Welcome to 2015! If you believe Back to the Future, this year our climate problems should be solved by the invention of fusion-powered flying cars. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
There seems little point in writing a “year-in-review” post as I’ve kind of already written it for most of the year. These three posts together provide a comprehensive review of Australian politics from September 2013 to October 2014:
In summary, it’s been a horror year in Tony Abbott’s Australia for the climate and on all policy fronts. Blinded by neoliberal ideology, Abbott and his Liberal Party are making the rich and powerful more so with every decision, except for the occasional bit of tokenism. And in Australia there is no group more rich and powerful than the fossil fuel industry. On the bright side, the Abbott government is extremely unpopular and public support for climate action is slowly trending upward, reversing the downward trend during the former Labor government.
At the international level, some possible glimmers of hope have (finally!) begun to appear, with the US and China announcing emissions targets for the next decade. But with one eye on the mounting evidence that we are already hitting tipping points for runaway global warming, I fear it’s too little too late. (I intend to write a post soon on how little difference has been made by the US-China deal.)
Beyond that, I thought I’d take this opportunity to plug some of my best posts of 2014. So without further ado, here are some of my best posts of 2014 (in chronological order):
- How Labor lost the climate debate
- 21 flaws in Tony Abbott’s climate policy
- Government has a double standard on entitlements
- Global warming not slowing – it’s speeding up
- We need to politicize climate change
- If 100,000 protest and few report it, did they make a sound?
- Tony Abbott learns what causes global warming (satire)
- Bust the budget (series)
- Time to move on from the carbon tax
- Is Energy Australia lying to its customers?
- Australian protest crackdowns ramp up
- Global warming is already dangerous
- The climate speech Tony Abbott should make
- No country for young people (or almost anyone else)
- Abbott sabotages RET, Palmer greenwashes ERF
- Australia continues climate obstructionism in Lima
At the beginning of 2014, I promised to “counter fossil-fuel-justifying ideology”. Looking back on the year, it turns out I haven’t really done much of that. Instead I’ve alternated between not-so-rapid response to events, cataloguing government actions, and depressed inactivity.
Hopefully in the new year, I’ll get around to finishing some of my more big-picture posts. I’m working on lots of ideas about both climate and general politics.
