Greens MPs

This was published today at ABC Unleashed

The release on Monday of the Rudd Government's climate change white paper is a clear demonstration that this Government is intent on playing politics with climate change without actually doing anything about it.

The useless emissions reduction target and self-defeating design of the scheme tells only half the story. The Government pre-empted the announcement by throwing half a billion dollars at expanding coal infrastructure in the Hunter Valley, and followed it up with a badly-designed incentive scheme for renewable energy that will ensure it does not grow beyond a marginal player to challenge the dominance of the coal sector.

Today's Age newspaper's editorial put it clearly:

This post was first published at ABC's Unleashed site:

With the global financial meltdown meeting the climate meltdown head on, the potential to deal with both crises using the same solutions has been gaining support.

Last month, the United Nations Environment Program joined with Deutsche Bank and others to promote a 'Green New Deal' based on investing billions of dollars in the four pillars of renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transport and ecosystem protection, reducing greenhouse emissions, building infrastructure and creating millions of new jobs. World leaders such as US President-elect Obama, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon have publicly embraced the proposal, with Obama listing a $150 billion clean energy plan as his top priority.

The 'Green New Deal', taking its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 'New Deal' to build the USA out of the Great Depression, is only the most recent embodiment of strategies put forward from Hobart to London over the last few decades, recognising that investing in protecting the environment is the only sensible economic plan.

This is a speech I delivered to the Sydney Institute last night. You can also listen to it here or download a pdf here.

Sydney Institute, October 27th 2008.

Green Politics, the Balance of Power and the Green New Deal.

Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening about Green Politics, Balance of Power and the twin global meltdowns of climate and finance. There has never been a more critical time to be a Green and there has never been a time when the philosophy and experience of Green politics - based on forty years of environmental, social justice, peace and democracy campaigning - has been more important. The decisions that will be made in the next five years are crucial for the future of life on Earth.

So that was estimates.

One of the few advantages of being new to this job is appreciating it's strangeness with fresh eyes. Three times a year, while the Senate is in recess, an intriguing and largely overlooked ritual takes place in the airy committee rooms of Parliament House in Canberra. Senior public servants, heads of departments and a highly qualified army of advisers and minders converge for five days of cross-examination in front of the Senate's eight standing committees.

In excellent news this morning, The Age reports that Christine Milne's amendments to the Luxury Car Tax, exempting fuel efficient vehicles from the levy, are already having an impact!

Ian Porter writes:

"THE changes made to luxury car tax have already started to influence the design of premium cars, with Audi announcing plans to install smaller diesel engines in some of its models so they consume less than seven litres per 100 kilometres - and become exempt from the tax."

Audi Chief Joerg Hofmann is quoted as saying:

So the day after tomorrow (ah that hoary old Hollywood chestnut...), Penny Wong will finally release the government's Green Paper, to which Professor Garnaut is one of many 'inputs'. Most of the others being big business.

While it won't be anything like final design, and it won't include any emissions targets or trajectories, the paper should give us a much better idea of what the government's thinking is on emissions trading. We'll have more of an idea of whether it'll be something The Greens can support with amendments. The signs thus far are that it should be supportable, but there is still the chance that it'll be so full of holes that we'd be better off without it.

Here's some notes we've put together on some of the key issues with emissions trading that we'll be looking out for.

This was published in Crikey this afternoon. My release from today is here.

Professor Garnaut’s much-awaited Draft Report [huge file here if the Garnaut website is still down] is, in general, strong on the architecture but terribly weak on the big, over-riding issue – preventing runaway climate change. His policy prescriptions are completely out of step with his science.

When we were looking for a transformative vision to take Australia into the post-carbon world, we got an incrementalist approach with a slow start and even a step backwards on the 2050 target.

Let’s firstly look at what Garnaut got right.

Penny Wong released the official greenhouse inventory for 2006 this morning, and you can read and study it in all its glory here.

I think Liberal Backbencher Chris Pearce may have done us all a big favour by taking the petrol price populism just that little bit too far this morning.

He went out on a limb calling for his own party to double its ridiculous 5c fuel excise cut to 10c and promptly got smacked down by members of his own party as well as others.

You know the message is starting to get through when Kerry O'Brien on ABC's 7.30 Report opens an interview with the Prime Minister by saying "isn't it time to look Australians in the eye and tell them the news is only going to get worse on oil?"