Let me Google that for you…
And they do press harder on the issue, fairly frequently:
They have to make as much noise as they can to try and be heard amongst the chorus of corrupt and stupid MSM
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Makes you wonder why both sides of politics have got their knickers in a twist over the closing of one lousy coal fired power plant that has reached its planned closure date in 3 years time.
That argument (bottom of the Craig Kelly article) that notes we can’t do it all on our own so we shouldn’t do anything especially if some others aren’t…
Can I apply that logic to paying tax, with Craig Kelly’s blessing?
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I think it might be because guys like Angus Taylor keep saying things like “we’re going to use tax revenue to build a white elephant coal thermal unit because no one else will finance it”.
For those that asked for it:
The fark did I just read?
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Lol. The old What’s Up With That. Anyone using that as an authoritative source is going to be hard to get through to. That’s Alan Jones level denial.
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Blockquote Willard Anthony Watts (Anthony Watts) is a blogger, weathercaster and non-scientist, paid AGW denier who runs the website wattsupwiththat.com . He does not have a university qualification and has no climate credentials other than being a radio weather announcer.
That description up there is a carbon copy of Eliot Higgins’ Bellingcat. Guy is just some hack from Leicester yet is bigged up by establishment media for parroting the corporate/government narratives.
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This is what I don’t get how the numpties don’t understand.
If a reputable scientist had categoric data that MM climate change was a hoax, why would they chose to keep their rem range B university research gig instead of sell it to fossil fuel companies for billions?
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This is often my argument. The answer from the denial drongos is usually something between “they” won’t allow the “truth” out or some equally vague version of this and trying to change the subject. It actually is the best argument to make. More effective on people who know something about the process of how science is done. Conspiracy idiots gonna conspiracy though.
And idiots gonna idiot.
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Bill Shorten unveils $15bn energy plan to help tackle climate ‘disaster’
Labor leader says he will top up Clean Energy Finance Corporation and unveils $5bn fund to modernise infrastructure
Katherine Murphy
On climate and energy policy, Labor never learns from its mistakes, Scott Morrison told us on Thursday, apparently limbering up for another heart-warming election season of who can be the biggest numpty.
The prime minister is wrong about that. The evidence tells us Labor does learn from its mistakes, and in climate and energy the ALP have become shape shifters in order to keep doggedly pursuing policies reducing emissions in an environment when that activity is construed, ever more bizarrely in reactionary circles, as some kind of hostile action.
Again, with our eyes fixed firmly on the evidence, we can note Morrison is brave to be talking about mistakes and a lack of learning in climate and energy policy, given the Coalition has been a rolling botch-up in this area, lurching from bouts of hyperpartisan self-interest to desperate scrambling to produce a policy that Tony Abbott wouldn’t veto (oops he vetoed it anyway), ending at a point that can only be described as outright clustercuss.
Just consider one small counterpoint from Thursday. Bill Shorten went to Bloomberg and laid out an energy policy that defined the pressing challenge of transforming Australia’s energy market from top to bottom, and then he rolled out some detailed policy options for dealing with it.
The energy minister, Angus Taylor, by way of riposte, bunged on a high-vis vest, stood in front of a smelter in Tomago, and talked about Shorten having to nominate which burping cows he would cull, which, for a person of Taylor’s intelligence and technical expertise, must feel about as close as it comes to End Times.
We’ve been here before: the hyperbolic carry on, it’s all pretty tired.
It was stupid then and it’s even more stupid now, with the clock ticking, the grid creaking, power prices rising and emissions rising in sectors of the economy outside electricity. We don’t have time for more nonsense, and there’s already been far too much of it.
When it comes to climate and energy policy, voters desperately need someone to be a grown-up and, on Thursday, Shorten told them, in his most important speech as opposition leader, that it would be him.
He would be the grown-up because, God knows, someone had to be.
Now, to the merits of Shorten’s policy offering. It’s a bit depressing, frankly, where we find ourselves, at the tail end of the dumbest decade, because the only options to achieve progress are third-order options, where governments are back to rolling out industry policies as the solution to problems.
A number of business groups on Thursday pointed out the downside risks of energy policy by picking winners but frankly some of those business groups were also on the front line of campaigning against a carbon price, a market mechanism, only a couple of years ago – so, chaps, what goes around comes around. You reap what you sow.
So, we are where we are. Wishing it were otherwise is a waste of energy and a waste of time and, in the context of where we are, Labor’s offering is sensible enough.
The plan looks like this. Give the Liberals one more chance not to be wreckers on the taxpayer dime, give them an opportunity to wake up for themselves and vote for their own mechanism, the national energy guarantee. And in the event that fails, then drive the required transformation by a combination of measures: a 45% economy-wide emissions reduction target, funding the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to drive new investments in large-scale generation and storage, upgrading sub-optimal transmission infrastructure and preparing coal communities for the inevitable transition.
Conceptually, that’s not a bad mud map.
Of course there will be detailed questions to answer, and there’s an obvious one sitting right at the heart of Labor’s package.
If the economy-wide emissions reduction target is 45% (and that’s the plan) then shouldn’t the emissions reduction target for the electricity sector be higher than that given abatement is cheaper in electricity than in other sectors of the economy? It’s cheaper to reduce emissions in electricity than it is, say, in transport.
The reality is the electricity target should be higher than 45% to try and contain the costs of the transition.
It’s a question that needs an answer but that’s a tangle Labor won’t want to get into, particularly given Taylor and others are already thundering apocalyptically about “wrecking balls” through the economy.
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I haven’t read Shorten’s energy policy but if it doesn’t include carbon pricing then it automatically makes it a dud
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Points given to having an actual policy though.
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It speaks to how much of a shambles our climate policy is when one of our major parties is lauded for merely having a policy to begin with.
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EFA
Pfft, why bother? It’s not like it’s been an issue that we have needed to address or caused any sort of problems at any time in the last two decades…
Oh, wait.
From what I’ve seen it’s the NEG with a 45% emissions reduction target, plus some (overdue and laudable) investment in the grid to help it deal with distributed and variable renewable power inputs.
Which is a mixed bag as far as I’m concerned. At this point things are desperate enough that I’ll take ANY policy with a realistic chance of cutting emissions significantly, but there are some obvious flaws in this one. An NEG is all very nice, but unless you also address emissions in the transport, agriculture (where they’re skyrocketing due to landclearing), logging etc industries, it’s not going to do the job in the long term. It’s total emissions that count, not just emissions from the power sector or emissions intensity or whatever other weasel measurements get used to avoid hard decisions. But hey, I’ll cheerfully take it over nothing - for now. A broadbased carbon price would probably be more cost-efficient and effective - all these other sectors will need to be addressed in time if emissions are going to be reduced enough though.
One thing that’s REALLY obvious though, it how compliant the media have been towards the Lib framing of the issue. So much dishonest shrieking about how renewables destabilise the power supply and ooooh South Australia is scary and blaming blackouts on solar power, and the media has subconsciously absorbed it, and now they’re talking in the same terms. Note that even the ALP is calling this an ‘energy policy’ rather than a climate policy. I suspect there won’t BE an ALP climate policy, and that they’ll just point to this energy policy instead. It’s really a frustrating thing as an environmentalist - it seems that any policy you advocate for gets defined in the media and in the minds of politicians by the people who oppose it. Climate policy is an energy issue. Marine parks are defined as a recreational fishing issue. Old growth forest logging is a forestry issue. Murray Darling water flows are an irrigation issue. It’s never the other way around.
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