Extinction Rebellion: hitting a nerve at Australia's climate flashpoint

The Extinction Rebellion protesters think you should be angry. They want politicians and opinion columnists to be angry. The more people they upset stopping traffic in the Brisbane city centre – the louder the car horns, the more vicious the insults – the more certain it is they’ll be back.

Extinction Rebellion protesters block
the corner of Margaret and William
streets during a climate change
 protest in Brisbane.

“It’s not an enjoyable experience, we don’t take pleasure in doing it,” says Emma Dorge, an activist arrested in Brisbane on Tuesday, during a day of mass civil disobedience that shut down Australia’s third-largest city.

Extinction Rebellion, the decentralised global movement calling for aggressive action on the climate crisis, has engaged in similar disruption tactics in major cities on every continent. Those protests have been most effective when they are most polarising, like in Queensland, where talking and writing and screaming and marching about the climate emergency has not shifted public sentiment; a state home to the threatened Great Barrier Reef, and also the world’s most controversial coal project.

Read the story from The Guardian by Ben Smee - “Extinction Rebellion: hitting a nerve at Australia's climate flashpoint .”

Westpac in rift with BCA on climate change policy

Westpac has become the latest major Australian company to split with the nation's top business lobby group over its approach to climate change, announcing a "variance" in opinion with the Business Council of Australia over the contentious policy issue.

Westpac said there was "variance" around the bank's position

 on climate change policy and that of the BCA.

Underlining the tensions in the business community over climate change, the country's second biggest bank on Tuesday said a review of its membership of peak bodies had found that it disagreed with the BCA on aspects of international and domestic climate policy, and domestic energy policy.

Read the story from The Age by Clancy Yeates and Colin Kruger - “Westpac in rift with BCA on climate change policy.”

No, you’re not entitled to your opinion

Patrick Stokes speaking today
at a special function staged
by The Conversation.

Patrick Stokes has an opinion about opinion, or does he?.

No, rather he has an argument about the process and whether or not we are entitled to an opinion.

The Senior Lecturer in Philosophy from Deakin University, who wrote about opinion on The Conversation, referencing climate scientists.

Commenting about “enthusiastic amateurs” seem to think they are entitled to disagree with climate scientists and yet still have their views respected 

Read the piece by Patrick Stokes published on The Conversation in 2012 - “No, you’re not entitled to your opinioNo, you’re not entitled to your opinion.”

Scope 2017 survey: Economists say action on carbon is vital, or say nothing at all

Ai Group's Julie Toth said market mechanisms
 should be used to meet national commitments
to substantially cut emissions. 

There is no consensus. Economists either believe it is vital that Australia becomes a low-carbon intensity economy, or that the issue is so unimportant – or perhaps that it is so politically divisive – that they choose not to volunteer an opinion.

Asked about the importance of reducing the country's carbon footprint and how best to do it, more than half of 27 economists from industry, consultancy, academia and finance questioned for the annual BusinessDay Scope survey agreed it was a must.

Another 10 left the question blank. Whether this indicates a lack of interest or the contentious nature of climate change policy is unclear.

But none of those who did answer made the case that cleaning up the economy did not matter. They overwhelmingly said action should be swift and include a market-based carbon pricing scheme.

Read Adam Morton’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Scope 2017 survey: Economists say action on carbon is vital, or say nothing at all.”

Pssionate and serious revolution is a battle of wills

Treasurer, Joe Hockey - it is his
 intent to dismantle the good work
 of the Labor Government.

In a passionate and deeply serious recent interview comedian Russell Brand argued that a revolution was coming.

Forget about the revolution in which men stood toe to toe and slaughtered each other for what we are witnessing, for the moment, is a somewhat more sophisticated difference of opinion.

Australia’s recent federal election saw you and me dump the sitting Labor Government in favour of a Coalition Government led by Tony Abbott.

Labor had worked hard in a less than positive political environment with a hung parliament to press ahead with several innovative legislative changes that won sweeping praise for Australia from those in the world community who understood the seriousness of climate change.

The Abbott-led Coalition, then in opposition, mischievously, and inaccurately, portrayed the work of Labor as simply wrong and most Australians, unable to vision life beyond the end of the decade, threw their lot in with Mr Abbott and his cohort of Liberal and National Party climate change skeptics.

Since its election on September 7, the government has moved quickly to erase all the climate change mitigation  steps taken by Labor, including the scrapping of the carbon tax and just today the ABC reported in a story headed: “Bill Shorten says Labor wants carbon tax replaced by ETS”, that the Coalition’s ambitions will not be realised easily.

In what is rebellious if not revolutionary, the government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, that had been directed by the new Treasurer, Joe Hockey, to stop lending money has defied that order and is still fulfilling its mandate.

In another story published today headed: “Clean Energy Finance Corporation defies Government call to stop lending”, explains that the Coalition intends to dismantle the corporation.

The Brand revolution looks like being more a “battle of wills” than a battle in the traditional sense.