1 day Ago By Nick O'Malley
News emerged on Monday that the Climate Change Authority had concluded the Coalition’s nuclear power plan would create an extra two billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by extending the life of the nation’s geriatric coal power plants. The Coalition’s response was swift and emphatic. It attacked the Climate Change Authority as partisan – the CCA that is headed by former NSW Liberal treasurer and energy minister Matt Kean.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen (left), Matt Kean and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the press conference announcing Kean’s appointment. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen “The Climate Change Authority has become a puppet of Anthony Albanese and [Climate Change and Energy Minister] Chris Bowen, as its latest report parrots Labor’s untruthful anti-nuclear scare campaign,” said Coalition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien, as reported by the Australian Financial Review . The opposition’s finance spokeswoman Jane Hume suggested that should the Coalition win government in coming months, Kean, or the agency he heads, might have to go.
“I cannot imagine that we possibly maintain a Climate Change Authority that has been so badly politicised,” she told ABC TV. “It simply isn’t serving its purpose to provide independent advice to the government on its climate change policy.” The problem the opposition faces is that if it was to abolish all the bodies casting doubt on its nuclear power plan, it would have to do a lot of abolishing.
Both the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator have published findings that the opposition’s nuclear plan would be a slower and more expensive way to replace the coal stations than the government’s policy of speeding up deployment of wind and solar, backed by gas and energy storage infrastructure including batteries and pumped hydro. Both those bodies have copped criticism from the Coalition for stating their case, too. On Wednesday, a (Labor-dominated) parliamentary inquiry into nuclear power published its interim report, which also found that nuclear would be more costly – in cash and emissions – than the renewables path charted by Labor.
O’Brien dismissed the inquiry as a “ sham ”. Messenger-shooting is an old sport in politics and has a particularly rich history in climate and energy policy. Just over a decade ago, the incoming Abbott government wasted no time in knocking off the Climate Commission , an advisory body established by Kevin Rudd.
Its chief commissioner, Tim Flannery, was sacked over the phone within hours of the government being sworn in. A few months later, the CSIRO’s “Climate Adaptation Flagship” was also knocked on the head. Now, in the US, the Trump administration is at work not just unpicking the considerable achievements of Joe Biden in climate, as we have reported , but even scrubbing references to climate change from official websites, including that of the White House.
This week the president ramped up his attack on the very fabric of the science the world is relying on in its response to climate change by preventing a group of scientists from attending a planning meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , the UN’s key climate science body. The journal Nature has since reported that a US State Department delegation will not attend the meeting, and that NASA has cancelled funding for a team to provide administrative and technical support to the IPCC’s climate-assessment effort. The sudden withdrawal of US expertise and funding will have a profound impact on the UN’s next major assessment of the state of the climate, and in particular on the world’s mitigation efforts, says Dr Pep Canadell, chief research scientist with CSIRO Environment.
Any retrenchment of Australian efforts in combating climate change is minor league by comparison, and it is not at all clear that any incoming Coalition government would be as enthusiastic in its opposition to science as the Trump 2.0 administration. But as heating accelerates , the world can little afford to have its elected representatives solving political problems by shooting the messengers that serve us all.
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