Taylor gets energy and emissions portfolio, Price dumped from environment

Prime minister Scott Morrison has abandoned the Coalition’s short lived separation of energy and emissions reduction responsibilities, and handed Angus Taylor the job of combining energy policy and meeting the government’s modest emissions reduction targets.

Angus Taylor (left)
and Matt Canavan.

In unveiling his new ministry and cabinet after the Coalition’s surprise re-election on May 18, Morrison also punted the much criticised Melissa Price from the environment portfolio, naming instead Sussan Ley, a minister in both the Abbott and Tunbull government who had to resign from the front-bench following investigations into her travel expenses and entitlements.

Price has been handed a minor defence ministry portfolio – defence industry – following her poor performance as environment minister which was marked by her indifference to major international reports, including the UN warning on massive loss of species, and her controversial and last-minute approvals for the Adani coal mine and a W.A. uranium mine.

Read the RenewEconomy story by Giles Parkinson - “Taylor gets energy and emissions portfolio, Price dumped from environment.”

America’s first climate change refugees are preparing to leave an island that will disappear under the sea in the next few years

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, Louisiana — America comes to an end here. Connected to the marshes and moss-laced bayous of southern Louisiana by two miles of narrow causeway, waters lapping high on each side, Isle de Jean Charles takes you as far into the Gulf of Mexico as you can go without falling in. But the dolour in the salt air is not just about loneliness and separation. It’s about impending demise.

This used to be a forest of oak and cypress trees.

Don’t call it a death sentence – the intention is the opposite – but state officials in late March made the announcement that had been a long time coming. Some on the island, nearly all members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indian tribe, met it with relief; others with hostility.

Marking the kick-off of what will be the first climate resettlement of its kind in the entire United States, land had been chosen an hour’s drive to the north for a whole new town to be thrown up. No one will force them exactly, but the intention is clear: to evacuate those still living on the island to the new site, where at present nothing but sugar cane stands, before it is too late.

Read the story by David Usborne from Business Insider - “America’s first climate change refugees are preparing to leave an island that will disappear under the sea in the next few years.”