Daily Links Aug 31

That Qld is proceeding with a state-owned green energy company holds many stories, privatisation is dying, the private sector is stymied in risk-management and that governments can show leadership among them.

Daily Links Aug 30

Adani, the company that’s been given astounding access to Qld groundwater for its dodgy mine, is running a third attempt to stop a fraud investigation into its activities. Why this excrescence of a mine is still a live concern beggars belief. While Canavan, Christensen, Taylor et al are in government, we must keep up a ‘watch and act’.

Daily Links Aug 29

‘We dread the onslaught of summer’ makes personal the experience of drought. This is what makes the GNats position on climate response so hard to understand. Clearly donors rank higher than electors and it is long past time that more of the latter woke up, as they have in the federal electorate of Indi and the state electorate of Shepparton.

Daily Links Aug 28

The doctor behind the article ‘Climate change is World War III and we are leaderless’ asks that Scott Morrison think of climate impacts on the future of his ‘lovely young children’. He seems to care little for the lovely young children he is imprisoning on Nauru so Dr Shearman, will invoking his personal interest compel him to act or will his ability to compartmentalise mean we continue blunder dumbly?

Daily Links Aug 27

Giles Parkinson, in a RenewEconomy article yesterday, tells you what you need to know but don’t want to know about Morrison Ministers Melissa Price and Angus Taylor, Environment and Energy respectively. Google the article and be afraid, be very afraid with the arrival of these two. Some days the steps backwards are well in excess of the steps forward!

Daily Links Aug 26

That Power prices hit household budgets less than in 1984 is cold comfort when we pay in absolute dollars rather than relative dollars. Even so, power prices can be pared back with energy efficiency – and this is just common to do so. So long as we have absolute dollars and we spend as few of them as we NEED on energy, anything that makes us review our resource use has to be a good thing.

Daily Links Aug 25

Since not much in energy/climate change that makes any sense has happened in Australia lately, here’s a bit of silliness that George Monbiot tweeted today:I swear to you, this headline is not from @TheOnion. It’s real.”Oil industry wants government to build seawall to protect refineries from climate change effects”.Beautiful, eh?

Daily Links Aug 24

The meeting at high noon today is a momentous one with not much joy, whatever the result. The choice is between no mitigation (remember Hillsong ScoMo’s black rock he gleefully brandished in Parliament), no adaptation (recall the Qld Walloper’s ‘joke’ about rising sea-levels swamping Pacific island states) or the globetrotting fashionista (Glorious Jewellery, who at least understands international views on global climate response, even as she has done little to contribute to our national response).

Daily Links Aug 23

There’ll be millions of climate refugees displaced by rising sea levels (and it is already underway, just ask people who’ve left the Cartaret Islands) in our region. There’s a parallel with asylum seekers displaced by our tragic military adventures. We’re responsible for this and we should offer asylum. In doing so little in cutting our emissions, we share responsibility for climate refugees. We’ll need a responsive government for this.

Daily Links Aug 22

If our concern about the drought was fair dinkum, we’d be moving farming off marginal land, we’d be rewarding progressive farming techniques (not the bad farmers, as Gittins points out) and we’d be serious about cutting the C emissions that are exacerbating climate variability. Giving drought support without responding to climate change is like mopping the floor while leaving the tap running.