Tag Archives: politics

Gillard Doesn’t Get Global Warming

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Newly-installed minority Prime Minister Julia Gillard doesn’t get global warming.

Her chosen minister for “Climate Change” – the sanitised term for global warming – is Greg Combet, a former coal engineer, union official and MP with coal workers in his NSW electorate.  He said in an interview with The Australian newspaper, referring to employees of the coal industry,

“I’ve got a responsibility to support those people’s jobs. The coal industry is a very vibrant industry with a strong future. What you’ve got to do is look to how we can achieve in the longer term things like carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power stations.”

So there it is.  The Gillard government will continue the fantasy that Australia can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while preserving the coal industry.

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The Real Obstacles to Greenhouse Action

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[A related article was posted on On Line Opinion 2 Aug 2010.]

The smoke screen obscuring the real obstacles to reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions is unlikely to be dissipated by the imminent election campaign, whatever the global warming policies the Gillard Government.

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The Australian Labor Party is Dead

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[This was published by On Line Opinion, 12 May.]

Isn’t it time we declared the Labor Party officially dead?

The party has become a façade, an empty shell, a Faux-Labor Party.  It lost its vision long since.  It has forgotten why it exists.  It has no purpose, other than to gain power for the egos that inhabit it.

Lacking a vision, Faux-Labor is purely reactive.  Lacking a vision, it cannot frame issues to its advantage.  It cannot seize the initiative.  Caught awkwardly in its opponents’ framing, it is forever on the back foot, only ever able to be less bad, never able to proclaim a noble goal and pursue it.  Its collapse in the polls is surprising only for its speed.

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Visionless Rudd Doesn’t Want to Reduce Greenhouse Emissions

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The most telling part of the Rudd Government’s “deferral” of efforts to reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions is that it won’t even look at the issue again until 2012.  In other words, it is unlikely Labor will actually do anything in its next term, even though it leaves open the suggestion it might do something in 2013.

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The Peaking of Climate Denialism and the Resurgence of the Sensible

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Despite the ascent of Tony Abbott to the Liberal Party leadership and some recent unhelpful comments by the Chair of the ABC, Maurice Newman, there are some glimmerings that the irrational backlash against global warming science may be peaking.

The backlash can be seen as part of a broader attack on evidence-based, sensible debate that has been systematically promoted in Australia over the past several decades.  The attack has ranged over many social and political topics, including asylum seekers and the “history wars”, which concern our forebears’ treatment of indigenous people.  It has also taken on an explicitly anti-science tone in recent years.

It is revealing to examine the nature of the climate controversy, and to spell out exactly what the approach of climate “sceptics” implies about how we should determine policy.  There are also lessons on how our political process can be distorted by disinformation and by superficial interpretations of “balance” in reporting.

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Tony Abbott and East Anglia have not cancelled Global Warming

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Published by On Line Opinion, 8 Dec.

The triumph of climate delialists in the Liberal Party and the recent unauthorised release of allegedly damaging emails from a British climate research group are being portrayed by some as the end of the global warming “conspiracy”.

However the so-called scandal of the emails is a manufactured storm in a teacup.  Anyway the evidence for human-caused global warming is far more diverse and robust than denialists make out.  In fact the latest evidence is even clearer, and more ominous.  Denialist politicians are on the wrong side of history.

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Neoliberal Pseudo-Science

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Also published at  Online Opinion.

The Global Financial Collapse, which is rapidly becoming the Global Economic Collapse, is provoking deserved criticism of the neoliberal ideology that has dominated the world for three decades. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in his recent debunking of neoliberalism in The Monthly, says markets need to be managed, but clearly many free-marketeers will resist reforms. We therefore need to be very clear. This was not an imperfection. It was not an unfortunate episode in an otherwise glorious record. Neoliberalism is flawed at its core, its performance was mediocre at best, and its failure was inevitable.

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