Skip to main content

Australia takes a giant step backwards

If proof was ever needed that Governments are stupid - and those that lead it even more so - than stand up Australia as #1 candidate for being not only dumb, but dumber!   The village idiots have won out - supported by the likes of the way-past it man, Rupert Murdoch.   He who derided "windmills" and things like that associated with climate change as "rubbish".

"Australia on Thursday scrapped its carbon tax, a move denounced by critics as a monumental step backwards on climate action that amounts to "inter-generational theft."

After lengthy debate, the Senate voted Thursday 39-32 to repeal it following its passage in the House of Representatives earlier this week.

The charge of roughly 25 Australian dollars per ton of carbon dioxide was put into effect under the previous administration of Prime Minister Julia Gillard. A report this month from the Australian National University found that the tax worked, helping to reduce between 11 and 17 million tons of CO2 cumulatively.

While Abbott cheered the vote scrapping the tax as "great news," and said it fulfills a campaign promise, critics of his climate policy decried the decision as a path towards further climate catastrophe at the community's expense.

EU Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard expressed "regret" for repeal of the tax which was working. "The EU is convinced that pricing carbon is not only the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions, but also THE tool to make the economic paradigm shift the world needs," she stated Thursday.

Addressing the Senate on Tuesday, Australian Greens leader Christine Milne said the move was a "pyrrhic victory because it is the community who will be paying with their lives, their farms, their futures, so that the big polluters can get off scot-free in Australia."

Milne also stressed that it represented a failure to act on climate, which would ultimately "impos[e] on our children a harder life."

"The Prime Minister and every single member who votes for the abolition of the energy bills are engaging in intergenerational theft," Milne said.

The Australia-based Climate Institute denounced the repeal, which makes the nation the first to axe a functioning carbon market, as "a monumentally reckless backward leap" away from climate action.

Like Milne, John Connor, CEO of the organization, criticized how the repeal of the tax shifts "responsibility of emission reductions shift from major polluters to the taxpayer."

"The result of repeal today is that Australia is bereft of credible climate policy just as the international community focuses on deeper reduction targets for 2025 and 2030, and even the heads of organizations like the International Monetary Fund, OECD and World Bank talk of the need to completely decarbonize the global economy by the second half of this century," Connor stated."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...

Palestinian children in irons. UK to investigate

Not for the first time does MPS wonder what sort of country it is when Israel so flagrently allows what can only be described as barbaric and inhuman behaviour to be undertaken by, amongst others, its IDF. No one has seemingly challenged Israel's actions. However, perhaps it's gone a bridge too far - as The Independent reports. The Foreign Office revealed last night that it would be challenging the Israelis over their treatment of Palestinian children after a report by a delegation of senior British lawyers revealed unconscionable practices, such as hooding and the use of leg irons. In the first investigation of its kind, a team of nine senior legal figures examined how Palestinians as young as 12 were treated when arrested. Their shocking report Children in Military Custody details claims that youngsters are dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, have their wrists bound behind their backs, and are blindfolded and made to kneel or lie face down in military vehi...

Wow!.....some "visitor" to Ferryland in Newfoundland