Climate sums fail

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten snapped at his Darwin press conference today, calling for an end to the “malicious and stupid” technophobic debate about Australia’s response to climate change. He is dead right: we only ever talk about the cost of action, and never about the cost of inaction, which is spiralling out of control. And the debate about the cost of action, when we do have it, is myopic. It was already looking grim when Prime Minister Scott Morrison coined the term “fair dinkum power”, but we hit peak ridiculous last week with warnings that a modest target for new electric vehicle sales by 2030 meant the death of the weekend.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has called for an end to the
“malicious and stupid” technophobic debate about Australia’s
 response to climate change.

Things got slightly more serious in Adelaide on Tuesday, when a grumpy Shorten declined to take questions about the cost of Labor’s emissions reduction targets, and today The Australian suggested a figure of $25 billion [$], by adding up the total value of international permits that may be bought over a decade under Labor’s baseline and credit scheme for heavy industry. The prime minister promptly raised that to $35 billion, and for good measure opened the door to uneconomic, unsafe nuclear [$] energy – another example of outmoded thinking.

Read the story from The Monthly by Paddy Manning - “Climate sums fail.”