Antinuclear

Climate change doesn’t get a mention in Turnbull’s budget

Turnbull’s first budget ignores climate change and dumps clean energy: That’s #innovative?, Independent Australia , Giles Parkinson 5 May 2016 So much for Turnbull’s trumpeting of a ‘transitional economy’ with zip $ for climate initiatives and $1.3 billion stripped from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.RenewEconomy‘s Giles Parkinson reports.

CLIMATE CHANGE, prime minister Malcom Turnbull once said, is the ultimate long-term problem that needs to be acted on urgently. But in his first budget as government leader, it is as though the issue does not exist.

Climate change was not even mentioned as a word, or a concept, or even an issue — despite Tuesday’s budget apparently being about growth and jobs for the future. T

here was no new money for climate initiatives and the only mention renewable energy got was to confirm that $1.3 billion in funds would be stripped from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

“There was nothing in the speech, not a word,”Professor John Hewson, a former leader of Liberal Party, told the SolarExpo conference in 2016.

“The slogan is jobs and growth. I would have though that one of the most significant sectors for economic and jobs growth is renewables — I am staggered that it didn’t get a mention in the speech or in the documents.”

Hewson said the decision to remove funding from ARENA was an “absolute tragedy.”

In the budget papers, for instance, there is no extra funding for the Direct Action plan that Turnbull once ridiculed and dismissed as a “fig-leaf” for a climate policy and now forms the basis of the government’s emissions reductions plan, including the Paris agreement it signed just a few weeks ago.

Once the government has spent the current $2.5 billion allocation for handouts to polluters to do pretty much what they were doing anyway, there is zero extra funding for emissions abatement.

The Coalition government might have been expected to shift towards a “modified” scheme that would see Direct Action evolve with its safeguards mechanism to become a baseline and credit scheme. But that’s what Labor suggested last week, and rather than accept the tentative offer of a return to a bipartisan approach to climate policies, the government slammed the door.

It slammed the door, too, on renewable energy innovation. The $1.3 billion of unallocated funds for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency remains excised from the budget papers – even though it remains legislated – while $1 billion is transferred from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and rebadged as a new Clean Energy Innovation Fund.

Don’t expect Labor to stand in the way of that initiative. It voted with the Coalition earlier this week against a Greens motion to protect ARENA, and has since blamed NGOs for not standing up to the Coalition move to de-fund ARENA,so it won’t stand up either.

For his part, Australian Solar Council chief John Grimes was taking a stand on the matter, telling the Energy Storage Conference in Melbourne on Wednesday that the federal government had “taken a backwards step” in defunding ARENA, and not making the Agency’s competitive grants available any more……..https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/turnbulls-first-budget-ignores-climate-change-and-dumps-clean-energy-thats-innovative,8955

May 6, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, climate change - global warming, politics