Catholics must be cringing at Cardinal Pell’s views on climate change
The coolist Cardinal’s hopes were dashed a week later when data came in confirming that 2010 was, indeed, the hottest year on record – even despite the European deep freeze………………….
Climate policies slashed to pay for a natural disaster, Crikey, 29 Jan 2011, “……..Catholic leader Cardinal George Pell, who influences an even greater congregation, wrote a week earlier of his delight at the extraordinary freeze that had hit Europe in late December – an event that just so happened to have killed dozens and ruined the travel plans of millions – because he thought it disproved the theory of man-made global warming.
“Nothing so delicious has happened,” he wrote, since President Obama’s aircraft was snowed in at the global warming summit in Copenhagen in 2009. The coolist Cardinal’s hopes were dashed a week later when data came in confirming that 2010 was, indeed, the hottest year on record – even despite the European deep freeze………………….
The $430 million ‘cash for clunkers’ scheme is axed, along with Green Start, but so is the remaining $234 million in the Green Car Innovation Fund. Funding programs for utility-scale solar and carbon capture and storage are cut and deferred, and solar cities and solar hot water schemes are brought to an early end. That’s half a billion dollars out of solar.
The closing of some of these programs will not be lamented…….Penny Wong, the former federal climate change minister, now in finance and vested with the responsibility of identifying sacrificial lambs, was never a fan of these schemes. Most were constructs from the offices of energy minister Martin Ferguson and industry minister Kim Carr, and she didn’t like them…….
One thing appears clear – Labor is being progressively seduced by industry groups and lobbyists who argue that complementary measures are not needed with a carbon price. This seemed to be the thrust of Gillard’s argument at the National Press Club on Thursday: The green schemes were cut because they did not deliver a low enough cost of abatement. In the case of clunkers, certainly not, but the other schemes were designed to support the early stages of development of technologies that can and – like solar – will defray costs elsewhere and, in the words of US President Barack Obama just a day earlier, underwrite the industries of the future. This does not look good for the development of the cleantech industry in Australia. The motor industry is in uproar, and the solar industry is mortified that it has been subject to $500 million of funding cuts and deferrals
Climate policies slashed to pay for a natural disaster | Crikey
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