Antinuclear

With Scott Morrison as Australia’s new Prime Minister- no hope for action on climate change

“Scoal-Mo” as PM. What does that mean for climate and energy policy? REneweconomy Giles Parkinson & Sophie Vorrath, 24 August 2018

 It says something about the state of Australia’s politics that the new prime minister, the man who brandished a lump of coal in parliament, is considered a moderate, at least in comparison to the forces he beat to the job.

……a relief for the renewable energy industry in Australia – because it is clear that Dutton may have led Australia out of the Paris climate agreement and even brought renewable energy schemes to a crashing halt.

But it may not be cause for celebration. Morrison will lead and will have as his deputy Josh Frydenberg, the man who put together the National Energy Guarantee that proposed no new investment in wind and solar for a decade.

Morrison is known as “Sco-Mo”, an abbreviation of his name. But he might just as well be known as “Scoal-Mo” after brandishing a lump of coal thoughtfully lacquered by the Minerals Council of Australia in parliament in February last year.

But we were. In doing this, Morrison was pinning his colours to the mast of energy policy idiocy of the sort you find in the Murdoch media and on talk back radio, and on the front and back benches of the Coalition.

And Morrison dived even deeper into the murky depths of ignorance a few months later.

South Australia had followed that outage in February – caused by the failure of a gas plant to switch on – by building the Tesla big battery – in just 100 days – but Morrison decried it as being as useful as the Big Banana………

Morrison, as Treasurer, also ignored climate change in his most recent budget, making no mention of it in his speech, apart from insisting that Australia would “maintain our responsible and achievable emissions reduction target at 26-28 per cent and not the 45 per cent demanded by the opposition.”……

Right now, there is no policy in place. Australia’s emissions are rising, predicted to miss the weak 2030 target by a wide margin, and there is complete uncertainty about the National Energy Guarantee that Frydenberg has been spending a year putting together with the Energy Security Board and the big business lobbies.

Frydenberg has had to run the line between good energy policy and the madness of the right wing, and ended up with a policy proposal that sought no emissions reductions from the sector that can deliver the cheapest……https://reneweconomy.com.au/scoal-mo-as-pm-what-does-that-mean-for-climate-and-energy-policy-26556/

August 24, 2018 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, climate change - global warming, energy, politics