Australia was ready to act on climate 25 years ago, so what happened next?

There’s something about climate change that almost everyone in Australia has either forgotten or never knew in the first place.

 John Howard with Rupert Murdoch. Both men helped to
hold back climate action in Australia in the 1990s and
beyond, according to a new book by the author Maria Taylor.

In 1990 Bob Hawke announced his government wanted the country to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by the year 2005.

For a fleeting moment, it seemed the Australian public, politicians and the media were in agreement with the science.

But a new book investigates how the industries that stood to lose the most worked to undermine the science and entirely reshape the story being told to the public.

“We have been propagandised,” says the author, Maria Taylor.

Read the story from The Guardian by Graham Readfearn - “Australia was ready to act on climate 25 years ago, so what happened next?”

(Listen to an interview with Maria Taylor on “Climate Conversations”.)

Coalition backtrack on Paris deal. ABC cuts corners on energy

Eighteen months on from the Paris agreement, and Australia appears to have forgotten what it signed up for. And it appears to be preparing, if not to abandon ship on the climate deal, then at least to stop rowing.

Federal energy and environment minister Josh Frydenberg told ABC TV Four Corners program titled “Power Failure” broadcast on Monday night that Australia may not reach zero net emissions until the latter half of the century.

He gave the impression that the only thing Australia had signed up for was the weak 2030 target of a 26-28 per cent cut in emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, branded inadequate by the Climate Change Authority and hopelessly so by most other analysis.

Either Frydenberg is suffering from amnesia, or he is once again cowing to the Coalition’s powerful right-wing rump, the same group that deems though shalt not mouth the words carbon price, or infer that renewable energy is good.

Read the story by Giles Parkinson on RenewEconomy - “Coalition backtrack on Paris deal. ABC cuts corners on energy.”