Opinion
Australia’s Special Pleading on Climate: Kyoto deja vu
When the Climate Change Authority – of which I’m a member – concluded that Australia should reduce its carbon emissions by 40-60% below 2000 levels in 2030, and by 30% in 2025, it did not pick the numbers out of the air. Those target levels are the minimum necessary for Australia to
When Racism Masquerades as “Equality”: The Adam Goodes Furore
Throughout most of Australia’s modern history white society has worked hard to make Indigenous Australians disappear. In the early days it took the brutal forms of ‘dispersion’ and taking children from their families. But a people can be made invisible in subtler ways. Aborigines were declared a dying race, written
‘There is such confusion in my powers’: Is an ETS a tax?
Here is a definition in search of a term: what do we call a calculated political strategy to confuse the citizenry in order to gain an electoral advantage? For anyone who thinks clearly, and wants to minimise ambiguity in their communication, definitions matter. In political discourse certain terms have diverse
Crimes Against Nature: The Banality of Ethics in the Anthropocene
Among the great crimes of the twentieth century, the most enduring will surely prove to be human disruption of the Earth’s climate. The effects of human-induced climate change are apparent now and will become severe this century, but the warming is expected to last thousands of years. That is so
Australia’s Kyoto Escape Hatch Now Exploited
In the saga of mendacity that is the climate policy debate, no claim has been more audacious than the one now being told by the federal government about Australia’s “success” in meeting its Kyoto emissions target. Environment minister Greg Hunt now routinely makes statements like this: We are one of
“Humanity has disappointed God’s expectations”: Pope Francis’s Call to Arms
Pope Francis did not speak lightly when he said that protecting God’s creation is a service that “the Bishop of Rome is called to carry out”. And so his encyclical “Laudato Si’, on care for our common home”, released yesterday, reflects his deeply held convictions. While the encyclical’s message will
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Having just left there after spending almost two hours in line and being unable to get in, I’d wager that the number of people inside the security perimeter, plus the number of people outside the perimeter who tried to get in, vastly exceeded that.