U.S. Slate Magazine - The Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific: How Australia became the dirtiest polluter in the developed world

Excerpt from Slate online magazine’s article The Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific:  How Australia became the dirtiest polluter in the developed world:

Australians like to think of themselves as green. Their island country boasts some 3 million square miles of breathtaking landscape. They were an early global leader in solar power. They’ve had environmental regulations on the books since colonial times. And in 2007 they elected a party and a prime minister running on a “pro-climate” platform, with promises to sign the Kyoto Protocol and pass sweeping environmental reforms. All of which makes sense for a country that is already suffering the early effects of global warming.

And yet, seven years later, Australia has thrown its environmentalism out the window — and into the landfill.

The climate-conscious Labor Party is out, felled by infighting and a bloodthirsty, Rupert Murdoch–dominated press that sows conspiracy theories about climate science. In its place, Australians elected the conservative Liberal Party, led by a prime minister who once declared that “the climate argument is absolute crap.”

In the year since they took office, Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Liberal-led coalition have already dismantled the country’s key environmental policies. Now they’ve begun systematically ransacking its natural resources. In the process, they’ve transformed Australia from an international innovator on environmental issues into quite possibly the dirtiest country in the developed world. And in a masterful whirl of the spin machine, they’ve managed to upend public debate by painting climate science as superstition and superstition as climate science. (We should note here that one of us grew up in Australia.)

The country’s landmark carbon tax has been repealed. The position of science minister has been eliminated. A man who warns of “global cooling” is now the country’s top business adviser. In November, Australia will host the G-20 economic summit; it plans to use its power as host to keep climate change off the official agenda.

If the environment has become Australia’s enemy, fossil fuels are its best friend once again. Two months after it struck down the carbon tax, the government forged a deal with a fringe party led by a mining tycoon to repeal a tax on mining profits. It appointed a noted climate-change skeptic — yes, another one — to review its renewable energy targets. Surprise: He’s expected to slash them. Independent modeling in a study commissioned by the Climate Institute, Australian Conservation Foundation, and WWF-Australia finds that the cuts to renewable energy won’t reduce Australians’ energy bills. They will, however, gift the country’s coal and gas industry another $8.8 billion U.S.

At a time when solar power is booming worldwide, sunny Australia is rolling back its state-level subsidies (despite domestic success) and canceling major solar projects. Meanwhile, the government has given the go-ahead to build the nation’s largest coal mine, with an eye toward boosting coal exports to India.   

Did we mention that Australians’ per-capita carbon emissions are the highest of any major developed country in the world? Welcome to the Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific. No, Australia isn’t a theocracy, and oil isn’t the source of its fossil-fuel riches. But it is the world’s second-largest exporter of coal and third-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and minerals and fuels account for nearly 50 percent of its export revenues. Its per-capita carbon emissions actually exceed those of Saudi Arabia. And its behavior of late is beginning to bear an ugly resemblance to those petro-states whose governments seem to exist chiefly to guarantee the spectacular profits of the fossil-fuel industry…….

Read the full article here.

Excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winning Inside Climate News article Canada-Australia 'Axis of Carbon' an Obstacle to Climate Pact:

Their prime ministers mince no words in their disdain for putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions to protect their fossil fuel exports….. Official data shows that neither Canada nor Australia can claim to be on track toward meeting their existing greenhouse gas emissions goals, modest as they are….. John Gummer, chairman of the UK Committee on Climate Change, was even more direct as he bashed Canada, and especially Australia, in an interview this summer with Australian television.

“Only Australia and to some extent Canada, but particularly Australia, is actually going backwards,” he said. “Australia now has miserable targets….. way out of line of any other advanced country and that's a very sad thing…. Australia has also been lambasted for attempting to keep climate change off the agenda when the G20 nations meet in Brisbane in November. It’s a tactic that Harper pioneered a few years ago when the G20 met in Toronto, to the considerable irritation of diplomats including Ban Ki-moon.

“Australia has been widely criticised for dropping climate change from the agenda on the basis that it is not an economic issue,” the Centre for Economic Development Australia said in an August report. “Climate change is a G20 litmus test as well as a test of Australia’s role. It is a problem with a global consequence requiring collective action.”…..

Read the full article here.

It is said a picture is worth a thousand words. So if readers are still in any doubt as to how the world now views Australia under an Abbott Government, this was the cold reception Foreign Minister Julie Bishop received at the U.N. Climate Summit on 23 September 2014:

"I'm disappointed but not surprised with Australia," Pa Ousman Jarju, Gambia's Climate Change Minister, who represents the 54 least developed nations at UN climate talks, told the Responding to Climate Change analysis website later. "What the Foreign Minister said was as good as not coming. It's nothing … as good as not attending."

There appears to be at least one realist amongst Metgasco Limited's shareholders

This was on the Hot Copper MEL forum last week:

Aunty gets taken for a ride by Queensland Premier

On 5 December 2013 the Australian mainstream media reported that Qld Premier Campbell Newman had appointed Retired Brigadier William Julian Andrew "Bill" Mellor to control the state government's anti-bikie strategy.

ABC News was one of the media outlets which ran with the story that had apparently come to light after transcripts of Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Committee (PCMC) hearings were tabled in Parliament in November 2013.

The ABC’s initial reporting revealed the house number and suburb in which Mellor lived. Campbell Newman complained to Prime Minister Abbott about what he called a security breach and, insisted that the Australian Broadcasting Commission should pay for a security upgrade to the Mellor residence.

An upgrade Bill Mellor’s own security consultancy firm has since supplied for an undisclosed sum.

While ABC Managing Director Mark Scott would be Internet savvy enough to realise that it would take a burly bikie with a laptop just minutes to track down Bill Mellor’s home address from information already listed on Google’s search engine before December 2013; Messrs Abbott and Newman either did not know or did not care that Mellor’s full residential address and current telephone number for his home-based business had been placed on a website with which he was connected by the man himself.

While a number of other easily accessible websites*, along with an online newsletter, all list the suburb where Bill Mellor lives. The Sensis online telephone book also gives his current residential 'phone number & address and, Google Images has a link to that webpage with his full residential details.

Campbell Newman also obviously did not remember that in a February 2013 media release he identified Bill Mellor as being connected with the association which owns the main website in question.

So Premier Newman himself would have led any interested bikie straight to Brigadier Mellor (he certainly led me) and Google Earth would have done the rest by supplying an image of the basic layout of the Mellor home and the streets leading into the little 14-house cul-de-sac in which Mellor lives.

However, it seems that no bikies were interested in where Bill Mellor lives, as according to The Courier Mail on 28 September 2014 It is understood that no threats or incidents have materialised.

Perhaps Campbell Newman can complain about another aspect of the ABC’s coverage and get Mr. Mellor enough money to inject some life and colour into his rather tired front garden.

* Even the then Governor-General unwittingly became part of the information overload by publishing Bill Mellor's full residential address at the time he received his Member of the Order of Australia - which was but four mouse clicks away from revealing the amount of money he paid for this house and years later received from its sale, as well as the price paid for his present residence.

The truth about the Australian Prime Minister's address to the United Nations on 25 September 2014

Prime Minister Tony Abbott  addressed  the 69th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 25 September 2014 during the Opening of the General Debate.

There was the standard set image of his attendance on the UN website:

Other more animated images in the Australian media such as this:

However, there were no long shots of the audience listening to Abbott’s speech.

This is one possible reason why…..

US President Obama speaking during the Opening of the General Debate in front of a packed audience of delegates on 24 September:

This was Tony Abbott speaking during the same Opening of the General Debate with a decidedly sparse audience the next day:

Like the difference in the size of their official audiences, the messages they delivered to the world were starkly different even when both were addressing the situation in Syria and Iraq.

These were President Obama's opening remarks:

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen: we come together at a crossroads between war and peace; between disorder and integration; between fear and hope.

Around the globe, there are signposts of progress. The shadow of World War that existed at the founding of this institution has been lifted; the prospect of war between major powers reduced. The ranks of member states has more than tripled, and more people live under governments they elected. Hundreds of millions of human beings have been freed from the prison of poverty, with the proportion of those living in extreme poverty cut in half. And the world economy continues to strengthen after the worst financial crisis of our lives.

Today, whether you live in downtown New York or in my grandmother’s village more than two hundred miles from Nairobi, you can hold in your hand more information than the world’s greatest libraries. Together, we have learned how to cure disease, and harness the power of the wind and sun. The very existence of this institution is a unique achievement – the people of the world committing to resolve their differences peacefully, and solve their problems together. I often tell young people in the United States that this is the best time in human history to be born, for you are more likely than ever before to be literate, to be healthy, and to be free to pursue your dreams….

While these were Prime Minister Abbott's:

I’m happy to be here at your urging, Mr President. It is the weightiest of matters that brings us together today.

Right now, thousands of misguided people from around the world are joining terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq because they claim Islam is under threat and because they are excited by the prospect of battle.

But whatever they think or say, these terrorists aren’t fighting for God or for religious faith.

At the heart of every terrorist group is an infatuation with death.

What else can explain the beheadings, crucifixions, mass executions, rapes and sexual slavery in every town and city that’s fallen to the terrorist movement now entrenched in eastern Syria and northern Iraq?

A terrorist movement calling itself “Islamic State” insults Islam and mocks the duties of a legitimate state towards its citizens.

And to use this term is to dignify a death cult; a death cult that, in declaring itself a caliphate, has declared war on the world.

So, countries do need to work together to defeat it because about 80 nations have citizens fighting with ISIL and every country is a potential target….

Full transcript of Obama's speech.

Full transcript of Abbott's speech.