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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday October 11 2018, @03:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the smoke-gets-in-your-eyes-and-lungs-and-clothes-and-environment dept.

Australia Doesn't Care to Break its Coal Habit in the Face of Climate Change:

Earlier this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a dire warning about climate change: unless governments of the world coordinate to implement multiple long-term changes, we risk overshooting the 2°C warming scenario that countries strived to target in the Paris Agreement. This would lead to ecosystem damage, increasingly dramatic heat waves and previously-irregular weather patterns in different regions, and subsequent health impacts for humans.

Retiring coal-fired power plants is a significant action that could limit our race toward an unstable future. But Australia's officials don't quite care. According to The Guardian, the country's deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, said that Australia would "'absolutely' continue to use and exploit its coal reserves, despite the IPCC's dire warnings the world has just 12 years to avoid climate-change catastrophe."

McCormack also reportedly said that Australia would not change its coal policies "just because somebody might suggest that some sort of report is the way we need to follow and everything that we should do."

The country's previous prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, abandoned emissions reductions targets that the nation had agreed to, and Australia's renewable energy targets are set to expire in 2020. In September, government analysis showed that Australia's greenhouse-gas emissions increased last year, and independent analysts said the country would likely not meet the greenhouse-gas emissions reductions that it committed to under the Paris Agreement. Unlike the US, Australia has not exited the Paris Agreement, but the country's current prime minister has declined to add any more money to the global climate fund.

[...] Still, Australia ranks only fourth for economic coal resources, with the US, Russia, and China ahead of it. In the US, which has the world's largest economic coal resource, the Trump administration has had a difficult time fighting to save coal. On Wednesday, US coal supplier Westmoreland filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the face of $1.4 billion in debt. That makes the company the fourth major US coal supplier to file for bankruptcy in recent years due to the significant decline in coal use.

Internalize the profits, externalize the costs?


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  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by khallow on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:23PM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:23PM (#747481) Journal

    I don't mean that this applies only to the present story (or context for that matter), but I can't help but wonder how people who say these things can look at their kids and not think that they are screwing up with their future lives?

    Well, where's the evidence that they're screwing up with the future lives of their kids? IPCC is remarkably lacking on this matter.

    Same thing in Canada, where somehow provincial governments think it's best to work toward creating manual, low education jobs to work in the oil sands than to protect the incredibly diverse environment they have.

    An environment which is not made noticeably less diverse by oil sands development. And those jobs pay well.

    This is the trope of the ignored expert [tvtropes.org]. It makes for a great story. But where's the evidence that this story is what is actually happening?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:56PM (#747540)

    Keep being ignorant and braonwashed, i think you are bexoming the new court jester round here.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @07:21AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @07:21AM (#747806)

    > An environment which is not made noticeably less diverse by oil sands development.

    Google the word "anthropocene"; [b]you're factually incorrect.[/b]

    Or go check for crickets this summer. Remember how fun it was to catch them as a kid? Now try to FIND one. Or go listen to birdsong, and then compare to recordings from the same area from the 60s, and just try, try to say it sounds the same. As any birder of that vintage can tell you, times have changed, lots of songs just aren't heard now, certainly almost all are heard less.

    This is the very definition of noticeably less diverse.

    > And those jobs pay well.

    And the money, made easily, is squandered freely. Few people leave the sands rich. Lots buy big trucks and drink heavily while there, though, and fly out at 2wk intervals to gamble and fuck the excellent pay away.

    You're ... [b]I guess you're just stupid.[/b] I don't mean that as an insult, though it's tempting to try to insult you. But besides that, I can't think of another good reason for saying things like this. [b]You lack or fail to exercise a ability to discern sensible from incoherent, plausible from gumbo, logic from rhetoric; you seem to be broken.[/b] I hope you find something good and productive to do with life, and never enter politics or other positions needing good decision making, and impacting others.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 12 2018, @08:54PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 12 2018, @08:54PM (#748032) Journal

      You're ... [b]I guess you're just stupid.[/b] I don't mean that as an insult, though it's tempting to try to insult you. But besides that, I can't think of another good reason for saying things like this. [b]You lack or fail to exercise a ability to discern sensible from incoherent, plausible from gumbo, logic from rhetoric; you seem to be broken.[/b] I hope you find something good and productive to do with life, and never enter politics or other positions needing good decision making, and impacting others.

      Pretty choice given the crap you just wrote. Let's review: because "anthropocene" is a word and crickets and song birds (cool story, bro!) allegedly dying off in my non-Canadian neighborhood means that Canadian oil sands are bad; good paying jobs are bad because the people getting the money from those jobs will just spend the money on things a certain AC poster doesn't like; and you are "trying" to not insult me by calling me stupid without even the slightest reason for doing so. Did you even bother to read what I wrote?

      Well, here's my obvious rebuttal: "anthropocene" doesn't mean "Canadian oil sands are bad"; there are a host of reasons for bird song diminution such as habitat destruction, lots and lots of cats, poisoning with pesticides, and noise pollution that have nothing to with Canadian oil sands; and I think it's outrageous to be against good paying jobs because the people might make bad or decadent choices - what is the point of democracy, if we aren't allowed to choose, and what's going to happen to social safety nets if we deliberately destroy the alternatives that help people avoid being a social burden?

      And I'm supposed to be the stupid one?