Australia
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The Climate Post: Climate bill finally dead enough to be fondly remembered
Read more about climate legislation attacks, new Chinese innovations, water wars, and more.
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Down under and upside down
Last week, I visited the Australian state of Victoria, where the Parliament approved a bold plan by Premier John Brumby (of the Labor Party) to cut carbon emissions twenty percent below 2000 levels by 2020. His conservative opponent in the November election, Ted Baillieu of the Liberal Party, goes much farther than his national party […]
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Paleoclimatologist studies sea levels in a desert
Exactly how much did the sea level rise three million years ago? Okay. Probably not a question you’ve asked yourself lately. But the question and, more importantly, its answer are significant. They will help scientists understand how fast and how high our current sea levels are likely to rise as today’s global warming trend melts […]
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This week in comically evil corporate behavior
Updated It’s only Wednesday and we’ve already got way more than a week’s worth of comically evil behavior from the fossil-fuel sector. Item the first: A Chinese coal freighter tried to take a shortcut through Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and rammed into the world-reknowned ecological treasure. The stranded ship remains in danger of […]
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One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef
The Shen Neng 1 in a plume of heavy oil in Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.Australian Maritime Safety AuthorityUgh. Everything about this is bad: A Chinese freighter crashed into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Saturday, running aground and spilling heavy fuel oil into the water. The ship is stuck, and while the flow of oil has […]
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Sole "Strategic Partner" of landmark geo-engineering conference is Australia's "dirty coal" state of
Climate Progress is beginning a multipart series on what has been called the “Woodstock” of geo-engineering. This historic but controversial event will take place March 22 – 26 in Asilomar, CA. Details can be found here on the website of the conference “developer,” Dr. Margaret Leinen of the Climate Response Fund. I have been interviewing leading […]
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Where things stand on the Copenhagen Accord and international climate politics
After the Copenhagen Accord was “noted” by the UN in December, there was a great deal of insta-analysis. In truth, there was no real way to evaluate the Accord because the meat of it — the emission-reduction commitments from participating countries — was blank. Literally: The deadline for participating countries to submit their commitments was […]
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‘Water’ author Stephen Solomon talks resource intelligence
Author Stephen Solomon recently suggested we need an “Al Gore of water” — a public champion to raise the profile of water scarcity threats and opportunities, as Gore has done for climate change. Solomon, an economics journalist, makes a bid for that role himself with his new book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, […]
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Political smarts key to success for Australia’s green tech industry
As I boarded my flight back to California in Brisbane, Australia, last Wednesday, I received an email alert that the Australian Senate had just defeated the Labor government’s climate change legislation. Only days earlier victory seemed all but assured, allowing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to go to Copenhagen with an iron-clad, albeit weak, agreement in […]
