When it comes to electric cars, we just need someone to turn on the lights

In the 1880s, the idea of electric street lights seemed absurd. If you had to light the streets, you did it with gas. Gas lamps were a fire hazard, smelled terrible and were barely an improvement on total darkness. Apart from that, they were fine.

A Tesla car recharges. The Tesla Model S75 RP has
 lower emissions when charged on the national
electricity grid than a Toyota Corolla.

With the perspective of time, we see a failure of imagination. We forget how the arguments stacked up to our forebears.

Read the comment piece by Alan Finkel in today’s Age - “When it comes to electric cars, we just need someone to turn on the lights.”

How Climate Change Fueled The Far-Right’s Rise And Why We Need To Stop Both

The notion of changing climates influencing politics in nations that have barely felt the effects of it and have the advanced technology and basic infrastructure to weather its worst effects may seem absurd at first glance. In every discussion of rising global temperatures, we’re talking about diseases and food shortages in the developing world, or political unrest in fragile and failing states while wealthy nations adapt and overcome, and isn’t that what has been happening? Yes, it has. All those assumptions are right. But because those assumptions are correct, the West is being indirectly, but very deeply affected by the effects of all this turmoil, and things are bound to get worse unless we do something serious about climate change.

Newly arrived Somali refugees wait outside a UNHCR
processing center at the Ifo refugee camp outside
Dadaab, eastern Kenya, 100 kilometers (62 miles)
from the Somali border. Human-induced climate
 change contributed to low rain levels in East Africa in
2011, making global warming one of the causes of
Somalia’s famine and the tens of thousands of
deaths that followed, a new study has found. 

You see, borders are not supernatural boundaries that allow nations to live in a vacuum and pretend that what happens in another country will always stay there. A painful transition to a post-industrial knowledge economy marked by wild inequalities and disparity in opportunities taking place in the West has created a lot of toxic strain between rural and exurban communities and their urban counterparts in the developed world. It’s arguably the defining struggle of these societies right now. Tens of millions began to feel as if the world was leaving them behind and changing into something they didn’t understand or really want to learn much about because it was too new, too scary.

Read the story on Politech by Greg Fish - “How Climate Change Fueled The Far-Right’s Rise And Why We Need To Stop Both.”

'Rings hollow': Keeping Liddell plant open longer not the way to go, poll finds

Barely one in five voters surveyed want to see the Liddell power station's life extended by either the federal government forcing owners AGL Energy or using public funds to do so, a new poll has found.

AGL says keeping Liddell Power Station open
a further five years from its scheduled closure in
 2022 would cost in the order of $500 million.

The ReachTEL survey of 2176 respondents conducted nationwide for the Climate Council last Wednesday, found even Liberal voters were roughly split – 40 to 39 per cent – over whether a Clean Energy Target that favoured renewable energy was the best approach rather than government fiat or subsidies.

Labor and Greens voters overwhelmingly supported a renewable energy approach rather than extending the Hunter Valley plant's life. About 29 per cent of One Nation supporters, though, backed forcing AGL to keep it open.

"The public has made its mind up on Liddell – and more broadly on the future energy direction of the country," Amanda McKenzie, chief executive of the Climate Council, said. "Australians understand the future is clean energy, whether on cost or environmental grounds.”

Read Peter Hannam’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “'Rings hollow': Keeping Liddell plant open longer not the way to go, poll finds.”