We have a very fine university in our backyard, with many outstanding scientists and talented students. The University of Queensland has earned its reputation through quality, and the recent resignation of its two top leaders will not greatly alter the view we have of UQ’s accomplishments. But these events should cause the university to go [...]
Tags:coal seam gas·Environment·integrity·jobs·Professor·Professors·University of Queensland
What a contrast. Just as the Cabinet is set to endorse the abandonment of a carbon price as the mainstay of their policy and adopt instead some worthy but all too modest measures on household and community carbon emissions, the citizen group Beyond Zero Emissions launches (tomorrow) a bold action plan to completely realign Australia’s [...]
Tags:Beyond Zero Emissions·energy·Energy Policy·Environment·Zero Carbon Australia 2020
Three images of oil that speak for themselves. The first, courtesy of Paul Rademacher’s site, shows the extent of the BP oil spill in relation to S.E. Queensland. It completely dwarfs not just the electorate of Ryan, but would extend from Noosa to Ballina on the NSW coast, and from Stanthorpe in the south-west to a [...]
Tags:Energy Policy·Environment·Oil·oil spill·Paul Rademacher·peak oil·Queensland·Steve Sorrell·URR
Results from the Lowy Institute’s Sixth Annual Poll have been reported to imply a dramatic loss of concern on the part of Australian voters about climate change. The Courier Mail, for example, reported (accurately) that “The sixth poll from the Lowy think tank also showed that Australians remained committed to acting on greenhouse gases” and [...]
Tags:2010·climate change·CO2·dead issue·Environment·federal election·Lowy poll·Ryan·temperature
As a university student in the 1970′s I was given a slender volume written by the UC Berkely economic historian Carlo Cippolla, Economic History of World Population (1962). No other book has ever changed my view of the world so much. In laying out the story of human life through the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, [...]
Tags:2010·candidate·Environment·federal election·Greens·Queensland·Ryan·Ryan electorate·Sandra Bayley
In 2007 Kevin Rudd and Labor made climate change legislation the centre-piece of their campaign. They introduced a profoundly inadequate bill, acted as if nobody else had anything to say on the matter, went off in a huff when they couldn’t pass it, and then refused an overture by the Greens for an interim carbon [...]
Tags:abandons·ALP·Environment·ETS·Kevin Rudd·Labor
Below is the Jiangsu Meilan Chemical Company, Taozhou City, China. The refrigerant HFC-22 produced here has a by-product, HFC-23, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases known (11,700 times greater warming effect than carbon dioxide). Under the Kyoto Protocol, the company receives credits for the destruction of this gas, which has been occurring for three [...]
Anyone who puts up their hand for election has a duty to state how they would vote on crucial legislation, and why. So in this final week of the ETS debate I’ll make my position absolutely clear, starting with its basis: 1. The only uncertainty about climate change is its exact extent and timing. Few [...]
Tags:ALP·climate change·CPRS·emissions trading scheme·Environment·ETS·Greens·Labor·Larissa Waters·Liberal·LNP·Nick Xenophon·Ron Boswell·Senate
The report that a senior environmental economist has been prevented by his employer – the CSIRO – from publishing in a peer-reviewed journal an article apparently critical of emissions trading compared to more direct policy options is highly revealing. It tells us that freedom of expression, even by experts, even on a topical matter of [...]
Tags:academic freedom·climate change policy·CSIRO·Environment·ETS·Labor·Spash
The Senate has given us a reprieve from the Government’s highly deficient Emissions Trading Scheme, but the warmed-over version being floated by the Liberals is no better…. and gives even more away to the worst polluters. The major parties have failed us badly in this crucial policy area. The Labor Party fixed early on a [...]
Tags:coal-fired power plant·Environment·ETS·TEQs·Tradeable Energy Quotas