Antinuclear

Australia’s political leaders ignoring climate change, in lead-up to election

Climate policy silence: Can’t our leaders handle the heat?, ABC, 19 May 16  By Greg Jericho We’re way past the point of pretending the world isn’t warming, so the question really should be why the major parties are so silent on their climate policies during an election campaign, writes Greg Jericho.

One aspect of having an election during winter is that even though temperature records are being broken, climate change is largely out of voters’ minds.

While there is fierce debate over housing affordability, jobs and industrial relations, the debate on climate change has largely been put to the side by Labor and only used by the Government as a fear tactic to cover their own policy failure.

On Monday, NASA announced that April this year was the hottest April on record, marking the seventh month in a row the monthly record had been broken, and the third month in a row of the record being broken by a record amount…….

Since 1880 the record average temperatures for January-April has been set 17 times (including 1880). The average increase in the record has been .07C, and there has never been an increase in the record of more than 0.2C. And yet in the first four months of this year the average temperature was 0.38C above the previous best – an increase 5.3 times greater than the average increase:…..

The temperature in April also meant that the previous 12 months was the warmest 12 month period on record – beating the previous best which was set in March, which beat the previous best which was set in February, which beat the previous best which was set in January, which beat the…

……On the Friday after the budget the Department of Environment released the latest quarterly update on our nation greenhouse gas emissions.

It showed that for the sixth quarter in a row, annual electricity emissions had risen.

The rise began when the carbon price was removed in the middle of 2014. Must be a coincidence, I guess.

The figures also showed that the use of coal in the generation of electricity on the national electricity market was at its highest since 2011:

And yet there is next to no real policy fight over the issue.

We only have Turnbull morphed into Tony Abbott in which he derides the ALP’s policy to introduce an emissions trading scheme for electricity and large industry despite it basically being a copy of the one he himself proposed back in 2009.

That the ALP is now proposing a policy as lame as that suggested by Turnbull when he was leading the Liberal Party in 2009 says a lot about how pitiful it is. At least, however, the ALP has also raised its target for emissions reductions by 2030 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels compared to the Government’s target of 26-28 per cent below.

The debate, however, is largely not about reducing emissions or climate change but rather one set through the frame that any action on climate change will reduce economic growth.

For now pretty much the only time climate change gets a mention from the Government is to attempt to scare voters by suggesting the ALP and the Greens will form an alliance and will introduce a “carbon tax on steroids“. Or we have Greg Hunt saying modelling by the climate change authority shows the ALP’s policy will increase electricity prices by 78 per cent and will cost the economy $600 billion – even though theclimate change authority itself says such analysis is “not correct”.

Moreover, most experts acknowledge that for the LNP’s policy to actually achieve its emissions cuts some form of an emissions trading scheme is required.

But at least while this nothing of a policy debate occurs we can all sit back and enjoy watching the temperature records fall and note as well that record levels of carbon dioxide are being measured in the southern hemisphere.

Surely just another coincidence.

Greg Jericho writes weekly for The Drum. He tweets at @grogsgamut. His personal blog is Grog’s Gamut. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-18/jericho-climate-policy-silence/7424598

May 20, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, election 2016