Thursday 28th of March 2024

and god said to scomo...

scomonoahscomonoah

The federal government has been excoriated on Q+A by Labor and cross bench MPs for not having a climate policy that gets the nation to net zero emissions by the year 2050.

Key points:
  • Questions were asked as to why there is still not a federal anti-corruption watchdog
  • The government came under fire for taking too long to commit Australia to net zero by 2050
  • The National party was widely accused as being a major stumbling block on that issue

The Morrison government was labelled a "rabble" by Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus during a withering attack over a lack of action on climate change.

The panel, consisting of Mr Dreyfus, Independent MP Helen Haines, Liberal Senator for NSW Andrew Bragg, television director Craig Reucassel and Melbourne Demons President Kate Roffey, were asked by viewer Glenn Gibson why the federal government had left it so late to draft climate policy.

The question came ahead of the UN's climate change conference in Scotland, an event Prime Minister Scott Morrison has yet to commit to attending.

Senator Bragg defended the government, saying formulating a plan on climate change was difficult.

"The plan to get emissions down is a very complex agenda because you've got to decarbonise electricity, you have to decarbonise industry and transport and you also have to look to agriculture," he said.

"What you'll see over the next few weeks is an agenda to decarbonise those three things with a target to get to net zero in a particular year and I think it's important that as part of that agenda there is a clear checkpoint along the way in 2030."

Asked what that should be, Senator Bragg said: "Forty per cent. I think that is quite achievable [and] would be a reasonable target for us to show the rest of the world we are serious about getting to net zero."

 

Mr Dreyfus was not placated.

"This is a rabble of a government," he said.

"We have been waiting eight years for a government to have a proper policy on climate.

"We have had 21 policies, all of them abandoned and we're now waiting on the 22nd."

Mr Dreyfus then accused Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and the Nationals of holding the Coalition and Australia to ransom.

"We're waiting for Barnaby Joyce and the National Party to tell the government of Australia, which they're part of, what the policy's going to be," he said.

"Federal Cabinet met yesterday but no-one is prepared to talk about what was discussed or even maybe decided because we're waiting until the National Party meet on Sunday.

"I find this absurd.

"We had the pre-COP in Milan two weeks ago; Australia didn't say anything at the pre-COP because we didn't have a policy.

"This rabble of a government have not got a policy and they have let Australia down big time."

Q+A host Virginia Trioli reminded him that federal Labor have not been perfect on climate change policy either, with Member for Hunter Joel Fitzgibbon at odds with his party on several climate policies.

Mr Dreyfus blamed the Abbott government for "wrecking" Labor's past climate policies.

Independent member for Indi, Helen Haines, also went on the attack against the National party.

"Fundamentally, the government have not had a plan," Ms Haines said.

"There's a closed door secret deal being done at the moment with the National Party and the Liberal Party.

"I represent an electorate in rural and regional Australia and let me tell you, farming communities, regional communities are so far in front of the National Party [and] the Liberal Party.

"The National Farmers' Federation committed to zero net emissions by 2050 years ago.

"The meat and livestock association have committed to carbon neutrality by 2030.

"We have the dairy farmers in my electorate sending me their plan for climate action.

 

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-15/government-is-rabble-mark-dreyfus-climate-change-net-zero/100540894

 

 

saving assange from the psychos in washington...

neat net trick...

Perhaps the hardest part of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 is the “net”. We won’t get to zero emissions without it, but it’s tricky and presents us with a great temptation to turn the whole exercise into a rort.

The goal is “net zero” because it’s neither possible nor sensible for us to eliminate every last emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But that won’t be a problem provided we can offset what few emissions remain by finding ways to remove from the atmosphere an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that’s already there.

 

How could we do that? By taking advantage of “carbon sinks”. Before we began burning fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas - for energy at the start of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was fairly steady and so had little effect on the world’s average temperature.

There were natural emissions of carbon dioxide, but these were matched by natural processes – carbon sinks - that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

 

As the Grattan Institute explains in its latest report, trees, vegetation, soils and oceans absorb carbon dioxide as part of their lifecycle, and hold it for a period before releasing it again.

“Sometimes this cycle is short (for example, a plant that grows and dies within a year) and sometimes the cycle is long (for example, a tree that lives for hundreds of years and takes hundreds more to decay).

“Natural cycles tend to balance out: the carbon that is absorbed by a plant will be released when the plant dies, but will be reabsorbed by the new plant that grows in its place,” the report says.

But all our burning of fossil fuels has destroyed this natural balance. The past 250 years have seen a huge build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has trapped heat from the sun and caused a rise in global average temperatures, in the same way a greenhouse allows you to grow tropical plants in Europe.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/the-net-in-net-zero-emissions-offers-a-huge-temptation-to-cheat-20211014-p59054.html

 

Europe Rethinks Its Approach to Forest FiresIt has been a bad summer for wildfires in Europe, and all signs point to more bad summers to come. Many countries are trying out new approaches to lower the fire danger, but not all of them are high-tech. Catalonia, for example, is turning to livestock. 

When fire is approaching through the forest, says Juliane Baumann, you hear it long before you can see it. The flames crackle through the underbrush. The fire's power rips the leaves from the trees and sends them floating through the air. And if you do ultimately find yourself within sight of the flames, rising in a wall several meters high, you won’t have much time to escape.

 

Baumann, 43, knows what she is talking about. For the last five years, she has been working as a firefighter in Catalonia, likely the only German on the force. During that time, she estimates, she has seen around 20 forest fires per year. Some of them have been small, requiring the attention of just a couple of fire engines. Others, though, have been much larger, with hundreds of firefighters battling the flames around the clock as helicopters circle overhead and yellow firefighting planes swoop by.

Read more:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/helicopters-planes-and-sheep-europe-rethinks-its-approach-to-forest-fires-a-8c44b806-d057-4abc-9e70-57f413a30561

 

Eat the forests before they burn? Neat trick....

 

saving assange from the psychos in washington...