Sep 04 2018
Precarious Climate can exclusively reveal surprising announcements made last week in a speech by Angus Taylor, Australia’s new Minister for Getting Electricity Prices Down. The media reported on only the first half of his speech, leaving out the unexpected turn he took toward the end. “My first and only priority is to reduce power prices,” …
Jul 01 2016
It’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for another election. It’s clear that neither of the major parties will act in the public interest. Still, it’s the one time in three years when we get a say about the future of our country, so here’s how I’ll be voting and you should too. The most pressing …
Sep 14 2015
As I write this, it looks like Malcolm Turnbull may replace Tony Abbott as Australian Prime Minister tonight. (Update: Turnbull is now PM!) Abbott has spent his two years in government doing everything he can to dismantle every climate change policy, and most recently was caught on tape joking about rising sea levels with Immigration …
Apr 01 2015
You’ve heard about peak oil, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Increasingly concerns are being raised about the sustainability of the most important resource keeping fossil fuel industries alive: stupidity. As environmentalist Comm. N. Sense explains: “the fossil fuel lobby relies on stupidity to keep the public electing the politicians who are allowing …
Feb 18 2015
If you’re Australian and you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know PM Tony Abbott narrowly survived a leadership spill motion in the Liberal party room last week. Most commentators agree we haven’t heard the end of this. The apparent leading candidate is Malcolm Turnbull. It’s also possible Abbott could be challenged by Julie …
Feb 08 2015
2014 was the hottest year in the global surface temperature record, according to independent analyses by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), UK’s Met Office, and even the team of skeptics at Berkeley Earth. The one exception is the University of York dataset, which has greater warming over …
Feb 02 2015
It was advertised as the speech that would turn around his government’s plummeting popularity. Government backbencher Andrew Laming said it would be “bigger than Ben-Hur”. But Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s National Press Club address today was underwhelming compared to even my expectations. He didn’t really say much that was new. The future he outlined …
Jan 01 2015
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 …
Dec 15 2014
The COP20 climate talks in Lima, Peru concluded yesterday. It will take a while to sift through the outcomes and figure out what they mean, but for now I want to concentrate on the Australian government, which has unsurprisingly continued its crusade against climate action. Unlike last year when Australia didn’t bother to send a …
Nov 27 2014
I had intended to write a comprehensive guide to the Victorian state election on Saturday, but time is running out. So rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll link to some great existing guides to the parties’ policies on climate and environment: Vote Climate Victorian election 2014 – climate policy summary (includes a guide to …
Precarious Climate