Slate.com Just Called Australia “The Dirtiest Country In The Developed World”
Good morning, world is fukt.
Another day, another global humiliation.
Overnight, Slate’s emerging technology blog, Future Tense, published an article whose title will make your stomach clench up in a tiny little knot. ‘The Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific; How Australia became the dirtiest polluter in the developed world‘.
Written by Ariel Bogle and Will Oremus, the 1700-word piece reads like a comprehensive listing of everything that’s wrong with our climate policy, led by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and “a prime minister who once declared that ‘the climate argument is absolute crap.'”
The country’s landmark carbon tax has been repealed. The position of science minister has been eliminated. A man who warns of “global cooling” is now the country’s top business adviser. In November, Australia will host the G-20 economic summit; it plans to use its power as host to keep climate change off the official agenda.
And from there, it gets worse.
Two months after it struck down the carbon tax, the government forged a deal with a fringe party led by a mining tycoon to repeal a tax on mining profits. It appointed a noted climate-change skeptic—yes, another one—to review its renewable energy targets. Surprise: He’s expected to slash them. Independent modeling in a study commissioned by the Climate Institute, Australian Conservation Foundation, and WWF-Australia finds that the cuts to renewable energy won’t reduce Australians’ energy bills. They will, however, gift the country’s coal and gas industry another $8.8 billion U.S.
At a time when solar power is booming worldwide, sunny Australia is rolling back its state-level subsidies (despite domestic success) and canceling major solar projects. Meanwhile, the government has given the go-ahead to build the nation’s largest coal mine, with an eye toward boosting coal exports to India.
Did we mention that Australians’ per-capita carbon emissions are the highest of any major developed country in the world? Welcome to the Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific.
The authors go on to list the Great Barrier Reef dredge-‘n-dump, the government’s pledge to open the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area to commercial logging, and the destruction of the outback by the mining, nuclear and military industries. “‘Let’s see,’ Australian leaders must wake up wondering every morning: ‘What natural wonder could we trash today?'”
They pull out reams of quotes to highlight the Government and News Corp’s persistent campaign to “turn the public against environmental regulations with threats of economic doom”, and to “shake the public’s trust in climate science … by comparing environmentalists to religious kooks”. (For examples, see John Howard’s description of climate change action as “a substitute religion“, and this quote from Tony Abbott in 2010: “I am not as evangelical about this as Prime Minister Rudd is. I am not theological about this the way Prime Minister Rudd is.”)
Surprising nobody, it doesn’t end on a hopeful note. “If the Australian people cannot recover some of their earlier regard for their environment, they may find in time that their great land is no longer merely apathetic toward their residence there, but openly hostile.”
So yeah. Take that.
–
To read the full piece on Slate, head here.
To watch The Roast skewer Abbott’s climate policy and absence from the UN Climate Summit, press play:
–
Feature image of Sunday’s climate rally in Melbourne by Takver, under a Creative Commons license. This image was resized from the original.