A recent report on the Democratic presidential primary highlights candidates attempting to burnish their climate credentials by blaming fossil fuel companies for not only the rise in atmospheric CO2 but for willfully ignoring or even concealing the risks ...
Climate and the Democratic presidential primaries – Part 1
There is universal agreement on the importance of climate policy, the need to sharply reduce carbon emissions and remain in the Paris Climate Accord among the Democratic presidential candidates. While this is encouraging for climate advocates, the ...
How do Australia’s GHG emissions stack up?
Australia’s 2018 annual net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 538.2 M tonnes (1), an increase of 3.5 M tonnes (or 0.7%) over 2017. Angus Taylor, the federal minister responsible for reporting and, in theory, reducing GHG emissions, brushed away s ...
How much will it cost to fight climate change?
During the recent federal election in Australia the cost of converting to renewable power and eliminating carbon emissions was raised and the ALP seemed to suffer by not providing an adequate answer. So what is a reasonable answer to this question ...
Adani
There are three broad positions that one can take on the Adani coal mine - each implies a different view on how the permitting process should work (or not work). For all those either supportive of the mine through to those mildly opposed (for whatever ...
Green New Deal and Decarbonisation
Calls for urgent action on decarbonisation are often linked with calls for dramatic changes to the political and economic status quo (1, 2). This poses the question, “is broadening the scope of climate policies to include major systemic change ...
Australian EV Policy – Part 2
In part 1 of this blog (1) we found that Australia has a very low electric vehicle (EV) penetration rate of 0.03% (% of EVs in the light vehicle fleet). This compares with rates of 0.3 - 0.5% in most developed economies, including Canada and the US ...
Australian EV policy – Part 1
The upcoming election has put Electric Vehicle (EV) policy into the spotlight. This is probably a bit overdue given that vehicle emissions account for something like 15% of Australian and global emissions (1). Those familiar with UNIPCC r ...
An energy policy for everyone
The upcoming federal election will see the current government heavily criticised in many quarter for not having a coherent (or even an incoherent) energy policy. The consistency of this criticism makes the accusation self evidently true and allows a leve ...
The federal election and climate policy
The federal election will be upon us very soon and all serious political parties have released something that looks like a climate policy or in some cases a set of policy initiatives. Pundits have already started to analyse the offerings and soon there w ...