At least 32 people including a one-month-old baby have been killed in northernPortugal and Spain, where hundreds of wildfires have forced residents to flee from towns and villages.

Portugal’s national civil protection authority said the infant had been missing after a wildfire near Tabua, 120 miles (200km) north of Lisbon. Seven people were missing and 56 people were injured – 16 of them seriously, the agency said.

The death toll in Portugal, where a huge fire killed 64 people in June, is likely to rise. The government declared a state of emergency for regions north of the Tajo river after Sunday was described as “the worst day of the year in terms of forest fires” by the civil protection spokeswoman Patricia Gaspar.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/portugal-spain-wildfires-f...

If this energy policy is called the National Energy Guarantee, or the NEG, it might be timely to remind you of this, from the prime minister, just yesterday. Doesn’t that feel like a lifetime ago.

That’s the task of government. To get beyond the slogans, and the three-letter acronyms that honourable members opposite don’t understand and to get a policy that works and have the one that works best. That is our commitment. Engineering and economics, not three-letter acronyms and terms that honourable members opposite and laugh about but do not understand.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2017/oct/17/coalitions-e...

Right now, Malcolm Turnbull is giving his best impression of a poker player about to table a royal flush, but this week’s Essential Report suggests that he’s actually playing a losing hand when it comes to energy policy.

It says much about the game the prime minister’s been playing over recent months that he appears to be overjoyed with the cards he’s picked up after throwing in the clean energy target. Or maybe that’s just his poker face.

Everyone knows he was ready to sit on the CET, but he and his energy minister Josh Frydenberg bowed to pressure from their backers – both political and financial.

Turnbull is certainly talking up his hand – lower prices, energy stability, lower emissions, all without the “the need for an actual emissions reduction policy! He’s giving his best bluff, hoping the public buys it if the lights go out over summer.

But in politics, as in poker, a hand’s strength is relative to those held by one’s opponents.

Bill Shorten’s playing the long game, sitting pat with a hand that the public has already endorsed, no need to go for the jackpot this hand and willing to deal down if required, but also increasingly in a position to bid up.

There’s Tony Abbott, toting his own weapon of mass distraction – a sacrificial goat no less – determined to table a hand of jokers, refusing to accept that you need actual cards that are recognised by the table before you get access to the kitty.

The business community is at the table too, although they seem ready to walk away altogether if the banker keeps dealing up this sort of rubbish. That’s apart from the Coal Club, desperately looking for a match for their ace of spades.

As for the rest of us? Well we don’t get dealt into this game, we just have to clean up the mess when the bank is broken and the players say goodnight to reconvene the next time to do it all again.

So why is Turnbull playing a losing hand?

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/17/malcolm-turnbull-i...

The Trump administration will scrap the Clean Power Plan (CPP), President Obama's signature environmental policy aimed at fighting climate change, confirming earlier reports of such a move.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt said at an event in Kentucky he will sign a proposed rule on Tuesday “to withdraw the so-called clean power plan of the past administration.”

The Clean Power Plan, which focused on cutting emissions from coal-burning power plants, was a major target of the current administration's regulatory rollbacks. In March, President Trump signed the Executive Order on Energy Independence that called for a review of the CPP, which he considers a “war on coal.”

And in June, Trump infamously announced plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, a global action plan to limit temperature rise to well below 2°C to avoid dangerous climate change. Without theCPP, the U.S. will not live up to its pledge made in Paris.

Pruitt, as Oklahoma's attorney general, made a career fighting EPA safeguards and was part of a coalitionof state attorneys general that sued the Obama administration to block the implementation of the CPP. The Supreme Court has since put the regulation on hold until the legal challenge is completed.

“The EPA and no federal agency should ever use its authority to say to you we are going to declare war on any sector of our economy,” Pruitt said Monday.

According to the Associated Press, the EPA plans to declare that the Obama policy overstepped federal law by setting emissions standards that power plants could not reasonably meet.

read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/10/09/trump-administration-pruitt-repeal...

I can see the the US Trump admin and Australia's government of Malcolm dorks sniffing each other's arse as if on a permanent conference call to pat each other's back and denigrate emission reduction targets while creating new fudge...