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The lobby’s recommendations for environmental charities would set a dangerous precedent and could hamper any community group the government deems to be in conflict with its worldview
Tens of millions of dollars are spent annually on political lobbying for the interests of the fossil fuel sector. That investment serves the interests of a small amount of company shareholders in keeping a legacy industry alive, despite the availability of newer, clean technologies, at lower cost.
In the wake of these behind-the-scenes policy negotiations, the real and present impacts of climate change, such as bushfires, coastal flooding and reduced crop yields are left at the door of future generations to deal with.
Related: Mining lobby calls for 10% limit on environmental charities' spending on advocacy
Related: CSIRO a paid-up member of Minerals Council, which fights climate change action
Continue reading...Trump’s Nasa nominee Jim Bridenstine is a climate denier who wants to end the agency’s climate research
According to 2016 election exit polls, only 38% of voters considered Donald Trump qualified to be president. 17% of those who thought him unqualified voted for Trump anyway, perhaps because he promised that as a wealthy businessman, he would be able to hire the best people to advise him. That was a claim his daughter Ivanka explicitly made in her speech at the Republican National Convention:
global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago. Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles. During the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D.—long before cars, power plants, or the Industrial Revolution—temperatures were warmer than today.
Who needs science when you can just use NASA to send up your big shiny rockets carrying American flags & feel like a big powerful space man? https://t.co/XO8fAAXw5M
Continue reading...Deputy PM tells Coalition party room AGL’s refusal to sell Liddell power station is about market behaviour but declines to repeat allegation on Sky News
The deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, has pulled back from a comment he made to the Coalition party room on Tuesday that AGL was “shorting” the market by refusing to sell the ageing Liddell coal-fired power plant to a competitor.
Joyce would not repeat the accusation during an interview on Sky News late on Tuesday – but he insisted the company had not provided a reasonable answer to the question of why it would decommission the New South Wales plant if a rival generation company wanted to buy it.
Related: Coalition's public shaming of AGL another assault on imaginary energy enemies | Katharine Murphy
Related: AGL to deliver plan to avoid energy shortage if Liddell power station closes
Continue reading...Like the debate over gun control, the public discussion in the US about whether to take action on the climate has often been characterised as a struggle between powerful lobbies and violent reality.
After each campus shooting or hurricane disaster, there is a brief uptick of concern followed by a gradual return to entrenched positions as the National Rifle Association or the oil industry reassert their influence, inevitably raising the question: just how bad do things have to get to reach a tipping point?
Related: Nuclear plans 'should be rethought after fall in offshore windfarm costs'
Related: Why do we see hurricanes like Harvey and Irma as otherworldly omens? | Philip Hoare
Continue reading...The Cassini mission, which will end on Friday, is one of the most wonderful achievements of the human race. A slack-jawed awe is the only proper reaction to the spacecraft’s travels and to its intricate route over seven years to Saturn, aided by the slingshot effects of its grazing the orbits of the inner planets, first Venus and then Earth, as it passed them in vast loops, representing astonishing feats of calculation.
Nor was it enough just to reach the outer planets and their region of immense distances from the Sun, from us and from each other. The flypasts of Jupiter and its moons, reached after three years, and then the orbit of Saturn attained four years later, are wonders of remote control and communication. The pictures that Cassini has sent back of the surface of the moons it has explored – and it actually landed the smaller probe, Huygens, on one of them – enlarge our vision of the universe as nothing else could.
Continue reading...On Marco Island, widespread destruction in Irma’s wake is not enough to make believers out of some climate change skeptics
10 dead in Cuba as record flooding hits northern Florida – latest updatesThey sat through hours of pummelling by Hurricane Irma, with winds pounding them at up to 115mph and rain driving in a solid white sheet as bright as a snow blizzard. Then on Monday, Floridians woke up to survey the damage, begin the cleanup and get back to carrying on regardless.
Related: Florida Keys facing potential 'humanitarian crisis' in Irma aftermath
They always tell us we will have a storm surge. I know they're doing it for safety reasons but I’ve never seen it happen
Related: Covering Hurricane Irma: journalists go to extremes to report storm
Continue reading...‘Climate change’ does not adequately capture the chaos brought to these islands by the extreme weather. Poverty will make the recovery even more difficult• Gabrielle Thongs specialises in disaster planning and spatial modelling at the University of the West Indies
The winds and rain came first, usual for this time of year. Crops drown in the sodden earth, the price of vegetables and fruits in the market rises and, as the rain and wind beat down on the tin roofs and wooden frames of many of our homes, communities bear down for more. Torrential storms, gushing flood waters and devastated infrastructure come next, and lives are lost in their wake. Evacuation is not an option for most citizens of the Caribbean. Instead of escape, survival is a matter of endurance.
Related: Irma hits the Caribbean – in pictures
Related: Stop talking right now about the threat of climate change. It’s here; it’s happening | Bill McKibben
Mismanagement of resources and failure to protect the environment pose a grave threat to small-island developing states
Continue reading...Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, flash fires, droughts: all of them tell us one thing – we need to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and fast
For the sake of keeping things manageable, let’s confine the discussion to a single continent and a single week: North America over the last seven days.
In Houston they got down to the hard and unromantic work of recovery from what economists announced was probably the most expensive storm in US history, and which weather analysts confirmed was certainly the greatest rainfall event ever measured in the country – across much of its spread it was a once-in-25,000-years storm, meaning 12 times past the birth of Christ; in isolated spots it was a once-in-500,000-years storm, which means back when we lived in trees. Meanwhile, San Francisco not only beat its all-time high temperature record, it crushed it by 3F, which should be pretty much statistically impossible in a place with 150 years (that’s 55,000 days) of record-keeping.
Related: Floods in drought season: is this the future for parts of India? | Raghu Karnad
This is a race against time. Global warming is a crisis that comes with a limit – solve it soon or don’t solve it
Continue reading...Announcement aimed at tackling pollution will prove a huge incentive to development and sale of electric and hybrid vehicles
China, the world’s biggest vehicle market, is considering a ban on the production and sale of fossil fuel cars in a major boost to the production of electric vehicles as Beijing seeks to ease pollution.
Related: Britain to ban sale of all diesel and petrol cars and vans from 2040
These measures will promote profound changes in the environment.
Continue reading...Scientific reticence allows politicians to neglect the real dangers we face. But waiting for perfect information means it will be too late to act
Three decades ago when serious debate on human-induced climate change began globally, a great deal of statesmanship was on display. A preparedness to recognise that this was an issue which transcended nation states, ideologies and political parties. An issue which had to be addressed proactively in the long-term interests of humanity, even if the existential nature of climate risk was far less clear cut than it is today.
Then, as global institutions were put in place to take up this challenge and the extent of change this would impose on the fossil-fuel dominated world became more obvious, the forces of resistance mobilised. Today, despite the diplomatic triumph of the Paris climate agreement, debate around climate change policy has never been more dysfunctional, indeed Orwellian, particularly in Australia.
Related: Australia faces potentially disastrous consequences of climate change, inquiry told
Related: Australia warned it has radically underestimated climate change security threat
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