Australia’s Liberal and Labor parties’ backward Climate Change policies
In its report Australia’s Renewable Energy Future, released early this year, the Australian Academy of Science says Australia has the potential to replace coal with renewable energy for its baseload power supply, accelerating the nation’s advance to a low-carbon economy.
Fossilised approach to power, Cheryl Jones, The Australian, August 11, 2010
BOTH Labor and Coalition policy on carbon trading will damage Australia’s emerging renewable energy industry, leading scientists have warned.
Michael Dopita, co-editor of an Australian Academy of Science report on renewable energy, says Labor’s plan to delay the introduction of an emissions trading scheme and the Coalition’s plan to go without one will send some start-up companies developing renewable energy to the wall. And climatologist David Karoly of the University of Melbourne says Australia will lose its “first-mover advantage” unless it acts quickly to introduce a market-based emissions abatement scheme to power the switch from fossil fuels to renewables.
The comments come as Australia goes into retrograde motion on climate change policy in the lead-up to the election.
Labor has said it would defer carbon trading until at least 2012 if re-elected. The decision came after the defeat of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation in the Senate last year when the Coalition, the Greens and the cross-bench voted against it.
It also followed the lack of agreement in international climate talks in Copenhagen last December.
The Coalition opposes emissions trading, saying the scheme will increase the cost of living, penalise business and destroy jobs.
Dopita, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University, tells the HES an emissions trading scheme is “essential to secure the roll-out of renewables on any reasonable timeframe”. Renewables “will not be developed” without carbon trading, he says.
“They will be developed overseas and, when eventually Australia needs to do something, it will then be locked into buying all the technology. The indigenous technology would have been choked off and killed.”
Karoly agrees.
“Australia would miss out on opportunities that exist to lead the world in the development of renewable technology for export throughout Asia,” he says.
In its report Australia’s Renewable Energy Future, released early this year, the academy says Australia has the potential to replace coal with renewable energy for its baseload power supply, accelerating the nation’s advance to a low-carbon economy.
………..Dopita says neither the Labor Party nor the Coalition is offering enough support to lead the renewable energy industry out of “the valley of death”.
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1.This month.
The Road to War brings a sharp focus to why it is not in Australia’s best interest to be dragged into a war with China which will almost inevitably go nuclear very quickly. The filmmaker has interviewed some of Australia’s senior foreign policy analysts who have vast experience behind them in analysing what really is going on here as the United States rattles its sabres with China. And sets us up to be its proxy, like the poor Ukranians have been fed into the Meatgrinder. So America can remain the Top Dog. The Road to War reveals how the United States through its spy base at Pine Gap and by stationing six nuclear capable B52 bombers in the Top End (without permission from the traditional owners) is making Australia a prime nuclear target if the current war of words suddenly melts down into full scale war.
The Road to War shows the implicit connection between Carbon emissions (the US military uses a whopping 70% of America’s annual petroleum to move its armies and vast War Machine around the globe to its 800+ military bases..but under a loophole wangled at Kyoto, the US military does not have to report its C02 annual emissions). The Road to War starts screening at selected cities and regional centres in March. See the trailer end for details.
Antinuclear 
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