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 published originally this morning at ABC Online

One of the most important numbers in Australia's history was revealed yesterday - a number that carries with it the hopes and fears of millions of people and embodies our priorities as a nation, our balancing of the relative worth of human beings.

It has been argued that the 5 per cent 2020 emissions reduction target that Prime Minister Rudd announced is no more or less than a political balancing act - navigating a midway path between the competing demands of business and scientists, of the Coalition and the Greens. But that is an extremely superficial view, and one that fails to see just how all-encompassing climate change is. There are much deeper choices at the core of any decision on emissions targets.

Perhaps the most obvious of these choices is the question 'do we value our children as much as ourselves?'

It's hard to find the words to express quite how atrocious today's decision announcement has been.

Here's a video that expresses what a lot of us are starting to think - that all those who voted for Kevin Rudd thinking he'd be better than John Howard on climate change were sold a lump of coal.

If you're angry, come along tomorrow and join us at the rallies listed here.

Yesterday, after a whirlwind six week campaign, Melbourne Uni and the National Academy of Music put out a statement the upshot of which is that the full 2009 program that the Academy had planned to run will now be run, with Brett Dean as Artistic Director, staying in its existing location, key staff remaining the same, and places to be offered to existing students. A new independent board will be appointed with a view to determining the Academy's long-term programming.

Sounds an awful lot like a complete reversal of Peter Garrett's decision to close the Academy on October 22. So how come the Minister's spokesperson told AAP last night that

On October 31, after an entirely inadequate process, Arts Minister Peter Garrett wrote to the board of the Australian National Academy of Music, Australia's world-renowned training ground for our top young classical musicians, informing them that they would be de-funded as of 2009.

In one easy decision, the musician-turned-politician threw some of Australia's brightest young talents on the scrap heap. According to some reports, he didn't even realise that there were students enrolled in ongoing courses at the Academy. I don't know whether that would make the decision less culpable on the basis of it being less cruel, or more on the basis of sheer ignorance from a decision-maker.

Having provoked a bigger storm than he perhaps expected, Minister Garrett was forced to swiftly turn around a replacement, a transition strategy and interim arrangements. The resulting policy on the run is as messy as you would expect.

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.

Yesterday the Rudd Government demonstrated very clearly where its climate and energy priorities lie - not with the proven renewable energy solutions, but with the geosequestration pipe-dream that Al Gore has recently called "too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate".

Fresh from burying Christine Milne's feed-in tariff Bill with a majority Senate Inquiry report saying it's a "great idea, but let's not do it", the Rudd Government went on last night to push through a Bill which gives a huge benefit to those who seek to bury CO2 under the sea floor - letting them make profits without having to carry the liability. This is a recipe for a new sub-prime crisis, telling industry that they can make significant profits safe in the knowledge that they will not need to carry the can for more than 20 years.

The debate on this bill is worth reading in its entirety if you have time. It exposes quite how blinded by industry rhetoric the Government and Opposition both are. Perhaps the pinnacle of this is to be found in

The thing I’ve found most fascinating about the responses to the Treasury’s ETS modelling
released yesterday is how, all of a sudden, a pile of big coal’s
biggest fans are agreeing with us that coal with geosequestration isn’t
going to come cheap!

Malcolm Turnbull, for example, told the media yesterday
that “The cost of carbon capture and storage is probably the biggest
single assumption in this whole analysis… There is no full-blown
demonstration plant employing carbon capture and storage so estimates
of its costs are speculative.”

Well-known climate naysayer, Brian Fisher, writes in today’s Australian
that “The Treasury’s assumptions on the capital cost of construction of
a CCS-ready coal-fired power plant appear to be about half those
estimated by well-qualified industry experts.”

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.

The last three days have been quite a revelation of exactly what's going on in Tasmania's forests. Regardless of the rhetoric of sensitive management of the forests, the real story is one of wantonly sending species towards extinction and viciously attacking those brave souls who stand up for protection.

On Monday, Bob Brown launched a new report by Margaret Blakers and Isobel Crawford into the state of the Swift Parrot

I've just seen this excellent video that I felt was worth posting. It is from Van Jones talking about his new book, The Green Collar Economy, putting a concise argument for spending half the money that was spent on the Wall St bail-out on delivering an economic and environmental boom.

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:

This article by Christine Milne was published in New Matilda on 24 September

In one of those perfect ironies, Prime Minister Rudd's announcement of his $100 million push to make Australia the global coal hub last Friday came on the same day that yet another so-called "clean coal" project, Santos' Fairview operation in Queensland, was scrapped.

The Fairview collapse "was to do with getting the funding balance right", according to a Santos spokesperson quoted in the Australian Financial Review last Friday. That, of course, is code for "we want more money from governments", tactfully argued by a company whose last half-year profits were $304 million and whose project has already been handed $75 million in taxpayer funds.

This piece from Christine Milne ran in today's Crikey email.

After all his careful statements of the prisoner's dilemma, Ross Garnaut has blinked.

Garnaut restates the problem in today's report, making the point that we cannot go to the global climate negotiations and plead a special case. He goes so far as to say that:

There will be no progress towards an effective international agreement if each country lays out all of the special reasons why it is different from others, and why it should be given softer targets. When climate change negotiators from any country list reasons why their country has special reasons to be treated differently, and take them seriously, we should be quick to recognise that the negotiators, and the countries they represent, intentionally or not, are inhibiting effective international agreement.

This piece by Christine ran in Crikey's email today.

Late in August, while the Business Council of Australia was making its ambit claim to limit Australia's emissions reductions to no more than 10% cuts by 2020, the famous North-west Passage around the north of Canada opened.

A few days later, just as Martin Ferguson was circulating his "softened" emissions trading proposal to big polluters, the North-east passage, around Russia, also opened.

Both these historically and strategically significant events have occurred individually in recent years as the Arctic summer ice has progressively melted. But this is the first time in human history that both passages have been open simultaneously, making the North Polar ice cap an island, and the consequences are far-reaching.

If it is inappropriate for a Government to threaten universities with their funding unless they do as they are told, how can it be appropriate to threaten schools?

Minister Gillard, in legislating for "the removal of unwarranted bullying government interference over our universities and other higher education providers," said that the aim is to "get the heavy foot of the Liberal Party off the throat of our universities". At the same time, she is applying the heavy foot of the Labor Party onto the throat of schools, arguing that federal education funding should be conditional on information about the performance of individual schools being made available to parents.

I was very pleased today to launch an excellent new publication by Rod Randall, from the Weeds CRC, which will be an invaluable tool in the fight against weeds in Australia. It's a book, but it's also free to download online!

Everyone knows that weeds and feral animals - alien invasive species - stand beside habitat destruction and climate change as the main drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide. But many people don't realise how widespread invasive species are in Australia.

The Senate Inquiry into Christine Milne's Private Member's Bill for a national, comprehensive, gross feed-in tariff for renewable energy is closing its call for submissions this Friday, August 15.

Those of you who would like to see a strong, supportive policy framework for renewable energy in Australia, I would strongly recommend that you put in a submission to the inquiry as a matter of urgency.

Christine's last post on the issue, setting out what the Bill would achieve, is here, and you can find all the details about the Bill and how to make submissions here.

This piece was originally published in today's Crikey email.

In the coming months before the emissions trading legislation comes before the Senate, the Rudd Government needs to think hard about what it is trying to achieve.

Does it plan to buy into the lowest common denominator populism of the Coalition? This approach drags the debate backwards, undermines the global climate fight, and risks alienating a significant portion of Labor’s own base who voted for leadership on climate.

Or will it lead from the front, inspiring Australians to embrace this challenge to rebuild, upgrade and retool for a zero emissions future? Will it appeal to people’s best instincts, articulating a positive vision of preparing ourselves for the future by investing in a systemic roll-out of energy efficiency, mass transit and renewable energy?

The final answer will be in the 2020 target that is promised in the legislation by the end of the year, but the signals from yesterday’s Green Paper were decidedly worrying. The Paper was framed entirely around costs and cash compensation instead of the opportunities for transformation we Greens have been advocating.

The Rudd Government's Emissions Trading Green Paper can now be downloaded from the Climate Change Department website here.

I've been trying to get to do a post on this since 12.30, but I'm alone in the office with Christine and the phone's been ringing off the hook - which is a good thing!

We will do a proper detailed post, but in the meantime, here is Christine's release from this arvo.

The upshot is that the Government has put their foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. The leak this morning about essentially keeping petrol out of the scheme (raising the price with one hand and dropping it by the same amount with the other!) is symbolic of the whole thing. An emissions trading scheme is about driving new investment, but this proposal would protect existing coal investments, shutting the door on efficiency and renewables and mass transit and alternative fuels.

Professor Garnaut is likely to be very unimpressed indeed today. His hard work has just been utterly trashed.