Federal environment minister Greg Hunt has hailed the first round of Emissions Reduction Fund auctions as a “stunning result”. But extrapolating the numbers puts Australia behind on its carbon targets.
- Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor, Melbourne Climate Futures initiative, The University of Melbourne
A report from Australia’s Climate Change Authority recommends cutting greenhouse emissions by 30% by 2025 if the country is to be seen as a good global citizen in this year’s climate negotiations.
Malcolm Fraser may be remembered for his failure to intervene in the Franklin Dam campaign, but he otherwise led a government distinguished for its environmental action.
Climate change barely rates a mention in the Intergenerational Report, despite the huge potential costs. Peter Christoff says the only way to overcome this short-sightedness is to end the politics and make the review independent.
Emissions fell by six times the rate in the five years before the carbon tax than they did under the carbon tax. – Environment minister Greg Hunt, The Guardian, January 17, 2015. Australia’s total greenhouse…
The UN’s climate negotiations in Lima (known as COP20) over the past fortnight were held in a military compound normally used by the Peruvian Army. Each day, negotiators at the COP passed an obstacle course…
Despite Australia’s best efforts, climate change muscled its way onto the G20 agenda. The summit’s final communique included one paragraph restating the importance of international negotiations in Paris…
A groundbreaking climate deal between the US and China will put pressure on the international community to broker a global treaty at next year’s United Nations talks, but experts say it still might not…
The new US-China climate deal is a game-changer. The United States, the world’s biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, has pledged to cut emissions by 26-28% by 2025 relative to 2005 levels, while…
After a week of mostly bad news on climate change, new figures reveal that Australia easily beat its first internationally-agreed climate target, with nearly 131 million tonnes of emissions to spare. That’s…
A Labor-dominated Senate committee has set the stage for the post-July tussle over carbon policy, recommending that Australia commit to much deeper emissions cuts than the current 5% target, and advising…
“Erratic”, “inconsistent”, “highly political” and “lacking in direction”. That’s the unvarnished verdict on Australia’s climate policy, according to experts within our own Parliament House. It wasn’t a…
Yesterday, the Climate Change Authority released its interim report on future emissions targets. The report recommends two options to replace Australia’s short term (2020) mitigation target of 5% below…
Saturday’s election will largely determine Australia’s domestic climate policy settings through to 2020. It will define Australia’s stance in international climate negotiations on targets and mitigation…
Now that the federal budget is out of the way, it’s time to look at another budget soon to be massively in deficit – Australia’s greenhouse emissions budget. Last week, atmospheric concentrations of carbon…
Peter Christoff: Your book, The World Until Yesterday, is really the third in a series on societies and their futures. Guns, Germs, and Steel was really a short history of everybody of the last 13,000…
American scientist and author Jared Diamond was recently in Australia promoting his 5th book The World Until Yesterday: What can we learn from traditional societies? Jared has worked extensively in New…
Why get worked up about our climate responsibilities when Australia’s contribution to global emissions – around 1.5% of the total - is small? Here is the usual reply. Australia’s domestic greenhouse gas…
DURBAN CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE: Occasionally international treaties conflict with each other. The last days of the Durban climate talks was one of those times. The United Nations’ Convention on Climate…
DURBAN CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE: Progress towards a binding international agreement on targets to tackle global warming has been more than glacial. Yet despite growing alarm among the climate science…
In mid-July, as Prime Minister Gillard began to stump the countryside selling her carbon package, a conference at the University of Melbourne considered the prospect of climate policy failure. Climate…
As the old saying goes, “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. On Sunday, the exhausting, almost decade-long battle to put a price on carbon pollution enters a new phase, when the MultiParty…
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