal, Alan,
we would have been stuck with even more of these things ..."
"What we are managing to do through this admittedly imperfect deal with the
Senate is to reduce the growth rate of this particular sector as much as the
current Senate would allow us to do."
And from the
Sydney Morning Herald; Mr Abbott has
only been close to one wind turbine:
"Well, I was on Rottnest Island a few years ago and I cycled around the
island most mornings and my path took me almost directly under the big wind
turbine which has been on Rottnest Island for some time."
and
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Why not an inquiry into the health impacts of the Australian coal industry?
There is ample evidence for that being a killer.
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"It's right and proper that we are having an inquiry into the health
impacts of these things and, frankly, it's right and proper that we have
reduced the renewable energy target because as things stood, there was going
to be an explosion of these things right around our country."
Shane Wright in the
West Australian newspaper commented on PM Abbott's hatred of wind power
and his opinion of the Rottnest turbine in particular.
Quoting from the article:
"It [the wind turbine] saves shipping about 430,000 litres of diesel a year
to the island and reduces greenhouse gases by about 1100 tonnes a year."
"The Rottnest Island Authority said there were no records of complaints about
its noise or appearance."
One has to ask, is our Prime Minister mad, stupid, or simply corrupt?
Surely one or some combination must apply?
How does Mr Abbott justify not wanting action on climate change?
(I cannot believe that he is stupid enough to believe that climate change
is not happening or is not caused by Man.)
He has three young daughters; he must care about the future that they will
be living through, even if he doesn't care about all the other people of
future generations.
He is not only causing Australia to move slowly in reducing greenhouse
emissions, he is doing all he can to maximise coal mining – and
therefore world-wide emissions – for as long as possible.
How does he square this with his Christian faith?
I have written a short
page on this subject.
First 142 Christians tried to
donate a 12 panel solar power system for Kirribilli House.
The offer was refused because of "concerns about Kirribilli House's heritage
listing and the cost of cleaning the solar panels."
(Of course they don't need to be cleaned at all.)
Later a group of 1000 Christians urge the PM to accept the gift.
The offer was refused again with no justification given.
On top of his obvious bias toward the coal that is poisoning our atmosphere
this shows that the Australian PM is actively opposed to renewable energy to
the point of obsession.
Just by the way, this reminds me of US (Democrat and environmentally minded)
President Jimmy Carter putting a solar water heater on the White House and
then (Republican) Ronald Reagan removing it when he came to power.
At a meeting about the implications of climate change and rising sea levels
in the Pacific Australia's Imigration Minister Peter Dutton joked about
rising sea levels lapping around the doors of Pacific islanders.
Prime Minister Abbott laughed at the joke.
This was quite disgusting and shameful to all Australians.
More information on the ABC.
Peter Dutton was promoted to Minister for Defence and Leader of the House in the later Morrison government (Scott Morrison is the person on the left of the photo).
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This section added 2018/04/14
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Who said the dinosaurs were all dead?
In April 2018 Tony Abbott (of the Liberal Party) and a few of his mates were still trying to prop up the
dying coal industry and undermine PM Turnbull (also of the Liberal Party).
They formed what they called the
"Monash Forum".
It was composed of Abbott himself, Craig Kelly, Eric Abetz, Barnaby Joyce and
Kevin Andrews.
They chose the Monash name because WW1 General Sir John Monash was instrumental in opening up the Latrobe Valley brown coal as a fuel for electricity generation for Victoria; at the time it was innovative.
Apparently without the members of the 'Monash Forum' noticing times have moved on in the hundred years since then.
If Sir John Monash was alive today he would have left fossil fuels behind; he was progressive.
A number of the
decedents of Monash have asked the Forum to stop using the Monash name, but the members have refused.
Just by the way, Craig Kelly, one of the members of the 'Monash Forum', showed his ignorance in a blast he gave
RenewEconomy; it was full of errors.
