‘Disappointing': Business leaders slam Morrison government on energy policy

The federal government faces a mounting business backlash over energy policy as leaders of some of nation's biggest companies and most influential lobby groups have publicly lamented the ditching of the National Energy Guarantee and blasted its proposed replacement.

BlueScope CEO Mark Vassella said the government has
 wasted the potential of the National Energy Guarantee.CREDIT:

One of the country's biggest manufacturers, Bluescope, on Friday singled out the decision to scrap the National Energy Guarantee as disappointing.

BlueScope chief executive Mark Vassella said the steelmaker, which employs thousands of people around Australia, understood energy policy was "complex and political" but the challenges in the sector needed to be addressed.

Read the story from The Age - “‘Disappointing': Business leaders slam Morrison government on energy policy.”

Prime Minister Trudeau and President Macron Are Taking on Climate Change Together

It was last June that the US, the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, announced it was leaving the Paris Climate Accord.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, says goodbye
 to French President Emmanuel Macron after a meeting
 at the Elysee Palace in Paris, April 16, 2018.

Now, the leaders of Canada and France are joining forces to combat climate change together.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron met in Paris on Monday to confirm a partnership in the fight against climate change.

The countries agreed to work more closely on tackling targets laid out in the Paris Agreement, according to a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office.

Read the story by Jackie Marchildon from Global Citizen - “Prime Minister Trudeau and President Macron Are Taking on Climate Change Together.”

Victorian coal to keep lights on in Japan, says Turnbull

On one of Victoria’s hottest mid-April days on record, Australian and Japanese leaders gathered at the base of Loy Yang, the state’s biggest power plant, to launch a project to secure the long-term future of its vast brown coal reserves.

Malcolm Turnbull says brown coal might
one day keep the lights on in Japan.

If this $496 million pilot project to convert the Latrobe Valley’s brown coal into liquid hydrogen pays off, there is hope that a new export industry will be created that will fuel the valley’s coal-dependent economy for many decades to come.

Speaking at the launch of the project between Australia and Japan in the Latrobe Valley, Prime Minister Turnbull highlighted the government's agnostic position on energy, one of the main tenets of the National Energy Guarantee, which has been used to increase the role of coal in Australia's energy mix.

Read the story from The Age by Adam Carey and Cole Latimer - “Victorian coal to keep lights on in Japan, says Turnbull.”

Countries made only modest climate-change promises in Paris. They’re falling short anyway

Barely two years ago, after weeks of intense bargaining in Paris, leaders from 195 countries announced a global agreement that once had seemed impossible. For the first time, the nations of the world would band together to reduce humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels in an effort to hold off the most devastating effects of climate change.

The Eiffel Tower lights up in December 2015 with an
advocacy message for the United Nations Climate Change
 Conference in Paris.

“History will remember this day,” the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, said amid a backdrop of diplomats cheering and hugging.

Two years later, the euphoria of Paris is colliding with the reality of the present.

Read The Washington Post story by Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney - “Countries made only modest climate-change promises in Paris. They’re falling short anyway.”

Pacific Islands Forum: Climate change and illegal fishing on agenda for Samoa meeting

Leaders from around the region will attempt to form a collective voice on such varied topics as climate change, illegal fishing and labour mobility as they gather in Samoa's capital Apia for the annual Pacific Islands Forum.

This year's gathering of Pacific leaders comes
 as the Australian Government pledges to
renew its engagement with the region.

The official theme of this year's forum is The Blue Pacific: Our Sea of Islands, Our Security through Sustainable Development, Management and Conservation.

In an address to journalists ahead of the forum, Samoa's Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi said the theme provided a new narrative for how the forum engaged with the world with a unified voice.

"By the sheer fact of our geography, such as trends associated with shifts in the centres of global power, this places the Pacific at the centre of contemporary global geopolitics," he said.

Read the ABC News story - “Pacific Islands Forum: Climate change and illegal fishing on agenda for Samoa meeting.”

Australia - once a leader, now a laggard

Australia was once among the leaders in taking steps to mitigate climate change, it now slums it with the laggards.

The Guardian reports that Australia has become an “anti-climate” climate influence on international efforts to slow global warming.

In a story headed: “Australia slides down to the bottom on climate change performance index”, it was noted that we have dropped to close to bottom of a ranking of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters.

The ranking covers levels of emissions, renewable energy supply, trends in energy efficiency and climate policy, was developed by the thinktank, Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe and was discussed in the second week of the United Nations climate change negotiations in Warsaw, Poland.

Australia’s intention to repeal its carbon price brought about by the election of a government that is dismantling the rest of the country’s climate mitigation infrastructure has been stated as a reason for its falling status.

The ice melts and like Nero we fiddle

by Robert McLean

 



Gustave Flaubert who said: “To
be stupid, selfish and have
good health are the
three requirements for
happiness. Though if stupidity
 is lacking, all is lost”.

Several Beneath the Wisteria supporters have read one of the latest pieces from George Monbiot and one asked “What are we doing about it?”

Sadly and pessimistically, I would suggest “very little” even though many corporations, organizations, companies and individuals claim they are “green”, the melting of the Arctic ice and a the warming of the world suggests we are doing nought.

Although individual efforts are honourable and warrant applause and even though pressure from the bottom is critical and essential to the achievement of a lasting change, what the world needs, urgently, is a top down driven change to our way of life.

The true realities of our changing climate will settle upon humanity this century and what are mostly hollow claims of being green will play no role in enabling us to cope with the emerging difficulties.

The world needs, right now, courageous and charismatic leaders able to illustrate to the business as usual boosters that our present way of life is not only unsustainable, but seriously worsening the state of the world.

Some argue the technology will provide the answers and while that may be a comforting thought and within that be a wonderful endorsement of science; the same science the climate change skeptics not only question, but mostly disbelieve.

The question is not really simply about an agreement or otherwise with science for it seems to be for deeper, stretching to be an ideological battle; a polarization that has a religious-like energy in which there is only right or wrong and seemingly no neutral ground on which people can gather, an isthmus from which they can reach down to save the world, from its own stupidity.

Sitting here writing, I look up at a Gustave Flaubert quote I have on the wall that says: “To be stupid, selfish and have good health are the three requirements for happiness. Though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost”.  

Humanity seems to put hedonistic happiness ahead of all else and in doing so allow its stupidity to bolt free, selfishly disabling the acclaimed good sense of humans and so risking the near ideal atmospheric conditions that have allowed humans for flourish.

Monbiot’s article, The Heat of the Moment, is frightening reading, but something we must contemplate and act on, quickly.