An existential threat - There’s a climate emergency … don’t tell the federal government

There is an air of pinch-me unreality about Australian politics as parliament’s work is conducted in apparent denial of the existential threat presented by climate change, which even the CEO of one of the world’s largest miners, BHP’s Andrew Mackenzie, acknowledged [$] in a major speech overnight. Backbencher Barnaby Joyce told the House this week that there was “not one thing that this parliament can do to change the weather – not one thing”. In that particularly boneheaded assessment he appears to be at one with the floundering minister for energy and emissions reductions, Angus Taylor, who squirmed his way through question after question from the Opposition yesterday, as he tried to avoid the undeniable fact that Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are going up as a result of this country’s climate policy vacuum.

BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison showed his complete disengagement with a classic bit of climate babble in Question Time yesterday: “We had to turn around a million tonnes in abatement over the course of our efforts,” he claimed, “and that’s what we have done.” A million tonnes or 700 million tonnes (the deficit the government claims to have inherited from Labor) – it’s all the same to the PM.

Taylor may have misled the House yesterday by saying that he had “no association and have remained at arm’s length at all times from Jam Land”, the company that is under investigation for alleged illegal land-clearing, as Labor pointed out in renewed questions today. Taylor tried a bit of revisionism, saying he had no association with the investigation and that his interest in Jam Land had been properly disclosed and widely reported. He will brazen it out – more proof that misleading parliament is not what it used to be

Read the story from The Monthly by Paddy Manning - “An existential threat  - 

There’s a climate emergency … don’t tell the federal government.”