Clean Energy Bill Passed Last Week. Sun Still Shines .

Having passed by 74 votes to 72 in the lower house, the Clean Energy Bill's passage into Australian law is assured with the Greens holding the balance of power in the senate.

What a wake of destruction she has left in her path. Four political leaders felled. Prime Ministers John Howard in 2007, Liberal, and Kevin Rudd in 2010, Labor. Howard lost because his 11th hour climate conversion was not believable. Rudd, because he deferred ETS action to appease a ratings slump.

Opposition leaders were not spared.

Support for Brendan Nelson as leader within the Liberal Party had all but collapsed by the end of July 2008, battered by his repeated gaffes on emissions trading and climate change. Malcolm Turnbull took over Liberal leadership late in 2008 prosecuting the case for an emissions trading system. He worked with Rudd's new Labor government and with business to design the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, only to be deposed in the leadership spill engineered by Tony Abbott, November 2009, in protest against Liberal Party support for the ETS.

In the path she followed we see a much altered, more volatile landscape. In 2007 there was overwhelming political support for an ETS, some 90% of the population. Now only about 30% support it. Abbott's personal approval and his party's ratings soared on the back of the carbon tax scare campaign mounted by resources industry front groups and fanned by red hot shock jocks like Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt. Prime Minister Gillard's had sunk to an all time low by the time the Clean Energy Bill 2011 passed.

Yet both these trajectories have altered since the Bill was passed:

The latest Herald/Nielsen poll finds Labor's primary vote has jumped 3 percentage points in a month to 30 per cent, a small increase but psychologically significant because it is the first time since May Labor's first preference vote has been in the 30s.
...
On the downside for the Coalition, Mr Abbott's personal ratings fell to their worst levels since he became leader.

The poll, taken after the government passed the carbon price legislation through the lower house on Wednesday, shows attitudes towards the carbon policy have hardened, with 59 per cent opposed, a 3-point increase since August. Support for a carbon price fell 2 percentage points to 37 per cent. Support for a carbon price among Labor voters has slipped 5 points in two months.
...
Ms Gillard's rating as preferred prime minister rose 4 points to 44 per cent and Mr Abbott's stayed steady at 48 per cent. Ms Gillard's approval rating rose 1 point to 33 per cent while her disapproval was steady at 62 per cent.

Mr Abbott's approval fell 2 percentage points to 41 per cent and his disapproval rose 2 points to 54 per cent.

These are his worst ratings since becoming Opposition Leader on December 1, 2009, and are similar to numbers experienced by Mr Turnbull just before he was deposed. The poll finds 44 per cent of voters back Mr Turnbull as Coalition leader compared with 28 per cent for Mr Abbott and 23 per cent for Mr Hockey.

Mr Turnbull has much stronger support among Greens and Labor voters.

Mr Rudd is preferred as leader by 61 per cent of voters compared with 30 per cent for Ms Gillard. In a match-up against Mr Smith, Mr Rudd leads by 60 per cent to 29 per cent.

In a match-up between Ms Gillard and Mr Smith, Ms Gillard leads by 44 per cent to 40 per cent.

She has wrought her damage, littering political fortunes and polarised public opinion, leaving a long trail of destruction behind, this idea of pricing pollution into energy costs so clean energy becomes commercial. But look up. A week has almost passed and the atmosphere is calming. The sun still shines and soon we'll have tools to control emissions and move economic growth onto a more sustainable path.

We many not be able to give our kids and grand-kids a stable climatic inheritance that was once their birthright, but at least we can bequeath them tools to manage their footprint, and to drive refinement of cheap, clean, green energy.

After all that has passed, this is a time to savour. For the first time Australia's position in the clean energy race is looking better. We have moved from the back of the peloton to somewhere in the energy-saving middle - ahead of the US, China, India and the developing world, behind the Europeans taking up the front - positioning us for some leadership further down the track.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

House of Lords to impersonator: 'cease and desist'

Looks like the House of Lords has rebuked “Lord” Monckton and sent him a ‘cease and desist’ letter, in an unprecedented fit of annoyance at his grandstanding:

Climate sceptic Lord Monckton told he’s not member of House of Lords

Clerk of parliaments publishes letter on Lords’ site saying peer is not and has ‘never been a member of the House of Lords’

The House of Lords has taken the unprecedented step of publishing a “cease and desist” letter on its website demanding that Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate sceptic and the UK Independence party’s head of research, should stop claiming to be a member of the upper house.

The move follows a testy interview given by Monckton to an Australian radio station earlier this month in which he repeated his long-stated belief that he is a member of the House of Lords. When asked by ABC Sydney’s Adam Spencer if he was a member, he said: “Yes, but without the right to sit or vote … [The Lords] have not yet repealed by act of parliament the letters patent creating the peerage and until they do I am a member of the house, as my passport records. It says I am the Right Honourable Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. So get used to it.”

Oh, and you’ve heard about his nobel laureate he allegedly received? This is his from his biography on his own think tank website, and has been up there for years:

His contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 - the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise - earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York, USA.

When challenged on Australian radio about this Monckton said it was a joke. AGW deniers swallow any swill, don’t they? Of the accumulated biomass that the good “Lord’s” supporters make-up, there is not one sceptical neuron firing. “Lord” Monckton. More a symptom of an exhausted decay of the last rump of the British aristocracy.

This is the same fraud who has been bankrolled by Alan Jones, the shadowy patron of the Galileomovement.com.au astro-turf outfit.

Carbon Tax Phone Hack

A tumultuous confluence of events has hit the Australian climate debate and brought me out of a brief blogging hiatus.

Sorry for the headline, it reads like a 'pick-me' for Google's search engine algorithm. But it best describe this confluence.

It had been building up for a while. Climate change rumblings had been heard decades ago, but were only picked up on the public radar early in the 2000s. Agitated by Australian opposition leader, Tony Abbott, aka Dr. No, as it approached shore, the carbon tax wave crashed over Australia last Sunday when Prime Minister Gillard announced the details of the Clean Energy Future package.

The public, encouraged by right-wing jockery, has gone feral -- as Julia Gillard found out when spruiking her carbon tax in the mall.



Around the same time of Australia's carbon tax announcement another wave of discontent that had started decades deep, crashed over the celebrity scene, had receded and rebuilt. It now loomed higher over British shores. When the News Of The World Hacking scandal reached it's ugly nadir and crashed Rupert Murdoch quickly, ruthlessly and famously severed NOTW. The drastic action was too late to stop the contagion spreading to other organs of the News Limited empire and it's BSkyB ambition. Arrest are being made, nine so far, British politicians have found their voice, the US is questioning News' influence and the Australian arm of the country is undertaking self-criticism lifted straight out of the little red book.

The two wakes met today when an unusually pensive Canberra press pack interviewed Julia Gillard today. Some of the questions:

Laura Tingle, Financial Review:

The News Corporation group are facing questions in Britain and the US about whether they are led by fit and proper persons to control such extensive media assets. Do our media ownership laws have sufficient fit and proper tests in them and what will be the appropriate response from the Government if governments elsewhere in the world make adverse findings against News?

Mark Riley, Channel 7:

I think a few of us have been reflecting on this in the last few weeks and certainly in the last couple of days, very sharply, on our responsibilities. When we see a gentleman in Gladstone trying to encourage people to take up arms against the government, a woman in Melbourne being shoved out of a public meeting and harassed down the street to tears, you confronted in a shopping centre by people screaming and Liberal Party members calling you liar and then a radio station coming here and broadcasting all day on the first day back of Parliament to whip climate change opposers into a frenzy. How do you see our responsibility and the way that we should be reporting this matter?

I never though I would see the day when the media would self-reflect.

There is more of this Carbon Tax Phone Hack confluence to come, mark my words. And, we in Australia are sitting right where these swells break. We live in the continent most prone to AGW, off a coal- and resources-lead export economy. We are the birthplace of the de-robed, if not dethroned, Murdoch emperor and his empire. The same one that has been pushing climate change denial for so long.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Tony Abbott supports a carbon tax

It's hard to believe than Tony Abbott ever endorsed a carbon tax, even tacitly, given the ferocity of his sustained attack on Julia Gillard for announcing her government's intention to set a carbon price next year in anticipation of an emission trading system.

But endorse it he did, on page 172 of Battlelines, the book he wrote after the Liberals lost office and before he took over leadership of the opposition in the spill that cost Malcolm Turnbull the top job by a singe vote. The issue was the ETS that Malcolm had fought so hard for.

Tony's words are cautious, but the meaning is clear:

"...many now think that a carbon charge scheme directed at the least environmentally efficient producers would be simpler and fairer than an emissions trading scheme."

The description, "carbon charge scheme" is hilarious, given that he battered Rudd's ETS with his "great big new tax" positioning. The guy means 'carbon tax'; he doesn't mean 'carbon price', as you need to have a price in order to have an ETS.

Given this, and the multiple positions that Abbott has held on climate change, it's quite obvious that Abbott's line of attack on Gillard is rank opportunism. Throw in the hard to ignore fact that the opposition does actually share the same emissions reductions objectives as the Gillard government, and one is left wondering about the Abbott's credibility. No wonder he has worked so hard to paint Julia as a liar. A case of projection, perhaps?

UPDATE:

Crikey has detailed Abbott's many stances on global warming, and included another example of Abbott's endorsement of a carbon tax:

Still, a new tax would be the intelligent skeptic’s way to deal with minimising emissions because it would be much easier than a property right to reduce or to abolish should the justification for it change.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Liberal's global warming history: fair weathered and fickle

Rod Tiffen is emeritus professor, government and international relations, at the University of Sydney.He catalogues the Australian Liberal party's shameful record on climate change and pens a devastating critique of their performance over time:

The Liberals were the first main party to wholeheartedly embrace the challenge of global warming. In 1990 Andrew Peacock, and again in 1993 John Hewson, went to the electorate with a commitment to cut Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by the year 2000.

In December 1997 the Howard government signed the Kyoto Protocol, which the prime minister described as an ''absolutely stunning diplomatic success''. He celebrated that Australia was able to ''make a massive contribution to the world environmental effort to cut greenhouse gases'' but had done so in a way that would protect Australian jobs.

Between 1997 and 2002 the Australian government, while trumpeting what a good bargain it had achieved, had no doubts about anthropogenic global warming and was committed to reducing it.

In 2002 the government reversed itself, refusing to ratify Kyoto, even though it argued it would still meet its commitments. Its rationale was diplomatic rather than scientific: it would only be part of an agreement that included the world's biggest polluters. It is unlikely it would have adopted this course if George W. Bush hadn't withdrawn the United States the year before. Neither leader had felt impelled to share their intentions with their electorates at the preceding election.

From late 2006 Howard realised that for political reasons the government needed to improve its credentials on global warming. (In his memoirs Howard declares himself agnostic on climate change, which is perhaps the reason all his discussions focus on the politics rather than the substance of the issue.) The government sprang into action, so much so that the environment minister, Malcolm Turnbull, claimed Australia led the world in policies on climate change. The government went to the 2007 election proposing an emissions trading scheme, apparently with unanimous internal support.

Under the first opposition leader, Brendan Nelson, the party adopted a classic harassment strategy. It did not question the need for an emissions trading scheme, but instead focused on any possible cost or inconvenience that would come with it.

Under the second opposition leader, Turnbull, there was more involvement in trying to frame a bipartisan policy, with detailed bargaining between government and opposition rarely seen in Australian politics.

But then a group of Coalition party members dramatically broke ranks. After the issue had been part of Australian politics for two decades, in 2009, probably for the first time, there were senior Liberals prepared to publicly deny the science. The factional chief Nick Minchin declared that climate change sceptics probably constituted a majority in the party. Suddenly, instead of conformism, there was a very public and uncompromising stance against Turnbull.

Tony Abbott won the leadership by a single vote, and the party had been split down the middle on the Rudd government's ETS. However, only Turnbull publicly signalled his difference from the new party policy, which was in direct contradiction to the previous position all had publicly adhered to.

Partly because his militant oppositionism unnerved Labor, bringing reversals from Kevin (greatest moral challenge of our time; let's put it off indefinitely) Rudd and Julia (public forum) Gillard, this stance served the Coalition well in the lead-up to last year's election. Abbott's ''Direct Action'' slogan remained largely uncosted and its environmental effectiveness unexamined, while the diplomatic isolation into which his stance would cast Australia also went unremarked.

From July on, there are likely to be majorities in both houses of Parliament supporting action to combat global warming, and the Prime Minister has committed herself - seemingly irreversibly - to introducing a carbon tax.

These mongrels should hang their head ground-zero low with shame:

We can expect loud and unanimous outrage from the Liberals on the perfidy of Labor and the Greens, but whenever the substance of global warming is discussed or the complexities of policy responses to mitigate it arise - Turnbull aside - they will seek to be as mute and inscrutable as their 1960 Laotian counterparts.

Turnbull aside... who is the stand-out Australian politician from the major parties in showing the conviction of his beliefs with respect to carbon mitigation. I believe this will stand him in good stead in the future. Gillard is on notice. Not from Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott, who has two conflicting positions. But from the Liberal who has not used up his moral capital.

Watch this space. Climate change politics is the most fascinating politics of all, including Australia's, as even the doyen of the local denier press has noted.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Hidden carbon price: We already pay $170 a tonne

Every since Gillard's unsurprising statement a week ago that there will be a carbon price set by the end of next financial year (in preparation for an ETS in a few years) there has been Federal mayhem. Death-threats, comparisons of Gillard to Gaddafi, and shrieks of outrage as Tony Abbott marshals his "People's Revolt" via angry, right-wing shock-jockery and his Liberal troops hyperbolate the morning's talking point all over the MSM.

From all this noise, one fact stands out at me. It's why the Coalition's 'government-picked-winner' approach must be never be put into practice:

Australians are paying a hidden carbon price of about $170 a tonne through a range of inefficient renewable energy programs. Wouldn't it be more sensible for the community to pay an explicit one that creates the conditions to lower greenhouse gas emissions through a market-based scheme?

Set a carbon price to prepare the economy for an ETS that will let the market do all the hard work of pricing. Why is it that Labor/Greens are pushing a market approach to reduce emissions, while the Liberals are still planning to smuggle in their command-controlled model should they stymie the Government's plans? To quote Barnaby Joyce this week:

"Every day just gets weirder and weirder,"

It sure does.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

America's $1 trillion carbon market twelve years away

clipped from environment.newscientist.com The new US president will most likely see in the emergence of a colossal carbon trading market, worth $1 trillion a year by 2020, according to a report released on Thursday. Another report, also out this week, estimates the US could be trading $600 billion in pollution credits annually by 2015. Either way, "it will be the largest environmental market of its kind," says Tiffany McCormick Potter, senior analyst for Point Carbon, which produced the 2015 estimate. According to Point Carbon, the European carbon trading scheme totalled $42 billion in 2007. The 2020 estimate comes from New Energy Finance, another financial analysis firm which focuses on environmental markets. Both firms have this week published independent reports on the future of carbon trading in the US.

Will Howard be alive to trade carbon?

Yesterday winter officially began in Australia, yet here I am still wearing me favourite t-shirt and blogging away in me favourite grundies. You, dear reader, should consider yourself seriously honoured.

So it is with a certain sense of irony that I witness that our prime global warming denialist, Prime Minister John Howard, release his Report on the Task Group on Emissions Trading into such an under-dressed climate. While his unprecedented acknowledgement of the need for emissions trading is a radical departure from his previous stances, and a welcome one, it is still hard to throw off those nagging doubts sparked by those within own party referring to him as The Lying Rodent.

ANALYSIS OF THE REPORT OF PRIME MINISTER HOWARD’S
TASK GROUP ON EMISSIONS TRADING

by Wadard

1. The PM's terms of reference are biased towards sustaining coal and uranium exports.

“Australia enjoys major competitive advantages through the possession of large reserves of fossil fuels and uranium. In assessing Australia’s further contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, these advantages must be preserved.
Against this background the Task Group will be asked to advise on the nature and design of a workable global emissions trading system in which Australia would be able to participate. The Task Group will advise and report on additional steps that might be taken, in Australia, consistent with the goal of establishing such a system."

2. Some of the submissions by interested parties are confidential, that is, not publicly available for scrutiny.

Why so? Is transparency not important? The list of 'non-confidential' submitting parties is here:

3. The Task Group Committee comprises of senior bureaucrats, mainly economists, and fossil-fuel industry representatives, not scientists or renewable energy experts.

The Bureaucrats:
David Borthwick – Economist and former member of the Office of the Prime Minister; Ken Henry - Secretary to the Treasury in 2005; Michael L’Estrange - secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Mark Patterson - the chairman of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (2001).

The Fossil Fuel & Industry Representatives:
Peter Coates - coal miner Xstrata; Tony Concannon - International Power managing director; Chris Lynch - BHP Billiton executive director; John Marlay - Alumina Chief Executive; Margaret Jackson - chairwoman of Qantas; John Stewart - National Australia Bank.

So honestly - do I really need to take this analysis further?

If the godfathers of the local Mafia and the Yakusa, the snakeheads of the Chinese Triads, as well as the financial manager from the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan opium franchise, their Russian Crime Syndicate partners, and the Columbian Cocaine Cartels were all brought together at the taxpayers' expense to form a working group to develop a framework to combat drug trafficking, and they sought submissions from the Banditos, Nomads and Hells Angels motorbike gangs, amongst others, would you read their report with confidence or amusement?

Well, that's how I feel about this task force's report, which you can download here and judge for yourself. Let me know what you think.

I don't like being so cynical, but Howard's track record in the integrity stakes makes Judas look like Jesus. I may be wrong to be so dismissive; it's just that they want to wait to 2012 to kick-off their carbon trading. That's five years away; Given Howard's advanced age I wonder whether he is having a lend of us all?

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Carbon dollars help individuals fight climate change

Carbon rationing with penalties for private citizens who exceeded quotas might be needed to tackle climate change, according to the former NSW premier, Bob Carr.

clipped from www.smh.com.au Carbon credit debate gets personal A range of regulations and carbon trading schemes were emerging in Britain and the US, but rationing an individual's carbon use was one of the most interesting ideas, Mr Carr told a business conference in Sydney yesterday. Speaking as chairman of an advisory council for think tank the Climate Institute, Mr Carr said the British Labour Government and the Conservative Party Opposition were taking the idea seriously. "Here is the most exciting concept. That is, the idea that every citizen be given a carbon credit," he told the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. "Every time you buy fuel at the garage or pay a gas or electricity bill or get on a plane, carbon will be deducted from your account.

Global Warning Climate Change

British Treasury hard astern, Stern steams ahead.

Sir Nicholas Stern, the globally coolest economist and the author of the world's most influential recent report on climate change is exiting the good ship British Treasury. Clashes with Chancellor Gordon Brown have been rumoured. There seems to be something of principle at stake for Sir Nicholas Stern. :::[SMH]

The news came a day after Mr Brown made a pre-budget statement that embraced virtually none of the recommendations of the Stern report, and dashed hopes the Blair Government would move swiftly to a new environmental agenda.

Brown had been trying to sideline Stern by commissioning him to write the report, but this came back to bite him on the bum. There will be more in the future as the reality of global warming keeps bumping into the rhetoric of the denialist and skeptic.

Sir Nicholas issued a statement saying he had planned the move for some time and had hugely enjoyed working with Mr Brown. But relations between the two men are widely known to be tense, a Downing Street policy adviser said. It was understood that Mr Brown had initially asked Sir Nicholas to write his report in order to sideline him, and that it only achieved global prominence because of its timeliness.

The report says that fighting climate change will save, not cost, the global economy money, and has been hugely influential around the world. Many environment ministers quoted it in addresses to the global summit in Nairobi last month. The Guardian described Sir Nicholas, 60, as the first climate change rock star.

He will leave in March to take a chair at the London School of Economics. The Government lured him from the World Bank, where he was chief economist, in 2003.

The Stern report recommends using carbon and other green taxes as part of a comprehensive response to global warming. Its most significant finding is that the cost of effectively fighting climate change is just 1 percent of GDP. Just 1 percent.

Mr Brown's proposed new air tax on 75% of of flights increases amount to just 0.1 per cent of GDP. From £5 ($A12) to £10.

Global Warning Climate Change Global Economy The Stern Report UK Carbon Tax