Climate change worsens as 'policy paralysis' deepens

(Quantum mechanics and climate change are similar – neither is understood by most people. However, it is the latter, climate change, that has become remarkably politicized and so mired in time-wasting debate during which the implications of this humanity threatening difficulty worsen every year and so as those complications worsen, those unable to accept the science ratchet up their rhetoric. Here Lenore Taylor writes for The Guardian about the “policy paralysis” in Australia – Robert McLean)

A coal truck hauls its load in the Hunter Valley.
Josh Frydenberg says no big changes are under
 consideration in the government’s climate policy.

Almost every group with a financial, intellectual or ethical interest in salvaging a workable climate policy is now deep in an urgent debate about how Australia can break a decade of policy paralysis. Everyone except the Turnbull government, that is.

The debate, involving big business, small business, investors, the government’s own independent climate advisers, academics, environmentalists, the welfare lobby and the unions, is predicated on the obvious conclusion that our policy – as it stands – cannot deliver the cuts to greenhouse emissions that are domestically necessary and which Australia has promised internationally.

But like the emperor with no clothes, continuing with the grand parade even after the whole crowd has finally declared him naked, the new environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, still insists Australia is “transitioning successfully with the policies we already have in place”.

Every stakeholder is hoping – based on plenty of nudges and winks from Frydenberg’s predecessor Greg Hunt – that a review scheduled for next year will turn the existing Direct Action policy into a workable policy, probably a type of emissions trading scheme. Labor’s election policy edged closer to what the Coalition’s policy could eventually become, offering, according to the Business Council of Australia, a “bridge to bipartisanship”

Read Lenore Taylor’s story in The Guardian - “Gaping chasm between Coalition's climate mantra and the real debate.”