Climate Change in Australia (Part 1)

Take it to the politics thread.

This is the problem with the CC thread - the issue is just used to score political points by people who have positioned themselves according to their political ideology without regard for the science.

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Epic rant, you might want to check the dates on that though. Not sure Julia Gillard the Education and workplace relations minister had much to do with it.

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Shhhh … you are interrupting mindless, ill informed philosophical hatred.

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Sorry it’s a blur of incompetence between dumb and dumber when it comes to those 2. It is an effort that I am not prepared to go to to directly attribute which fuckup should be attributed to which “leader”.

No it actually killed people.

Like, for example, the fundamental laws of physics and what they say about the IR absorption/transmission properties of atmospheric CO2? Cos that’s all as tangible as hell.

And when it did that, something between 60-90% of species on the face of the earth went extinct, and sea levels rose up to 150m higher than they are now. Dunno about you, but given that i rely on a lot of the species on the face of the earth for minor stuff like the food I eat and the air i breathe, that’s something I would prefer not to live through if a bit of sensible forward-looking policy could put it off for a few hundred thousand years

Wow if only you had been around 1000’s of years ago to promote your “forward-looking” policy.
Funny stuff! How to blow your own argument in the one paragraph!

Here ya go, I’ll rephrase it using really short words, especially for your benefit and for the benefit of anyone else reading this whose reading comprehension peaked at ‘Run Spot Run’ and who thinks ‘science’ is nerds playing with testtubes full of green bubbling stuff.

Major climate change is really really bad to live through. Most species that exist when it happens, die.

We know this because we have the fossil record of the results of past climate change.

Sometimes, every few hundred thousand to every few tens of millions of years, major climate change happens naturally. This is bad for the majority of life unlucky enough to be living on earth at the time.

Right now, major climate change is happening unnaturally. This is bad for almost everything that is living on the earth now. However, this time luck has nothing to do with it. We can minimise the impact of this very very bad thing if we are sensible.

This will, most likely, give us at least a few hundred thousand years before we have to worry about natural climate change. Wouldn’t that be nice?

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The NEM started less than 20 years ago. If you go back before then, you’ve got a completely different set of factors at play - privatisation, market structure, available technologies etc. - so not sure it’s really comparable. But even if it was comparable, how are you measuring competition?

100% agree on your investment uncertainty argument. As a hypothetical if government was to announce that coal was to be the primary source of energy for the next 40 years and put in water tight legislation to ensure that to be the case, then investment in coal would definitely increase as it’s a known producer of usable, cheap energy that can be produced en masse.

While economically correct in theory, that hypothetical (and I know it’s just a hypothetical) has fatal political, social, scientific and legal flaws. Obviously you can’t make legislation irrevocable. So as soon as another government took power - one that didn’t want Australia to be an international pariah because it was burning coal while the rest of the world worked towards carbon neutrality - it would dismantle that legislation as its first act of power. And investors would know that this would be the case, and so wouldn’t invest in coal in the first place.

The obvious answer is to have a basis for bipartisanship, which the Finkel Review and a clean energy target provides. I don’t think it goes nearly far enough in terms of recommended emissions reductions from the electricity sector, but it’s a start.

As a side note, a carbon tax would be a much simpler and more efficient economic tool than a clean energy target (as would an emissions intensity scheme or an emissions trading scheme), but they’re all politically toxic now, so we’re left with the next best option.

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The essentially positive story of CFC reduction - slightly depressing though that history seems bound to repeat with the manoeuvrings of the energy industry & politicians. Do we ever really learn?

"The Coalition MPs causing such a rearguard rumpus on behalf of Big Coal ought to book lessons on how to perform a screeching U-turn when the light finally dawns on them.

They could do worse than study the amazing switcheroo of the once infamous Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy.

Remember the ozone hole?

Think of the ozone hole of the 1980s as the climate of the 21st century and chlorofluorocarbon (CFCs) as coal and you might get a preview of the humiliation awaiting the current champions of coal-fired energy.

Back in 1974 two scientists postulated a link between the depletion of the ozone layer above Antarctica and the increasing use of CFCs, which were used in refrigerators, cleaning solvents, as aerosol propellants and in the manufacture of plastic foams.

The findings were poo-pooed and outright attacked by big industry and conservative politicians. But by the end of the 1970s, growing evidence of the depletion of the ozone layer was causing alarm among those who cared to look at the science.

The ozone layer, after all, is critical in protecting life on Earth. It absorbs ultraviolet radiation which otherwise causes skin cancer, damage to the genes and suppresses the immune system in living organisms.

The US president at the time was Jimmy Carter, who declared his Christian faith embraced a commitment to protect the environment. “Stewardship of the earth”, he called it.

Many CFCs of the time were marketed as Freon by the US chemical giant DuPont.

And in 1978, with evidence growing that CFCs were chewing up the ozone layer, Carter’s administration outlawed the use of Freon in aerosol cans.

DuPont was infuriated. Its product might have been endangering life on Earth, but regulations like this would endanger something more important: profits.

With the support of like-minded Big Industry, DuPont established an outfit called the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy. Its real aim was to confront anti-CFC science and to lobby politicians to stop any further regulation.

Those who denied the science and fought to keep pumping CFCs into the ozone layer are now consigned to the history’s bin

It got its wish when Ronald Reagan, who believed government regulation was devilry, became US president in 1981.

But the world was moving on, leaving Reagan’s US and DuPont behind. In 1985 a giant hole in the ozone layer was finally proved.

So concerned were most developed countries that diplomats met in Montreal in 1987 and signed a treaty, the Montreal Protocol, requiring massive reductions in the production of CFCs. Australia was among the first signatories.

Two years later, 12 European Community nations agreed to ban the production of all CFCs by the end of the century. In 1990, diplomats met in London and voted to significantly strengthen the protocol, calling for a complete elimination of CFCs by the year 2000.

Meanwhile, DuPont had slyly sniffed the wind. Its representatives attended the Montreal convention, performed an astonishing backflip and actively lobbied for a total ban on CFCs worldwide.

It had developed a new product, known as HCFCs, which DuPont claimed would fix the problem.

Along with this U-turn, the CFC Alliance changed its name to the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy. It was recognition that the game was all but over. The only thing left to do was stall for time and to sound responsible.

In fact, HCFCs do deplete ozone, albeit at a rate much reduced from CFCs. They too were eventually banned in favour of non-ozone-destroying products known as HFCs.

Thirty years on, ozone-watching scientists announced last year that the ozone hole had finally begun healing.

The hole in 2016 was four million square kilometres less than the 21 million square kilometres of the year 2000, and the downward trend was generally on course (with the notable exception of 2015, when volcanic activity kicked the hole wider).

The world’s decision to tackle the compounds that were destroying the ozone layer and threatening life on Earth is now considered history’s most important environmental action.

Those who denied the science and fought to keep pumping CFCs into the ozone layer are now consigned to the history’s bin.

And today, those in Australia who deny that coal is destined to go the same way, eventually, as CFCs, and who appear content to cripple their own political movement in the argument, seem to have learned nothing."

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Sorry this deserves more than a like.
We should be moving to clean energy, it shouldnt even be a discussion.
Bruny island project will be interesting over there they are trialling battery storage on a small scale.
http://brunybatterytrial.org/

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Australian Media: nothing… crickets

BBC World News: Two-thirds of Great Barrier Reef damaged

Scientists from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies say mass coral bleaching has damaged the World Heritage site for two years in a row.
The latest damage is concentrated in the middle section, whereas last year’s bleaching hit mainly the north and experts are worried that the coral might not be able to recover.

Nup,. … Costello is an intelligent bloke.

■■■■■■ typical

F[quote=“werewolf, post:2141, topic:170, full:true”]
Serious? Juliar created the debts that my kids kids will still be paying off. In doing so she actually killed people with one of the ludicrous green schemes known as the pink Batts program. This actually killed people. Tony Abbott did a lot of good including getting rid of the disgraceful carbon tax sell off by Juliar to claim power.
Not disputing he was a poor pm but he’s not in the ballpark of some others.
[/quote]

Mr Wolf, you really do post much stupidity, but this is about the worst.

Check the facts on Government debt and you will see that this current government hold the record. That said, debt is good, as it is government job to invest in the Nations future, though Mal could tax the rich a bit more.

As it was pointed out Gillard was not PM for pink batts saga. In any case, it was a good policy and those died at the hands of shoddy employers who rorted the program, but you know that and you are just being an a-hole once again.

And history will show the Tony was a much better PM than the current do nothing bloke.

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While I’m in the mood, if someone took a potshot at Tony Abbott, I wouldn’t complain.

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Well we can agree on one thing that Abbott is better than Turnbull.
However to blame employers on the failure of the wasted money pink Batts scheme is ludicrous. It’s up to the instigator to set up the relevant controls for a project to be successful. It’s a dismal fail and the fact that you are prepared to come up with that line shows you are either blinded by your labourness or should not be within a barge poll of having any control over a project!

There is a politics thread you know?

I’m sorry…better at what?

Abbott is one of the most loathsome creatures I’ve ever (wanted to) run across (with a steamroller). An absolute embarrassment to this country and anyone who likes him ought to be damn well ashamed of himself.

Happy to throw Abetz, Andrews, Dutton, Bernardi and Brandis in there too.

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This is the wrong thread. However if you look at his election slogans his main points were to stop the boats, get rid of the ludicrous carbon tax and get the budget under control. He achieved 2 of the 3. He did not get the budget under control but to be fair was blocked by Labour.

Edit: I like him and I’m quite proud. Simply because he is better than Turnbull and better than the dumb and dumber Juliar and Dud double act.