Michelle Grattan talks to Labor environment spokesman Mark Butler about climate change, an ETS, the possibility of an early election, the ALP national conference and much more.
Pressure is mounting inside and outside Australia for greater action on climate.
AAP Image/Dan Peled
Despite looming legal challenges, states are devising plans to comply with limits on power plant carbon emissions – a crucial part of Obama’s climate policies.
Public opinion is still firmly anti-nuclear.
Christopher Jue / EPA
Christian Holz, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
This month Canada revealed its post-2020 climate target as 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. But current policies make it unlikely Canada will achieve the target within the country.
Luangwa River, Zambia, at the start of the dry season.
Emma Archer van Garderen
Bjorn Lomborg’s “consensus” approach involves ranking global development policies by their ratio of benefit to cost. But this hard-headed economic rationale can actually end up entrenching inequality.
More mines, more roads, as the government puts its drive towards economic development ahead of all else.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
Amid talk of paths to surplus and investing in infrastructure, both sides of politics seem to have forgotten Australia’s longstanding responsibility to govern sustainably, and not just for the economy.
Labour’s green jobs numbers add up, but the picture’s less clear on fracking.
Hopes for a singular breakthrough at the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks were dashed, but that doesn’t mean the negotiating process isn’t making quiet progress.
EPA/Henning Bagger/AAP
Hopes are high that a global climate deal can be reached in Paris this year. In part 1 of a three-part essay on the prospects for such a deal, Nick Rowley sets out three myths about the UN talks that need to be dumped before we go forward.
The tax burden of a carbon tax could come to represent a benefit for future generations.
Image sourced from Shutterstock.com
Big energy infrastructure projects – power plants, coal mines, long distance transmission lines – take time, resources and, typically, some political muscle. They create highly visible if short-lived construction…
Is that an electric bike you’re riding, Santa?
EPA
Devoted followers of international wrangling on climate change will see much that they recognise in the five-page text emanating from the UN climate talks in Lima. The “parties” (countries) have long accepted…
Handshakes as the Lima conference went into overtime to deliver an agreement. But there is still plenty of uncertainty about how next year’s Paris deal might look.
EPA/COP20
The world is a step closer to a new climate agreement that will see all countries, not just developed ones, take action on greenhouse emissions after 2020. The two-week Lima climate summit, which ran two…
UN negotiators will struggle to balance the demands of countries that want binding emissions targets, and those that don’t.
EPA/Paolo Aguilar
Could the preoccupation with legally binding targets sink the next climate deal in Paris in 2015? In the run-up to this week’s Lima talks, widely seen as a precursor to the Paris summit, the Abbott government…