SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Australia's Senate has voted to repeal the carbon tax, a levy on the biggest polluters passed by the previous Labor government. Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose Liberal-National coalition beat Labor in an election last year, had made the repeal a central aim of his government.
Politicians have been locked in a fierce row about the tax for years. Labor says it helps to combat climate change, but the Liberals claim it penalises legitimate businesses. The Australian Senate voted by 39 to 32 votes to repeal the tax. Introduced in July 2012, it charges the 348 highest polluters A$ 23 (£ 13; US$ 22.60) for every tonne of greenhouse gases they produce.
The Climate Institute think-tank said in a statement that the move left Australia "bereft of credible climate policy".
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot said the carbon tax had been "useless and destructive". He says he plans to replace it with a A$2.55bn taxpayer-funded plan under which industries will be paid to reduce emissions and use cleaner energy.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 18 2014, @08:01AM
Wherever he learned creationism, he probably didn't learn it from the Jesuits. The Catholic Church generally doesn't believe in such nonsense, the Jesuits least of all. There was Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin S.J., who among other things was among the palaeontologists who discovered Peking Man (they even called him the Jesuit who believed man descended from monkeys), and was influential in the Catholic Church's current general attitudes towards evolution and science in general. The official position of the Church today seems to be more that it isn't really that concerned with such questions of science. If science shows that evolution is how humans came to be, then they'll say that God used the mechanism of evolution to create humanity. They screwed up with Galileo five centuries ago and they seem determined not to make the same mistake again today. This is also why just about every Catholic school out there teaches evolution, just as secular schools do. You can be Catholic and believe in either evolution or creationism, but the latter is far from being a mainstream belief in Catholic circles the way it seems to be among Christian evangelicals.