The straight-forward climate question Josh Frydenberg will not answer

Is climate change an existential risk to Australian society and the world community? It's not a difficult question, but one that climate minister Frydenberg has failed to answer.

Climate warming has been a factor in the Darfur crisis.

The response should not be too challenging. An Australian Senate report released on 17 May this year, after an inquiry into the implications of climate change for Australia’s national security, found that climate change is “a current and existential national security risk”. It says an existential risk is “one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development”.

The report was not opposed by the government Senators on the inquiry committee. Mark Crosweller, the Director General of Emergency Management Australia, Sherri Goodman, an expert witness from the USA, and the former senior Shell executive and emissions trading advisor to the Howard government, Ian Dunlop, put the issue of existential climate security risks on the inquiry’s agenda.

Read the story from Climate Code Red - “The straight-forward climate question Josh Frydenberg will not answer.”

Sharyn points our a bad example from Turnbull and Frydenberg

From today's Age ........

Defining clean to include dirty

Federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg yesterday revealed that the government is considering changing the mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to allow it to invest in coal-fired power generation.

Making dirty clean with the stroke of a pen.

 

The CEFC’s purpose is to promote renewable and clean energy. Needless to say, coal is neither renewable nor clean. In an ordinary cabinet of a well-functioning government, an environment minister would step in at this point to strenuously oppose such a proposal on the grounds of, well, everything.In the Turnbull government, Frydenberg is also the environment minister. 

The “new” coal-power stations that he and his colleagues tout are marginally (around a quarter) less dirty than the dirtiest old ones, still dirtier than gas and significantly more emissions-heavy than the current CEFC investment guidelines allow. In other words, the government proposes to redefine clean to include dirty. 

Read The Monthly story - “Defining clean to include dirty.”