Environment, Media, Politics, Society

Report: Carbon Emissions Increased After Six Years Downward Trend Following Abbott’s Repeal of Carbon Tax

240px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17200px-Tony_Abbott_-_2010We have been following the alarming rollback on environmental protections under Australia’s conservative Abbott, including the repeal on the carbon tax (the first of a major Western power). Tony Abbott has pledged to reverse environmental measures from the protections of the country’s famous reefs to opening up pristine areas for development. Now, just two months after the repeal of the tax on emissions, a study shows that (not surprisingly) carbon emissions and electricity demand in Australia have risen after a nearly six-year long trend of decline. This comes a week after the report of scientists who found an over 99% likelihood that humans are causing climate change.

The company releasing the report, Pitt & Sherry, tracks electricity use and emissions in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) and said that emissions are expected to continue to rise as a result of the rollback. In just two months, the increase was the equivalent to an annual increase of 0.8 percent.

The Abbott government has also pushed for more power generation black and brown coal power stations and there has been a drop in renewable energy use. The Abbott government has now commissioned a report recommending the effective repeal of the country’s Renewable Energy Target (RET), a scheme designed to ensure that 20 percent of its electricity would be generated from renewable sources by 2020. This will likely further the increase in non-renewable energy use.

The Abbott repeal removed the tax on carbon emissions for around 300 of the country’s biggest emitters to pay for their CO2 emissions.

Source: Scientific American

79 thoughts on “Report: Carbon Emissions Increased After Six Years Downward Trend Following Abbott’s Repeal of Carbon Tax”

  1. I have yet to see base load achieved by a Wind Farm
    I have yet to see base load achieved by a Solar Farms…
    I have yet to see base load achieved by a Tidal energies.

    “There is a cleaner, greener way”. Yes, From LFTR
    Hmmm… I wonder how much slag is produced in those silver mines for that clean solar panel.

  2. Paul C.
    I stayed away from quoting Dr. Mann JUST to avoid your stoning of me.
    Why should people have to live like that? Live in fear of a bully?

    You’ve attacked rain and myself. All in one big attempt to bloviate your way to believability.

    I’ll call it out! rain is new and maybe more intimidated by your bullishness than I. However, stop and take your personal inventory for a moment… WHY is your compulsion centered on being bullish, in the first place?

  4. @Bruce 10:38 am. By all means, stop buying products made in China. Before you do, read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Made-China-Adventure/dp/0470379200

    While you are at it, stop buying products made elsewhere with components or materials made in China. Just about all small electronic components found on circuit boards that are not semiconductors (i.e., capacitors, resistors, inductors, fuses, relays, connectors, etc.) come from China.

  6. Last I checked we don’t have a place to go if we ruin our environment here.

    As for economics there is a subject named “spill-over costs.” One form of this is with environmental damage. An example is the cost of cleanup after years of misdirected policy and not taking into account the long term cost, lost of profit, and goodwill a company has earned in order to increase short term gains in these areas.

    In the long term the spillover costs will generally increase and most astute company senior managers understand this, but often choose to ignore it tempted by quick profits or hit and run type of management for personal gain.

    One economic theory is that if companies practiced better environmental practices the long term financial gain will offset potential disasters’ expenses, and from that perspective it is better for the shareholders for the company to remain stable and profitable. Cleanup costs have the potential to bankrupt companies if led to grow wildly. Plus a damaged environment can force relocations or bad public relations that can deter sales.

    If only viewed from economics and without any proffered care for the environment there should be strong incentives to be better stewards of nature from a corporate perspective.

  8. Annie – who is John Gray? I looked him up at The Prospect and could not find a biography.

  9. Nice hit and run ad hominem attack, but you still didn’t show that I was wrong. If you have a translation that backs you up, put it forward. I showed you mine. Show me yours.

  10. I often think when Paul is pontificating, who is Paul C. Schultz and why should we take is word for anything? 🙂

  11. One trick pony,

    I cannot believe how badly you misstated the proverbs you supposedly quoted.
    …
    ============================
    I can believe that you think there is only one translation and one meaning.

    Your trick puta.

  13. Paul C. Schulte
    Gee Paul, what should I think?
    In a few threads back, you claimed I’m braindead and can’t think on my own.

    Sure am glad you’re here to do all my thinking for me.

    P.S.
    Times change Paul. Maybe you will too.

    1. Max-1 – I do not remember telling anyone to their face they were brain dead. Usually I only get testy with people who are testy with me.

  14. I cannot believe how badly you misstated the proverbs you supposedly quoted.

    Proverbs 26:24-27New International Version (NIV)

    24 Enemies disguise themselves with their lips,
    but in their hearts they harbor deceit.
    25 Though their speech is charming, do not believe them,
    for seven abominations fill their hearts.
    26 Their malice may be concealed by deception,
    but their wickedness will be exposed in the assembly.
    27 Whoever digs a pit will fall into it;
    if someone rolls a stone, it will roll back on them.

  15. Paul C. Schulte

    Freud is out of fashion and has been for years and Toynbee is no longer taught in universities.
    =======================
    For one reason:

    “Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind … Freud’s ideas are rejected today because they imply that the human animal is ineradicably flawed. It is not Freud’s insistence on sexuality that is the source of scandal, but the claim that humans are afflicted by a destructive impulse.” – John Gray, Prospect Magazine (emphasis added)
    …
    “In other words, a society does not ever die ‘from natural causes’, but always dies from suicide or murder — and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown.” – A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee (emphasis added)
    …
    Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it’s very unlikely that we’ll find any [extraterrestrial intelligence]. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let’s take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation … you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation” – Dr. Noam Chomsky paraphrasing Dr. Ernst Mayr
    …
    “One would say that [man] is destined to exterminate himself after having rendered the globe uninhabitable.” – Lamarck (1817) (emphasis added)

    (See Genesis: The Evolution of Biology, by Jan Sapp, p. 274, fn. 14; quoting from Lamark’s writings)
    …
    “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson (emphasis added)
    …
    “In 1973, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist cross-trained in philosophy, sociology, and psychiatry, invoked consciousness of self and the inevitability of death as the primary sources of human anxiety and repression. He proposed that the psychological basis of cooperation, competition, and emotional and mental health is a tendency to hold tightly to anxiety-buffering cultural world views or “immortality projects” that serve as the basis for self-esteem and meaning. Although he focused mainly on social and political outcomes like war, torture, and genocide, he was increasingly aware that materialism, denial of nature, and immortality-striving efforts to control, rather than sanctify, the natural world were problems whose severity was increasing. In this paper I review Becker’s ideas and suggest ways in which they illuminate human response to global climate change. Because immortality projects range from belief in technology and materialism to reverence for nature or belief in a celestial god, they act both as barriers to and facilitators of sustainable practices. I propose that Becker’s cross-disciplinary “science of man,” and the predictions it generates for proximate-level determinants of social behavior, add significantly to our understanding of and potential for managing the people paradox, i.e., that the very things that bring us symbolic immortality often conflict with our prospects for survival. Analysis of immortality projects as one of the proximate barriers to addressing climate change is both cautionary and hopeful, providing insights that should be included in the cross-disciplinary quest to uncover new pathways toward rational, social change.” -The People Paradox, Ecology and Society 14(1): 34 (emphasis added)

    (The Damaged Global Climate System – 3).

    Flattery is a form of hatred (Proverbs 26:24-27).

  16. Canaries in coal mines…

    Winged Warnings: Built for survival, birds in trouble from pole to pole
    http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2014/aug/wingedwarnings1essay

    Birds are the planet’s superheroes, built for survival. But for all their superhuman powers, they are in trouble.

    Globally, one in eight – more than 1,300 species – are threatened with extinction, and the status of most of those is deteriorating, according to BirdLife International. And many others are in worrying decline, from the tropics to the poles.

    “If birds are having issues, you have to think about whether humans are going to have issues too,” said Geoff LeBaron, an ornithologist with the National Audubon Society based in Massachusetts and international director of the Christmas Bird Count.
    (continued)

  20. Ugh… just click the link to Bill McKibben above.
    Canada leads world in forest decline, report says

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