28 April 2016, RenewEconomy, Climate policy becomes trench warfare, once again. The release of Labor’s climate policy has led immediately to a resumption of World War I style trench warfare. The opening salvo, the pre-prepared advertisements and admonishments, was blasted off within hours, to be followed by tunnelling under the Labor trenches, minefields and more misery for both major Parties and for the population they are elected to serve. The misery is the suffering from current and future ill health which could be prevented if progress could be made in a bilateral, constructive manner. Labor’s policy has significant health implications because health is closely linked to energy policy and it is in this light that Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) makes comment. Our profession is reminded that WHO regards climate change as the biggest health threat of the present century. Our involvement is therefore a vital professional commitment to the health care of communities and patients. Good energy policy has the ability to provide the co-benefits of reduced air pollution which contributes to death and illness from heart and lung disease in thousands of Australians while at the same time reducing green house emissions which result in climate change and thousands of deaths world wide and many in Australia from increasing storm, flood and fire. Read More here
Category Archives: Australian Response
26 April 2016, RenewEconomy, Turnbull’s evolving climate strategy: When less is more. The Coalition government under Malcolm Turnbull has a rapidly evolving strategy on climate change and clean energy – announce new jobs and investments, but only after cutting even more jobs and investments. Those were the allegations levelled at the Turnbull government on Tuesday after the CSIRO announced a new climate change research centre in what appears to be a patch-up job by innovation minister Christopher Pyne and environment minister Greg Hunt, and Hunt’s announcement of an “extra” $50 million for the Great Barrier Reef. The CSIRO cuts are particularly galling for the science community. A new division to be based in Hobart, combining with elements of the Bureau of Meteorology, will employ 40 climate scientists. But CSIRO chief Larry Marshall, intent on converting the CSIRO from focusing on the public good to revenue opportunities with business, says 75 jobs will still be lost from the climate division, albeit down from 110. CSIRO climate scientists dismiss this as a “con” job. Professor Dave Griggs, a former director of Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University said it was like “trying to put a sticking plaster over a gaping wound.” Similarly, Hunt on Tuesday announced $50 million of “new” funding for the Great Barrier Reef, which the government has finally realised is under grave threat following the worst bleaching event on record, which has touched more than 90 per cent of the reef. The Greens said: Not so fast, arguing that the funds simply replace monies cut in the past two years – $40 million from the Reef Water Quality Program in 2014, and $10 million from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Read More here
21 April 2016, ECOS/CSIRO, Systematically addressing disaster resilience in Australia could save billions. The cost of replacing essential infrastructure damaged by disasters will reach an estimated $17 billion in the next 35 years, according to the latest set of reports from the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities.The reports, Building Resilient Infrastructure and the Economic Costs of Social Impact of Disasters, outline the costs associated with replacing essential infrastructure damaged by disasters and provide an overview of the direct costs of physical damage within the total economic cost of disasters. In 2015, the total economic costs of disasters exceeded $9 billion, a figure that is projected to double by 2030 and reach $33 billion per year by 2050 – funds that could be spent elsewhere on other major national projects. During the Roundtable’s launch of the reports at Parliament House last month, risk expert and CEO of reinsurer Munich Re, Heinrich Eder, noted that these projections are based only on economic and population growth. They do not even include the increasingly detectable effects of climate change. These are big, and socially traumatic, numbers. Long-term they have the same sort of potential to create holes in national and state budgets as our ageing population does—the subject of repeated Intergenerational Reports and eventual decisions about adjusting retirement age. Read More here
15 April 2016, Renew Economy, Turnbull’s Jekyll and Hyde climate and clean energy policy. Environment minister Greg Hunt this week has been on a mini-tour of Western Australia, with the head of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency – which he wants to de-fund – announcing the sort of grants for solar and battery storage installations that he wants to stop. If there was any hint of irony in praising the work of ARENA and taking credit for the initiatives of an institution that the Coalition has spent much of the last three years trying to abolish, it was not immediately apparent. “The Turnbull government is providing $17 million funding for nine new R&D projects set to deliver renewable energy technologies and solutions suited to the 21st century,” Hunt proudly announced in a press release, before enthusing at the opening about the potential for Australia to lead the world in battery storage. “I’m delighted to announce that in partnership with Synergy, the Australian government is contributing $3.3 million for a community household storing of – solar storage and energy facility,” he told a gathering of media and dignitaries. “Behind us we have 1.1 million hours’ worth of storage. This is the real world, this is the future that is behind us in terms of storage, solar energy on the roofs in front of us, the storage behind us.” And on it went. Indeed, Hunt’s speech was a compilation of everything that people find confusing and dumbfounding about this Turnbull government. Australia will be among the first to formally sign the Paris climate deal, but it still hasn’t the domestic targets or the policies to get anywhere near its share of meeting that agreement; it professes support for wind and solar but has no new developments to show for it; it claims to have brought certainty to the renewable energy industry, when the only certainty in the last three years has been the lack of investment; it hails innovative solar and storage projects and then removes the funding mechanism that makes them possible; it applauds the work of a key agency it has tried to dismantle and finally strips it of funding; it wants to cease grants to clean energy projects “to protect taxpayers money” but then uses grants to polluters as the basis of its emissions reduction fund. Read More here