Australia

Critical List: Rick Perry is a flake; all sorts of rhinos are dying

As president, Rick Perry would eliminate the Department of Energy, if he could remember he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy. Do countries have to officially declare a trade war? How will we know when the U.S./China trade war over solar power actually starts? Canada continues to prove that it’s just masquerading as a […]

Critical List: Australia will have a carbon tax; 10 percent of Chinese farmland contaminated

Australia is going to have a carbon tax: The prime minister's plan just passed the country's senate. Not only do cars kill, so do commutes. A man in England dumped more than 1 million tires across the country. Heavy metals have contaminated 10 percent of farmland in China. Shorter Rick Perry: The government should stop […]

Australians to kill camels for carbon credits

Australians really don't like the hundreds of thousands of feral camels that run around the continent, so every once in a while the government decides to spend money on sending guys with guns up in helicopters to cull their numbers. But now they have a utilitarian justification for the culls: They're fighting climate change.

Like cows, camels spew methane from their digestives systems. By cutting their lives short, one company argues, Australia would be preventing the release of the methane the camels would emit over their remaining years. The company, Northwest Carbon, also says it'll be able to offer carbon credits for the reduction in emissions.

Critical List: Australia inches from passing a carbon tax; Rick Perry’s secret economic sauce

Australia's carbon tax bill passed its lower House by a thin majority; it should easily pass the Senate and make it into law.

An oil cleanup contest awarded $1 million to the winning Team Elastec/American Marine, which soaked up 4,670 gallons of oil per minute and got to 89.5 percent of the oil, on average.

China is going to tax the hell out of oil and gas and reinvest the money in nuclear reactors and wind farms.

Australian golf course is infested with sharks

Hey, remember that rumor that sharks were roaming the streets after the Queensland floods earlier this year? That may well have been reality. This Brisbane golf course is infested with 10-foot sharks, who washed into the water hazards during a previous giant flood. 

Australia is so, so screwed

It's possible that the 19th century British powers-that-be were just running a really, really long con when they sent their convicts to settle Australia, because anyone who lives there now is royally screwed. In Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell chronicles exactly how screwed. (Answer: Royally.)

In the few weeks he was there, Goodell encountered:

a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts.

And in the longer term,

What water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming dec­ades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.

Do Australian lorikeets have a drinking problem or a mysterious disease problem?

Red-collared lorikeets—a type of parrot—show up every year in Australia acting like they've been hitting the fermented fruit juice a little too hard. Locals report symptoms like "falling over" and "difficulty flying" and "running into things" and "act[ing] friendlier than normal," which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever gone to college. (Don’t ask about “difficulty flying.” That was a bad night.)

Ok, but less funny ...

BP will be messing up Australia next

The Great Australian Bight has all of the hallmarks of a place you really don't want to mess with — incredible marine diversity, endangered whales, awesome natural beauty. But the Australian government decided that this would also be a good place to let BP prospect for oil, and gave the company a tax break to ease their way on that project.

Hey, we found a new dolphin species!

We all know the Earth still has more and stranger species than we've discovered, or at least it will until we clear-cut and climate-bomb them right into extinction. But you usually figure these fragile exotic lifeforms are hanging out in caves under Madagascar, or somewhere else that's tough to get to. Turns out, though, that at least some of them have been chiling near Melbourne, Australia, where researchers have discovered a new species of dolphin just basically right under their noses.