Last Thursday, Malcolm Turnbull was the prime minister of Australia. By the end of this week, he’ll be just another guy in Sydney.
 |
| President Donald Trump speaks next to then-Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull at the White House in February. |
Turnbull was felled by climate-change policy. His attempt at a moderate, even milquetoast energy bill—which included some mild cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions—proved too aggressive for his co-partisans. On Friday, members of Australia’s center-right Liberal Party voted him out of office.
Pity for Turnbull, though at least he can he can trudge home to his mansion on Sydney Harbor. And pity for Australia, which lately has had some trouble keeping its prime ministers in office. (It’s churned through six of them since 2007.) Yet even setting that context aside, Turnbull’s tumble remains a disquieting sign for anyone hoping for an aggressive global climate policy. In Australia—where global warming has contributed to the die-off of half the coral in the Great Barrier Reef since 2016—even a mild climate bill could not pass under a conservative government.
Read the story from The Atlantic by Robinson Meyer - “The Global Rightward Shift on Climate Change.”
No comments:
Post a Comment