Politics news September 23rd 2010
Posted on 23 September 2010 by e-news
Local Government comes out for renewable energy and against new coal plant.
On Tuesday October 22nd 2010 the Yarra City Council passed a motion, calling for ALL of Hazelwood Power Station to be replaced with renewable energy by 2014, and for the proposal for the new coal-fired power station in the Latrobe Valley (HRL dual-gas) to be rejected. If you want to make a submission against this proposal go to the MASG site.
Poll shows bush is keen on clean energy
An Auspoll survey of 1,500 people found 85 per cent of rural respondents and 82 per cent of urban respondents want the government to “make clean energy cheaper quicker, through large scale development of solar, geothermal and wind power in urban and regional Australia”. For more read the story on CI.
This matches well with the surveying and doorknocking that MASG and the 100% Renewable campaign undertook in which > 95% of Castlemaine residents want government to do more to support renewable energy.
BHP boss Marius Kloppers: It’s time for carbon tax
THE world’s biggest mining company, BHP Billiton, is urging the Gillard government to impose a tax on carbon before any international agreement.
This is in order to protect Australia’s long-term economic interests.
BHP Billiton chief executive Marius Kloppers has also warned the government not to try to change the terms of the pre-election mining tax deal negotiated with the big three miners.
In a major address yesterday, Mr Kloppers made it clear the mining industry did not intend to be passive in the face of the political uncertainty created by minority government.
His very public intervention pressures the government on two fronts: not to cede ground to the Greens and independents who wish to revisit the fundamentals of the mining tax; and to take more decisive action on climate change in the wake of Labor dropping its emissions trading scheme and the fiasco of the proposed citizens’ assembly.
For more see the article at The Australian.
Our greatest Strategic Error: By Ian Dunlop
We have had a dream run since World War II, built on our natural wealth. Despite the occasional hiccup, our economy has expanded year after year, with increasing prosperity. Understandably, we are proud of being world leaders in agriculture, mining and processing, and we have created a strong and vibrant society in many other areas.
Our resource base is formidable and expanding. But that bounty is fast becoming our Achilles’ heel. Our exports and domestic energy systems are carbon extensive, our per capita carbon emissions are amongst the highest in the world.
Our most vulnerable point is oil; we are about 50 per cent self-sufficient, declining rapidly unless new discoveries save the day, which seems unlikely. But peak oil, which may well mean a 20-30 per cent reduction in oil availability by 2030, is not even on the agenda of the major political parties.
If the world now moves rapidly to a low-carbon footing due to the need for an emergency response to climate change, whilst facing increasing oil scarcity due to peak oil, many of our traditional advantages turn into major strategic risks; that is risks beyond our control which have the potential to fundamentally change our way of life, and undermine our economic strength.
So we fall back into the comfort zone of our dig-it-up and ship-it-out high carbon mindset. In so doing, we are making arguably the greatest strategic error in Australia’s history.
For while Australia is moving backwards on climate change reform and ignoring peak oil, the rest of the world is vying for leadership of the low carbon economy. A decade hence it is likely that the incremental demand for our high carbon products will have evaporated.
At that point, we will be left with a large inventory of stranded assets, minimal investment in low carbon alternative energy, little resilience to weather the impact of both climate change and peak oil and strident calls to bail out companies that are “too-big-to-fail”.
Check out Ian Dunlop’s full article here.
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