Pearse: Greens should let this government fall and learn
|
As I wrote in The Monthly in July:
Well, the sun came up on Sunday, the impetus for renewal is here, and while not everyone recognises it yet, this election was a great victory for Australian democracy. Labor deserved this rebuke, the Coalition earned no mandate, and the Greens and Independents are being taken seriously. The number of Green MPs appears to have doubled, including the Senate balance of power and an historic first seat in the House of Representatives, where Independents appear to have the balance of power in a hung parliament. The message is loud and clear — Australians want something better than what the most rigid two-party system in the world is delivering. Not surprisingly, it’s a message the major parties seem inclined to ignore. Both sides still characterise the Greens as left-wing, oblivious to their broadening base. Neither major party yet comprehends how their own policy ineptitude (most obviously on climate change) has contributed to increased Green support. Penny Wong’s performance on Saturday night said it all. She dismissed the Greens as being in an exclusive contest with Labor, as only looking to take votes off Labor, not the Coalition. As it happens, the Greens have taken two Senate seats from the Coalition at this election. Wong still argues that the Greens vote against the CPRS in the Senate prevented Labor from taking serious action to combat climate change. Lindsay Tanner ran this line ad nauseum, and the electorate has rejected it, most emphatically in the electorate he vacated at the last minute. For Wong and most of her colleagues, the penny still hasn’t dropped that the CPRS would have done nothing to reduce emissions in Australia because it gave the worst polluters over 80% of their emission permits for free, and placed no limit on the number of cheap carbon credits that could be purchased offshore. It paid the polluter, then outsourced the problem. Meanwhile, though our coal exports already generate more CO2 offshore than our national total, Labor still backs the doubling of coal exports over the next decade. In the lead-up to the election, facing an implicit threat to “change the Prime Minister or we’ll change the government”, coal union bosses ruthlessly installed a Prime Minister likely to be more sympathetic to the interests of the biggest coal miners. Julia Gillard famously “threw open the doors of the government to the mining industry” and a deal to protect their profits was done in a matter of days. The significance of what was arguably the first successful mining industry-run political coup d’état in the Western world, went largely unreported. The sad reality is that Labor is as much a hostage to the coal industry as the Coalition, and the difference between the climate policies of the two major parties is negligible. Both parties aim to meet woefully inadequate emission targets through creative accounting — Labor mainly by outsourcing emissions cuts through dubious forest protection deals in PNG and Indonesia, the Coalition mainly by paying farmers for good gardening to retain more carbon in soils. Both sides are determined to protect the biggest polluters and avoid the essential shift from fossil to renewable energy. Under the circumstances, little effective action on climate change is likely this term from whichever major party forms the new government. The Labor Party might ultimately agree to brave a carbon levy, but you can bet it will be one that is as polluter friendly as its CPRS. There are, of course, numerous issues to be weighed other than climate change and on many of them, most Greens (me included) loathe the prospect of an Abbott administration. Even so, taking a long-term view, it’s hard not to wonder whether the national interest and democratic renewal are best served not by propping up the incumbent government, but allowing it to fall, and learn from its mistakes sooner rather than later. Guy Pearse is a Research Fellow at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. A member or the Liberal Party for 19 years, he joined the Greens in 2008. |
|
|
|
52 Comments
What staggering hubris. And when you’ve installed the Coalition, led by a reformed (?) climate skeptic and leader of a party with even more links to the mining industry, you’ll “let them fail” too if they don’t do you tell them to, Mr Pearse?
The biggest tragedy in Australian politics, is, as Guy writes,
the penny still hasn’t dropped that the CPRS would have done nothing to reduce emissions in Australia…. Both sides are determined to protect the biggest polluters and avoid the essential shift from fossil to renewable energy.
It is a pity that the two biggest parties are populated by hateful men and women who care more about their own careers, than the country.
So let me get this straight- the fibs should be put back in to teach Labor a valuable lesson, so its death to the school reforms, health reforms and the NBN. Not to mention Rupe will want his quid pro quo or that the greens will stop his bs.
I have a different take on the results.
Tony is so toxic to the voters that the fibs only scored a 1.7% swing despite the massive, massive campaign swung against Labor (and the Greens) by the media and other vested interests. All tony had to do, like Barnaby, was keep his mouth shut.
Labor might have hemorrhaged votes but the informal vote got a higher swing than the coalition. You can dress it up anyway you like but the Fibs got done in the washup considering all the resources used to get them elected.
And you can expect the boys to shoot their mouths off without engaging their brains in the near future and the coalition stocks to fall again to where even Rupert, Janet and the rest of the conga line won’t save them.
If Abbott is willing to give the NBN and anything else (that he slagged off) to the independents to be PM he shows that he always was a man of little substance.
If he lasts two months I will be surprised.
‘The number of Green MPs appears to have doubled’
While obviously an acronym for Member of Parliament, in this country ‘MP’ refers specifically to Members of the House of Representatives. You may have noticed that Members of the House of Representatives have the initials ‘MP’ following their name while Senators do not (and have the word ‘Senator’ preceding theirs). To use ‘MP’ in the broader sense is just plain misleading.
‘an historic first seat in the House of Representatives’
Sheesh. A Greens MP (Michael Organ) was elected to the federal seat of Cunningham in 2002.
If this was a high school essay, you’d already have failed before the teacher even began analysing the bizarre logic that to teach Labor to be Greener, the Greens should reward a more mining-friendly climate skeptic with the top job in the country.
Guy, as I wrote in reply to you in The Monthly, there simply isn’t evidence that the Greens’ base has become progressively broader in a political (rather than numerical) sense. Quite the contrary, as I explained in my article in Overland Journal before the election (here: http://web.overland.org.au/previous-issues/feature-tad-tietze/), the Greens’ constituency represents an overwhelming Left of Labor political force.
Pre-election opinion polls and reports of preference flows on Saturday also indicate that Greens voters remain overwhelmingly ALP-oriented, but of course deeply critical.
Like you, I am no fan of the ALP and have been thrilled by the Greens’ result on the weekend. But I am less confident that the ALP will learn any significant lessons from a spell in the wilderness. Thirty plus years of neoliberalism have decimated the personnel who could drive any process of reassessment. And the trade union leaders, passive and conservative, are just as likely to go along with the right-wing ideology that dominates the party.
If the Greens are in a position to support confidence in a minority ALP government, that would be the least worst result out of the ones on offer. Currently we are seeing the business elite and the Murdoch media mount a campaign (similar to their anti-RSPT crusade) to subvert the electorate’s rejection of both major parties and install Abbott to drive an austerity program to cement Australia’s “competitiveness” in unstable economic times.
If the Greens can stop that happening but also refuse to give the ALP a free hand to continue its rightward drift, the party can build on the progressive constituency it has already snared. Simply letting Abbott fall into power unopposed would give him more legitimacy than even the ALP has managed to hand him to date.
That would be seen as a betrayal by those Left voters who form the vast majority of Greens supporters, and who in Melbourne delivered such a historic victory for Adam Bandt.
Guy - I agree with RUSSELL - the last paragraph of your article exhibits muddle-headed thinking. While putting a price on carbon is extremely important, is it worth sacrificing the NBN, reasonable health and education policies, a good industrial relations reform, outstanding economic management etc.? In other words, all the existing and proposed Labor policies which would suffer Coalition “reform”. I don’t think so!
I know people will argue with the economic performance of the last government, but from a global perspective just about everyone agrees that the Labor party got it right. Every other criticism is just xenophobic, party political nonsense. Get over it!! The mere thought of Hockey and Robb, not to mention that great economic guru, Abbott, running the financial affairs of this country fills me with horror. For this reason alone, I sincerely hope that the Gillard government continues.
Anyway, its all about the numbers. Whichever party wins the most seats (not votes) should form a minority government. If it is a dead heat, I repeat, take a look at what Mike Rann did in South Australia over an eight year period - an extremely successful result of how to run a hung parliament/government, and a very pertinent example to follow in the current federal debaucle. However, I agree with a previous post from LIZ45 - Abbott is not up to this type of consensus behaviour.
My old mate Pearsey - it’s a long time since Kennedy School, but my god you’ve gone single issue in your old age. It’s just an extraordinary position to decide that your view of the worth of the CPRS as proposed in the last parliament is now the only serious litmus test for whether Labor should be supported; and that in fact a party that will unambiguously be more hostile to the causes you now support should be given the chance to govern.
You have indeed embraced the “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” mindset. How did it come to this?
Cheers
Damian Smith
” Both sides still characterise the Greens as left-wing, oblivious to their broadening base.”
Of course the Greens are a hard left party, Guy. Enjoy the euphoria of a great Green election result but don’t insult our intelligence.
Thanks for this analysis, Guy. As long as I have been interested in politics, Labor has always argued that anyone to the left of them is somehow helping the conservative side of politics. I found it depressing to see Penny Wong trot out that line on Saturday night - it depends on an audience being ignorant about the actual arguments of the Greens. Were the Greens expected to vote for a scheme they did not actually think would be effective action against climate change? So typical of Labor thinking - that we are not meant to support what we believe in but what our leaders tell us is possible.
In one conversation on Saturday, I was told by a Labor person that those who voted Green were really Liberals in disguise - invisible to this person were the thousands of students and many others on low incomes voting Greens.
These arguments are well worn and tired - support us or you have betrayed “the cause”. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for Labor to start talking about why they lost so many votes to the Greens - it certainly wasn’t because of the leaks ! or the decapitation of Rudd. The voters who defected to the Greens or new voters who went straight to the Greens mostly did so on policy grounds.
This is 90% an excellent article.
However, I think there may be some prospects for making some real progress on climate change policy in this parliament. At least it’s worth exploring. The long game is maybe what we’re left with, but we should try to do better.
Amazingly, Penny Wong - and Stephen Conroy, but that’s another tale (!) - have avoided critical attention so far for their significant roles in Labor’s demise.
Penny was tasked with brokering a deal between competing demands (environmental, industrial and social). But she has a track record of stitching up the environment movement with a one-sided con. Once again she operated true to form. Perhaps that was the Labor cabinet’s intention all along?
In any event, the CRPS deal she brokered in the end was so bad to people who actually care about the issue that while it was acceptable to ‘liberal’ Liberals, it was wholly unacceptable to the Greens. This is for reasons Guy has capably explained, again, in this article.
Labor has since tried to spin the notion that this failure was ‘OPs’: the Greens, the Libs, the Chinese … anyone but themselves.
Yet it was all so predictable. I groaned when I first heard Penny Wong had been appointed Climate Change Minister. I watched her form in NSW forest politics in the 90s and regret to say I don’t believe she cares a hoot about the long-term future of the planet. She’s too glib for that. She’s a political fixer par excellence, who follows power not principles.
As for what comes next… I think it’s interesting how the more intelligent cross-benchers may be willing to push for action. Even just opening up parliamentary debate that isn’t stifled by a two-party straightjacket would be significant progress.
The quality of advice the cross-benchers receive is important. Labor has been selling greenhouse flim-flam. It’s crucial the independents are clear about why that’s so, why we need to do a lot better and how it’s possible to do that.
Let’s hope they call the Global Change Institute at UQ.
Well done Guy I agree with most of what you have said here especially about the win that this election represents for Australian democracy.
I do fear a coalition government though because of the senate control that will be afforded to it in the first year of it incumbency. That said I foresee a world of trouble for who ever does form government. Australian house prices are set to begin to decline just as the US wall street market is set to plummet. With that will come a realisation among many that their net worth is not anything like what they think it is. And somehow partisan media outlets will paint this as a result of the Greens. For any who are bothered to investigate such matters have a look at the US CMI Growth Index. My advice is to get out of stocks as fast as possible and batten down the hatches. Given this I would prefer to see abbott cop the flack for it but the MSN would (correctly ) attribute the blame elsewhere, the same would not happen to a gillard government.
I don’t have to know everything about NBN, CPRS, broadband, alternatives in energy, level of pollution or the direction this country is heading.
I pay my taxes (religiously) and I delegate the government to sort out most of our problems. With my money they should be able to hire the best experts on every important issue concerning this country.
All I expect from the government is to have trust in their selection process based on individual case merit and not on the stupid principle of easy access to my money by some hooligans.
I have to have trust in the government that they administer my money justly in the best interest of the country they represent, which is Australia, by the way, and its taxpayers.
It seems that neither of the major parties got my message in this election.
Ratrace to power resembles a Shakespearian tragedy or just a sick joke.
‘Look at the guy with the red tie on his shoulders!’ He’s been running endlessly around like a dog!.
-‘It’s not the tie, wooly. It’s his tongue’.
Thanks Guy. Predictable responses. I am a member of the Greens and was a voter for both “sides” of politics in th past. Sides? What sides? Both Lib and Lab are smack in the middle and lost. I found virtually everything said bu Gillard and Abbott to be offensive in some way.
The Greens have some hard thinking to do but the church is much broader than most of the commentators here give them credit for.
Facts are stubborn things, but they don’t seem to get in the way of “beyond Left and Right” or “broad church” analyses of the Greens like the ones Guy and Bill Parker put forward here. There is compelling quantitative data on the make-up of the Greens vote and the party’s activist membership (two related but quite different groups), which I summarised in my Overland article. And it points in the opposite direction to what some Greens activists and supporters believe it does (or should do).
It is often said that growing the Greens vote must automatically mean watering down the party’s message, and moving it to some mythical political middle ground, except perhaps on some defining issues like climate change. This is the substance of Guy’s argument. Yet building constituencies involves more than simple addition, and dilution of a strong progressive message could just as easily leave left-wing Greens voters (remember they are the vast majority) alienated from the party’s chase for votes. Of course some will argue “where else can they go?” but that reeks of the ALP’s strategy in recent times, and see where that got them.
It’s about time there was thought given to actually rebuilding the Australian Left, one not trapped by the logic of Labor’s surrender to the corporate elite. Guy’s argument, as seductive as it may appear on the surface, runs the risk of demoralising a progressive constituency that has grown in size and confidence in significant measure due to the clear political alternative offered by the Greens.
Certainly the Greens bled some from the Liberal Vote (a seat such as mine - Grayndler - inner-city ‘getting wealthier’ should be looking Liberal: in fact, now it’s looking green (though the local member is good, and a good minister, and not part of the putsch). The libs were all but wiped out here. Having a studeent (21!) run here didn’t help (though it helped that 20 year old who got one. Or probably it didn’t help that 20 year old, but it didn’t hurt him.)
But the Greens are a ‘left’ party too.
What?
How about we break the left-right paradigm down completely: it’s over - it doesn’t work any more…
once you remove these artificial distinctions, things clear a great deal…
Am I getting the numbers wrong? When the Rudd climate change package was blocked, it was NOT the Greens that blocked it. Liberals Nationals and family first had the majority in the Senate (still will till July 1) and so THEY blocked it. The 5 Greens did vote against it too… but it was already blocked.
If the 5 Greens had voted for it, and Xenaphon too for that matter, it STILL WOULD NOT HAVE PASSED.
I am glad the Greens voted against it because it was such a pissweak policy that would have locked in failure for years. But the facts are that it was already blocked and the 5 green votes could not have saved it.
Please correct me if I am mistaken here.
No-one could be more pleased than me that the Greens will hold the balance in the Upper House but can we get over the bizarre claims being made on here and elsewhere i the media that Australians have overwhelmingly turned from the major parties ?
It’s an example of the extraordinary navel gazing of the meejah as they stumble about trying to relevance for their own dismal failings towards the public in the important role they once played.
98% of Australians voted for either the Coalition or Labor as they always have. Murphy’s Law tells us that at some stage there will be hung parliaments and also that the battle i always on at each election for some 4-500,000 votes that determine the outcome in a number of seats.
God I wish the popular press would just fold up and go away and take their idiotic TV reporters with them.
@Jim Reiher
On plain numbers, you’re right, but there were a couple of Coalition senators who crossed the floor on CPRS. Throw in the ALP and Greens and the Bill would have carried.
@Jim Reiher, except that Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce crossed the floor (2nd December, 2009) so the government would have passed it if the Greens had voted for it. Still, I fully support the Greens in taking the stand that they did.
@Charles, beat me to it
Word Dr _Tad …
It would be several steps the wrong side of madness for The Greens to adopt the course you suggest Guy.
Before this election took place, I could see no basis for thinking that the victory of one of the major parties consistituted the greater prospective harm. I wanted some way in which they could both lose, and in a perverse way, I got that result, and the perverse consequence of that is that there is now the distinct possibility that the ALP’s political enfeeblement will produce the government most people thought they would get in 2007 — courtesy perhaps of such figures as Bandt, Windsor, Oakeshott (and perhaps Wilkie) all of whom are on record as wanting NBN, a carbon price, quality health services, humane treatment of asylum seekers and a resources rent tax on mining.
That’s a huge step forward for progress and a blow across the chops for its enemies, whose near success turned out to be much worse than a total rout. If The Greens + Indies can deliver progressive government and break the two-party logjam, only the conservatives and spin merchants (on both sides) will lose.
The cross benches don’t need to enter the government. They only need to guarantee supply and to support the government in confidence votes. The rest of the stuff can be negotiated.
Oscar said:
Err no … 82.69% voted for the major parties (ALP, Liberal Party, LNP, Nationals), according to the latest figures. 11.4% voted for The Greens. I’ve been generous calling the Nationals “a major party” because they scored slightly more that 1/3 of the green vote, (3.87%) and The Greens aren’t normally called a major party, but as most bracket them with the Libs as a governing party, I’ve let this slide.
It ‘s pretty poor to get a key fact like this wrong, when the figures are online.
I just hope that all this business about the Greens being left wing, that Bill Shorten married the daughter of the GG and will compromise the relationship-whatever. Not to mention the nit-picking by the monarchists re this same relationship will be seen as being the massively unimportant trivia which has resulted in Australians remaining tied to Mum England’s apron strings.
Guy Pearse is correct. Seldom has the Oz electorate voted with such wonderful accuracy in slamming the two major parties right where the maximum pain is. The Greens have ideas, they think ahead. They actually want Oz to become a better place.
The Liberal, National, and Labor Parties took us to be the zombies from planet Zog. And we didn’t like it. This is our chance to question all our shibboleths-footy being more important than a good education, our gratitude that the David Flints of Oz dictate a monarchy for us, that the mining industry has ungoverned rights to dig up our mineral wealth. Flog it off overseas. Save none of it for our own use. Bugger the country and pay a minute fraction of taxes.
This is our once in a lifetime chance. Carpe diem.
I too am a member of the Greens-it took the Labor Party to drive me into the arms of the Greens. And I’m too old to change back again. So I hope it remains a hung parliament. It will give us a chance to clean out the Augean stables.
Charles and Jimmy - thanks for the clarity on that. now that makes more sense.
Like yourselves, I am still glad they did not vote for such a pathetic piece of legislation.
Yeah, really great analysis Guy *cough*
If the Greens were to take your rather inane advice and help install the coalition minority government, it would inevitably leave them firmly wedged between the devil and the deep blue sea.
On one hand, they could choose to massively compromise on their values and pass legislation delivered up by Toxic Tony and the Tarahumara Tea Party - alienating large sections of their base in much the same way the Australian Democrats did last time they bent over to accommodate the Coalition
Alternatively, they could stick to their guns and resolutely refuse to pass Toxic Tony’s legislative agenda - risking both a hardening of broader public perception of the Greens being obstructionist left wing whack jobs and creating an opportunity for Labor to horse trade with the Coalition, rather than face the inevitable double dissolution election
It would seem a far smarter strategy might see the Greens assuming the posture of honest broker in the Senate, tweaking improving and passing the more progressive components of Labour’s legislative agenda - endearing them in the process to people like myself, who whilst deeply disappointed in Gillards populist pandering and lurch to the right on many issues, still don’t see the Greens as being mature enough to play well with others when they hold real political power.
I suspect a lot of you Greens have become so addicted to railing against the tyranny of corporate excess, you can simply no longer see the wood for the trees when it comes to compromising in the name of progressing a broader agenda
This debate about climate change is all predicated on the assumption that Australia can actually make a physical difference to reversing global warming through its efforts.
The Greens are absolutely nuts with their targets.
The reality is that Australia only contributes 1-2% of emissions. Even if one shut down the entire Australian economy today and every single coal powered station, it would make little or no difference whatsoever to addressing global warming.
So all it is a symbolic act that is supposed to “shame” the major polluters like China and the US to act? Seriously, it is completely delusional to think that Australia has that kind of influence in the world. The major polluters will act in their own interest and at their own pace. Australia has little to do with it.
By all means , if you want to engage in symbolic acts, try to reduce our emissions and be greener by investing in renewable energies, planting more trees etc. But not at a cost to the Australian economy.A carbon tax of the kind proposed by the Greens would run the Australian economy to the ground y significantly increasing electricity costs while making little or no difference to reducing global warming.
J4OU trotted out an old delusionist canard:
Let’s look at that. So really if the other 177 regimes that emit less than us also forget about it on the same basis, that too makes no difference. If the 14 or so that emit more say that since Australia’s 1.5% makes no difference, they should have a 1.5% discount, then that won’t make any difference either.
Gotta laugh … Since when do we run policy on that basis? Ivan Milat contributed only a tiny proportion of Australian deaths during his freedom. Maybe we should have left him to do as he pleased. He’s really expensive to lock up. You know 9/11? Nothing compared with US road deaths in that year …
Of course, if one asks, what proportion of the existing problem (i.e the accumlated surplus post industrial CO2 in the flux) has Australia contributed, one gets a much bigger number — something like 19% IIRC. That’s what we are having to respond to, not the amount we are adding in any given year. If that surplus were’t there, there’d be a much smaller problem.
When driving towards a cliff edge, slowing down is sensible, but not adequate. Adequate would be stopping, especially if you aren’t sure where the edge is.
Oh dear!
“The message is loud and clear — Australians want something better than what the most rigid two-party system in the world is delivering”.
I had thought the bandied about Guy Pearse CV was the ultimate in his BS but this beats it and throws in presumptious pontificating as well.
“Australians want….” no less. “Which Australians?” as Mrs T might have put it to George Negus, “Name me one”. To prove the more likely version of reality that Australians are beginning to feel reasonably comfortable again after the GFC fright and, if they think about it at all, thankful not to have to listen to the competitive ranting anger and hate of US shock jocks and activists would be hard but the polling which showed huge numbers likely to make up their mind only at the last minute does nothing to support GP’s vapid substitute for analysis and thought.
I’m afraid it is looking increasingly likely the Greens have delivered Government to Tony Abbott.
Great achievement that !
The Greens, through their petulant and naiive rejection of the CPRS lead to the downfall of Kevin Rudd, and to the political situation we find ourselves in today.
Should Abbott become Prime Minister, there will not be a carbon price, carbon tax or CPRS whilst he remains in office.
It reminds me so much about the referendum for a Republic. A perfectly sensible model was rejected as inadequate and that was the end of that. When will Australia next visit this question ?
Apparently, not in Mr Abbott’s lifetime, nor whilst Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is alive.
It’s the same situation with the CPRS.
Should Tony Abbott be installed as Prime Minister of our”guided democracy”, Murdoch, the MSM, and the Mining Companies will ensure he will win the subsequent election and remain in power for a very, very long time.
But I’m sure that will not bother the Greens as they will have remained ideologically “pure”.
After all, best to have no CPRS than one which doesn’t reduce emissions enough.
That is best to have no reduction in carbon emissions than a slow reduction.
Well done !
Keep up the good work !
The inscription on Pieter van der Heyden’s Avaritia print of 1558 reads:
“Scraping Avarice sees neither honour nor courtesy, shame nor divine admonition”.
The mining junta only sees a threat to more greed. To kill the threat, they need only label the Greens as anarchists who would ruin economic prosperity. Guy is right that you can take the “Labour” out of coal mining, but you can’t take Labor out of the coal industry. But Fran is also correct - the opportunity must be seized. Failure is the status quo, your great grandkids are the price.
Avaritia is: “The personification of greed, a fashionably dressed woman, [who] sits in the central foreground blithely gathering coins in her lap, while a poisonous toad lurks directly in front of her”
This poisonous toad seems especially apt in my home state of Queensland.
PSoup. How many times do we have to run this one? The Greens’ rejection of the CPRS was neither petulant nor naive. The CPRS was definitely not a “perfectly sensible model”. It would have thrown pots of money at the biggest polluters and it set no limits to the level of emissions the govt could offset using unproven and probably dodgy international schemes. The Greens had no interest in remaining idealogically pure: they wanted a CPRS that would deliver what the science unequivocally says we need to avoid a >2C rise: global carbon emissions to peak not much later than 2020, and a worldwide reduction in emissions to 50% on 1990 levels by 2050. The CPRS didn’t make those aims difficult; it made them impossible.
While you take your zombie memes somewhere else, please consider the following:
1. The past tense of “lead” is “led”.
2. No ALP spokesperson has said a thing to suggest that a majority Gillard government would be interested in a carbon tax, price or pollution reduction scheme this term.
3. Failure to pass the CPRS wasn’t really what led to Rudd’s downfall. It was more his failure to convince the electorate to accept his RSPT.
“Australians want something better than what the most rigid two-party system in the world is delivering.”
And it took all of two paragraphs for you to put your foot in your mouth. Hyperbole mixed with cynical fantasy - well done.
Labor’s toxic CPRS was an insult to discerning Australians and industry rejoiced. The ‘climate crap’ Liberals shill for polluters and the Greenhouse mafia.
Australian regulatory agencies are industry sycophants who do not abide by the air pollutant limits set down by the EU. Industrial CO2 and other air pollutant emissions in this nation are regulated by persuasion which has earned Australia the ignominious international reputation as the most pathetic nation in all the OECD countries on climate change action.
Australia’s CO2 emissions per capita have now exceeded the US. Australia’s global contribution of CO2 is around 1.5%, however, some 231 countries or divided regions are reporting their emissions so what do the maths tell us here?
The prospect of the Liberals winning government is ominous, however a collaborative alliance between a Labor opposition and the Greens could be preferable with the Greens retaining the balance of power to keep the bastards honest. Otherwise, we may as well invest in a glamorous outfit for that Doomsday Ball that’s coming our way.
@Fran Barlow
Nations generally have no morals, only interests. They would not publicly admit this, but most countries would seek to minimise their reduction obligations and maximise those of others. The debacle at Copenhagen clearly demonstrated this.
It makes no difference what Australia does. As long as the major polluters like the US and China do not significantly cut their emissions, any action by Australia counts for nought. It is they that have to show leadership, not minnows like Australia.
Lets examine the corollary of what you are suggesting -Europe has introduced emission trading - has their stance swayed the US and China to significantly cut emissions?
Some big assumptions indeed you are making.
I DOES make a difference what Australia does. In terms of tonnes of GHGs maybe not, but in terms of international influence it does. We are pariahs and the world knows it. Change from being a pariah and show how things CAN be done and we make a difference.
@j4ou,
Firstly, countries do sometimes have morals. Although it is clearly contentious at the moment, Australia is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention and does accept thousands of asylum seekers and refugees every year. This is primarily a moral policy. Also, pre-Copenhagen there was widespread support for an ETS. I believe that the public supported reducing our carbon emissions because it was the right thing to do, not because there was an obvious economic benefit (although I believe there are some) or other material interest served.
Have you heard the saying, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’? Based on our current emissions, Australia is clearly part of the problem. You seem to be suggesting that this is fine with you. If there was a natural disaster and you noticed some people were looting, would you think to yourself, ‘Well, I’m wealthy so I don’t need to loot but everyone else is doing it so why don’t I?’.
Finally, proponents of inaction often put forward the argument that moving to renewable energies is too expensive. I don’t agree that there’s necessarily a long-term economic cost, although there is undoubtedly a short-term cost. In the coming decades, would you prefer that Australia is a quarry for coal that no-one wants or a world-leading exporter of renewable technology? Australia was a world-leader in solar technology in the 80s. We can be that again.
I think if you read my earlier posts, I am not suggesting we do nothing. Simply that Australia for the time being, respond proportionately and realistically to the problem in a way that does not harm its standards of living by pushing up electricity prices.
Because of its relatively low total emissions (forget about per capita, that is irrelevant) then any action Australia takes is not going to physically reduce global warming at all. Especially when the major polluters are dragging their feet at the moment.
It going to be symbolic and merely for PR purposes (perhaps avoiding “pariah” status as Bill Parker puts it).
All well and good. But there is no “carbon-free lunch” - the point of a carbon tax is to hurt, deter and change consumers’ behaviour to reduce overall emissions. And this would include hitting low-income earners and the disadvantaged.
If ordinary consumers are going to be hit in the hip-pocket by a carbon tax and yet after all that, there is still no discernable impact on global warming, then it is without doubt, a useless policy.
A better approach would be to hold off on a carbon tax pending what path the major polluters decide and improve the alternatives to coal by way of subsidies and rebates -e.g wind, solar and nuclear - until they become workable alternatives. Still a worthwhile symbolic gesture.
There are ways to reduce emissions without inflicting pain on low-income earners. Compensation and sliding-scale electricity prices are two that come to mind. Regarding the former, under Labor’s amended CPRS, low-income earners were actually given so much compensation (too much) that they would actually be better off. That’s counter-productive. Under a sliding-scale model, you could discern a figure for reasonable per-person electricity use (similar to Target 155 for water use in Melbourne) and regulate that price hikes for use in this range are minimal but gradually increase per-kW prices in bands higher than that. If you want to run a reverse-cycle air-conditioning unit for example, you have to pay for the emissions it produces or possibly reconsider whether you need it running all the time. You could also mix the two strategies.
What is your context for proportionality? I think a proportional response to the problem would be to reduce Australia’s emissions so that they are somewhere near the average per-capita for developed nations, not remaining way out in front. In this sense, ‘proportion’ means that Australia accepts responsibility for our proportion of the problem.
“It makes no difference what Australia does. As long as the major polluters like the US and China do not significantly cut their emissions,”
J4OU – China and the US have adopted far more significant measures to mitigate CO2 emissions than Australia and several states in the US are not hanging around waiting for Congress to enforce the regulation of air pollutants. Unlike this country, California does not permit the burning of pollutant waste oil in industrial kilns, in keeping with their clean air policies and the US now has one of the fastest growing wind power markets in the world, second only to China.
The adage: “think globally, act locally” particularly applies to this arid nation and the parochial reality is the elevation of CO2 and relevant hazardous air pollutants.
Hydrocarbons, heavy metals, pesticides, nutrient pollution nationally and rampant salinity in WA have placed many of our ecosystems on life support and mass fish, bird and animal mortalities are occurring all too regularly but these calamities continue to be trivialised by our incompetent regulators, industry and constituents alike. Additionally, tardy past and present mining industry operations remain responsible for the wholesale slaughter of millions of native animals each year.
It is a short-sighted Australian, obsessing over his hip pocket, who thinks that the driest nation on earth can continue the status quo with impunity. A status quo that makes a total mockery of Australia’s Environmental Protection Acts – corrupted and manipulated by industry and sycophantic regulators. However, the short-sighted do have a choice – climate change catastrophes coming his way or the collapse of his fragile ecosystems, exacerbated by a growing human population and an elevated extinction of biodiversity as we know it - whatever comes first.
J4OU, you continue to exhibit the muddled thinking that reducing our carbon output is a cost to Australia.
There will be costs, and there will be benefits. The opportunities of renewable energy are enormous, and have blue sky about them, the costs are definable, and in fact merely put a dollar figure to costs we are already paying (we, the people, the environment, the planet). The fact that the great polluters aren’t paying a carbon tax doesn’t mean we aren’t paying, it just means that they aren’t paying.
As usual, the debate around renewables versus status quo doesn’t reach any depth, only emotional platitudes.
And debating how far ‘left’ the greens are is a little ridiculous without mentioning that the most left leaning party at the moment is the Nationals, by a long way. Head towards the ‘centre’ from where the Nats are and you will pass the Greens along the way.
But going back to these dichotomies doesn’t progess the debate at all. It is akin to fiddling while Rome burns.
And to blame the greens for rejecting the CPRS displays a startling ‘led-by-the-nose’ gullibility. The proposed CPRS was a dog, would have had no effect on behaviour or emissions, and was specifically designed by Wong and Rudd as a political response to damage the Greens. Turnbull’s demise was an accident. It was Rudd in his popular pomp scoring political points rather than trying to win government by good policy.
@ DOGS BREAKFAST
Interesting that you say “As usual, the debate around renewables versus status quo doesn’t reach any depth, only emotional platitudes” because it is very close to the pot calling the kettle black.
Why do I say that?
I can encapsulate my reasoning in my comment on your muddled “The opportunities of renewable energy are enormous, and have blue sky about them, the costs are definable, and in fact merely put a dollar figure to costs we are already paying (we, the people, the environment, the planet).”
My comment is that you fail to acknowledge that there will be huge costs in replacing cheap generation of electricity from coal burning by any of the available renewable technologies for the forseeable future and the costs will be met by Australia and Australians whereas the environmental benefits to Australia can only be whatever is afforded us by the worldwide reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Don’t let yourself be confused by the fact that we can, in the course of changing from coal burning generation, effect some desirable environmental outcomes because they can be achieved at less cost more directly. Don’t be confused either by the specious “jobs created” arguments which are always available when someone proposes to do something uneconomic and inefficient compared with what the highest productivity technology. (I don’t suppose you would advocate phasing out motor cars and going Amish with horse drawn vehicles only).
As to the environmental arguments I would hope that serious minded Greens would protest the proliferation of costly wind farms throughout the Western District of Victoria, not only on economic grounds, which may not worry them, but on the landscape destruction grounds, particularly ones like Origen Energy’s Stockyard Hill development which will blight a Heritage landscape and property.
“As to the environmental arguments I would hope that serious minded Greens would protest the proliferation of costly wind farms throughout the Western District of Victoria,”
Julius – I would hope that the serious minded Greens continue to protest the proliferation of coal mines, gold mines, nickel mines, bauxite mines, relevant filthy smelters etc, where the mining industry continues to impact on human and animal health and continues to bludge off the environment with impunity. The massive land grabs by the mining industry which prevails, through state and national forests, private and farm lands will render these once fertile lands unfit for human habitation.
Considering the arrogance of the industry, the environmental carnage perpetrated by many of these companies and their denial of climate change, the “Polluter Pays” Principle, ingrained in the EPA legislation, should be enforced forthwith so please desist from trying to frighten the victims of these greed barons who are committing crimes against humanity and who have never been held accountable for the damage they have caused:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage
Julius said:
As someone who sees (at best) very little carbon emission abatement per dollar spent using windfarms, I would indeed protest the proliferation of such developments. In a way, this is why I’d like a proper price on carbon. If the price is correct we ought to be able to abate emissions at the price we are imposing. If the cost per tonne of CO2 abated using wind (or any other technology or combination of technologies) exceeds the price we are imposing, then one can see that the method is ineffective. At the suggested Greens interim carbon price of $23 per tonne, you are simply not going to get a tonne of abatement out of wind. You would get it replacing lignite coal with CCGT and you might get it replacing anthracite with CCGT. Nuclear power would easily fit into this budget — even though its cost is higher at the moment than gas, it abates a lot more CO2 and most of its cost is the initial outlays, and unrelated to power output. Gas won’t always be as cheap as now either. Nuclear fuel costs form only a trivial part of the cost of plant operations. Of course, the new fast spectrum reactors we see will be able to make use of existing hazmat, both degarding it and staunching demand for new fuel.
The price we are willing to pay ought to be a reality check. Cash for clunkers, as proposed by Gillard will cost about $396 per tonne. If we think this is too high a price, we’d better find some other way of abating emissions. CC&S will cost at least $100 per tonne, so unless its advocates favour this price, they ought, IMO to shut their cakeholes.
I think a price of $100 per tonne is indeed where we need to be by 2015, so I’m in favour of stuff that fits that budget — and I am not at all convinced that CC&S does fit this budget. It might fit into it in some places for a while — until the storage for the CO2 under pressure is exhausted — but thereafter all bets are off.
Some energy efficiency/usage avoidance measures fit into the $23 per tonne, but not all, though CO2 abatement is not the only reason for acting. Resource depletion is another. So too is other atmospheric and marine pollution. One could advocate retiring coal plants and reducing fossil fuel powered vehicle miles on human health grounds alone.
This is the basic metric though.
IMO, we could, today if we wanted:
1. Remove the federal subsidy for diesel fuel usage or restrict it to diesel fuel derived from biomass waste (e.g waste vegetable oil, F-T from syngas from waste biomass) or some other near Co2 neutral source (e.g. algae). LPG subsidies could also be dropped.
2. You make dirty energy not tax deductible, and you use as your benchmark for stationary plants the 1t CO2 per MWh typical of anthracite plants. (ergo a Brayton Cycle plant that has a Co2 intensity of 450Kg per tonne gets to deduct 55% (550/1000) of its energy cost. Similarly business users can deduct fuel expenses from taxable income by comparing the Co2/BTU profile of their fuel with that of standard petrodiesel. Thus if their fuel produces only 10% of the CO2 per BTU as standard petrodiesel, they get to deduct 90% of the cost.
3. You take the money you clawback under 1) and 2) above and hand it back in cash or services (e.g. concessional public transport, quality low cost housing, cheaper health, dental or some other benefit) to those on or below A.W.F.T.E.
In short, the system doesn’t impose new taxes or charges, but rather, withdraws subsidies and then compensates those onto whom the costs will be passed. People can choose to pocket the money and use less energy or spend it on the dirty energy. There will however be an advantage to be had in producers of energy finding wasy to be come less Co2-intensive.
Apart from the compensation package, one would not need to pass such measures through the senate. It would require little new compliance by those wanting not to change their businesses. Only those wanting to get tax deductions for cleaner energy would need to submit different paperwork. There would be a market in better using waste biomass, in using waste heat from plants, in PV (you could then remove the subsidies, FiT etc) and in using electric vehicles especially if the source of the power were a lot lower in Co2 intensity than coal. That’s true in Tasmania where most of their stationary power comes from hydro (and to a lesser extent from gas), and also true in WA and SA where a lot comes from gas. They’d be very happy with that.
Some rough calculations I’ve done suggest that the effective cost on CO2 would be about $30 per tonne — so ballpark with The Greens interim price proposal. Once industry started to retool though it’s likely that they would pick the most cost-effective measures and might actually find ways of cutting a lot more sharply than this price would suggest, meaning that when and if a cap and trade scheme came about they would actually favour it, since it would reward them for their innovation.
Such a scheme would make the geothermal projects we are now looking at in SA and elsewhere a lot more viable, so even if we still weren’t willing to look at nuclear, this might come into play.
Fran, that’s a great post. Withdrawing subsidies from fossil fuel use would at least temporarily raise the price of energy, because the energy companies will try to preserve their huge profits. The solution is to combine the withdrawal of subsidies with a targetted tax on the upper end of these companies’ profits - which you then use to alleviate the effects of price rises on the poorest.
To those who criticise this as typical leftwing tax-and-spend, how hard have you been arguing to scrap these nasty lefty top-down big government fossil fuel subsidies? Not that hard I reckon.
Fran - one thing I disagree with you on is CCS. I agree the technology isn’t with us yet, and there are other problems (where to store the carbon, and for how long, and does it legitimise fossil fuel use and/or distract from the main game, which should be renewables) but I have yet to see a model of projected energy use that achieves the emissions cuts we need that doesn’t include CCS. It simply has to be made to work, or we’re all stuffed.
Jeremy said:
First some nice things … ta … not sure about company profits — - too hard to avoid them doing an end run around that.
A couple of things here. Aquifers (and other places where CO2 can be stored under pressure forever (it has to be remember) are themselves a limited and non-renewable resource. So by definition, it’s not sustainable and you have to keep shipping the stuff farther and farther from source. Not only that, it lowers the proportion of chemical energy one can convert to power from coal by about 20% and coal won’t last us long either, even without doing that. Of course, coal plants will still be filthy and digging up coal will still be deadly and there will still be fugitive emissions.
Saying things like It simply has to be made to work, or we’re all stuffed is a dodge unless one can make it work. I could say “we simply must find an alternative or we’re all stuffed” and that would be just as right. Actually, that is right because unless we can get atmospheric concentrations back to the point at which they were stable i.e. 280ppmv we will continue to warm the planet and sooner or later, we, or our descendents, will wear the full consequences.
We have some time-buying options in geoengineeering, but that won’t last us indefinitely.
I am a strong advocate of nuclear power as a key energy technology, but even that won’t solve the problem entirely.
Fran, thanks for your reply. I’m not up on the Australian situation (I didn’t start working in the climate change scene until I got to the UK, where I live now) but here’s a fun way for you to kill a few hours, if you fancy: http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/lc_uk/2050/2050.aspx
The UK Dept of Energy & Climate Change has a tool where you can experiment with different energy mixes to meet our targets and still satisfy energy demand. I totally agree that geoengineering (CCS in particular) only buys us time and is not a sustainable solution. The aim is to get emissions to peak in the early 2020s and to halve by 2050.
The problem is urgent and what we need right now is something to buy us time until we can work out a longterm solution (such as an almost-totally decarbonised economy). If we solve this problem, I think CCS is going to be very important in the coming decades, and probably not important at all by the end of the century. New nuclear build will be the opposite: it won’t help us bring down emissions in the short term (i.e. before 2020) but is likely to be a large part of a sustainable-ish energy mix in 50 years time.
Groan, we just go round and round in circles on the same old topics and misunderstandings. I and lots of others have written articles on CCS in Crikey and all the MSM (perhaps except News Ltd?). There is no argument about it “working”. It is pretty simple chemistry. All steps have been well understood for decades and there is no question about it being “possible”. The only real technical issues are to do with the fact that the CO2 in the exhaust from most fossil-fuel plants is very dilute which becomes a logistic/economics question. This is why most people believe retrofitting of old plants will never happen — not because it is impossible but because it is just too inefficient and expensive. And there is no prospect of a magic solution. So the new systems either preburn coal to create carbon-free fuels (essentially hydrogen) that are then burned in the generator. The other is to use oxygen in the burner, rather than just air, and recycle it until by the time the oxygen becomes limiting, the CO2 is high concentration etc. greatly improving the efficiency/cost of the capture.
No, it is the various laws of thermodynamics that fundamentally make the whole process uneconomic. Silly even, really. You are taking complex carbon compounds (with the energy in those carbon bonds in the organic compounds that were created by plants harnessing sunlight to remove oxygen during that biochemical process — oxygen is the “waste” product of photosynthesis) then millions of years later, recombining it with oxygen (burning) that is the release of the energy, and in the process the carbon structure is reduced to lower-energy compounds, mostly CO2 and some CO. Capturing it and simply compressing it and sending it to be stored might be the simplest but is not only uneconomic (using a significant fraction of the original energy released) but the very long-term storage is really truly uncertain (not just some Green namby pamby worry). There is a reason why the only CCS plants in the world are one in Mountaineer that captures no more than 2% of the output, and a demo 25MW oxy plant in Germany (SchwarzPompe) that actually re-releases the captured CO2 back into the atmosphere because it has not got permission to pump it underground.
It’ the economics stupid! read here: crikey.com.au/2009/05/06/more-smoke-and-mirrors-from-the-coal-lobby/
Now there are companies (Calera) in the USA who are proposing to lock the CO2 into solid carbon compounds, essentially calcium carbonate compounds. Well, talk about a giant circle back to nowhere. Naturally the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry tell you that that is going to consume a lot of energy. No ifs, ands or buts. In fact I have pointed out (as I am sure any competent biologist, biochemist or chemist has, repeatedly — this is really no more than high-school level) it doesn’t make sense to do this with new synthetic chemistry when there is a billions years of evolution that can probably not be improved upon: photosynthesis! Thus the ocean seeding experiments in which phytoplankton use energy from the sun to convert CO2 into calcium carbonate (for their skeletons and hard bits) that upon death, sink to the ocean floor and over millenia or in fact millions of years and countless zillions of animals, eventually becomes limestone, chalk etc. that you see in White Cliffs of Dover etc. (and marble etc, lots of different forms) — obviously an extremely stable non-threatening form of carbon storage. Using solar energy!
If you can understand these simple facts about coal burning and the idiocy of trying to reverse the process so we don’t poison ourselves, you come to realize that it rather makes more sense to skip the fossil fuels to begin with.
Oh, and Fran, about nuclear power for Oz: it’s the economics stupid! Unless one believes a series of improbably fantasies as the BNC website does.
theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/nuclear-its-just-too-expensive-for-us-and-the-rest-of-the-world-20100225-p4y3.html
Nuclear? It’s just too expensive, for us and the rest of the world
MICHAEL R. JAMES February 26, 2010
theage.com.au/opinion/politics/nuclear-economics-just-dont-add-up-20091223-lcuj.html
Nuclear economics just don’t add up
‘New nuclear build will be the opposite: it won’t help us bring down emissions in the short term (i.e. before 2020) but is likely to be a large part of a sustainable-ish energy mix in 50 years time.’ (Jeremy Yapp)
I’ve yet to be convinced that the above hypothesis would apply to Australia. The 2006 Switkowski Report suggested that this country could have 25 reactors by 2050 which would supply a mere one third of Australia’s energy requirements.
Constructing 25 reactors over 40 years appears to me to be a superhuman feat, given the cost overruns and the technical problems that currently prevail. Nor do I imagine GenIV reactors coming off a production line anytime in the near future.
The resource state of Western Australia is the largest polluter in the nation yet by September 2009, over 450 uranium projects in WA were being reported to the global financial markets. I envisage that the majority of projects in WA will be open cut mining.
Critical factors in the event of large scale uranium mining is understanding the
sustainability of mining including environmental costs, cumulative radioactive emissions, solid waste burden, containment of tailings, declining ore grades, energy, chemicals and water inputs, contaminated sites, rehabilitation and other pollution outputs including greenhouse emissions.
Mining expert, hydrologist and academic, Gavin Mudd advises that given the vast quantities of mine wastes now produced annually in Australia, there would be a very substantive quantity of listed National Pollutant Inventory pollutants contained within tailings and waste rock yet they are excluded from, or least poorly addressed by such accounting and reporting systems.
The evidence currently produced by the Commonwealth’s Supervising Scientist suggests that the containment of radionuclides in operating mines cannot be managed safely and it appears that past environmental and occupational safety calamities remain a recurring problem.
In addition, this nation has not yet managed to rehabilitate past projects. The Commonwealth Government spent some $25 million of taxpayers’ money on rehabilitation of the former Rum Jungle field in the 1980s yet the adjacent East Finniss River is still heavily polluted by acid mine drainage leaching from ‘rehabilitated’ waste rock dumps.
The ‘clean, green’ image of nuclear energy is misleading for I fail to see anything clean and green in digging up vast tracts of land in an ‘enlightened’ 21st century, potentially and collectively over thousands of square kilometres, to enable an industry to get at uranium but the realities appear to remain ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for a nuclear industry that I suspect may take humanity two steps forward, three back.
Flower, I’m with you on this one. Based on my (extremely limited) understanding of Australia’s energy mix and use projections, I think it’s unlikely nuclear will ever be cost-effective, efficient or useful there. And financing it would mean either the govt guarantees a floor price on energy so Ziggy and his mates feel confident to build the reactors, or we just give them an old-fashioned rentseeker’s subsidy. Neither option is a good one, when there’s so much scope for renewable energy generation in Australia.
Globally, however, I think nuclear will be a significant part of the mix by 2050. Which raises another tangent: given that no N-weaponised country can possibly guarantee that uranium it imports isn’t going to end up in a weapon, and also given that it is (I think) legal for a govt to refuse to honour a contract to sell uranium if it thinks it’ll end up weaponised, couldn’t Australia (holding more than a quarter of uranium deposits) hold the world to ransom and refuse to sell to a Nuclear state? That should focus some minds on the non-proliferation treaty.
Thanks for indulging my peace-nik fantasies.
CCS:
1. Determine nearest carbon sink
2. Gain local approval for sink
3. Determine retrofit + pipeline price
4. Seek ridiculous subsidy from Government
5. Compare with c/kW of alternatives
6. Consider alternatives with commensurate subsidy
Nuclear:
1. Find site to build a nuclear waste facility
2. Gain local approval
3. Repeat Step 1
4. Consider alternatives
Jeremy – I would imagine that the non-proliferation treaties are no guarantee that a state would not turn rogue. Meanwhile the pilfering of uranium continues around the planet but happily most of the thieves appear to be under the misapprehension that they can make a bomb from LEU.
I would concur that the large nations that have bred like rabbits have little option but to include nuclear energy in the mix. Nevertheless, I find it ironic that the US has more nuclear reactors than any other nation yet they are the biggest polluters. However, I guess supplying energy to 300 million citizens is no mean feat, expected to worsen since the U.S. Census Bureau has projected a figure to top 419 million by 2050.
And since the resurrection of uranium mining, the protests are rapidly increasing:
March 2010: Nearly two-dozen doctors in Sept-Îles, Quebec, are renewing their threats to resign and leave the province after the government rejected calls for a moratorium on uranium mining and exploration in the region.
April 2010: Buenos Aires - An Argentine high court halted the project of a foreign company to mine uranium in an open-pit mine in Quebrada de Humahuaca in the northern part of the country, declared a World Heritage of Humanity site.
July 2010: Conservation groups and Native American tribes appealed a federal court decision that denied a request to halt uranium mining just six miles north of Grand Canyon National Park.
July 2010: Thousands of residents of Armenia’s southern most region threatening to block a major highway if the government presses ahead with uranium ore prospecting in the area.
Etc. etc.
And I too must protest because while Australia can provide large nations with uranium for their nuclear energy, I am not that altruistic that I would wish to clean up another nation by turning my own nation into a radioactive wasteland – a realistic prospect for the not too distant future in down under. Cheers.