Business community unites to urge Coalition to abandon energy 'big stick’

Australia’s biggest energy and business groups have banded together to urge the government to abandon its “big stick” approach to energy legislation, warning the divestiture powers the government craves will impede investment and create genuine sovereign risk.

 Australian business groups warn the government’s
‘big stick’ approach to energy legislation will impede
 investment and create sovereign risk. 

Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor threatened to break up Australia’s energy companies if power prices didn’t come down – by utilising commonwealth divestment powers never used before in Australia – through legislation due to be introduced to parliament this week.

The proposal, labelled an “extreme measure” by the energy sector, had already created waves in the Coalition party room, with dissenters uncomfortable with the prospect of such a dramatic market intervention.

Read the story from The Guardian by Amy Remeikis - “Business community unites to urge Coalition to abandon energy 'big stick’.”

Climate change action off the agenda under Morrison government

Energy Minister Angus Taylor has unveiled a new energy policy focused exclusively on reducing electricity prices, in a strong signal the Morrison government will abandon all efforts to lower carbon emissions.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor with PM Scott Morrison

The move comes a week after the issue of climate change precipitated the ousting of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

“My No.1 priority is very, very simple,” Mr Taylor said in a speech on Thursday. “It is to reduce power prices, and to do this while we keep the lights on.”

He would do this, he said, by empowering consumers to shop around, cracking down on price gouging, and increasing “reliable supply” – a phrase that has come to refer to keeping coal-fired power stations running.

Read the story from The New Daily by James Fernyhough - “Climate change action off the agenda under Morrison government.”

Dear Mr Adani 'invest in solar not coal'

Read this letter to "Mr Adani" - 

We are leaders from many faith traditions and communities across Australia. We are writing to you to ask you to abandon your proposed mine and instead use the same money to invest in solar energy in North Queensland.

Interview: Ian Chubb and Penny Sackett

Emma Alberica.

Emma Alberici speaks to former chief scientists Ian Chubb and Penny Sackett about Tony Abbott's comments on climate change and his view that the federal government should abandon a Clean Energy Target.

Watch the Lateline report - “Interview: Ian Chubb and Penny Sackett.”

We're under attack from climate change and our only hope is to mobilize as we did in WWII

In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”

In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region’s coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to white bone-yards.

Day after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total evacuation of a city of 90,000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods to threaten the priceless repository of art in the Louvre. The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The Zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the heads of newborn babies across an entire continent; panicked health ministers in seven countries are now urging women not to get pregnant. And as in all conflicts, millions of refugees are fleeing the horrors of war, their numbers swelling daily as they’re forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.

World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.

Bill McKibben says: “We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.”